pedanther

. I've been making a few changes to my daily routine, having identified a couple of factors that were messing with my ability to go to bed at a sensible hour. It's been working pretty well so far; I've been in bed within half an hour of my target time most days this week. There were even a strange couple of days where I was all ready to go to bed at least an hour earlier than the time I've been aiming at – only to find my brain insisting that it wasn't time for bed yet and finding things to do until I reached the target time.


. After we finished up our production of Guys and Dolls, I decided to read some of the Damon Runyon short stories that inspired it, to see how much had been changed in the process. "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown", which was the basis of the main plot thread, is recognisably the same story, albeit with a twist that the musical chose not to use (and without a whole bunch of complications the musical added to stretch it out to two acts). After that, things get more distant; "Pick the Winner" has a familiar set-up but a very different ending, while "Blood Pressure" has a familiar scene or two set in a completely unrelated plot, and by the time I got down to "The Hottest Guy in the World" and "The Snatching of Bookie Bob", the only things they really had in common with the musical were some of the character names. (And there are some things in the stories that I'm glad the musical doesn't have in common; it's been a long while since I read a story with as much casual antisemitism and misogyny as "Blood Pressure", and I hope it's a long while before I read another.)


. In other reading, I decided I should make some progress on some of the other reading challenges I've been neglecting since I started doing the book chain, so I read The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne, which was a March pick for the Random challenge and also let me check off the April prompt ("animals") in the themed challenge. I got The Purloined Poodle as part of an ebook bundle that included something else I wanted; it's apparently a spin-off from an urban fantasy series I haven't read. (And, based on this sample, probably won't read; the main characters were fairly entertaining in a small dose but I think I've had enough of them now.) The spin-off sees two of the characters deciding to take it upon themselves to solve a mystery – which got us off to a bad start, because when it comes to stories about complete amateurs playing detective, I prefer the ones where the character has to turn detective because they have a personal stake in the solution of the mystery over the ones where the character is just being a busybody, and this falls too much toward the busybody end of the scale for my liking. I enjoyed it more once they'd located the culprit and the story shifted from amateur mystery-solving to a more straightforward sort of adventure story as they resolve the situation (which I suppose might be a sign that I'd like the main series more than the spin-off, but I'm still not interested enough in the characters to really want to find out). I did laugh out loud at least once, at the bit where Oberon the talking dog reviews The Great Gatsby on the criteria of things interesting to dogs.


. At board game club this week, we played Winter Rabbit again, having determined that we may have misunderstood how an important mechanic of the game worked when we played it the first time. I'm not sure we've got it right yet; on our second game, we won the scenario in half the time the game allowed for the attempt, which seems unlikely to be the intended experience.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see an observational documentary, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine.


. Every now and again, there's an announcement of a big Ingress meet-up somewhere in the world, and I stopped bothering to read the announcements ages ago because it was annoying reading about the fun people were going to have somewhere that's nowhere near me. ...which is how I came to miss the announcement, a few months ago, that the next meetup is going to be in Perth. I only found out this week when another player in my faction messaged me to ask if I was planning to go. I haven't definitely ruled it out, but I'm feeling reluctant; it would mean making travel plans, and getting time off work, and all that sort of thing, in order to go and be sociable with a crowd of people I don't know and might completely fail to get on with. (The prospect of collecting another month-long respiratory infection is also weighing in the scales somewhat.) I thought I might be able to encourage myself by finding something else I wanted to do in Perth around the same time, so I could be guaranteed to get something out of the trip, but everything else I might be tempted to go to Perth for that month is either two weeks earlier or two weeks later.

Our production of Guys and Dolls opened this week, and has been playing to good-sized and appreciative audiences. My American accent, which had been commuting between New York, Chicago, and some other place that might have been New Jersey, finally settled into place in time for the final dress rehearsal.


