pedanther

Saturday was my last full day in town. I went to Parkrun in the morning, taking the opportunity to visit a course I haven't done before; I picked one near the seashore since I hadn't been properly near the sea yet during my visit, though as it turned out the track was on the landward side of a string of high dunes so I didn't actually see the sea except in glimpses. Later in the day I went to WABA and to Astrofest, and caught up with people I knew.

On Sunday morning, I went to the beach with relatives, and we looked in tide pools and found interesting shells and generally had a nice time. In the afternoon, it was time for the train home. On the train, I read The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, one of a bundle of ebooks I got a while back which had originally been published in a serial format with different authors writing each chapter. I got on better with it than the last one I tried, in that I didn't give up before I reached the end, but I found it disappointing; the plotting was uneven, with elements being introduced without proper set-up or dropped without proper pay-off, and the characters were all Types without enough personal history or individuality for me to really care about what happened to them.

When I got home, I did read Remarkably Bright Creatures. If it weren't for the octopus, it would be a kind of book I don't usually read, but on the whole I enjoyed it, though one of the subplots set off one of my narrative allergies so badly that I started skimming chapters whenever it cropped up. It might have been a good thing that I didn't have it with me on the train; I think I might have been less happy with it if I hadn't been able to put it down and walk away for a bit when it was getting too much.

After the better part of two years, I've finally finished listening to all of Re: Dracula, the audio drama podcast adaptation of Dracula Daily. I started listening last year on its original release, but stopped partway through, then restarted at the same point when it came around again this year. To be fair to the podcast, a major reason I struggled with it was external; last year was the year I started logging daily reading progress and not just when I completed a book, and I made the possibly unwise decision to log Re: Dracula as an audio book and keep track of the cumulative run time. That would always have been a challenge and a distraction from simply listening and enjoying, though now I'm done being fair I want to also note that having to calculate and subtract the run time of all the ad breaks certainly didn't help.

With that out of the way, Letters From Watson is now the only serialised fiction thing I'm still participating in, and when that finishes next month I think I'm going to want a significant break before I let myself consider getting caught up in any more.

I put my 750 Words account into scheduled vacation mode before my trip, since I wouldn't have access to an internet with a keyboard and I don't write anything of significant length on my phone, and I didn't reactivate it immediately after I got home. Partly that was because I'd found that it was actually quite nice to be able to go "I'm tired, I'm going to bed" and not "I'm tired, but I have to write 750 words before I can think about going to bed", and partly it was because I couldn't decide what to do about the days I'd skipped: try to summarise them, or just write them off and resume journalling from where I was. Anyway, I didn't do any journal entries all week, and one of the consequences was that I didn't have a handy supply of pre-digested things to say. That's one of the reasons this is a week late, though perhaps not the main one – but that is a topic for next time.

. A good number of years ago, I backed the original set of Magic Puzzles 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles on Kickstarter, and then they sat around unopened because I never got around to setting up a space where I could work on them. A week ago, I finally hauled one out to have something to do with my hands while watching a Youtube stream (which was celebrating the third anniversary of its Youtube channel, and therefore nearly the third anniversary of the first time I said to myself, "You know, I could probably do one of those Magic Puzzles to have something to do with my hands while watching these"), and I've been working on it in spare moments. I finished it this morning, and am now trying to decide how long to leave it out and admire the artwork before I clear it away so I can get started on the next one. (I was a bit worried that the puzzle's gimmick, advertised as a "mind blowing magical ending", would end up being a fizzle; in the event, I think that description is overselling it a bit, but it is pretty neat.)


