pedanther

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

Finished reading Here Lies Arthur. It's one of those books that takes King Arthur back to his hypothetical roots in post-Roman Britain, though the author's note makes a point of saying that it's meant as an entertaining might-have-been and not as a serious attempt at 'what really happened'. The might-have-been is that Arthur was just one of many warlords trying to become the top dog, and not the most noble or the most powerful, but had the significant asset of being supported by Myrddin, a skilled storyteller who made Arthur a legend in his own lifetime. It's an interesting premise, and produces some reflections on the nature of truth and the power of belief (it's narrated by Myrddin's apprentice, known to posterity as the Lady in the Lake, who has mixed feelings about the wisdom of the entire enterprise). I did find it a bit distracting that many of the stories that are posited as having their origins in actual events of Arthur's life are ones that I'm pretty sure only became attached to the Arthurian legend centuries later, but I suppose when you're writing an entertaining might-have-been you have to use the stories your audience will recognise. I was entertained, and got invested in the characters, and was satisfied by the way it wrapped up.

This week I also re-read The Man Who Made Gold by Barbara Ninde Byfield, a short fantasy novel that was a favourite of mine in younger days. According to the reading log, it's been nearly twenty years since I last read it, but I still remember every story beat and a lot of the dialogue. (I found myself noticing a few turns of phrase that have shown up in my own writing.) Whatever you do, don't feed Frederick!


I've already been to the cinema more times this year than in all of 2024. I went to see two movies this week, Wicked: Part I and Conclave.

Wicked: Part I is the movie adaptation of the first act of the long-running musical inspired by the novel inspired by The Wizard of Oz, telling the story of the young woman who becomes known as the Wicked Witch of the West. It was very good; there were a few places where I thought things that worked on stage hadn't quite translated gracefully to the screen, but nothing I had real trouble with. There were also some elements they'd taken the opportunity to tweak for the better, particularly the characterisation of Nessarose, who gets pushed around (both figuratively and, given the wheelchair, literally) significantly less than in the stage version. I was damp-eyed at times, including at the finale - and, somewhat to my surprise, during the opening scene, where nothing has even happened yet. (Or rather, since the opening scene is setting up a flashback that tells the whole story, everything has happened but you don't know it unless you've already seen Wicked. This is the first time I've seen the opening scene since I saw Wicked on stage, so it was my first time watching it with full knowledge of what's just happened and what's not being said. The added realism of film also means that if you know to look you can see what's just happened in Glinda's face, in a way you wouldn't from twenty rows back in a theatre.) The decision to split the musical over two movies attracted some debate, but it seems to be working so far. I actually wasn't that worried about Part I, because the first act has its own character arc and triumphant finale; I'm interested to see how well Part II works, as the second act not only has to deal with the fallout from Part I but gets lumbered with all the fiddly details of making the story of Wicked dovetail with the story of The Wizard of Oz.

Conclave is a political thriller, based on a Robert Harris novel, about the shenanigans surrounding the election of a new Pope. Political maneuvring, dramatic revelations of candidates' secrets, all that kind of thing, wrapped up with some excellent acting and even a few thoughts about justice and faith and the role of the Church in the modern world. In terms of dramatic appropriateness, it's not really a surprise who ends up getting elected, but it's a fun journey seeing how things get to that point.


I've finished my playthrough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so I started playing XCOM 2. And then I started Not Playing XCOM 2.