This week I retired the Fitbit. The display screen has been on the way out for some time; at first, it was illegible in sunlight, which was annoying from the viewpoint of wanting to know my progress while I was out and exercising but otherwise supportable, but by the end it had got to the point that I had to shut myself in a room with the blinds drawn and the light off to be able to read it at all.

During the time I've been using the Fitbit, Fitbit-the-company was bought out by Google and I have some concerns about how things have been developing since, so I decided to look elsewhere for a new fitness tracker. In the end, for a variety of reasons of which some are more sensible than others, I opted for the Samsung Galaxy Fit3, which I'm liking well so far. (One thing I particularly liked about it was that I could use a stockpile of reward points that was otherwise just going to expire to get it for only $30.) It's actually a slightly better fit for my wrist than the Fitbit was, and the screen is nicely legible in all kinds of light levels. I like the Fit3's version of "maybe it's time to get up and stretch" reminders better, too.


I follow several Youtube channels whose thing is gameplay videos of computer games designed to be played by multiple players (either competitively or co-operatively). Usually there's a variety of games represented, with some channels focussing on new releases and others being more into old favourites, but it happened twice this week that a recently released or recently updated game showed up on two of the channels at the same time.

One was Make Way!, a racing game where the players build the race track as they go along, which looked like it would be fun to play with the right group of people but could be a bit difficult to follow as a spectator.

The other was Split Fiction, a two-player co-operative game, and I don't have any opinion of the gameplay because the video I watched included the opening cinematic that sets up the premise, which was so stupid that I got bored and quit the video just as it was getting to the playable part. (The stupidity was a mixture of clichéd characters and situations - it's the kind of story that features a sinister machine called The Machine, with audible capital letters - and a few bits of blatant plot convenience. The one that really sticks in my head is that one of the protagonists is presented as being suspicious of the situation she's entering, but doesn't get around to demanding answers about what's going on until after she's compliantly gone through the induction process and it's basically too late to avoid getting forced to take part; it's particularly jarring because the induction includes changing out of her own clothes into a jumpsuit with all kinds of mysterious electronic attachments, which if I was her would have been the point where I refused to go any further without an explanation.)


I didn't go to Parkrun on Saturday, or board game club on Monday, because my sleep patterns had been thrown off and I wasn't feeling well. I did get a good amount of other exercise in the course of the week, with several long walks and bike rides.


I finished reading The Friendship Factor; I don't have anything I want to say about it that I didn't already say last week.

I've already posted about the run-up to the election, and about the books I read this week.


The Randomize Your TBR book challenge has continued to assist me in reducing my to-read collection by methods other than reading. When I went to pick the random book for March, the first random selection was a book that I realised I was no longer interested in reading, so I moved it straight to the box of books that I'm going to dispose of one of these days, and tried again until I got a book I was interested in reading. On a separate occasion, I had a go at one of the bonus prompts, which says to select a random book only after spending half an hour going through the to-read and pulling out books that have been there for a while and you're not interested in anymore. I spent the length of a podcast on it and moved another dozen books to the disposal box.


We had another public holiday on Monday. In the morning, I did some yard work that involved being up on a ladder, which wasn't as terrifying as I expected. (I'm usually very bad at being up on ladders, because my sense of balance gets wonky. One of the things that seemed to help on this occasion was that I was wearing good shoes that gave me a firm grip on the ladder.)

In the afternoon, there was another long afternoon session of the board game club. We played Eclipse again, and then a game of Dominion.


At the Rep Club, we did the first full run-throughs of both acts of Guys and Dolls this week. There were definitely places that needed improvement, but on the whole they went more smoothly than I'd expected. (I nevertheless sang the traditional Three Weeks Song at a moment when it seemed apposite.)

It's getting close to the dress rehearsal stage, so I went and got a hair cut and have shaved my beard off. This got a variety of reactions when I showed up for the next rehearsal, running the full spectrum from no reaction at all to "who is this stranger?". One of the other cast members remarked that she thought this was the first time she'd ever seen me clean-shaven, which I don't think is quite true, because we were both in another show a couple of years ago where I'm sure I remember that I was clean-shaven, but I think it is true that there hasn't been another time in the intervening years where I haven't had facial hair of one variety or another. I wasn't sure I recognised the person in the mirror myself at first, though later in the day I caught sight of myself in the mirror and instinctively smiled like someone meeting an old friend whose face one hasn't seen in a while.


