pedanther | Entries tagged with roleplaying

. Rock of Ages is only a few years old, but it's a musical in the classical style -- which is to say that the plot is formulaic and the characters thin, but none of that matters while the songs are happening. After the first read-through of the script, I had a pretty low opinion of it, but after the first vocal rehearsal I was much more kindly disposed.

. I didn't end up reading The High Window in March, deciding instead to focus on finishing off Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and a couple of other books that have been lying about half-read for a while. Now that the decks are cleared, I appear to have started reading The Woman in White instead. I didn't have this much trouble starting The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but then I've read those before and I knew what to expect from them; I haven't read The High Window before and it appears to be getting stuck in the general reluctance to Start New Things.

. It took me a few months to get through Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, but not because I didn't enjoy it; it's a dense read, not to be gulped down too quickly or when the mind is already full of other things. This is a book about the present being built on the bones of the past. The plot has Smilla uncovering a sequence of events stretching back to the second world war, and ultimately caused by something that happened much longer ago. At the same time, the novelist is uncovering, a bit at a time, the events that made Smilla into the person she is. For each of the people she meets along the way, we're given a glimpse of what made them the people they've become. It reminds me of John le Carré's thrillers, which are similarly portraits of people under pressure. (And, like a lot of le Carré's novels, it doesn't tidy everything away neatly and happily at the end. I found that it gave good enough answers to the most important questions, and that I could live with the uncertainties that remained, but this isn't a universal experience.)

. Over the past while, I've been importing my reading log into StoryGraph. Since the first decade of my reading log exists only on paper, this has involved a fair amount of typing, some opportunities to bathe in nostalgia, and occasionally squinting at an entry and muttering, "That's weird, I don't remember that book at all." I've also learned a thing or two about International Standard Book Numbers, including how the typo protection works and how to translate the old 10-digit ISBN into a modern 13-digit ISBN (not to mention an exciting side-trip involving my copy of Tarzan of the Apes, which is so old it only has a 9-digit SBN).

. After a long hiatus occasioned by various life events and scheduling conflicts, our roleplaying group has resumed meeting more-or-less regularly and has got back into the investigation we were in the middle of before things ground to a halt. In our most recent playing session, we started investigating a lighthouse that had been left abandoned(?) after the occupants were attacked in the middle of renovating it. I figured out a way of climbing up the outside of the lighthouse and getting in at the top, a strategy that had served us well for getting past the guards last time we needed to investigate a tower; unfortunately on this occasion it turned out the scenario had been designed to provide an increasing challenge level as the players worked their way up, so going in from the top meant running straight into the most difficult set of opponents in the lighthouse. I was obliged to retreat back down the side of the lighthouse and rejoin the rest of the party, and we used the front door instead.

. I recently got an achievement in Duolingo for having been doing the lessons continually for an entire year. At this point, I'm not sure I'll ever have a practical use for having German as a second language, but it gives my brain exercise and I learn fun things from time to time like the existence of a German expression that translates as something like "He's missing a few cups from the cupboard".

. The production of Hello Dolly has concluded successfully; up next is a season of short plays. The one I'm in is an absurdist comedy about a married couple having a very trying day: he's been fired, and she's murdered somebody but can't remember who it was.

. My morning walking routine has become somewhat less regular since winter brought in the cold dark rainy mornings, but it still happens often enough to have a claim to existence. My most common route these days is a lap around the outside of the racecourse, part of it on a nice wooded walking trail dotted with war memorials that I keep telling myself one day I'll actually stop to look at. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll widen the loop a bit and continue on to the north end of the walking trail, at the park with the sound shell where they do concerts in the summer. Most days it's pretty deserted at that time of the morning, but one time there was a car boot sale on, and one morning this week they were setting up for what looked like an inter-school sports day.

. Something else that's been getting less regular and less frequent lately is our roleplaying sessions, due to difficulty getting everyone's schedules lined up. At our most recent session, one of the other players turned out at the last minute to be unable to join in, so we couldn't continue the campaign, but everybody who did turn up had been looking forward to getting some roleplaying in, so I volunteered to run a one-shot session of Lasers and Feelings, a mini RPG whose design features include being able to be run with no preparation whatever. There were some rough patches, but everybody had fun.

. I caved and got Disney+ about halfway through the run of Loki so that I could keep up with what friends were talking about on Tumblr without worrying about spoilers, and I don't regret it. Now that I have it, I'll probably circle back and watch WandaVision at some point; I still don't much care about the MCU versions of Wanda or Vision or especially about the MCU version of their relationship, but apparently it's also got Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau in it and I want to find out what they're doing these days. Black Widow I went to see in the cinema, since I'm fortunate enough to have that as an option and even here where cinema tickets aren't cheap it cost literally half as much to see it on the big screen with other people than it would have to watch it on a little screen by myself at home.

. With the WA elections coming up, the ABC has published a summary of the 19 parties running and their major policies. May be useful for telling apart the minor parties who didn't just name themselves after their main policy.

