pedanther

One of the reasons why, until this month, I hadn't been to town since 2019 was a lingering fear that if I went into the crowded city I would come back with something interesting and respiratory. In a typically human display of logical thinking, however, having made up my mind to go I didn't take any serious precautions against that outcome, and went cheerfully unmasked among crowds on trains and in buses and in rooms full of boardgamers and so on and so forth.

So it wasn't entirely a surprise when it became apparent, within a week of my return, that I had in fact acquired something interesting and respiratory.

It isn't covid, or at least I've got a negative result on all the covid tests I've been taking. I even tried a brace of those fancy new ones that also test for flu and RSV, and got negative results on those as well. So I'm not quite sure what it is, except that it's definitely annoying.

It started with a general feeling of being tired that had developed by Saturday morning into enough of a something that I cancelled my social plans for the afternoon and spent most of the afternoon asleep instead. The worst of it was over within a few days, leaving just the post-nasal drip and associated cough which do not appear to be in any hurry to go away.

I've been sticking at home to be on the safe side, and skipped board game club and other social occasions. (And a committee meeting, which felt particularly weird because I don't think I've missed a meeting of that committee in years and there's a part of me that worries about what they might get up to without my eye on them.)

One of the ways I passed the time during the week was re-reading Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic tetralogy, and then the sequel tetralogy, The Circle Opens. I started reading them years ago along with the Mark Reads online book club, but for some reason I don't now recall I stopped partway through. The decision to re-read them now and finish the series was partly a choice to read something fairly undemanding that I knew I'd enjoy, and partly a deliberate attempt to manipulate my reading statistics on StoryGraph: The all-time stats page includes a top ten list of the authors a user has read the most books by, which in my case starts with Terry Pratchett at #1 and continues down through several excellent SF writers, two creators of classic detective series, and the most prolific author of Doctor Who tie-in books, to finish – now – with Tamora Pierce at #10. The previous #10 was an author who I regrettably read voraciously during my undiscerning teen years but would now rather not give any hint of endorsement to, so I'm glad to have crowbarred him off the list.

Remarkably Bright Creatures fit the themed reading challenge for November ("a book about families") and the last book of The Circle Opens fit the challenge for December ("Finish a book or series that has been lingering for a long time" – and also the alternate option, "a book about someone who is gifted"), so I've completed that set of challenges ahead of schedule. On the other hand, I'm straggling with the random book challenges: I haven't finished the October book yet (This Is Improbable is one of those books that was designed to be dipped into on odd occasions, not read in long stretches) and I haven't settled on a November book. The November challenge is to pick a book at random from the books with your favourite StoryGraph 'mood' ("adventurous", in my case); I failed to get on with my first pick, as previously detailed, and my next few attempts to re-roll the choice landed on books I wasn't in a suitable frame of mind for. Part of the trouble, I think, is that if a book with my favourite mood has been sitting on the to-read shelf for years there's probably some reason I'm not keen to read it. I'm currently having a shot at a Sabatini novel I picked up in a second-hand shop once, and being reminded that although Sabatini inspired several classic adventure movies I've never entirely got on with his books at first hand.

. ( Babylon 5 )

. ( Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse )

. ( Bumblebee )

. ( Sherlock )

. ( Doctor Who )

1. Since I mentioned that the brass band was contesting at the Nationals, I suppose I should add that they came second in their grade, which is pretty good going considering (a) there were around a dozen bands in that grade, and (b) it's a grade up from where we competed last time.

But I wonder what it says that my immediate reaction to the news was a little voice somewhere inside me asserting confidently that they'd never have done so well if I'd gone and played with them.


2. I have now seen every episode of the original series of Star Trek, plugging an obvious gap in my geek credentials. I started at the same time Mark Watches did, nearly two years ago, but fell behind almost immediately because I wasn't willing to buy the DVDs just to watch them once, and this turned out to be a bad part of the world to borrow them. Star Trek wasn't available on any online streaming service in Australia at the time, and none of the local bricks-and-mortar video libraries had it, so I ended up relying on a mail-order video library that would only send them out one disc at a time and took a whole week to get the next disc to me when I sent the previous disc back. It was a considerable relief when one of the Australian streaming services finally started offering Star Trek, and I could knock off the second half of season three in under a month.

