Week in review: Week to 28 February
Mar. 2nd, 2026 07:50 am. The family walk-and-talk has successfully occurred for two weeks running.
. The weekend boardgame group continued to play Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )
. At the weekly game meet, I played Cockroach Salad, 7 Wonders, The Mind, The Royal Game of Ur, and Thirty-One. ( Read more... )
. I have completed the jigsaw puzzle I was working on. It made a bad initial impression which it has not subsequently succeeded in overcoming. ( Read more... ) I have a second puzzle from the same series, and I'm going to do it next because it's there (and I'm curious about whether the nonsense booklet is a regular feature), but it's going to have to work a bit to gain my good will.
. I went to another concert, at the same venue and with mostly the same group of friends. This week it was the Hindley Street Country Club, which is much more my kind of music; I had an okay time last week, but this week I really enjoyed myself, ending with a big grin on my face and at one point going so far as to consider thinking about getting up and dancing. ( Read more... )
. I am continuing to play and enjoy XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's an indication of how much extra content is in the DLC that this first play-through has been going for over two weeks, during which I've been playing fairly often, and I'm still a fair distance from the final boss mission. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the final boss mission; another thing that the DLC adds to the game is a series of mini-boss missions that are less intense versions of the final boss mission and provide opportunities to develop and practice useful strategies. Defeating each of the mini-bosses also results in a reward of a unique powerful weapon that I expect I will be glad of in the final battle.
. The weekend boardgame group continued to play Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )
. At the weekly game meet, I played Cockroach Salad, 7 Wonders, The Mind, The Royal Game of Ur, and Thirty-One. ( Read more... )
. I have completed the jigsaw puzzle I was working on. It made a bad initial impression which it has not subsequently succeeded in overcoming. ( Read more... ) I have a second puzzle from the same series, and I'm going to do it next because it's there (and I'm curious about whether the nonsense booklet is a regular feature), but it's going to have to work a bit to gain my good will.
. I went to another concert, at the same venue and with mostly the same group of friends. This week it was the Hindley Street Country Club, which is much more my kind of music; I had an okay time last week, but this week I really enjoyed myself, ending with a big grin on my face and at one point going so far as to consider thinking about getting up and dancing. ( Read more... )
. I am continuing to play and enjoy XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's an indication of how much extra content is in the DLC that this first play-through has been going for over two weeks, during which I've been playing fairly often, and I'm still a fair distance from the final boss mission. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the final boss mission; another thing that the DLC adds to the game is a series of mini-boss missions that are less intense versions of the final boss mission and provide opportunities to develop and practice useful strategies. Defeating each of the mini-bosses also results in a reward of a unique powerful weapon that I expect I will be glad of in the final battle.
Week in review: Week to 21 February
Feb. 24th, 2026 10:30 am. At the weekly board game meet, we played Liar's Uno while we were waiting to see who turned up, and then the main game was Clank!.
( Read more... )
. I went with friends to a concert by the iconic punk rock band The Living End. It's not my kind of music particularly, but my friends were going and it was at a nice outdoor venue in good weather, so I figured I might as well go along and see how it went. I still don't think it's my kind of music particularly, but I had a good time.
. I went on a walk with some of my relatives and we talked about how our weeks had been going. We're hoping to make it a regular event.
. I was looking for new ice cube trays and decided I wanted flexible silicone ones instead of rigid plastic. I couldn't find any regular cube-shaped silicone trays, but I came across a set that made ice blocks shaped like animal heads, and decided that a bit of extra whimsy wouldn't hurt. They were available in dog heads and cat heads, so I got one of each. The dog heads are working a treat, but I haven't been able to get the cat heads out of the trays -- the extra surface area of the whisker details is providing too much grip on the ice blocks.
. Since I'd had to pay for it as part of the bundle, and it had already downloaded itself, I figured I might as well try out War of the Chosen, the big expansion DLC for XCOM 2. I have mixed feelings about parts of it, but on the whole I'm having a positive experience.
( Read more... )
Something I'd expected to dislike, but actually haven't so far, is that several of the obligatory story missions have been revamped specifically to rule out the easy solutions that players had found for achieving the objectives. There's one particular mid-game mission which had become effectively a solved problem where I just had to go through the same sequence of moves each time I played it; the revamped version breaks that sequence of moves, so that I had to actually work at completing the mission, and the result was that I had fun playing it and was interested in how it would turn out. It remains to be seen whether I will have the same response to the final boss mission, which I gather has been rejiggered specifically to remove the strategically-convenient geography that I've been relying on over multiple play-throughs to make the final boss fight much easier than the game designers intended it to be.
( Read more... )
. I went with friends to a concert by the iconic punk rock band The Living End. It's not my kind of music particularly, but my friends were going and it was at a nice outdoor venue in good weather, so I figured I might as well go along and see how it went. I still don't think it's my kind of music particularly, but I had a good time.
. I went on a walk with some of my relatives and we talked about how our weeks had been going. We're hoping to make it a regular event.