I'm keeping up with my exercise, and have been on several long and interesting bike rides.

Inside Job, my random book for January, is one of an ebook bundle of Subterranean Press chapbooks I got a while back. It has a striking and atmospheric cover that completely fails to convey the tone of the contents; if I'd known it was a comedy, I might have skipped it, because historically I have not got on with Connie Willis's comedies. I didn't get on with this one, either; there's potential in the premise of a professional skeptic and debunker being forced to come to terms with two apparent impossibilities, but Willis's approach didn't work for me.

I also read a Bony novel, The Bachelors of Broken Hill, which I have mixed feelings about, and have started reading Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.


The annual Three Sentence Ficathon is on at threesentenceficathon. I have consequently written six sentences of fic already this year, which is more than I wrote in all of 2024. (It might actually be seven sentences: I had to jam two sentences together to fit one of my responses into three sentences, and the result just doesn't flow right and bothers me every time I look at it. I'm thinking of changing it back to four sentences when I put it on AO3, if I get around to doing that.)


Board game club has started up again for the year. This week I played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (I was the murderer twice, and got caught very quickly the first time but managed to eliminate the inconvenient witness and win the round the second time) and Mayan Curse (which I enjoyed and would like to play again, though I'm iffy about the way it uses some old-fashioned tropes).


I've signed up for a free trial subscription to AVCX, an online crossword thing that publishes a few new crosswords each week. I heard about it independently in two different places recently (one of the compilers was a guest on the Lateral podcast, and it also got plugged on a puzzle-related Youtube channel I follow), so I decided to take that as a sign to check it out. I'm enjoying the puzzles so far, and have been finding them to be at a satisfactory level of difficulty. (Not counting this week's cryptic crossword, which I've only got about three answers on so far because I've forgotten most of what I used to know about how cryptic clues work and haven't got around to brushing up yet. And I seem to recall I did better at cryptics when they were on paper and I could doodle possible solutions in the margins.)


Dance rehearsals have started for Guys and Dolls. I've had an easy time of it so far; my character moves around in time to the music, but doesn't do anything that rises to the level of Dancing.


I spent the entire week continuing to not play XCOM 2. I did occasionally find myself thinking that my mental state had improved and maybe I could have another go at it, but usually there was something I wanted to get out of the way first, or it was late enough in the evening to be too late to be starting a new campaign.

I've finally worked through all of the collection of respiratory ailments. One of the last symptoms to persist was a lethargy that I hadn't really noticed until it wasn't there and I was suddenly interested again in doing things that I'd been putting off all month. If I don't do them now, it'll just be the usual procrastination.

One of the things I'm suddenly interested in again is exercise: I'm already right back on track with the walking and bike riding I'd been doing before.

Mildly annoyed that my regular check-up at the doctor fell due now, at the end of a month of inactivity and leaning on comfort food, instead of a month ago, when I was exercising regularly and eating fairly well. The results weren't too bad, considering, but I'd have liked to have known how much better I was doing. Oh well, there's always next time.

I finished reading several things this week. First there was the Classic Tales of SF collection I've been working through since July; the last two tales after Herland were both novellas, so I finished them both in one day. Then Letters From Watson reached the end of The Valley of Fear, which means it has now gone through the complete Sherlock Holmes canon and is going into hiatus until the organiser feels up to doing the whole thing over again. Then I also finished Bone -- I had a strong suspicion I would finish it quickly despite the page count, which is why I picked it -- which means I have also finished the Randomize Your TBR challenge for 2024. I've already signed up for the 2025 Randomize Your TBR challenge, but I'm still considering whether to do the monthly theme challenge again; I like it, but it's the same themes every year, so I might do a different monthly theme challenge instead.