(And yes, "it has Star Trek" was literally the sole criterion I used to decide which streaming video service to sign up for. It wasn't a bad decision, though; the same provider also has the Australian streaming rights for Doctor Who, as well as a pretty large collection of shows I've always intended to watch some day but couldn't be bothered when the best option looked like being the mail-order video library.)


3. A little while ago I discovered a YouTube channel dedicated to Tiny Planets, an animated show that was one of my favourite things in the world when I was younger. I’ve been watching episodes on and off since, and it’s just as delightful as I remember it being. (In fact, it’s even more delightful, because the version on YouTube is without the intrusive narration that was added when it aired here.)


4. This week I finally got around to attending a meeting of the local gaming group, whose existence I learned of a bit over a year ago. I insist that this is partly their fault for giving the impression that they don't want new people to find them: before this week, the only evidence I'd seen of their existence was a single flyer on the wall of a shop that is itself quite hard to find. (They also have a Facebook page, I'm told, but it's not visible to people who don't have Facebook.) To be fair, they're not hurting for members; there was a pretty good crowd the night I went.

They cover a range of tabletop gaming areas: the meeting I went to had a table each devoted to an RPG campaign (Pathfinder), a miniature wargame (Warhammer 40K), and Magic: The Gathering, as well as several tables devoted to more casual boardgaming.

Not being the kind of person who's good at interposing myself, I hovered until one of the organisers noticed me and gave me the tour, then hovered some more until one of the boardgames finished and the people on that table invited me to join their next game. They turned out to be a pretty friendly bunch, and did a lot to counteract the uncertainty I was still feeling about whether I was welcome.

We played 7 Wonders (I came third) and Love Letter: Batman (I came dead last, partly because I was having too much fun to concentrate on strategy). Love Letter: Batman isn't as weird as it sounds, and doesn't actually involve any love letters: it's a spin-off of a game about deducing the location of a compromising letter, but in the Batman edition you're deducing the hiding places of villains instead.

Once I got past the nervous hovering I had a lot of fun, and I don't intend to wait a whole year before I go again.


5. The single best thing I've read recently is a fanfic called Empty Graves, which is the story of why you never hear about anybody going back in time and killing Superman when he was a defenceless two-year-old. (The short answer is Martha Kent. The long answer is more complicated, and ends in a brighter place than I was afraid it would when I was halfway through.)

 

1. This weekend is the final weekend before the season of short plays opens. Today was the tech rehearsal, where we nailed down the lighting and sound effects. There's something about seeing the play properly lit for the first time that makes it seem real in a way it didn't before.

Or maybe it's just relief; there were times when I wasn't sure the lighting was going to come together. As it was, we ended up throwing out one of my ideas because it just plain wasn't going to work. (Fortunately, it was a bonus subtlety, not a key detail, and I wasn't all that attached to it.)

Actually, during the first run through the lighting cues, there was a second idea that wasn't going to work, so I threw it out too, and we moved on. Then, some time later, after we'd gone on to other things, the lighting guy wandered past and asked a question about it, and then a few minutes later he wandered past again and said, "How about if we...?" And we tried it, and it wasn't what I'd imagined, but it did the job even better than what I'd imagined would have done if it had worked. One of the things I love about working in theatre is the collaborative aspect, especially when it means somebody comes up with a better idea than I did.


2. This week, Mark Oshiro reached a new high-water-mark in unpreparedness at Mark Reads. One of the things that makes it so entertaining when Mark is working his way through a new novel is that not only does he not know what's coming in the sense that he's never read the novel before, but he also doesn't have the kind of mind that retains and assembles clues to predict future plot twists. The plot twists always take him by surprise.

