pedanther

. One of the problems creeping up on the community theatre I'm a member of is that we have a shortage of people who know how to design, rig, and plot theatrical lighting. ( Read more... )


. In one of the online groups I'm a member of, there was a conversation about Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, Black Jack, and Princess Knight, which gave me an opening to introduce more people to the existence of one of my favourite episodes of the 1980s Astro Boy anime, which uses time travel to set up a three-way crossover between the main characters of those three shows, with some bonus cameos from other Tezuka series thrown in.


. I completed my play-through of XCOM 2 without needing any more do-overs, and felt sufficiently confident to start another play-through with the commitment that this time I would push on and not take any do-overs no matter what setbacks might befall. Consequently, I have achieved something in XCOM 2 that has never happened before: I've seen what happens when you lose the game.( Read more... )


. I had my annual dental check-up. No serious issues, though the dentist did note that there are signs I'm brushing too hard on the side of my mouth where the brush is at a comfortable angle, so that's something I need to be conscious of.


. I didn't make it to board game club this week, because I had to go to a meeting instead.


. The supermarket nearest my house has been closed for months, because the space was bought out by a different operator and it's been going through a full refit. The official opening of the new supermarket was this week, and I walked over at lunch time to see what it was like. ( Read more... )


. My November pick for the random reading challenge was Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, which I've been vaguely meaning to get around to for ages. ( Read more... )


. At Parkrun this week, there was a group of visitors who are travelling around the country doing as many different Parkrun courses as they can. Some of them have done 250 or more different Parkruns.


. On Saturday evening, I went to a concert by a touring group who performed sea shanties and related works (including a rendition of Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage"). The music was nice (they harmonised beautifully), but it was also a valuable experience in that it got me out of the house and socialising with the other audience members, many of whom I knew well enough to be comfortable chatting with, and some of whom I haven't had a chance to talk with in ages.

I'd been feeling rather grim all week, and I think part of it was a lack of opportunities to interact with people in a non-goal-oriented way. Anyway, whether it was the music or the social interaction (or just that the weather had finally broken), I felt much better when I got up this morning.

. The local public library celebrated fifty years of operation this week, ( Read more... )


. While I was at the library, I borrowed Death of a Foreign Gentleman by Steven Carroll. In post-war Cambridge, a controversial philosopher is killed in a hit-and-run. There's a detective on the case, but it's a novel built around a murder investigation rather than a mystery novel; ( Read more... )


. This week, I also finished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which I've been reading on and off for a while. ( Read more... )


. The Youth Theatre did their end-of-year show, which this year was a collection of short plays and skits on a common theme. It was a lot of fun. One of the highlights was a short play the senior class wrote themselves.


. At board game club this week, we played Night of the Ninja, Gravwell, and a couple of games out of The Lady and the Tiger.( Read more... )


. A while ago, I noticed that the storage space on my current phone is large enough that I could put my entire CD collection on there without making much difference, ( Read more... )


. At Parkrun, the weather was warm enough that the flies were out and about and kept coming to say hello. I made a mental note to remember the fly veil next week.


. On Saturday afternoon, I was between books and not in a mood to start anything long or heavy, but I had a reading streak that was one day away from a significant milestone, so I read a picture book from the library called The Grizzled Grist Does Not Exist!. It was fun, and it was nice to see the heroic role going to the quiet, observant child who nobody pays much attention to.

. At board game club, we had another Sunday afternoon session, and also the usual evening event. At one or the other, I played Dune: Imperium, The Tainted Grail, Mansions of Madness, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game (only the runner-up for most awkwardly named LOTR-themed game I encountered this week, because I also came across Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings™ Game). Three of those were co-operative games, which we won with margins of varying widths; Dune: Imperium is competitive, and ended up a very close competition, with only one victory point separating the winner from the player who ended up in last place.


. I finished reading The Night Marchers, my April book for the random selection reading challenge, without ever warming to it. My chances of getting caught up in the story weren't helped by the fact that the printer hadn't trimmed the page block cleanly, so I had to keep stopping several times a chapter to separate the pages with a letter opener.


. I got a good time at Parkrun again: not as fast as last week's record, but still faster than the previous record.


. In the afternoon, I sat out on the front porch in the sun for a while, reading, and watched a butterfly and a couple of bees investigating the flowers that are starting to appear on the volunteer plants in the front yard.


. I've started reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow, one of the reading challenge options for March. I'm not sure what I think of it yet.


. I've already finished the jigsaw puzzle I started last week. Either I'm getting really efficient at organising and solving jigsaw puzzles - which is not necessarily a positive, because the value of them is in having one around when I need to relax by bringing order out of chaos, not in having finished them - or I've been in particular need of the relaxation lately. (Work has thrown up a few challenges lately, and so has the committee.)


