. Apart from the regular gaming group meet-ups, I've also been drawn into a smaller group who meet sometimes on weekends to play the kind of board games that take hours to get through and so don't usually get brought out at the more casual meet-ups. Among other things, that's meant I recently got a chance to play
Fury of Dracula again for the first time in years. I played Dracula, and I started well but the hunters found my trail just as I was about to slip through their cordon and get away into the area they'd already searched, and after that I never quite managed to shake them off until they eventually cornered me in Madrid. Everybody had a good time, so perhaps it won't be years again before I next play.
. 'Tis the season to look wistfully at fic exchange sign-ups and then decide not to get involved. Lately I've been particularly wistful about
Remix Revival (which I enjoyed a lot the first time I did it, but I'd feel weird doing it again when I haven't written anything else substantial in the interim) and
FEAR Buddies, where instead of matching on people to write fics for it matches on people who need cheerleading/motivation to finish a fic they were already planning to do. That one seemed like something that would be useful, and where I could be useful, but signing up would have involved, like, figuring out what kind of motivation I need and writing it down and stuff. I'd sign up for a lot more exchanges if the sign-up forms could read my mind and make these sorts of decisions for me.
. I've just finished re-reading
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings. It's the first time I've re-read them all the way through since before the Hobbit movies came out, so I spent quite a bit of time noticing differences between the books and the adaptations. One thing that struck me particularly this time through is about travel times; in the adaptations, journeys tend to be "travel montage of indeterminate length" or "cut to them arriving", but in the books Tolkien always gives a definite idea of how long a journey took, so there's more of an impression of how big the land is and how far apart things are. There are places in the movies where it seems like the characters are getting somewhere the same day but in the books it's several days travel, or in the movies it seems like a few days but in the book it's weeks.
. Another thing I've read recently is "All Systems Red", the first novella in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which has been on my to-read pile for ages but I never got around to before. Now I have a decision to make, because the second book in the series is significantly more expensive (maybe it's a full novel? I'm not sure), but the current wait time on the library system's copy is two months.
. I've occasionally noted the progress of the local paper's rerun of the Modesty Blaise comic strip, so for completeness there is one more development to note. (This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I didn't hear about it at the time because I stopped reading paper newspapers during the coronavirus restrictions and haven't restarted.) It's not carrying the strip any more, having decided that some of what passed as acceptable when the strip originally ran is no longer suitable for a family newspaper. Looking back, it's not exactly that I was unaware of the strip's shortcomings, but I never really thought about it because it was such a familiar presence; I might have gone "well, it was written fifty years ago" but I never got from there to ask the question "so why is it being given space here and now?". Apparently whoever was responsible for the content of the comics page was in a similar headspace, at least until the rerun got up to the story set in the Australian outback, at which point the problem started hitting close to home and the question was forcefully received from multiple directions and received the only possible answer.
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