. The brass band has started up again for 2021. We're in a position where we have some rebuilding to do before we're at the level we were around this time last year, not just because of the long pandemic hiatus but also because the new year is the time when people go away to university or leave town for new jobs elsewhere, and this year we've lost our conductor, a couple of key players, and two of the mainstays of the band committee. We have a new conductor and new committee members, but there's going to be a while before we have an idea of the effect on the band's collective personality and goals.

. The Rep Club has also started up again for the year. We have a season of one-act plays going up next month, and then will be the big push toward this year's musical. We're having another run at Hello Dolly!, which we were going to do last year before the pandemic hit. Some of the people who were cast last year have left town or had to withdraw for other reasons, but fortunately most of the losses were down in the supporting cast where the gaps are easier to fill in.

. The roleplaying campaign is progressing. We're beginning to accumulate some of those "your players did what?" anecdotes that every good campaign produces. Our adventuring party has done enough adventuring to pass probation and get officially accredited, which raises the question: What are we going to call ourselves? I've been leaning toward something about dire wolves, on the "if I had a nickel for every time we've been attacked by dire wolves" principle, but only if we can make it clear that "dire" isn't a judgement on our adventuring abilities. When I mentioned this to the rest of the group, somebody suggested that we could call ourselves The DW, and claim it stood for whatever seemed most appropriate depending on who was asking. "When you're in trouble, you call DW," said two players in unison.

. I recently had a go at reading The Barrakee Mystery, an Australian murder mystery novel from 1929 that turned into the first of a series running to 29 novels over three and a half decades. The protagonist of the series, though he's more of a supporting character in the first novel, is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, known as "Bony", a detective with mixed ancestry from an Aboriginal mother and an unknown European father. As such, it's worth noting that the series spans several eventful decades in the history of race relations in Australia. I'd read some of the novels from near the end of the series before, but the beginning is a very different experience. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder why a white author in the 1920s would put a half-Aboriginal detective in his novel, but of course race relations play a big role in the plot and Bony isn't the only half-Aboriginal character in the novel. It's an uncomfortable read at times: Bony and the narrator both have pointed things to say about white Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people, but the novel also seems to take it as given that someone with mixed white and Aboriginal heritage will be dragged down by their inferior blood. (It's the Aboriginal blood that's being posited as inferior, to be clear.) It certainly takes it as given that most of the white characters will be prejudiced against Aboriginal people to a greater or lesser extent, and that this isn't expected to affect how likeable the audience finds them.

I sometimes think about what a modern TV adaptation of the Bony novels might be like. It would probably have to be pretty thoroughly reimagined; even the most recent of the novels is over fifty years old, and The Barrakee Mystery is coming up on its centenary, and the national conversation on race has changed a lot in that time. But sometimes I feel like we kind of owe it to Bony, for the fact that there have already been two TV series inspired by the novels and both of them starred white men. (The 1970s series made at least a token effort to audition Aboriginal actors before casting a white man and investing heavily in brown makeup; the 1990s series just straight-up made the protagonist a handsome white twentysomething, played by one of the several bankable handsome white twentysomethings that were on TV all the time in those days. And those days were the days when Ernie Dingo was also a bankable twentysomething, so it's not like they didn't have options.)

A few years ago I was in an online roleplaying game with a Weird West setting. As part of the set-up for the game, we were each asked to write three solo scenelets with our character: one demonstrating a character trait tending to lead to positive outcomes, one demonstrating a character trait tending to lead to negative outcomes, and one establishing the character's personal goals/mindset/the basis of a character arc.

I happened to be rereading the scenelets today, and I still like them, so I thought I'd stash them here in case I lose access to the site they're on.

The character is Wil Butler, a warlock troubleshooter.

( Read more... )

. The Rep Club has begun rehearsals for our annual Christmas show, which this year will be a version of Sleeping Beauty. (The coronavirus is pretty much under control in this part of the world, and theatres are allowed to have audiences although there are still requirements in place for socially distanced seating.) I'm playing the butler/chamberlain/dogsbody, who I would describe as the comic relief except that this is the kind of show where everybody is the comic relief at some point. It's more that most of the other characters are also necessary to the plot in some way, while my character is only there for comic relief and the occasional bit of exposition. I'm enjoying it immensely.

. Our roleplaying campaign has brought us to a town where there's currently an election campaign going on. One of the candidates is a big-spending jerk who's whipping up prejudice against non-humans. (I haven't asked, but I'm pretty sure all of this was actually in the campaign sourcebook.) Despite this, he's been friendly to our adventuring team the couple of times we've encountered him, and even offered us work, even though none of us are human: the cleric is a tabaxi (cat-person), the ranger is a verdan (a goblinoid race specific to this campaign setting), the rogue is a halfling (like a hobbit, but less trademarked), and the fighter is a warforged (a kind of magic-powered robot). During our second conversation with this guy, we figured out why: he's apparently never heard of warforged, and is under the impression that our team is led by a human warrior in an unusually elaborate set of armor.

