pedanther

. I had a much more productive and satisfying week at work.


. I'm having more trouble finding time to go for a walk or bike ride on weekdays now that it's getting dark so soon after the end of office hours, but I'm still managing to maintain a minimum of three per week.


. At board game club, we played Feed the Kraken, a social deduction game set on board a ship where some of the sailors have secret agendas. I'm iffy about social deduction games; I don't enjoy the ones that are all about being able to read opponents' body language to figure out if they're being dishonest, but I don't mind some of the ones that have some kind of mechanic that provides objective (though ambiguous) evidence of another kind. In the case of Feed the Kraken, that's plotting the ship's course: each of the factions on the ship wants to steer the ship toward a specific destination, so any change in the heading suggests something about the loyalties of the players who were contributing to navigation that round, but each decision involves three players drawing and discarding cards in such a way that it's never clear precisely who's responsible for the outcome. I enjoyed the game a lot, even before I ended up playing a key role in getting victory for my faction.


. I stopped using Duolingo a while back and uninstalled the app, but hadn't actually got around to closing my account, on the off chance that I might want to pick it up again at some point. Given the recent nonsense, I decided this week that that was never going to happen, and deleted my account.


. I have a rented storage unit which I had not had access to for months: the self-storage facility installed a new automatic front gate, and although I got the email notifying me of the upcoming change I never received the promised follow-up email containing instructions on how to open the new gate. And, being me, by the time I'd realised the follow-up email wasn't coming, enough time had passed that I felt awkward about contacting the site manager to raise the subject, a situation which obviously got no better the longer I put it off. I was reminded about this again this week, and decided enough was enough, and now the situation is resolved: I did an end-run around the contact awkwardness problem by driving to the self-storage facility, finding the manufacturer's logo on the housing of the gate mechanism, and googling for instructions. Fortunately for the success of this endeavour, it turns out that all the manufacturer's smart gates respond to a standard app that can be downloaded for free, and when I entered my contact information after installing the app it automatically matched me to the self-storage place's list of users and offered me a button to open the gate. Everything in the storage unit appears to be fine, if a bit more dusty and cobwebby than when I saw it last. (And I really should get around to talking to someone about the pile of stuff I agreed to temporarily store for a colleague until the covid lockdown ended...)


. Picked up Battletech again for the first time in a couple of weeks, and ended up playing it for a few hours. (Part of that was a big boss mission that took about an hour all on its own.) I'm still not sure exactly how much I'm really enjoying it, but there are enough little things that once I start playing I keep going "I'll just finish off this thing" or "I'll just tweak that thing". It's getting to the point I predicted earlier where the difficulty has ramped up enough that if I keep just coasting along with a vague idea of how the systems work I'm going to be in real trouble sooner or later; on the other hand, that leads to memorable events like a mission where I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment. (That mission was followed by a cutscene where one of my colleagues remarked that she wondered if the conflict we'd been taking part in was really worth it, and the team's executive officer gestured at our pay packet and said, "It's worth it to us." And then we needed to spend nearly the entire pay packet on repairs for the mechs that had been shredded in the mission. That's life in the armoured mercenary business, I guess.)

I've been on long service leave for a month now. It's mostly consisted of doing not-very-much around the house; I've got a lot more reading done. I had ideas about starting new craft projects, or learning a musical instrument, or travelling to the city to catch up with people, or travelling somewhere farther afield, but none of them have really gone anywhere. Part of the problem is that I've always been bad at self-motivated scheduling; if I don't have a specific deadline or a specific event to co-ordinate with, if it doesn't particularly matter exactly when something gets done, then I can't decide when to do it, until either a deadline comes to the rescue or it's too late. (I'm the same with going to the cinema; if I'm really keen on a movie, I'll go in the first week, but if I'm not I'll keep going "maybe next week" until there's no next week, and I either go to one of the last showings or I realise that I can't make it to any of the last showings and I've missed my chance.)

There's a similar issue on the 'travelling farther afield' side, in that I don't know what to do with myself if I go to a new place on my own; I usually travel with people I know, or to visit people I know, or at least to attend a specific event, and every time I say to myself "I could go to (as it might be) New Zealand!", I don't have an answer to the follow-up question of "And do what?" When my long service leave was originally scheduled, the answer to "And do what?" was going to be Wellington Worldcon, but we all know what happened then.

I abandoned this post for a bit to write a different one on the subject of "I've got a lot more reading done", and after I posted it, it occurred to me that the self-motivated scheduling issue is also visible in my blog posting history: I've got a regular routine going with the monthly log posts, and the monthly reading challenges have enough structure that I want to keep providing progress updates, and from time to time there will be specific events like a theatre production, but whenever I think about writing something about more general life events, I always think "I can do that later" and then later never happens.