But he's surpassed himself this time. He's currently reading Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!, which has a plot revolving around a detective on the trail of a sinister conspiracy led by a shadowy anonymous figure. He didn't pick up on any of the hints that might lead a genre-savvy reader to guess the villain's identity in advance, but that's normal for Mark. He didn't put it together after reading the scene in which the detective figures it out, which is okay because it's not spelled out for the reader in that scene. But then he went on and read the scene in which the detective goes and confronts the villain and he still doesn't know who the villain is.


3. Last week was the local round of the annual Toastmasters speech evaluation contest, which I always enter, even though I never win, because it's valuable practice and a good way to sharpen a useful skill set.

This year I won.


4. Two weeks ago, I finished reading The Lost Prince, one of the lesser-known works by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. It was... kind of weird, for a number of reasons, and something of a disappointment after the two novels aforementioned. It hasn't aged well on things like classism and sexism, and I'm not inclined to give it a pass on anything like "of its time" grounds because it was written after The Secret Garden, so we know the author could pass the Bechdel test and write working-class characters as actual human beings if she wanted to. (It should perhaps be noted, to be complete, that some of the upper-class characters in The Lost Prince don't quite convince as real people, either; class essentialism cuts both ways. I was amused and not entirely surprised to subsequently discover that a significant proportion of the Lost Prince fic on AO3 is crackfic in which the Lost Prince's bloodline literally isn't entirely human.)


5. Three weeks ago, I signed up for HabitRPG, which aims to make getting stuff done more interesting by supplying a RPG-themed context: strengthen a good habit or tick off something on your to-do list, and your character gains XP and loot; strengthen a bad habit, and your character loses health points. It probably says something about my habits that most of my loot has been going toward armour and health potions to stave off the effects of my bad habits, but I have been seeing some improvement, and noticing moments when I've gained the necessary willpower get something done or avoid a bad habit by remembering what will happen to fictional-me if I don't. One area where I feel I've made definite improvement is in the area of getting to bed at a reasonable time; even when I fail to get to bed by the self-imposed deadline that would win me loot, it's usually not by much, and I don't do the noodling-around-on-the-internet-until-ridiculous-o'clock thing nearly as often. It's having a knock-on effect on how easily I get out of bed in the morning, too.

1. Over at Mark Reads, where Mark Oshiro reads popular works of literature he's somehow managed to avoid knowing anything about, Mark has just begun reading the Discworld series. It's really entertaining watching him encounter for the first time things that we long-time Discworld fans have become used to. (Like the Discworld itself, flat and resting on the backs of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of an enormous turtle.) (And then there's the Luggage...)


2. I am continuing at the gym fairly regularly, though not quite as regularly as I'd like; I'm aiming for at least three visits a week, but often only manage two. (My evenings are pretty crowded these days, and I am very much not a morning person so going before work isn't a thing that is happening.) An unanticipated side-effect, thanks to the gym's choice of background noise being a hit music channel, is that I'm now more familiar with the current popular singles than I've probably ever been in my life.


3. We're not doing The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee this year after all; the new year brought unanticipated new workloads and time-sucks for several key people (and, in one case, the news that his employer was relocating him to a city 400 miles away). The club has regrouped and scheduled The Importance of Being Earnest to take its place; all the remaining cast of Bee were invited to take part, but I opted to step back and concentrate on preparing for the National Band Championships.


4. Because, and I may not have mentioned this yet, we will be defending our title at this year's Nationals, even though it means flying over to the other side of the continent to do it. (The flying is actually the bit I'm most worried about; it will be my first experience of commercial air travel, and I could have done without the extra worry of how my instrument case is going to interact with the luggage limits.) The guest conductor who helped us get into shape last year has been back, and I don't know if we're going to win again but I think we have a good chance of not disgracing ourselves.


5. Back to talking about local theatre, our other local theatre group has announced that its next production is going to be Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth. That's an... interesting choice; the play has some tricky staging requirements which I expect would be especially challenging for a community theatre production. I look forward with interest to seeing how it comes out.