XCOM 2 is a substantially tougher game than its predecessor, both in general difficulty and in things like the way it gives each soldier enough individual personality that you care when one of them gets killed. I was doing pretty well at first, and fairly sure I was enjoying it, but then I hit a difficulty spike and kept repeatedly failing missions. I kept playing, but it was getting less and less about the joy of overcoming high odds and more and more about stubbornly throwing myself against the same obstacles over and over. Part of it was that, even when it was going badly, playing the game was a distraction from stressful things happening in real life, but it got to the point that I spent a day playing XCOM 2 in every spare moment and quite a few moments I strictly speaking couldn't spare, not only procrastinating things I didn't want to do but failing to get around to things I did want to do and would have enjoyed. I wasn't enjoying XCOM 2, I realised; I was engaged, but it was more like a weird kind of doomscrolling (and possibly, given how often the success or failure of a mission seemed to come down to the initial random conditions, something unpleasantly like a gambler going back to the table declaring that this time was going to be the winner). So I decided the next day that I would not play XCOM 2 at all, and find other things to do if I needed to procrastinate. I stuck with it, though at first it required some stalling tactics ("At least do the washing up first, then we'll see"), and at the end of the day I felt so much better and had got so much done that I've spent the rest of the week Not Playing XCOM 2. (It didn't all go as well as the first day; there was a day where I was feeling out of sorts and spent most of the day mindlessly faffing about on the internet, but I still think that left me in a better mental state than an equivalent amount of beating my head against XCOM 2 would have done.)

I don't think this is really XCOM 2's fault - I think it just happened to be in the right/wrong place when my mental health wasn't the best. I've enjoyed - properly enjoyed - playing it before, and I probably will again. Just... not right now.


I had the unusual experience this week of going to an unstructured social event and enjoying myself. I usually prefer to get my socialising done in situations where there's some kind of event providing structure - such as band rehearsal, or board game club - because when there's nothing to do but interact with humans, I'm never sure what I should do or whether I'm doing it right. This event was actually a gathering of people from the board game club, and was originally described in the invitation I got as "socialising/boardgames", but by the time I got there it had been decided to hold the event out in the host's back yard, where it was cooler but not very well lit, and to stick to socialising and leave board games for another time. It turned out pretty well; there were enough people to keep the conversation going without any one person being under pressure, and I knew everyone well enough to be comfortable in their company.

. I went to the cinema for the first time in months, to see a new Australian film called Kid Snow, which was filmed on location in Western Australia and has a few people I know in the crowd scenes. (I also know some of the locations, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a sequence where the characters leave a small country town, drive all day, and arrive in a new small country town, in which both small country towns are played by the same somewhat larger country town, a few blocks apart.) The plot is the kind of thing that sounds very familiar if you try to explain it in a single sentence, and some of the dialogue is a bit on the nose, but the main performances are strong (including the tagalong kid character, who is genuinely charming and not irritating except when the story means him to be). Some of the supporting performances, too; at least two of the supporting characters are played by actors who have separately starred in other Australian productions that I've been meaning to get around to (one of which, Mystery Road: Origins, was filmed on location in the same part of Western Australia and has more familiar faces in it).


. Last weekend was a long weekend in WA, which as far as the local boardgaming club was concerned meant an opportunity to break out some of the longer board games that we don't get to play in our weekly evening sessions. Over the weekend, we played several rounds of Pandemic Legacy (which started well and then got out of hand repeatedly as additional constraints began appearing), Fury of Dracula (with unintentionally appropriate timing; in the chronology of Dracula this week in September is when the heroes stop playing catch-up and start actively hunting vampires), and a six-player game of Agricola, among other shorter games.


. I was right, I did end up picking Cobra for the September random book challenge. This involved shamelessly bending the instructions for selecting the book, but I've done that a few times already with this challenge. I feel like it's the kind of challenge where the aim is ultimately to break decision paralysis and read a book, and as long as that goal is achieved it doesn't really matter if you follow the instructions to the letter. I wouldn't be so cavalier with a reading challenge where the book selection mattered in itself, like the challenge I've seen going around where the aim is to read one book originating from each nation.


. Apart from the two monthly reading challenges I'm doing, I'm also doing another less structured one that's just a long list of varied prompts like "a book with a hotel on the cover" or "a book with a title that sounds like exercise". I haven't been mentioning it because the range of prompts is so broad that I can usually find something to check off for every book I read, so I've been tending to treat it as an afterthought and not an aid to book selection. However, since I was caught up on both the monthly challenges with some time left in September, I decided to look at the list of unfinished prompts and see if it would suggest something to read next. My eye was caught by "a book with the word 'secret' in the title", since that seemed like an easy one to match against my to-read list on StoryGraph -- and it was even easier than anticipated, because when I went to the to-read page the very first book listed, in the section at the top of the page for high-priority books, was The Mountains Have a Secret, the next novel in the Bony series. So I borrowed that from the library and read it. Then I immediately went on to read the following book, The Widows of Broome, because the ebook edition has a really ugly cover that I hate looking at and didn't want lurking at the top of my to-read page for however long it would otherwise have taken me to get around to it.