Oh, one other thing I have achieved with my first month of long service leave: I used the start of it as a push (specific event again, see) to start doing 750 Words again. Mostly I've just been writing down what I did during the preceding day; I'd hoped I'd get more blog posts out of it, but the journal is a lot of "then I did this and then I did this" that's barely interesting even to me, so I'd have to go back through it and pick out the interesting bits, and (all together now) I Can Do That Later. It does seem to be starting to have some effect on my ability to get things written, though; I wrote a quite a long (for me) review on StoryGraph recently, and I suspect this blog post would never have been written if I hadn't had this morning's 750 words to get me warmed up.

. I have long been a fan of Bride of the Rat God, Barbara Hambly's historical fantasy novel set in 1920s Hollywood, so I was intrigued to discover that she's recently started putting out a series of historical murder mysteries set in 1920s Hollywood in which the main characters described by the blurb are unmistakeably the protagonists of Rat God with slightly different names. Scandal in Babylon, the first book of the series, does an interesting balancing act where its characters don't appear to have actually experienced the events of Rat God (they're all acting as if this is the first time they've been caught up in a murder, and there's no mention of any supernatural elements), but they're picking up from where the characters of Rat God left off – the film star's sister-in-law already has the job and the boyfriend she acquired over the course of that novel, for instance – so that if you want to read it as a sequel you just have to squint a bit. The story itself leans a bit much toward the cosy mystery vein for my taste, so I'm not sure if I'm going to continue on with the series, though I am curious about where it might go now that it's got past having to set everything up again for the benefit of new readers.


. For the April theme challenge ("a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming"), I chose an anthology called Mists and Magic, edited by Dorothy Edwards. Being an anthology, it's arguable whether the book as a whole is about the required subjects, but enough of the individual stories fit the criteria that I feel good about it as a pick. I haven't finished it yet, so I haven't looked at the May theme challenge yet.


. I got new spectacles in April, and for some time afterward kept stopping to stare around and marvel at how crisp the world is when my prescription is up to date and my lenses aren't all scratched up. I think part of why I was so surprised is that my brain had tricked itself into thinking that the way I see the world when I'm wearing my contact lenses was the best it ever got. To some extent that's reasonable, because the contact lenses get replaced more often so they have the most recent prescription and aren't at all scratched up; however, my eyeballs have at least two separate things wrong with them, and the contact lenses only correct for the more common and less complicated problem, so with the contact lenses in the world is always a bit blurry.


. I've finished playing SteamWorld Dig 2, and moved on to SteamWorld Heist, set in the same milieu a few centuries later. The art style and so on are very similar, but the gameplay mechanics are different, and so far I don't think I'm enjoying it as much. There might be something about the story, too: Dig 2 featured a single protagonist with a clearly defined ultimate goal, which helped hold what plot it had together even when it was effectively a case of solving whatever the immediate problem happened to be and then whatever new problem that caused, but Heist is about a group of characters, who are not very deeply characterised and don't appear so far to have a goal beyond the immediate problem.


. The rehearsals for the musical are coming along. There was a nice moment at a rehearsal recently. We were working on the choreography for a song which has an instrumental break in the middle, during which some of the characters do a bit of dumbshow which is briefly described in the script but the score (at least the vocal score, which is all we had to work with) doesn't give any details about how long each part of it was supposed to last. As an additional complication, there's also a scene change in the course of the song, and the score doesn't indicate exactly where that happens either (I have a suspicion that in the original staging there was a revolve or some other bit of machinery that rendered it trivial) but we'd figured out that it should probably happen during the instrumental break as well, to avoid undermining the singers. So we spent some time working out who needed to be doing what, and when, and walked it through a few times without music. And then we tried it with the music to see where the timing needed to be adjusted - and it fit into the instrumental break perfectly, first try.

When I last wrote, Ladies in Black was about to open. The season went really well. Nobody got covid, as far as I remember, or anything else that required them to miss a performance, although it was flu season and there were several interesting infections going around.

Once the season was over, I fell in a bit of a hole for a while. To start with, I came down with the flu -- the way one often does come down with something just after the end of a big obligation that's been an ongoing source of stress, as if the body's going "okay, can collapse now". And it was a pretty big thing that had just ended: not just Ladies in Black, because rehearsals for that started while we were still doing Rock of Ages and rehearsals of Rock of Ages started when we were still doing Female Transport, so in all I'd been in a continual state of Preparing for a Show for something like eight or nine months running. And suddenly I was going from rehearsals multiple times a week and always knowing what was coming up next, to having almost no regular commitments and no clear idea of what my next goal was. It was a bit of a shock to the system.