. The thing about the XCOM games is that, while I enjoy them, I'm not terribly good at them, or at least I wasn't at first, and I've never got all the way through one without saving before every mission and shamelessly reloading if everything goes pear-shaped. When I first started, this was necessary to avoid complete mission failure and my entire team getting wiped out on the regular, but as I've improved I've also been increasingly tempted to stretch the definition of mission failure, a tendency that was shown up when I found myself taking a mulligan on a mission which had gone entirely according to plan right up until the last-moment death of a single soldier who just happened to be one of the ones I was sentimentally attached to. After that, I promised myself that on my latest runthrough I would only replay missions that were complete disasters and specifically would keep the result of any mission where the objectives were successfully achieved no matter how many soldiers got killed doing it. I have kept to that resolve, even for the mission that ended with only two soldiers still standing; it's been challenging, and included long stretches where I was struggling to field a team for missions (and at least two points where I had to automatically fail missions because I literally didn't have enough active soldiers to do them), but it was very satisfying when I overcame that and started building up the team again. There's some kind of life lesson in that, probably. The funny thing is that, although there were those stretches where it felt like we were limping along, in the end the campaign has taken about the same amount of time as all my earlier ones; I reached the end game in roughly the same number of missions and within a month, in-game time, of my previous longest campaign. Presumably that had something to with the fact that I still took do-overs on the missions that I completely failed; doing a run where I kept the result of every single mission, no matter how disastrous, would be an even more interesting challenge, but one that I don't think I'm a good enough player yet to survive.


. After I completed the latest runthrough of XCOM 2, I decided it was time for a change of pace, so I've been playing a platformer called SteamWorld Dig 2, which I assume I got in a bundle at some point because I don't remember ever specifically deciding to buy it. I've been playing it often enough to start seeing it behind my eyelids, and enjoying it a lot, and it's reminding me how much I also enjoyed playing the last platformer of this kind that I played (the excellent Yoku's Island Express), so I'm thinking maybe I should play this genre more often.


. Another thing I've been really enjoying lately is a new D&D Actual Play series called Natural Six, which put out some preview/prequel episodes a while back and released its official Episode 1 last week. The players are all charming and invested in their characters, and they and the DM all bounce off each other really well. New episodes are being released fortnightly, on Youtube or as a podcast, alternating with episodes of an after-action series where the players talk about the previous week's session.


. The random book selection for April was based around picking one of the oldest books on the to-be-read list – which in my case didn't actually result in one of the books that's been waiting to be read the longest, because I already had a large stack of unread books when I joined StoryGraph and I didn't make any effort to list them chronologically. Actually, it looks like I started by adding the unread books on my ereader, which necessarily are all more recent than when I got the ereader about a decade ago. I definitely have paper books that have been waiting longer than that.

The book that was randomly selected for me was The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, a young adult time travel story that I think I picked up as part of a special offer and had no idea what it was about until I started reading. There were some parts that I felt lacked the subtlety that I would have expected if it were a book for not-young adults, but on the whole I enjoyed it well enough and found it satisfying in the end. (Speaking of the end, it makes some interesting choices about which questions it leaves unanswered – although I've noticed that, because of the time travel, at least one of those questions is actually answered in the first chapter before the reader knows what the question is yet...)

The theme challenge for April is "a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming", and I haven't picked a book for it yet.

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.)

1. There are 18 novels and a bit over twice that many short stories set in the Liaden Universe, and yesterday I finished reading through them all one after the other. It took me a bit over two years, although that's mainly because I was blogging each chapter or story as I read it, which meant I couldn't read the next one until I'd thought of something to say. Without that restriction, I'd have got through them much quicker, but then I'd have probably missed a lot of things I noticed on this re-read.


2. Rehearsals have begun for the Christmas Show. I was nervous before the first rehearsal - I was running it alone because my co-runner couldn't make it, and although I'd only called half the cast that still meant more actors than every play I've directed before now put together - but it seemed to go all right. And seeing them moving around the stage helped me figure out what the set should look like in the first scene. (Note to self: Draw a diagram of that.)


3. I seem to have become a morning person now. I'm regularly waking up a couple of hours before work (or the equivalent time on weekends) without any artificial assistance, and regularly feeling sleepy and going to bed about eight hours before that. I do wonder if it has anything to do with spring and the sun coming up earlier; it'll be interesting to see what happens when the days start getting shorter again.


4. I haven't mentioned Doctor Who Legacy in while; not since I reached the end of the first "season" and concluded that it still didn't have anything resembling a plot. In fairness, therefore, I should note that it does develop an actual plot toward the end of the second "season", though the connection between the story elements and the actual gameplay remains tenuous to non-existent.


5. My new favourite podcast is I Was There Too, which explores the world of movie-making through the perspectives of people who had tiny roles in big movies. Guests have included the first marine to die in Aliens, the woman with the baby carriage in The Untouchables, the Apple Store clerk in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and, in a special group interview, all those other people on the bus in Speed.