. Somebody in a book-related online group posted a picture of their recent book acquisitions, which included Prez: Setting a Dangerous President. This briefly gave me hope that Prez had somehow been revived without me hearing about it, but when I looked it up it turned out it was just a new edition of the first six issues with a different subtitle and a new bonus story.

The modern incarnation of Prez, written by Mark Russell with art by Ben Caldwell, ran for 6 issues around nine years ago, and then was cancelled just as it was really getting going. I wasn't a huge fan, but it had its moments, and Russell was clearly going somewhere with it and I would have liked to have seen where that was. Of the various questions left unanswered when the series was cancelled, the one that increasingly haunts me as time goes on is the place in the story of comic relief and occasional deus ex machina Fred Wayne, a quirky reclusive multi-billionaire who drops into the story from time to time to give events a nudge, and somehow avoids being one of the series' villains despite being a multi-billionaire with enough money and influence to bend democracy to his whim, whose reputation canonically rests on taking credit for the unrecognised work of more creatively gifted employees. (The bit about him making his first fortune from generative AI that's started crowding human writers out of the market hasn't aged well, either.) It might not bother me so much if there weren't occasional moments that might have been hints that Russell knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was setting Fred up to be an antagonist later on -- I even have a left-field theory, based partly on things that happened in the original 1970s incarnation of Prez that aren't in evidence in the six published issue of the reboot, that he might have been intended as the ultimate villain of the series. Or I could be reading too much into it, and Russell just wanted a convenient deus ex machina and didn't think too hard about the implications. We don't know, and what bothers me is that there is, now, no way we can ever know for certain.

. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the best thing I've seen in a cinema in a very long time. It's a showcase of the dramatic and creative possibilities of the medium, but more importantly it's all in service of an emotionally resonant and satisfying story. The cast are all great, too. I would happily have added it to the very short list of films I've gone to see in the cinema more than once, but the local cinema only did a single screening. Actually, to be fair, they've recently announced a second single screening, but unfortunately it's on a night when I have rehearsals.


. Rehearsals are continuing for Rock of Ages. I've also been roped into a part for another production, partly on condition that it's a small role and I don't have to attend every rehearsal but it still means that there aren't a lot of nights left that I don't have rehearsals.


. In the annals of small personal victories, I hired a lawnmower for an hour and tamed the overgrown grass in my back yard. I've known where the hire place is for months, but I kept putting it off on the excuse that they didn't stock small lawnmowers and I didn't know if the ones they had would fit in the back of my car. Turns out it was fine once we folded up the handle. The staff were very helpful, and in all it was definitely a better experience than any of the other ways I've dealt with the overgrown yard in the past. (Most often by hiring an entire person to come and do it, which is stressful and rather more expensive and it keeps happening that when I like the work a person has done, they've gone out of business by the time I want them to come and do it again.)

As a fun side note, I noticed when I was done that my Fitbit was registering an elevated heart rate (probably mostly from hoicking the mower in and out of the car, rather than the bit where I pushed it around), and wondered if the automatic exercise logger would make something of it. It did: it marked it down as a period of bicycle riding, presumably on the basis that the arm with the Fitbit on had spent most of the period in question in a handlebar-holding position.


. For this month's reading challenge (book with a direction in the title), I'm reading James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. It's a collection of stories set in the Pacific theatre of World War 2; a couple of them, combined, were the inspiration for the musical South Pacific. I haven't got up to either of those stories yet; the ones I have read so far have been less cheery than I remember the musical being. One of the ones I have read is set on Norfolk Island, which was interesting; I don't often see American writers writing about Australian history.