Another aspect of it, though who knows how large of one it was, was that Rock of Ages and Ladies in Black were both musicals, so for several months there I'd had regular opportunities to make music in a communal setting, and suddenly that was gone too.

I have at least found something I can do about that last bit: an acquaintance was handing around flyers for a new singing group focussing on sea shanties and other traditional songs, so I've signed up for that and went to the first session this week.

If we've known each other long enough, you may recall me mentioning seven years ago that I'd finally bought my first ever mobile phone.

As of last month, I am now onto my second ever mobile phone.
( Read more... )
( My new phone can talk to a Fitbit )
( and run Ingress )

. I was cleaning out unused apps on my phone, came across Duolingo which I hadn't opened in months, and decided on a whim to have another crack at brushing up my German. The lessons I've been revising this week have included Food, Animals, and Plurals, so I've been learning quite about the dietary habits of bears. I have learned that the bear drinks the beer (das Bär trinkt das Bier) and that the bears eat the strawberries (die Bären fressen die Erdbeeren). It's not an all-alliteration diet, though; the bears also eat the fish (die Bären fressen die Fische -- on second thought, maybe that's just a different kind of alliteration). Or perhaps it's just these particular bears, who I was informed in the most recent lesson are called Hans and Karl (die Bären heißen Hans und Karl).


. Our roleplaying campaign continues. I'm playing the fighter class character of the group, and my ancestry/class backstory meant I started out with heavy armour, so my role in the group has come to include going out ahead in any fight and making a nuisance of myself so that our opponents will waste time trying to land a hit on me while the rest of the team picks them off from a safe distance. (Not that I am not also doing my bit to pick them off, especially since I learned the feat called Riposte, which gives me a reaction attack against an attacker who fails to penetrate my armour.) In the various times we've used this strategy, I have had occasion to be thankful that my character's ancestry also bequeathed resistance against poison and immunity to suffocation. It's almost a running joke at this point that every time the team has encountered a monster with a suffocating attack or a cloud of choking dust or a creature surrounded wherever it goes by a noxious vapour, the person who's taken the brunt of it has been the guy who doesn't breathe.


. In this part of the world, the coronavirus situation has receded to the point that things involving groups of people are happening again. The brass band has resumed rehearsals, although a bit aimlessly because until the last week or so all the places the band usually plays were still closed. The Rep Club is having a variety performance this weekend to mark being able to have live shows with audiences again (although the remaining social distancing restrictions do mean that the theatre will be at half capacity). The gaming group has also started meeting again this month, although there were a lot fewer people there than usual while I was there. I played Half Truth with a group of people; both the players and the group of kibitzers we accumulated agreed that it was a good and fun game, but I don't think I'll get anyone to play against me again in a hurry.


. I don't seem to have reacquired the interest in watching theatrical streams after all. I think part of it is that watching a theatre performance this way lacks the shared social aspect; there's nobody else with me while I'm watching, and nobody I know who I can discuss the performance with afterward.


. I've now been working from home for several months. I'm still dressing in work clothes on work days, but not always before I actually start work: somewhere along the line I decided it was okay, if I was still in my pyjamas at work o'clock, to check my email and deal with anything urgent before I went and got dressed, and that's extended to the point that sometimes I'm still not dressed at lunchtime. So far I'm holding the line at being dressed for lunch, although once or twice lunch has happened quite late as a consequence.

So, how about that coronavirus, huh?

This weekend was going to be a very busy one for the band, with a performance at the monthly markets this morning and the rest of the weekend devoted to a series of workshops with a visiting conductor to get us into shape for the Nationals next month. Then the Nationals got cancelled because coronavirus, and then the markets got cancelled because coronavirus. So it's been a much more relaxed weekend than I was anticipating.

Swancon has also been cancelled because coronavirus. This has brought me to a realisation: for years, I've spent every Easter weekend at either Swancon or the Nationals, and now they're both off the table. Unless I come up with a plan quickly, I may be obliged to (dramatic musical sting) spend Easter with my family.

In more cheerful coronavirus cancellation related news, Broadway's Laura Benanti has created a Twitter thread for students whose school musicals have been cancelled to post bits of their performances. The performances themselves are great, and many of the stories are charming, and the thread itself is generating a few interesting moments of its own (like somebody posting a video of their school production of Matilda and getting an encouraging comment from someone who's played Matilda professionally). (via rthstewart)

I wasn't sure I'd go to Swancon this year, but within a few minutes of arriving at the opening sundowner I knew I'd made the right decision to come. Swancon is as much about the people as the events for me, and I've had Swancons in the past where I've had a good time because of the people even if the programme was a bit thin and I had no idea who the guest of honor was.