Auditions for the club's next production were held this week. There was an option to audition remotely by sending a video for people who couldn't make it to the audition session, and I decided I'd better take that option rather than trail my remaining respiratory symptoms through a room full of people -- which meant that I needed to teach myself how to make and send a video on my phone. It came out pretty well, I thought. Not having been to the audition session, I have no specific information about who else auditioned, so I can have some fun speculating about who might have been cast in the other roles.

The Obscure Favourite Characters blog on Tumblr is doing a seasonal mini-tournament for Santa Clauses and Father Christmases. I nominated Raymond Briggs's Father Christmas, who seems to be doing well in his first contest.

Fiction books
(anthology). The Witch Who Came in From the Cold: Season One (e)
Ben Aaronovitch. The Masquerades of Spring (e)
Pamela Freeman. Victor's Quest
Tamora Pierce. Cold Fire (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Fire in the Forging (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Healing in the Vine (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Magic in the Weaving (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Magic Steps (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Power in the Storm (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Shatterglass (e)
Tamora Pierce. Street Magic (e) (re-read)
Rafael Sabatini. The Sword of Islam
Shelby Van Pelt. Remarkably Bright Creatures (e)
Evangeline Walton. The Island of the Mighty

In progress
Hanan al-Shayk. Women of Sand and Myrrh
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Valley of Fear (e) (re-read)

Abandoned
(anthology). Tremontaine: Season One (e)

Picture books
Lee Fox, Mitch Vane. Jasper McFlea Will Not Eat His Tea
Julia Patton. The Very Very Very Long Dog
Eve Titus, Paul Galdone. Anatole

Non-fiction books
Marc Abrahams. This Is Improbable
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)
Patrick Radden Keefe. Say Nothing (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Rosaleen Love. Reefscape

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland

. The season recently closed for the club's latest production, The Regina Monologues, a set of six interconnected stories inspired by the six wives of Henry VIII but set in the present day. I wasn't involved (it's an all-female cast, with only the six women appearing on stage), but I went to see a performance and was very impressed. It's the most challenging (for both the cast and the audience) bit of drama the club has done in the last few years.

The club's next production is Seussical, the musical inspired by the works of Dr Seuss, which I'm also not in; I decided not to audition for several reasons, including still being a bit musicalled out after Mamma Mia. My sister was disappointed when I told her; she says I have the right kind of face to be a Dr Seuss character.


. Am still listening to Re: Dracula. One problem I've been occasionally having is that because it's intended to be listened to on a specific schedule, I sometimes find that the schedule expects me to listen to an episode when I'm still busy digesting something else. That was an issue the day I read the last of the Penelope trilogy, and I couldn't easily put the episode off because there was another one due the next day; it cropped up again the night I went to see The Regina Monologues, but on that occasion there was a break of several days before the next episode, so that time I postponed the episode until I felt ready for it.


. A while ago, I started using the Calibre ebook management software to organise my ebooks. Part of the motivation is that I've replaced my physical ebook reader a couple of times now, and each time I did, the books that I bought through the official store had their read status and tags automatically re-applied from the cloud, but not the several hundred books I'd obtained by other means. The second time I was faced with the prospect of going through all those books, individually re-marking the ones I'd already read (if I could remember) and re-adding all the tags (if I could remember, with part of the problem being that the tags largely existed to remind me of things), I added Calibre to the mix, in the hope that once this round of re-marking and re-tagging was complete Calibre would remember the details for me and handle the whole task should it ever again be required.

I've achieved a full success with the tags; if I add a tag to a book on the reader, it automatically gets copied to Calibre's records next time they share information, and if I add a tag to a book in Calibre, it's automatically copied to the reader. The read status has proven to be trickier. With the help of a plugin, I've got it set up so that the ebook reader tells Calibre whenever I change the status of a book on the reader (how far I'm up to, or if I've marked it as finished); what I haven't been able to find is a way to arbitrarily mark a book as finished in Calibre and have that recognised by the ebook reader. I suppose if all else fails I can go through everything on the ebook reader and mark the ones I've read there, and that information will be transferred to Calibre, and then hopefully since it's information provided by the ebook reader it will, when the time comes, be transferred back.


