pedanther

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.

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.

1. I've been listening a lot lately to the podcast Film Reroll, which has the premise that each episode a group of people play a one-off roleplaying campaign based on a famous movie, just to see how far off course the plot can go when it depends on dice rolls and player imagination instead of having an author handing out plot points and making sure things pan out in the way they intend. Pretty far off course, it turns out; apart from the obvious consequences like people muffing their dice rolls really badly and everybody dying, one of my favourite examples so far is an episode where one of the players ended up sitting on the sidelines for the whole thing, because the plot took a direction early on that completely bypassed the character they'd been planning to play.

Another example is the campaign I've just finished listening to, The Wizard of Oz. It follows the movie fairly faithfully up until the protagonists meet the Wizard (though a bit more smoothly in some places, as the players get some good dice rolls in when facing the obstacles the Wicked Witch puts in their path) -- and then the players have to decide how best to tackle the job of stealing the Wicked Witch's broom for the Wizard, at which point the plot jumps dramatically off the rails, and the campaign ends up turning into a four-episode, eight-hour epic fantasy quest with cut-throat politics and dragons. Bits of it are amazingly poetic and surprisingly moving, and it's the one so far where I really felt at the end like I had been immersed in a story and not just been listening to a group of friends joking around. (Not that there's anything wrong with listening to a group of friends joking around; that describes most of the podcasts I listen to regularly.)


2. Our run of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee has ended, as usual just when I felt I was really beginning to get the hang of it. (If I ever get to the end of a show and think, that's okay, there wasn't anything left to do here, that's when I'll really be sad.)

Next up is another production with a very long title, The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Operatic Society production of The Mikado. It's this year's big production by the director who's done Oliver! and Chicago and suchlike in previous years, and I was actually quite looking forward to having nothing to do with it for a change, but then I was invited to come on board as assistant director and gets some hands-on experience in the running of a big production, and I didn't feel I could say no.


3. I got to go to exactly one meeting of the gaming group between the end of rehearsals for Spelling Bee and the beginning of rehearsals for Mikado, but I got to do the things I'd wanted to do, so that was good. As I mentioned last time, I had two games I wanted to play, and I got to play both.

Ingenious is an abstract pattern-based competitive game with a tricky scoring mechanic where each player is scored on several different criteria and only the lowest score counts, so if you get too focussed on building up on one score and neglect the others you can easily find yourself in real trouble. I started playing the app version last year and was sufficiently impressed by it to buy the physical game in the hope of finding people to play it with me. As it happened I found two, which made things interesting because the app version only does two-player games and so I'd never played a three-player game before. It turns out that, like many other games, it's rather more complicated and more difficult to get on top of with two opponents than with only one. I ended up not coming last, and considered myself well satisfied with my performance. The other two players seemed to enjoy themselves too, so I expect I'll take it along again another time.

Forbidden Island, which my brother gave me for Christmas, is a collaborative game in which the players are exploring an island for centuries-old lost treasures while dealing with the inconvenient fact that the island is rapidly sinking. (If memory serves, the manual claims that this is the result of an ancient booby trap set by the owners of the lost treasures, who apparently really didn't want them to be found again.) Mechanically, it's kind of like a more family friendly (less complicated, less worldwide catastrophe depicting) version of the collaborative game Pandemic, which is not a coincidence as they're both designed by Matt Leacock.


4. Recently the emergency jump start box in the car ran low on juice, which it announced by beeping loudly and regularly and loudly, which inspired me to drive directly home and look for the charge cable instead of stopping on the way to do the shopping as I'd intended. This prompted three observations:

First, that it was probably designed deliberately to make a loud and irritating noise clearly audible throughout the car specifically to make it impossible for its owner to contemplate putting off the job of recharging it, because it's not a good idea to put off charging a piece equipment you might need in an emergency. In which case, congratulations to the designer, it worked.

Secondly, while driving home I had cause to ponder the subjective nature of time, because the beeps didn't always seem regularly spaced; sometimes they seemed closer together, and other times further apart. The most convincing mechanism I've seen proposed for the subjective experience of time changing speed is that it's a function of memory; the same amount of information is coming in at the same rate all the time, but when nothing much is happening we don't bother to remember most of it, and then it seems like time has gone by really quickly, but when things get exciting more detail gets stored and then it seems in retrospect that the experience was stretched out more.

Thirdly, if I hadn't been able to find the charge cable when I got home, I'd have been stuck with a loudly beeping box that I had no way to shut up, and that would not have been fun. Here's where I benefited from some of the work I've been doing sorting my clutter into boxes. It took a few attempts to guess which box I would have sorted the charge cable into (gadgets and accessories? extension cords? stuff I'm going to put away as soon as I figure where it goes?) but it was still probably faster and less stressful than if I'd had nothing more to go on than "it's in this huge pile of clutter somewhere, probably".


5. We had the state election last weekend. Overall, it was a landslide victory for the Labor Party, which has been in opposition for the last eight years, and a crushing defeat for the Liberal-National coalition government. (Obligatory Aus politics footnote: The Liberal Party's name refers to their economic stance; they're conservative on social issues.) In my local electorate, the contest was much closer, to the point that we still, a week later, don't know exactly who the winner is. Normally by this point in a vote count it's clear who won and the rest of the ballot counting is just to find out by how much, but in this case it's split almost evenly between the three major party candidates, which never happens. In this case, the Labor candidate has the lift that his entire party's getting but is a newcomer to politics running against two well-known local identities with long track records in public service. The Libs' candidate may even have got a boost from his own party's misbehaviour, or rather from his response to it; a couple of times during the election campaign he got caught wrongfooted when his party announced policies that would have a signficant local effect without warning him first, and he wasn't shy about saying what he thought about that.

