pedanther

. The season recently closed for the club's latest production, The Regina Monologues, a set of six interconnected stories inspired by the six wives of Henry VIII but set in the present day. I wasn't involved (it's an all-female cast, with only the six women appearing on stage), but I went to see a performance and was very impressed. It's the most challenging (for both the cast and the audience) bit of drama the club has done in the last few years.

The club's next production is Seussical, the musical inspired by the works of Dr Seuss, which I'm also not in; I decided not to audition for several reasons, including still being a bit musicalled out after Mamma Mia. My sister was disappointed when I told her; she says I have the right kind of face to be a Dr Seuss character.


. Am still listening to Re: Dracula. One problem I've been occasionally having is that because it's intended to be listened to on a specific schedule, I sometimes find that the schedule expects me to listen to an episode when I'm still busy digesting something else. That was an issue the day I read the last of the Penelope trilogy, and I couldn't easily put the episode off because there was another one due the next day; it cropped up again the night I went to see The Regina Monologues, but on that occasion there was a break of several days before the next episode, so that time I postponed the episode until I felt ready for it.


. A while ago, I started using the Calibre ebook management software to organise my ebooks. Part of the motivation is that I've replaced my physical ebook reader a couple of times now, and each time I did, the books that I bought through the official store had their read status and tags automatically re-applied from the cloud, but not the several hundred books I'd obtained by other means. The second time I was faced with the prospect of going through all those books, individually re-marking the ones I'd already read (if I could remember) and re-adding all the tags (if I could remember, with part of the problem being that the tags largely existed to remind me of things), I added Calibre to the mix, in the hope that once this round of re-marking and re-tagging was complete Calibre would remember the details for me and handle the whole task should it ever again be required.

I've achieved a full success with the tags; if I add a tag to a book on the reader, it automatically gets copied to Calibre's records next time they share information, and if I add a tag to a book in Calibre, it's automatically copied to the reader. The read status has proven to be trickier. With the help of a plugin, I've got it set up so that the ebook reader tells Calibre whenever I change the status of a book on the reader (how far I'm up to, or if I've marked it as finished); what I haven't been able to find is a way to arbitrarily mark a book as finished in Calibre and have that recognised by the ebook reader. I suppose if all else fails I can go through everything on the ebook reader and mark the ones I've read there, and that information will be transferred to Calibre, and then hopefully since it's information provided by the ebook reader it will, when the time comes, be transferred back.


. At the boardgame club this week, I had a chance to get a couple of games on the table that I haven't had out for a while. I got Jabberwocky and The Lady and the Tiger in a Kickstarter; neither is a single game, but instead each has a set of components (cards and coloured tokens) and a rulebook containing rules for several different games that can be played with the components, depending on how many players you have. They seemed like a useful and flexible thing to be able to take along to a boardgame gathering, but in practice I've only ever played a couple of games out of each and still don't really know most of the games well enough to be confident suggesting them.

My favourite game from either set is "Labyrinth", a two-player game in The Lady and the Tiger where the cards are laid out to create a playing board that changes configuration each turn and the players race to get all their pieces from one corner of the board to the other across the shifting terrain; I got to play a game of it this week while we were waiting for more people to show up so we could start a larger game.

When one other person showed up, we also played a three-player game from Jabberwocky; in "Gyre", which I don't think I've played before, the cards are laid out to create a playing board which the players move around the edge of while performing actions to gain control of specific areas on the board. It took us a round or two to come to grips with how the game worked, but it ended up being a very close match and we all enjoyed it.

(I promise the games don't all start with the cards being laid out to create a playing board; last time I had Jabberwocky on the table, for instance, we played "Slithy", which involves using the tokens to bid for points based on the predicted value of another player's hand of cards.)


. One of my so-far-unrealised plans for long service leave was to take up knitting or crocheting or something of the sort, partly for the potential practical value and partly to have something to do with my hands while I'm watching TV or listening to a podcast. Since I have so far consistently forgotten to go and obtain the necessary equipment and materials, I decided this week to shift my sights to something a bit less ambitious, and for which I already have the necessary equipment to hand: namely, learning to shuffle a deck of cards properly. My current shuffling technique is not the worst I've observed among the people I've played with, but it's awkward and clumsy enough that I'd like to improve it, and I've always been impressed by anyone who could do a clean riffle shuffle. I haven't made much progress on that specific goal so far, as none of the "How to do a riffle shuffle" tutorials I've looked at bother to explain how the actual riffling part works, having apparently been written by people who have been handling cards long enough to have forgotten which of the things that are now second nature to them might be opaque to a beginner. So for now I'm sticking with a tutorial that covers the very basics of card handling, like what a "dealer's grip" is (another thing that came up in a shuffling tutorial without further elaboration), and hoping to work my way up. I can do a pretty consistent one-handed swing cut now, at least, so that's something.