. At the boardgame club this week, I had a chance to get a couple of games on the table that I haven't had out for a while. I got Jabberwocky and The Lady and the Tiger in a Kickstarter; neither is a single game, but instead each has a set of components (cards and coloured tokens) and a rulebook containing rules for several different games that can be played with the components, depending on how many players you have. They seemed like a useful and flexible thing to be able to take along to a boardgame gathering, but in practice I've only ever played a couple of games out of each and still don't really know most of the games well enough to be confident suggesting them.

My favourite game from either set is "Labyrinth", a two-player game in The Lady and the Tiger where the cards are laid out to create a playing board that changes configuration each turn and the players race to get all their pieces from one corner of the board to the other across the shifting terrain; I got to play a game of it this week while we were waiting for more people to show up so we could start a larger game.

When one other person showed up, we also played a three-player game from Jabberwocky; in "Gyre", which I don't think I've played before, the cards are laid out to create a playing board which the players move around the edge of while performing actions to gain control of specific areas on the board. It took us a round or two to come to grips with how the game worked, but it ended up being a very close match and we all enjoyed it.

(I promise the games don't all start with the cards being laid out to create a playing board; last time I had Jabberwocky on the table, for instance, we played "Slithy", which involves using the tokens to bid for points based on the predicted value of another player's hand of cards.)


. One of my so-far-unrealised plans for long service leave was to take up knitting or crocheting or something of the sort, partly for the potential practical value and partly to have something to do with my hands while I'm watching TV or listening to a podcast. Since I have so far consistently forgotten to go and obtain the necessary equipment and materials, I decided this week to shift my sights to something a bit less ambitious, and for which I already have the necessary equipment to hand: namely, learning to shuffle a deck of cards properly. My current shuffling technique is not the worst I've observed among the people I've played with, but it's awkward and clumsy enough that I'd like to improve it, and I've always been impressed by anyone who could do a clean riffle shuffle. I haven't made much progress on that specific goal so far, as none of the "How to do a riffle shuffle" tutorials I've looked at bother to explain how the actual riffling part works, having apparently been written by people who have been handling cards long enough to have forgotten which of the things that are now second nature to them might be opaque to a beginner. So for now I'm sticking with a tutorial that covers the very basics of card handling, like what a "dealer's grip" is (another thing that came up in a shuffling tutorial without further elaboration), and hoping to work my way up. I can do a pretty consistent one-handed swing cut now, at least, so that's something.

. Our production of Mamma Mia opened this week. It's been our best-selling show in memory, with every single performance sold out before it even opened - hurrah for name recognition! The rehearsals went pretty well (as the director remarked, it helped that most of the cast already knew most of the songs), and at the traditional milestone three weeks before opening it was actually in good shape for a show with three weeks of rehearsal left. Then we lost a week of rehearsal due to half the cast being struck down by various respiratory illnesses, and one week before opening we were in good shape for a show with two weeks of rehearsal left. We managed to pull it together in the last week, though, and although the performances have had some rough edges they've been nothing to be ashamed of.


. For the April theme reading challenge ("a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming"), I chose an anthology called Mists and Magic, edited by Dorothy Edwards. It's a collection of short stories and poems about witches, ghosts and other magical creatures, aimed at a young audience, so I'm coming to it rather late. (It hasn't been sitting in my to-read pile quite that long, mind you; it's only been fifteen years or so since I picked it up at an ex-library sale for reasons I don't now recall.) I probably would have enjoyed it a lot at the target age, but coming to it now I found the stories mostly short and slight, and in many cases was already familiar with the element the story was relying on for novelty. There were a few that I thought stood out, in particular "Christmas Crackers" by Marjorie Darke and the editor's own contributions, "Night Walk", "Witch at Home", and "The Girl Who Boxed an Angel". Looking back on them, those are stories where the author put some extra effort into characterisation and didn't settle for writing about A Generic English Child; I concede the possibility that there may have been readers in the target audience who would have preferred the generic protagonists as easier to identify with, but they didn't do it for me. "Night Walk" is apparently an extract from a novel, which I'm now interested in reading the rest of.