1. From the "I always assume everyone has heard about these already" department: Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere is being adapted into a six-part radio drama, with a cast that's wall-to-wall British acting talent, led by James McAvoy as Richard Mayhew, Benedict Cumberbatch as the angel Islington, and Anthony Head & David Schofield as Messrs. Croup & Vandemar. More details are on his blog.

Also forthcoming from Neil Gaiman: his second Doctor Who episode. Details are not on his blog, except this one: that it guest stars Warwick Davis.


2. A recent discussion at Ana Mardoll's blog got onto the subject of the loaded term "Mary Sue", and started trying to come up with more descriptive alternatives. Two terms have gained traction at the time of writing: "Magic Goose Hero" (so implausibly irresistible that all the characters want to grab on despite it making no sense for them to want to do so) for the character, and "Protagonist Centred Everything" for the problem. And this is the thing which came out in the discussion that I hope catches on, even if none of the actual terms do - that when a story revolves around an impossibly awesome protagonist, the protagonist and the problem are not one and the same. When the plot and other characters exist only to showcase how awesome the protagonist is, they're all part of the problem too.


3. Still reading along with Mark Reads Tortall. Nearing the end of the last book in the Lioness Quartet now, and things are starting to really come together. It's not as easy to stick to the one-chapter-at-a-time schedule as it used to be.


4. One of the nice things about the new washing machine is that it has a delayed start function, which means that I can load it up before I go to bed and wake up to newly-washed clothes in the morning. In theory. In practice, I need more work on getting the timing right - I got up on Saturday morning and went to see if the laundry cycle was finished, and arrived just in time to see it start.

(Also in washing machine news: I don't need a new stool after all, because the existing laundry chair - which the laundry basket sits in while I'm taking clothes out and hanging them up - is a good height for the job.)

(Yes, it's an exciting life I lead. I've learned to live with it.)


5. If somebody had told me Casino Royale opens with Freddy Fisher going down for treason, I might have watched it much sooner. (Or perhaps not. But it did provide a nice unexpected moment of interest. As did Alan Jackson's brief and ill-fated stint in MI6 a bit later, though him I admit I couldn't place until the credits.)

I don't think I'm really the target audience for this sort of thing, though; most of the big bravura action sequences had me, well before they ended, muttering "Yes, very nice, but can we get back to the plot now?"

1. I'm re-reading the last few volumes of Sandman along with Mark Reads Sandman. (To start with I just dipped into the books when I wanted to check a detail, then I started re-reading bits, and now it's definitely a continuous re-read.)

I don't think I've mentioned Mark Reads here before, though I keep meaning to. The general premise is that Mark reads a popular work of fiction that he doesn't know anything about, one chapter a day, and after each chapter he writes and blogs a post reacting to the events of the chapter and trying to predict where the story's going next.
( Read more... )
Things Mark has read include Harry Potter, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, and The Hunger Games. He also has a companion blog, Mark Watches, where he's currently episode-by-episoding his way through Buffy and Angel.


2. I've more or less given up on the multiplayer aspect of Worlds in Time, the Doctor Who online multiplayer game, and am working my way through the storyline as if it were single-player mode, accompanied only by the computer-operated assistants. ( Read more... )


3. Meanwhile, Portal 2 has an actual single-player storyline that I've been working my way through. ( Read more... )


4. For my thoughts on Brave and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, see my previous Five Things post.


5. I went to see Steel Magnolias mainly because I had several friends in the cast; I wasn't at all sure it would be my kind of thing. As it turned out, I liked it a lot. This suggests that there may be whole unexplored areas of fiction that have drifted by me because they seemed on the surface to be not my kind of thing. If so, I'm not sure I want to know; it's not as if I don't have a large enough pile of things to read and watch as it is.

(There's probably some clever way to tie this back around to point 1, since one of the things Mark Reads is built on is Mark discovering and falling in love with works that he'd previously drifted by because they superficially appeared to be not his kind of thing. But it's late, and I'm tired, and I'm not going to bother.)