. I was looking for new ice cube trays and decided I wanted flexible silicone ones instead of rigid plastic. I couldn't find any regular cube-shaped silicone trays, but I came across a set that made ice blocks shaped like animal heads, and decided that a bit of extra whimsy wouldn't hurt. They were available in dog heads and cat heads, so I got one of each. The dog heads are working a treat, but I haven't been able to get the cat heads out of the trays -- the extra surface area of the whisker details is providing too much grip on the ice blocks.
. Since I'd had to pay for it as part of the bundle, and it had already downloaded itself, I figured I might as well try out War of the Chosen, the big expansion DLC for XCOM 2. I have mixed feelings about parts of it, but on the whole I'm having a positive experience.
( Read more... )
Something I'd expected to dislike, but actually haven't so far, is that several of the obligatory story missions have been revamped specifically to rule out the easy solutions that players had found for achieving the objectives. There's one particular mid-game mission which had become effectively a solved problem where I just had to go through the same sequence of moves each time I played it; the revamped version breaks that sequence of moves, so that I had to actually work at completing the mission, and the result was that I had fun playing it and was interested in how it would turn out. It remains to be seen whether I will have the same response to the final boss mission, which I gather has been rejiggered specifically to remove the strategically-convenient geography that I've been relying on over multiple play-throughs to make the final boss fight much easier than the game designers intended it to be.
Notes on a music collection, part 1
Feb. 14th, 2026 10:14 pmAccording to my music player, my digital collection consists of 2,542 tracks, with a total running time of 143 hours and 39 minutes.
The phrase "a song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks" is going to show up often enough that I should probably come up with a snappy abbreviation.
( Read more... )
The phrase "a song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks" is going to show up often enough that I should probably come up with a snappy abbreviation.
( Read more... )
Week in review: Week to 24 January
Jan. 26th, 2026 11:24 am. At the board game meet, I wasn't interested in the big game of the week, so I stayed on the casual table, where we played Cockroach Salad, The Mind, Ingenious, and Tacta. The person who suggested playing Ingenious was actually one of the people I'd played with a few weeks ago, who'd enjoyed it enough to want another go.
. I started a new game of XCOM 2 with the difficulty setting moved down a notch, and have been having a much better time in the sense that I've been zooming through it with no serious difficulties, but I'm not sure how much fun I'm having. It's allowing me to avoid the unpleasantness I was getting mired in when things went badly wrong, but I'm not feeling particularly elated when things go well; I'm not sure whether that's because it now feels insufficiently challenging for the victories to feel significant, or just because I've been having a down week in general.
. I still have a few chapters left to go on the Raffles book, and haven't decided whether it's worth pushing through for the sake of ticking off a reading challenge prompt. For now, I've put it aside to read other more enjoyable things, including Stephen Briggs' stage adaptation of Monstrous Regiment (I've been thinking about proposing one of his adaptations to the Rep Club, but if Monstrous Regiment is typical we're going to have trouble finding a big enough cast).
. The Traitors finale was suitably dramatic and I think the victory was well-earned.
. There was a screening of a documentary film about George Orwell and what he had to say that was relevant to the current state of the world. I was interested enough to get in the car and head to the cinema, but on the way I had second thoughts about whether I really wanted to spend my evening watching a documentary about the current state of the world, so I turned off a couple of blocks early and refueled the car and then went and did something else more fun.
.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thedarlingone is doing a series of blog posts where they organise their digital music collection by going through the tracks in alphabetical order and post capsule reviews of each. My digital music collection could do with organising, too; I have not yet made up my mind whether I want to do the same thing, but I've got as far as opening an alphabetical listing, looking at it, and then going in search of an app to fix the metadata on a bunch of tracks.
. I started a new game of XCOM 2 with the difficulty setting moved down a notch, and have been having a much better time in the sense that I've been zooming through it with no serious difficulties, but I'm not sure how much fun I'm having. It's allowing me to avoid the unpleasantness I was getting mired in when things went badly wrong, but I'm not feeling particularly elated when things go well; I'm not sure whether that's because it now feels insufficiently challenging for the victories to feel significant, or just because I've been having a down week in general.
. I still have a few chapters left to go on the Raffles book, and haven't decided whether it's worth pushing through for the sake of ticking off a reading challenge prompt. For now, I've put it aside to read other more enjoyable things, including Stephen Briggs' stage adaptation of Monstrous Regiment (I've been thinking about proposing one of his adaptations to the Rep Club, but if Monstrous Regiment is typical we're going to have trouble finding a big enough cast).
. The Traitors finale was suitably dramatic and I think the victory was well-earned.
. There was a screening of a documentary film about George Orwell and what he had to say that was relevant to the current state of the world. I was interested enough to get in the car and head to the cinema, but on the way I had second thoughts about whether I really wanted to spend my evening watching a documentary about the current state of the world, so I turned off a couple of blocks early and refueled the car and then went and did something else more fun.
.
thedarlingone is doing a series of blog posts where they organise their digital music collection by going through the tracks in alphabetical order and post capsule reviews of each. My digital music collection could do with organising, too; I have not yet made up my mind whether I want to do the same thing, but I've got as far as opening an alphabetical listing, looking at it, and then going in search of an app to fix the metadata on a bunch of tracks.