. Our season of Mamma Mia has come to a successful conclusion, and I have been, with some relief, to get a hair cut. (I'd grown my hair out a bit to suit the character I was playing, and I didn't mind the look, but it was getting long enough to be annoying to deal with.) The club's next production will be The Regina Monologues, a retelling of the stories of the wives of King Henry VIII; it's an all-female cast, so I get to have a bit of a break without worrying about whether there's a part I should have gone for.


. The random book selection for June was taken from the subset of the to-read pile consisting of books which had been tagged "adventurous" and "challenging" by StoryGraph users. My randomly-selected book was The Workers' Paradise, a small-press science fiction anthology which I'd bought to support the publisher and then left languishing because I suspected it wasn't really my kind of thing. This turned out to be an accurate suspicion; I struggled through about half of it before deciding that I just couldn't take any more, and that I'd seen enough of the editor's choices to be confident there wouldn't be a story in the back half that made the whole thing worthwhile. I went back to the random selection, and (after vetoing a couple more short story anthologies) got a replacement pick of Spinneret, an adventure novel by Timothy Zahn. I had a much better time with that, although I was dubious about some of the politics and I thought the characters were rather flat; each character started out with a clear role in the plot (the Leader, the Scientist, and so on) and never really developed beyond it.


. For the June theme reading challenge, the theme was "a book about the ocean, maritime life, coasts, or something sea-related". I thought this might be my cue to finally read Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures, which I keep being recommended and have had a rolling hold on for a while – but then the ebook reader broke and I missed the deadline for rolling over my hold, so I've been bumped back to the bottom of the hold queue, which means that even if the replacement ebook reader does show up soon it's going to be a while (the library website is currently estimating a couple of months) before a copy becomes available. So I'm going to have to come up with something closer to hand that fits the theme.


. Separately from either of the monthly challenges, this month I also read Killing Floor, the first of Lee Child's long-running series of thrillers featuring Jack Reacher, and confirmed that it's not the kind of thing I'm likely to want to read more of. Having the kind of mind I have, I was struck by the boilerplate in the front of the edition I read, which has a little summary of Reacher's backstory that presumably is repeated verbatim in every book in the series. What struck me is that it places the events of Killing Floor in 1997, which is a reasonable assumption on the face of it, given that that's when Killing Floor was published... except that it's a plot point in the actual novel that it's taking place in a presidential election year, which 1997 wasn't.


. I have mixed feelings about the latest season of Doctor Who, but I found enough to like that I'm glad I watched the whole thing and didn't give up when I was feeling disappointed with it partway through.

. A good number of years ago, I backed the original set of Magic Puzzles 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles on Kickstarter, and then they sat around unopened because I never got around to setting up a space where I could work on them. A week ago, I finally hauled one out to have something to do with my hands while watching a Youtube stream (which was celebrating the third anniversary of its Youtube channel, and therefore nearly the third anniversary of the first time I said to myself, "You know, I could probably do one of those Magic Puzzles to have something to do with my hands while watching these"), and I've been working on it in spare moments. I finished it this morning, and am now trying to decide how long to leave it out and admire the artwork before I clear it away so I can get started on the next one. (I was a bit worried that the puzzle's gimmick, advertised as a "mind blowing magical ending", would end up being a fizzle; in the event, I think that description is overselling it a bit, but it is pretty neat.)


