pedanther

. No board games this week: the regular meeting was cancelled because the venue had been hired out for a special event, and the person who usually hosts the weekend sessions had gone away for the long weekend. One of the people from the board game club did host a barbecue, which I went to and had a good time.


. We had another good rehearsal where we got the harmonies to sound like they're supposed to.


. I came across a demo for a new computer game called Vampire Crawlers, which several people I know have said good things about. That's "crawl" as in "dungeon crawl"; you go into a spooky location and fight vampires and zombies and assorted other monsters (all of whom, so far, have moved in an upright posture). I'm not sure what I think of it yet, but I'm at least interested enough to keep playing a bit longer.


. Sequel to last week's link, where someone watched the music video of "The Wombling Song" with zero context: she was curious enough that she's now started reacting to the Wombles TV show.

. I had the whole week off, and spent a lot of it either enjoying having nothing particular to do or feeling crumby due to the well-known phenomenon whereby as soon as I was on holiday and the show wrapped I came down with the mild lurgy I had been steadfastly refusing to entertain because I had things to do.

At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.


. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: ( Read more... )


. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. ( Read more... )


. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.


. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.


. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.


. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.


. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.


. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)

. At the board game meet, we played Lovecraft Letter, Flip 7 with a Vengeance, and Concept. ( Read more... )


. I blew off Parkrun this week because there was a forecast of rain. Another time I'd probably have gone anyway, and likely been fine (the rain didn't start really coming down until after Parkrun had concluded), but it was closing night of the short play season that evening and I decided I owed it to the audience to stay dry and warm and not catch the flu or lose my voice.


. The short play season went very well, with good audiences for a short play season, especially on closing night. The cast and crew all got on well, too, which is always nice. We start rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown tomorrow.


. I've been intrigued for a while by the no_true_pair fic challenge, in which you choose a set of characters and are given fic prompts for each pair of characters in the list, but the sticking point has always been that I can't make up my mind what characters to do it with. I waffled about joining the latest four-character round for ages, and eventually signed on literally five minutes before the posting phase was opened with a set of characters picked more or less at random. So far, I've written a vignette for one prompt and started on another, and it's been an interesting exercise in thinking about what the paired characters have in common, but I'm not sure it's going to result in anything I actually consider publishable.


. I've completed the jigsaw puzzle I've been working on. In the end, I liked it a lot more than the previous one I tried from the same manufacturer, although I still think the engineering of the pieces could stand to be a bit tighter.


. The latest addition to my daily puzzle routine is Glyph, a Wordle-like game in which you have four guesses to identify a word with the assistance of an image showing the letters of the word stacked on top of each other. I'm enjoying it, and doing pretty well; the only time I've needed all four guesses was the first time I tried it, and that was partly because I'd got the explanation of the letter-order hints back to front.


. I'm not sure what it says that I've been only vaguely aware of NASA's Artemis II mission -- which plans to send a human crew on an observation pass around the Moon, closer than any humans have been in fifty years -- and it was only by chance that I saw a notice that lift-off is scheduled to take place this week (early Thursday morning, Australian time).