(In other news, the populist party that was expected to be a protest vote magnet did much worse in the election than expected, possibly because they were frankly and very visibly incompetent, with several of their candidates being kicked out of the party during the election campaign for doing things that a proper recruitment process ought to have caught ahead of time. It's all very well going "vote for us because you can't trust those professional politicians and we're not professionals", but being so utterly unprofessional inevitably invites people to wonder how you can be trusted to the run the place if you can't even hold the party together long enough to get over the finish line.)

Fiction books
G K Chesterton. The Incredulity of Father Brown (e)
George MacDonald. At the Back of the North Wind
Tamora Pierce. Magic Steps (e)
Eric Frank Russell. Wasp
Ryk E Spoor. Grand Central Arena (e) (re-read)
Ryk E Spoor. Spheres of Influence (e)
Ursula Vernon. Dragonbreath

In progress
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Ghost Ship (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Street Magic (e)
Terry Pratchett. Moving Pictures (e) (re-read)

Abandoned
Kylie Chan. White Tiger (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Simon Singh. Big Bang

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
George MacDonald. The Princess and the Goblin

1. Rehearsals for The Duchess of Coolgardie continue. We're at the point now where we've learned our parts enough to relax into them somewhat and explore the possibilities for enriching them, instead of getting stuck on worrying about whether we'll have our lines down in time for opening. Last weekend we had some workshops with a couple of professional theatre people our director knows, which inspired some of the cast to lift their game (including, let's be real, me). There will be another set of workshops this weekend, which will hopefully have a similarly improving effect.


2. The other local community theatre group's production of The Wizard of Oz opened today, and I went to the opening night. I enjoyed it a lot, and although it had some of the weak points one usually gets when community theatre attempts big-budget spectacle - particularly since they were basing it on the movie rather than a version designed for live theatre - there were some moments that were genuinely magical. (On which note, they got major points from me for the way they handled the bit where the ruby slippers disappear off the Wicked Witch's feet and appear on Dorothy's.)


3. The annual performing arts festival has been and gone. I was on the organising committee again this year, and acted as MC for most of it, although I had to skip out for part of one afternoon to go to a Duchess rehearsal. Annoyingly, the part I missed was the part with all the character vocal sections, which is always one of the highlights for me. There was plenty else to enjoy in the parts I was present for, though. It ended on a high, with the final session of the final day featuring various vocal ensembles doing impressive harmony work.

Weirdly, I had the old show-about-to-open nightmare a few days after the performing arts festival was over. Didn't bother me much, I know it too well by now, but the timing was odd.


4. Another thing that's been and gone is the annual Toastmasters Humorous Speech Contest and Table Topics Contest. I usually take part in the Table Topics contest, but this year it was another victim of being scheduled against a Duchess rehearsal.


5. I did go to see Guardians of the Galaxy before the local run finished. I enjoyed it overall, but there was room for improvement in several areas: most blatantly, a number of skeevy jokes that I think it could have done perfectly well without.

Fiction books
Barbara Hambly. Bride of the Rat God (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, et al. Sandman: Worlds' End (re-read)

In progress
Neil Gaiman, et al. Sandman: The Kindly Ones (re-read)
Naomi Novik. Crucible of Gold

Non-fiction books
Di Trevis. Being a Director

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Ben Aaronovitch. Whispers Under Ground

Fiction books
Verlyn Flieger. Pig Tale
Murray Leinster. The Forgotten Planet
Ellis Peters. The House of Green Turf
Ellis Peters. The Knocker on Death's Door
Ellis Peters. Mourning Raga

Non-fiction books
Verlyn Flieger. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Di Trevis. Being a Director

Fiction books
Bennett Cerf, Roy McKie. Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles
Marianne de Pierres. Code Noir
Marianne de Pierres. Crash Deluxe
Marianne de Pierres. Nylon Angel
Phyllis Ann Karr. The Idylls of the Queen
Anthony Price. Our Man in Camelot
Brandon Sanderson. The Way of Kings

In progress
Murray Leinster. The Forgotten Planet

Non-fiction books
Declan Donnellan. The Actor and the Target

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Verlyn Flieger. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology

Fiction books
Paul Cornell, et al. Superman: The Black Ring volume 1
Paul Cornell, et al. Superman: The Black Ring volume 2
Fred Ebb, Bob Fosse. Chicago
Kim Newman. Bad Dreams

In progress
Kim Newman. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Non-fiction books
Kari Maund, Phil Nanson. The Four Musketeers: The True Story of D'Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis & Athos

In progress
(collection). Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Kim Newman. Jago

Fiction books
(anthology). Ocean
Ina R Friedman, Allen Say. How My Parents Learned to Eat
Ayano Imai. The 108th Sheep

In progress
Ben Aaronovitch. Moon Over Soho
Kim Newman. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Non-fiction books in progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Kim Newman. Bad Dreams