. I wrote a journal entry every day this week. A couple of times I didn't get it done in the morning, and was tired in the evening, and considered skipping a day, but then I told myself it would only take about half an hour and then it would be done, and I could probably manage that, and so far I've turned out to be right.

. At the board game club, we played a few games of Coup as a warm-up, and then a new game called Bomb Busters.( Read more... )


. I'm still catching up on the backlog of the randomly-selected reading challenge. The selection for April is The Night Marchers and other Oceanian stories, a collection of Oceanian folk tales retold in comic book form. ( Read more... )


. I've finished another jigsaw puzzle. Looking back, I think I finished it significantly faster than the last few, which I attribute to the fact that I went and worked on it whenever I was feeling stressed, and it's been a stressful week both at work and in the committee I'm on. I did lose one piece off the side of the table at some point, and only noticed when I was nearly finished and found myself with a single gap in the puzzle and no piece to put in it, but fortunately once I started looking I found it under the edge of the sofa pretty easily.


. I'm still doing Parkrun, though I haven't always been mentioning it. It went well this week; I didn't have to stop and re-tie my shoelaces even once, and I got my best time for the year to date.


. I went to see the new Superman movie with friends. There were bits of it that I didn't think entirely worked, but I had a good time.

. I think I've found a good balance with the journalling, where I'm keeping a useful amount of notes about things I want to talk about and not spending an off-putting amount of time on it.


. At board game club, we played Power Hungry Pets and Space Base.( Read more... )


. ( Planning for the new financial year )


. I'm continuing to listen to The Hidden Almanac on the anniversaries of each episode's original release date. This week marked a milestone: ( Read more... )


. I had a productive week at work, and learned some new things.


. I went to see the Rep Club's latest production, The Great Emu War. ( Read more... )


. I finished the jigsaw puzzle I was working on in around ten days, and left it sitting around to look at for a few more days before taking it apart and getting started on the other jigsaw puzzle I got for Christmas. This one is based on a Star Wars movie poster, and is proving challenging: ( Read more... )


. At Parkrun, ( Read more... )

I haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, ( and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends )

In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.


At board game club, ( we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )

( Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )

( Reading challenges )

( Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )

( I overslept and missed Parkrun )

I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".

The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.


At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.


It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.


At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.


Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.


This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.


On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.


I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)

. The family Christmas gathering was held a few days after Christmas this year, because that was when everybody could manage to be in the same place for the same few hours. (Including the out-of-town contingent, who I hadn't realised were also going to be there until I got a text message with a photo of something interesting they'd seen on the road here.) It was very nice to spend some time with everybody. My haul this year included several jigsaw puzzles, my siblings having taken note of how much I enjoyed working through my set of Magic Puzzles earlier this year (and possibly also of the fact that it's much easier to be sure that I don't already have a particular puzzle than that I don't already have a particular book).


. As the weather has been getting hotter, there's been an increasing issue at Parkrun with flies taking friendly interest in one's face, and the attendant risk of accidentally inhaling one. (Or nearly inhaling one, which is almost as bad.) After Parkrun last Saturday, I decided I'd had enough and afterward went straight to the shops to buy a protective net thing to wear over my head and keep them off. Step two is remembering to take it with me to Parkrun.


. My reading this week included Always Was, Always Will Be, written by Thomas Mayo, one of the campaigners for the Voice to Parliament, after the referendum went the way it did, which I saw in the new books display at the library and felt I should read; and, for a change of pace, E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, which I've been meaning to read for years and am very glad I finally did. (And not just because now I'll be less likely to keep getting it mixed up with The Boxcar Children and The Story of the Treasure Seekers.)


. I've started playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown again. I set out with noble intentions that this would be the time I got through an entire playthrough without reverting to the last save point when things started going pear-shaped, and of course that didn't last but it did last longer than I might have predicted. As I've been getting back into the swing of it I've been pushing out the limit on what counts as going sufficiently wrong, and getting back near the mark of keeping going as long as a mission wasn't a complete failure, and re-learning that it is possible and even fun to recover from setbacks like having most of your most experienced squad wiped out in one go.


. Game Show 1939! is a fun podcast where contestants are faced with trivia questions sourced from quiz books published in the 1930s. "Some of the answers in the books have changed since then, and some of the answers were never right to begin with, but for the purposes of today's quiz the official correct answer is whatever was written in the book." Part of the format involves contestants being given a preview of the categories and trying to predict which ones they'll find easier to answer and which ones to force their opponent to answer. Most of the questions are followed by the host explaining who or what the question was about.

