pedanther

1. Tomorrow, we start rehearsals for the one-act play I'm directing, which is about three chimps who have been locked in a cage with typewriters to see if any of them will produce Hamlet.

(Today, this showed up on my Tumblr dashboard. It's obviously an omen, but an omen of what?)


2. Yesterday, the plumber came around to have a look at the hot water system, which has been playing up, and pronounced that the heater unit is dying of old age and we're looking at replacement rather than repair. He also noted several other aspects of the system that have been left behind by changes in the codes over the decades since the house was built, which are probably going to have to be dealt with as well.

The house is not mine, so it's not entirely my problem, but I expect this is still going to get interesting before it's done.


3. The day before yesterday, I played Puzzle Pirates. They've recently added a new shipboard-duty minigame, which represents the task of repairing a ship's sails. It didn't take me long to pick up; it's almost exactly the same as the Repair minigame in the same developer's most recently-launched game, Worlds in Time.


4. A week ago last Thursday was the most recent meeting of the local Toastmasters club, and I was the designated emcee. Things got a bit worrying when it turned out we had a big gap in the schedule: usually, each meeting includes three or four members giving prepared full-length speeches, but as the meeting approached it turned out nobody who was able to attend the meeting had a speech ready, and nobody who had a speech ready was able to attend the meeting. One of the members volunteered to extemporise a full-length speech, and succeeded so well that he'd gone twice the designated length before he could be prevailed upon to wrap up. The rest of the speech time I filled in with improv games chosen to fit speech-related goals like vocabulary building and choosing one's words carefully; those also went down well, with one member complaining that they hadn't gone on long enough. In the end, there was general agreement that the meeting had been a success, though that didn't stop the club president in his closing address pointing out that every Toastmasters member is expected to be working on a speech project, and that it's a sign of something slipping if nobody in a room full of members has a speech ready to go.


5. Three weeks ago, justice_turtle started reading every Newbery Medal and Newbery Honor book in chronological order. Each book gets a liveblog-style reaction post and a more formal review, with a score out of five. (Spoiler: One of the Newbery Honor books has already got a score of 0, and it has been unfortunately made clear that in the 1920s chronic racism was no bar to being considered a worthy contribution to children's literature.)

So, by the way, I recently got back into playing the MMOG Puzzle Pirates, in which every player is a cartoon pirate sailing the seas in search of plunder, buried treasure, and adventure. (The adventures are new since last time I played regularly, about five years ago, and include Fight the Zombies of the Cursed Isles, Raid the Treasures of Fabled Atlantis, and Sack a Fort Full of Imperial Redcoats.)

This is my character's official in-game portrait. I probably ought to be ashamed of myself, but I'm not. (In fact I discovered, when I got around to looking up my old character profile from five years ago, that I did exactly the same joke for my character portrait back then. Plus ça change...)

I've decided, for no very good reason, that my next self-set goal will be to assemble a set of black armour so I can do a version of that character portrait gordon_r_d always does when he starts a new MMOG. This will probably keep me going for a while because the supply chains in this game have been designed to make black clothing rare and expensive (the dev team likes to encourage colourful pirates). Not to mention that I've decided what I really need to make the ensemble work is a particular type of helmet which can only be obtained by going a-raiding to Atlantis and stealing it off one of the guards...