. The thing about the XCOM games is that, while I enjoy them, I'm not terribly good at them, or at least I wasn't at first, and I've never got all the way through one without saving before every mission and shamelessly reloading if everything goes pear-shaped. When I first started, this was necessary to avoid complete mission failure and my entire team getting wiped out on the regular, but as I've improved I've also been increasingly tempted to stretch the definition of mission failure, a tendency that was shown up when I found myself taking a mulligan on a mission which had gone entirely according to plan right up until the last-moment death of a single soldier who just happened to be one of the ones I was sentimentally attached to. After that, I promised myself that on my latest runthrough I would only replay missions that were complete disasters and specifically would keep the result of any mission where the objectives were successfully achieved no matter how many soldiers got killed doing it. I have kept to that resolve, even for the mission that ended with only two soldiers still standing; it's been challenging, and included long stretches where I was struggling to field a team for missions (and at least two points where I had to automatically fail missions because I literally didn't have enough active soldiers to do them), but it was very satisfying when I overcame that and started building up the team again. There's some kind of life lesson in that, probably. The funny thing is that, although there were those stretches where it felt like we were limping along, in the end the campaign has taken about the same amount of time as all my earlier ones; I reached the end game in roughly the same number of missions and within a month, in-game time, of my previous longest campaign. Presumably that had something to with the fact that I still took do-overs on the missions that I completely failed; doing a run where I kept the result of every single mission, no matter how disastrous, would be an even more interesting challenge, but one that I don't think I'm a good enough player yet to survive.


. After I completed the latest runthrough of XCOM 2, I decided it was time for a change of pace, so I've been playing a platformer called SteamWorld Dig 2, which I assume I got in a bundle at some point because I don't remember ever specifically deciding to buy it. I've been playing it often enough to start seeing it behind my eyelids, and enjoying it a lot, and it's reminding me how much I also enjoyed playing the last platformer of this kind that I played (the excellent Yoku's Island Express), so I'm thinking maybe I should play this genre more often.


. Another thing I've been really enjoying lately is a new D&D Actual Play series called Natural Six, which put out some preview/prequel episodes a while back and released its official Episode 1 last week. The players are all charming and invested in their characters, and they and the DM all bounce off each other really well. New episodes are being released fortnightly, on Youtube or as a podcast, alternating with episodes of an after-action series where the players talk about the previous week's session.


. The random book selection for April was based around picking one of the oldest books on the to-be-read list – which in my case didn't actually result in one of the books that's been waiting to be read the longest, because I already had a large stack of unread books when I joined StoryGraph and I didn't make any effort to list them chronologically. Actually, it looks like I started by adding the unread books on my ereader, which necessarily are all more recent than when I got the ereader about a decade ago. I definitely have paper books that have been waiting longer than that.

The book that was randomly selected for me was The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, a young adult time travel story that I think I picked up as part of a special offer and had no idea what it was about until I started reading. There were some parts that I felt lacked the subtlety that I would have expected if it were a book for not-young adults, but on the whole I enjoyed it well enough and found it satisfying in the end. (Speaking of the end, it makes some interesting choices about which questions it leaves unanswered – although I've noticed that, because of the time travel, at least one of those questions is actually answered in the first chapter before the reader knows what the question is yet...)

The theme challenge for April is "a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming", and I haven't picked a book for it yet.

1. So, the National Band Championships? To our utter, utter astonishment, we won our division, and are now the Australian D Grade Champions. Discussions are underway about the practicality of going to next year's championships (which will have returned to the far side of the continent) to defend the title.


2. My hotel room number for the weekend (assigned entirely without any input from myself) was 42.


3. I got to more of Swancon than I'd feared, if less than I'd hoped (and in the process usefully expanded my working knowledge of the city's public transport options). I enjoyed what I got to, and caught up with the usual suspects, including leecetheartist and rdmasters, who as usual introduced me to several games I was not previously familiar with. (I particularly liked Winter Tales, where the movement of the pieces on the board is just the skeleton of the game, and the emphasis is on collaboratively spinning a story about what the characters represented by the pieces are up to. I like collaborative storytelling. Other games I was introduced to included King of Tokyo, a silly but fun game in which giant monsters slug it out for the chance to trash Japan, and Roll Through the Ages, which had a bit too much number-crunching and not enough story for my taste.)

The guests at next year's Swancon are to include Tamora Pierce and Isobel Carmody.


4. I have a new gadget, a Kobo ebook reader. I haven't really used it much yet, because when I'm at home I prefer to make inroads on the enormous pile of unread dead-tree books in my living room, and save the ebooks for when I'm travelling. (I had intended to put it to work on the trip back, but it turned out I couldn't actually activate it and load it up until I got home.)


5. Too many people dying lately. I particularly regret the loss of Richard Griffiths, who played one of my favourite fictional detectives, Henry Crabbe, in the TV series Pie in the Sky. If that doesn't ring a bell, his film credits include wicked uncles in both Withnail and I and the Harry Potter series. He also had a noteworthy stage career. By all accounts he was a really nice guy, and will be missed.