. At the beginning of last year, I read Harley Quinn: Reckoning, the first in a trilogy of YA novels retelling the origin story of the Batman supporting character (and increasingly a headline character in her own right) Harley Quinn. It was very good, although I found it stressful, and had to read it in short bursts with long breaks between, because of it being a prequel and having certain events from Harley's canonical backstory hanging over it. After I finished it I immediately put a hold request on the sequel at the library - and then spent the next year and a half putting it off, and flipping the hold every time the book became available, because it was apparent from the blurb that this was going to be the volume in which those canonical events started happening, and I was dreading seeing how they played out. This week I finally bit the bullet and started reading Harley Quinn: Ravenous; the first few chapters were heavy going, but once it reached a certain point and it became apparent how the author was going to handle Harley's story a lot of the dread evaporated and after that I got through it much quicker. (It does an interesting thing where it treats Harley's usual origin story as just the rumour that got around later; by the end of Ravenous, you can see how people started telling that story, but some of it is exaggeration or misrepresentation and some of it is quite plainly the result of people who weren't there adding assumptions to incomplete information and jumping to entirely incorrect conclusions.) I'm still going to need a breather before I tackle the final book of the trilogy, but I'm not dreading it in the same way.


. This week was an anniversary of the the first local Parkrun event, which reminds me that I haven't kept up on reporting my progress there. I'm still doing Parkrun regularly, and have passed a few more official milestones: I've now participated in over 250 individual Parkrun events, and am working my way toward 500. My record as an event volunteer is much more spotty, because when I can make it to an event I usually prefer to be out on the course getting my exercise and not standing around by the finish line, but for the anniversary event I volunteered to scan membership barcodes. I remarked to the event organiser that this is one thing that has changed over the years: when I first joined, the barcode scanners were rudimentary and nobody was allowed to participate without showing an official member barcode card printed in the regulation size and format, but now the scanning is done with a smartphone app that can recognise a wide variety of sizes and formats, including official Parkrun wristbands and keyring fobs, not to mention the people who just have a copy of the barcode on their own smartphone. (Or smartwatch. At the event, there were several people who presented their barcode on a smartwatch; some of the watches displayed it very small to fit it on the face of the watch, and some displayed it as a square QR code instead. I was relieved when the app was unfazed by either challenge.)


. I went for a long bike ride this week, most of it through the park where Parkrun is held but exploring some of the many trails that aren't part of the Parkrun course. It was quite a warm day, and I had reason to be glad I'd remembered (for, as far as I can remember, the first time ever) to pack a water bottle in the bike's water bottle holder. It was nice to be out amid the nature for a bit.


. I've been doing very well lately at getting the washing up done regularly. Perhaps by way of compensation, I seem to be getting worse at putting the clean laundry away in a timely manner. (The sticking point appears to be the t-shirts. I thought I'd found a solution, but now that's not doing it either.)


. The café near my house does bubble teas in a wide variety of colours and flavours, but due to the discouragement of single-use plastics they're always served in an opaque cardboard vessel with a sealed lid. I understand the practicalities, but it does rather suck a lot of the fun out of having a brightly-coloured bubble tea when you can't see it.

1. At gaming group this week, I played Spyfall and Unstable Unicorns. Spyfall is one of those hidden role/social deduction games that I'm bad at and don't enjoy. Unstable Unicorns is a fun card game that I would happily play again, although the endgame got a bit draggy because the emphasis shifted to everyone trying to figure out who was closest to winning and block them. In the discussion afterward, the more experienced players said that the set we were playing with (which had a lot of expansion cards in) might have had too many blocking cards in it to play well; it certainly had too many cards in it to shuffle easily.


2. The Rep Club's next production is the musical Can-Can, which has just opened. I have not been actively involved, since I was still up to my elbows in Boston Marriage when casting and pre-production started, and once Boston Marriage was over I decided I needed a rest and thus steered well clear of the maelstrom that even a well-organised musical production inevitably becomes. After that will be the comedy How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, which is holding auditions this week.


3. The brass band competed in the state championships over the long weekend, and won our division. It was a fun weekend, and we are looking forward to doing states again next year (and probably the nationals the year after that, when they will be in Perth again).


4. I am still doing Parkrun. I even managed to do it when I was in Perth for Swancon, since the hotel was not far from the Claisebrook Cove course. (I went early, to make sure I could find the starting line before it began, but it turned out that they didn't set up the starting line until five minutes before the start time, so all I got for arriving half an hour early was half an hour of wandering around worrying that I'd somehow ended up in completely the wrong place. The actual course was great, though, very scenic, and I would happily do it again next time I'm in that neighbourhood.) I didn't manage to do it when I was in Perth for the state band championships, though, because the place we were staying was well situated in relation to the championships but not well situated relative to any Parkrun locations.


5. I've had a set of the Richard Hannay thriller novels -- The Thirty-Nine Steps and its sequels -- sitting in my to-read pile for ages, and I took them along as light reading for the band trip. They're all reasonably enjoyable, but I can see why The Thirty-Nine Steps has been repeatedly filmed and all the others have faded into obscurity.