. I have finished the extended story mode of Invisible, Inc in Expert Plus difficulty, and consequently I've now garnered every in-game achievement except the gimmick achievement that it's literally impossible to attain while actually playing the game. I'm glad I took the time to work on Expert Plus difficulty; I don't want to sound like one of those "You haven't really played until you've beaten the game on the highest difficulty" gamers (particularly since the game itself describes Expert Plus difficulty as 'a bit ridiculous') but my experience was that once I started getting the hang of it the extra level of challenge made it more immersive, and finishing the story mode came with a real sense of accomplishment.

. A short video: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain look back on 2020

. Beginning this weekend, the Youtube channel Fear: The Home of Horror will be offering for viewing, complete and free of charge, seven of the classic Universal Monster Movies: Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I'm seeing conflicting reports on how long the movies will stay up (most consistent suggestion is about a week), and whether some countries are excluded from the offer, but if you're interested it might be worth checking out.

. Can I Play That? is a website that covers video games and video game consoles from the viewpoint of disability and accessibility.

. A poem: The Child-Eating Forest Speaks Its Mind

. World Watch OnLine is a Buckaroo Banzai fan site. The current front page news is about a new Buckaroo Banzai novel (by Earl Mac Rauch, creator and writer of the movie), but elsewhere on the site there's an essay titled "The Buckaroo Barrier", in which a fan recounts his experiences introducing people he knows to the movie. He reports that the most common reaction to a first viewing is bemusement, but every time he's been able to persuade someone to give it a second shot they've clicked with it and enjoyed it. Speaking as someone who wanted to like the movie, but whose reaction to a first viewing was bemusement, this is encouraging news; maybe I should give it a second shot...

. Knives Out is probably the most satisfying movie-going experience I've had all year.


. The christmas show has successfully concluded its run. As is often the case with comedies, by the time we hit dress rehearsals we were wondering if there were any funny bits in the play at all, but once we got it in front of an audience who hadn't heard all the jokes fifty times already it turned out it was quite funny, actually.


. Game Maker's Toolkit, the Youtube channel that did the "Designing for Disability" series earlier this year, has published an end-of-year round up of games released in 2019 that did particularly well or particularly poorly at accessibility for players with disabilities.


. In more local video game news, I've unlocked all the endings of Yoku's Island Express and nearly got 100% completion. All that's left are a few dexterity challenges, which I may or may not bother with attempting, and the achievement for forgiving the villain, which I'm physically capable of doing any time I want but frankly I don't want to.


. I'm going to see The Rise of Skywalker tomorrow. Until then, I'm trying to avoid the places where I'm likely to encounter spoilers, although I have seen The West Australian newspaper's front page headline, which was... not especially encouraging.

1. Oliver! opens on Friday. I've been singing the bridge section from "Another Op'nin', Another Show" a lot. One week - will it ever be right? Actually, we're doing pretty well, apart from a couple of scenes and a couple of crowd songs where the choreography could stand to be tightened a bit.

The junior contingent of the cast is doing pretty well on the stage, but is getting on a lot of nerves backstage. The last time we did Oliver!, about fifteen years ago, it was in a big modern theatre with a soundproofed backstage area and a separate room for the kids and their minders. For this production, we're back in our home theatre, which is older, smaller, and more rickety, so we're all sharing one green room and spending a lot of time trying out new variations on "Hey, pipe down, the audience will be able to hear you" in the hope that one of them will stick.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that there was one scene that kept going wrong because somebody was getting their lines out in the wrong places, and when we dug the script out to check it turned out to be me. Whoops. Still, I'm pretty confident we've got that straightened out now.


2. At the gaming group this week, we played Talisman, subtitled "The Magical Quest Game". Well, we started playing; the designers took the "epic quest" brief very seriously, so it's not a quick play. Three and half hours later it was nearly time to pack up and nobody was close to winning, so when the first player died we decided that would have to do as an outcome and ended it there.