Well, the programme was a bit thin, and I had no idea who Charlie Jane Anders was before she was announced last year as this year's guest of honor, but I had a good time. (And, for the record, Charlie Jane Anders' new novel is amazing, and also she turned out to be one of the people because of whom I had a good time.)

At times, it felt less like I was at a convention and more like I was on holiday in Fremantle coincidentally at the same time as a bunch of people I knew and other interesting people I enjoyed meeting. I did make it to a few of the panels, but often on the basis of who was on the panel, so they were an extension of the running-into-interesting-people thing.

I went to the Doctor Who panel this year. I often don't bother, because in my experience trying to fit the entire year's episodes into a one hour panel doesn't lend itself to meaty discussion of any particular issue: it's name an episode, everybody quickly mentions what they liked about it, on to the next episode. But that turned out to be just what I needed this year, and I left feeling more optimistic about giving Chibnall and co a chance to show in their second season what they can do now they've had time to find their feet. I also learned, which perhaps I should have realised sooner, that the meaty discussion happens after the scheduled panel is over, when everybody from the panel and audience who doesn't have anywhere they need to be hangs out in the corridor discussing the bits they didn't get to cover earlier.

I'm not sure whether I'm going to Swancon next year. Next year's committee seem like they're on the ball, and I expect I'd enjoy hanging out with people even if the programme doesn't come together -- but they're holding it on the Anzac Day long weekend instead of Easter, and I have commitments at home on Anzac Day. (At least, I will have commitments at home on Anzac Day if I'm still in the brass band then; there's a non-zero possibility that by then I'll have become completely fed up with the way the band is being run these days and quit.) And also next year is the New Zealand Worldcon which I'm considering going to, and I'm not sure if I have the resources to do a Worldcon and a Swancon in the same year. On the other hand, if I am still in the band this time next year, we'll probably be going to the Nationals on the Easter weekend, so it would be possible for me to do the Nationals and Swancon in the same year for once.

1. The pigeons have largely moved on since the owner hired somebody to leave pigeon-scaring whatsits around the place. (At least, the owner told the real estate agent that they would handle the pigeons, and then somebody started leaving pigeon-scaring whatsits around the place while I wasn't home. I haven't been able to get the agent to give me a straight answer, but I have to assume that the two events are connected, because the alternative is that there's a serial prowler in the neighbourhood with a grudge against pigeons.)

The current wildlife topic is now the family of stray cats that have decided to include my yard in their territory. There's three or four of them, young gingers of a similar age that I assume are siblings; an older ginger that I assume is their mother never comes any closer than next door's yard, possibly because she's old enough to remember the previous tenants' dog. After it became clear they weren't going to move on by themselves, I have been trying with some success to convey to the youngers that this territory already belongs to a much larger mammal than them; the trouble is that I left it long enough that they've found themselves a safe nook under the front porch and they tend to flee for that instead of, as I would prefer, out of the yard entirely.


2. I'm still regularly attending and enjoying the gaming group, but blogging about it has become one of those procrastination lint balls where the longer I fail to get around to it the larger the task becomes and the more likely I am to keep putting it off.


3. At the Rep Club, we're in rehearsals for our annual season of short plays. I'm doing sound and lighting design again, and part of my motivation for writing this blog post is that I'm procrastinating on assembling a complicated final sound effect.

Tonight the club is holding a quiz night to raise funds for the theatre renovation drive. Some of the rounds will have theatrical twists; the one I know about because I'm involved is the movie quotes round, where instead of playing clips from movies they're getting club members to act out brief scenes or monologues for the contestants to identify.

Tomorrow there are auditions for the big production for 2019, which will be the musical My Fair Lady. I have expectations about who will be most likely to get the main roles out of the people I know will be auditioning, but it's a popular enough show that we're likely to get people auditioning who wouldn't usually, and I may yet have my expectations confounded.


4. I am still doing Parkrun regularly, and recently passed my first official milestone, 50 Parkruns.


5. I never got around to mentioning that I was growing the muttonchops again, and now I'm not any more. I pruned the facial forest back to stubble for the hot part of summer, and then let it grow out as regular beard for a little while, and within the first week several people indepently told me how much of an improvement they thought it was. I quite liked the muttonchops look myself, but the beard is also not bad when it's this short, so I think I'll stick with the beard at least until I find out what the hairstyle requirements are for My Fair Lady.

I'm still doing Parkrun. I had to miss a couple of weeks when the play ate my Saturday mornings, but I went this weekend and my time was reassuringly no worse than usual. Next weekend, I'll be at Swancon, but there's a Parkrun course not far from the hotel where I'll be staying...