pedanther

. At board game club, we played Lanterns, Exploding Kittens, Drop It, and Carcassonne. I haven't played Carcassonne in ages, but it turns out I'm still good at it (and, just as importantly, enjoy playing it). I also enjoyed playing Lanterns, which I'm not as good at, and Drop It was okay. I don't remember what the gameplay of Exploding Kittens was like because everything else about it was crowded out by how repulsive the artwork was.

The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic Legacy: Season One with got together on Friday and we played through to the end of the season. I'm kind of glad we're done with it; it was an interesting experience seeing how the game changed over the course of the season, but the story parts continued to be familiar and predictable right to the end. We'd also started to lose track of some of the rule changes, which contributed to us finishing the season on a more successful note than if we'd remembered all the new rules that were added to make the climax of the season more challenging, but I think that even if we had kept perfect track of all the rules we still would have achieved a respectable outcome.

We also played a game called The Isle of Cats.


. Years ago, when we were studying Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, the official text we had to use was an omnibus edition that also included An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. I read An Ideal Husband at some point in the intervening decades, but I never got around to reading Lady Windermere's Fan until last month and it was only this week that I read A Woman of No Importance. Wikipedia says it's generally considered the least successful of the four, and that makes sense to me; unlike, say, Earnest, which is clearly and coherently a comedy, A Woman of No Importance is a bunch of witty dialogue crammed into a drama revolving around a subject that is not in the least funny, and I don't think it all fits together quite satisfactorily.


. There's a new podcast called DC High Volume, which is doing official audio adaptations of classic comic book storylines. They've just finished Batman: Year One (which was not bad, although there were a few scenes, including the climactic action moment, that I don't think quite worked without the visuals), and are following it up with The Long Halloween.


. I've either been having more vivid dreams lately, or just remembering them more clearly when I wake up. It might be something to do with catching up on my sleep debt, or possibly because the weather's turned cold and I've started sleeping with the winter covers on.

Went to town, for the first time since before Covid. Caught up with my favourite aunt, my favourite niblings (and their parents), and a few friends from the old days. Got dragged along (not unwillingly) to a community orchestra rehearsal, where I played a trombone for the first time in years and was reassured by how much I still remembered. Got my dress shoes repaired. Visited the beach and looked at creatures in tide pools. Went clothing shopping, with questionable success. Successfully avoided coming home with more books than I arrived with. As usual, was too busy doing things to write anything down in detail.

One unanticipated benefit of being away from home with no reliable access to news media or social media was that certain major world events were just a faint noise in the distance instead of something I was living through as they happened. Actually, having most of a week away from social media probably did me a lot of good in general.

My hold on Remarkably Bright Creatures came up shortly before the trip, and I borrowed it with the intention of reading it on the train, but when I got my ebook reader out it turned out it had somehow not downloaded, so I had to leave it until I got back. Instead I read the new Rivers of London novella, and finished off Try Whistling This. I also tried reading my November book for the random book challenge, but I gave up on it after a couple of chapters. It had originally been published as a serial with a rotating set of authors taking turns writing chapters, and I found the effect off-putting; instead of setting up a definite story, it felt like the opening was throwing balls up in the air for other authors to catch, without any real idea of where they would land or any reassurance that they wouldn't be fumbled and dropped. While I was in town, my main book for reading on buses and trains was my other library book, Say Nothing, a fascinating non-fiction book about events in Belfast during the Troubles, which I managed to finish before I left, partly because it's so compelling but also partly because I spent so much time on buses and trains (everything is so far apart in the city).

I played the Dungeons and Dragons: Adventure Begins board game with the niblings. They enjoyed it, especially the bits where players are encouraged to tell a story about what happens when you roll the dice, and were curious about the differences between the board game and regular D&D.

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Before the trip away, we had another session of Pandemic: Legacy, and are now three-quarters of the way through Season One. I'm still enjoying the gameplay, but finding the unfolding season plot predictable and uninteresting.

At the regular weekly evening boardgaming session, we played Nemesis: Lockdown. We had very fortunate starting conditions, with no aliens showing up for several rounds, and most of the players having co-operative objectives that meant we could share information honestly and didn't take long to establish what we needed to do to survive the endgame. The downside of everyone being so well equipped for survival was that the game went on for hours - we only narrowly managed to get finished and packed up before the venue closed. Every game of Nemesis: Lockdown I've played has run long, and I think from now on it's going on my list of games not to start playing in the evening. (It may also end up on my list of games not to play at all, because the other thing that's happened every time I've played is that I've been killed by aliens over an hour before the game ended and been stuck with nothing to do waiting to see how it all turns out.)

. 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.