Each player picks a character out of a deck of about a dozen, each of which has varying strengths and weaknesses. (I was playing the Minstrel, who has high intelligence/magical ability, low physical strength, and a special ability that means that if he is attacked by a wild animal, instead of having to fight it he can try to charm it with his music, and if he succeeds it will follow him around and help him fight things he can't charm.) If you're not playing with a time limit, the rule is apparently that when your character is killed you get to pick another one and start again from the beginning (otherwise you'd be sitting around for ages waiting for someone else to win, which would be no fun).

The board is laid out in three concentric rectangles. The outermost area is the settled world, with towns and fields and forests, and the best places to stock up on weapons and armour and other equipment before setting out on the quest properly. Across a river is the middle area, which has more adventurous climates, like deserts and mountains, as well as the royal palace and the high temple, and a big sinister portal that leads into the mountain fastness that is the object of the quest. The innermost area has encounters with vampires, werewolves, Death itself, and another door that can only be opened with the eponymous talisman, and leads to the treasure everyone seeks.


3. I finally got around to seeing the caper film Now You See Me, which was very entertaining but I suspect is going to make less sense the more I think about it. (It's certainly a lot better constructed than The Illusionist, the last trick-ending movie featuring stage magicians I saw, but that's really not a high bar to clear.) I wish I'd gotten around to it before someone told me which character was the Fifth Horseman, because that's the kind of thing I enjoy trying to figure out for myself. I think I might have managed it; I'm pretty sure that even without knowing the answer in advance I would have ruled out three of the suspects by the time the endgame started, which would have narrowed the field considerably. (One of them gets ruled out for you at the end of the second act, another I think would have pinged my red herring detector from being pushed a bit too hard as Suspicious, and a third either can't be or must be the Fifth Horseman, depending on how much I-know-you-know one applies to the hints about the Fifth Horseman's motives, and I think I would have come down on the correct side.) But it would have been nice to find out.


4. It's not been a good month for my childhood, with the deaths of author Nicholas Fisk (Grinny, Monster Maker, et al.) and actor Alan Young (the definitive Scrooge McDuck, among many notable roles in a varied career).


5. This week's Batman fanfic rec: Unpaid Internship, in which there's less than an hour until a quarter of the earth's population meets explosive doom and Batman is carrying something that he's adamant isn't a baby.

1. My passport has been issued, which is the point at which I decided I was going to accept this is a thing that's actually happening:

In December I'm going to visit Germany, and also Austria and the Czech Republic, with a group of friends, to see this "White Christmas" thing everybody's written so many songs about.

This is a bit exciting, because the closest I've been to overseas before now is Rottnest Island.


2. Rehearsals for the Christmas show continue. Sometimes I think it's going really well, other times I'm horrified at how much there is left to do. Four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse...


3. What with one thing and another - specifically, the two things mentioned above - I haven't signed up for Yuletide this year and it doesn't seem likely I'll end up contributing. My creative wossnames are currently all tied up in the Christmas show, and I'll be travelling, with uncertain internet prospects, during the all-important Eleventh Hour Crunch. Best wishes to everyone on my friendslist who is taking part this year.


4. Went to see Justin Kurzel's new film version of Macbeth, which has been getting impressive reviews, and now I'm horribly tempted to describe it using the phrase "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", which wouldn't really be fair. For one thing, one of the problems I had with it was that there are several points where I think a bit of sound and fury was just what we needed and didn't get. For another, it's full of things that are clearly Significant - it's saturated with Significance, to the point that the whole experience ended up feeling rather smothered - I just don't think that in the end they added up to anything coherent.

(Also, on a more nitpicky note, there were several places that hit one of my directorial peeves, where the dialogue says one thing and the action shows something else. This was particularly annoying since it's a production that's not afraid to prune big chunks of dialogue out, or even occasionally to change a line, with no good effect on the rhyme or the scansion. If you're going that far, then either do something about the line that contradicts your vision, or if the line is too important to be done away with, consider that that might mean your vision might need adjusting...)


5. Every time I get my hair cut, I seem to end up with more forehead than I had before.