. For May, there was a choice between "something old, or a book about something or someone old" and "a book that you think you might bail out on, or a book about emergencies, panics or escapes"; I chose Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, a book about someone very old, and a lot of emergencies and panics, that I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't going to bail out on. After finishing it, I immediately went and got the sequel from the library, and now have book 3 of the series on hold.


. The random book selection for May was taken from the non-fiction section, and my randomly-selected book was Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do About It by Thom Hartmann. The general principles are interesting, though for the most part already familiar to me. It has a couple of things holding me back from engaging with it in depth. One is that it's very much a book by an American, for Americans, about America. The other is that it was already a decade old when I acquired this copy (it came as part of an ebook bundle on the theme of "Hacking Capitalism") and it's been sitting around unread for a good while since then, so the America that it's about is the America of George W. Bush's second term and there's nearly two decades of developments (and lack of developments) that it has nothing to say about. Trump is mentioned once, in a list of American tycoons; Obama is not mentioned at all. (Bernie Sanders gets quoted a couple of times, but the author finds it necessary to explain to the reader of 2006 who he is.)


. The new Liaden novel, Ribbon Dance, is just out, but I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet because my ebook reader went into a coma a couple of weeks ago; it was only about a year and a half old, but fortunately that meant I qualify for a free replacement, but the replacement hasn't arrived yet.

Fiction books
Alan Bennett. The Uncommon Reader
Gail Carriger. Soulless
Catherine Johnson. Mamma Mia!

In progress
Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (e)
Arthur Conan Doyle. A Study in Scarlet (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Catriona (e)

Picture books
Margaret Wild, Jane Tanner. There's a Sea in My Bedroom (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Gerard Jones. Men of Tomorrow

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Thomas Babington Macaulay. Lays of Ancient Rome

* Hi! So, it's been a while since I've done a proper post. A big part of that is that I was priced out of the place I was renting, and I've been occupied with the process of finding and moving into somewhere with rent I can afford. There's a funny story about how I found the place I'm living now, or rather how it was found for me, but I don't think I can do it justice without including too many identifying details.

* At the Rep Club, we're currently rehearsing for the Christmas Show. It's going well; it's one of those fortunate productions where everybody gets along and things are progressing fairly smoothly. We might even achieve the rare feat of doing a full run-through more than a week before the show opens.

* I did end up bailing on Dracula Daily and Re: Dracula, shortly after I last posted about them, as part of a general recognition that I was trying to keep up with too many different things on Tumblr. I've stuck with most of the other similar things I was signed up for (am enjoying Kidnapped Weekly, and increasingly convinced that I never have actually read Kidnapped before), but I'm trying to avoid getting sucked into any new ones. Most recently, I managed to resist the temptation to get involved in a readalong of Journey to the West – something I would love to share with people under other circumstances, but right now too much of a commitment to take on.

* The reading challenge for September was "a book with a one-word title"; I read Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton. The reading challenge for October was "a book about people wearing masks, hiding, or masquerading as something they are not"; I read The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (and a whole lot of comic books where Scooby-Doo and friends team up with Batman and friends). The reading challenge for November is "a book by, about or telling the story of an indigenous population"; I wasn't sure a Bony novel would really count, but I decided it was time to try the next one anyway – it was Bushranger of the Skies, and I wouldn't have been comfortable counting it for that prompt but fortunately it did definitely fit the alternate prompt for November, which was "a book about families".

* I've been watching Pluto on Netflix. I could write a post about the experience, but it would be pretty much exactly the post I wrote about the experience of watching The Sandman on Netflix with a few proper nouns changed.