. I've given up on the discipline of wearing work clothes on work days: I decided to make an exception one time because I was behind on the laundry and didn't have any work clothes to wear, and my everyday clothes were so much more comfortable that I extended the exception indefinitely.

. One of the things I've been doing to pass time this month has been working through back episodes of the Youtube channel Marie Clare's World, where a fan of 21st-century Doctor Who is watching and posting reaction videos to the original series. Part of what makes it interesting to me is that she's managed to go into it not knowing anything except what she's picked up from references in newWho, so she knows roughly how many Doctors and what they look like, but not when or how they enter and leave the series, and that the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Master and Sarah Jane are in there somewhere, but again not exactly when, and basically nothing else. So she's going in knowing that this is the kind of thing she likes, but as unprepared for the plot twists and such as the original audience would have been (or even less, in some cases where the original audience would have seen it splashed over the papers beforehand). She's enjoying it a lot, too; she's appreciating the old special effects on their own merits and finding something good to say about nearly every story, even the ones at which Received Fan Wisdom tends to turn up its nose. And she's been devastated by some of the companion and Doctor departures.

. A little while ago I made toad-in-the-hole for a family gathering, using the old recipe we used to make it all the time when we were children. I think this is the first time I've baked something from scratch basically on my own; the sibling whose house we were gathering in kept an eye on me but didn't intervene except to tell me which cupboard things were in, and the one time when the batter went weird. The trouble was that the recipe starts "For batter, use the pancake recipe with half the milk and twice the eggs", and then the pancake recipe requires the milk to be added in two stages, half before beating and half after -- and then on top of that we were doubling all the quantities to make enough for the whole family -- and I lost track of how many halves that made and ended up with too much milk in the mixture so we had to improvise to get the proportions vaguely right again. In turned out pretty good, and I'm open to the idea of trying this baking thing again at some point.

. I was cleaning out unused apps on my phone, came across Duolingo which I hadn't opened in months, and decided on a whim to have another crack at brushing up my German. The lessons I've been revising this week have included Food, Animals, and Plurals, so I've been learning quite about the dietary habits of bears. I have learned that the bear drinks the beer (das Bär trinkt das Bier) and that the bears eat the strawberries (die Bären fressen die Erdbeeren). It's not an all-alliteration diet, though; the bears also eat the fish (die Bären fressen die Fische -- on second thought, maybe that's just a different kind of alliteration). Or perhaps it's just these particular bears, who I was informed in the most recent lesson are called Hans and Karl (die Bären heißen Hans und Karl).

. Our roleplaying campaign continues. I'm playing the fighter class character of the group, and my ancestry/class backstory meant I started out with heavy armour, so my role in the group has come to include going out ahead in any fight and making a nuisance of myself so that our opponents will waste time trying to land a hit on me while the rest of the team picks them off from a safe distance. (Not that I am not also doing my bit to pick them off, especially since I learned the feat called Riposte, which gives me a reaction attack against an attacker who fails to penetrate my armour.) In the various times we've used this strategy, I have had occasion to be thankful that my character's ancestry also bequeathed resistance against poison and immunity to suffocation. It's almost a running joke at this point that every time the team has encountered a monster with a suffocating attack or a cloud of choking dust or a creature surrounded wherever it goes by a noxious vapour, the person who's taken the brunt of it has been the guy who doesn't breathe.

. In this part of the world, the coronavirus situation has receded to the point that things involving groups of people are happening again. The brass band has resumed rehearsals, although a bit aimlessly because until the last week or so all the places the band usually plays were still closed. The Rep Club is having a variety performance this weekend to mark being able to have live shows with audiences again (although the remaining social distancing restrictions do mean that the theatre will be at half capacity). The gaming group has also started meeting again this month, although there were a lot fewer people there than usual while I was there. I played Half Truth with a group of people; both the players and the group of kibitzers we accumulated agreed that it was a good and fun game, but I don't think I'll get anyone to play against me again in a hurry.

. I don't seem to have reacquired the interest in watching theatrical streams after all. I think part of it is that watching a theatre performance this way lacks the shared social aspect; there's nobody else with me while I'm watching, and nobody I know who I can discuss the performance with afterward.

. I've now been working from home for several months. I'm still dressing in work clothes on work days, but not always before I actually start work: somewhere along the line I decided it was okay, if I was still in my pyjamas at work o'clock, to check my email and deal with anything urgent before I went and got dressed, and that's extended to the point that sometimes I'm still not dressed at lunchtime. So far I'm holding the line at being dressed for lunch, although once or twice lunch has happened quite late as a consequence.

. I have now been working from home for a bit over three weeks. So far, I have stuck to dressing in work clothes on work days, although I haven't been bothering with unnecessary fripperies like shoes. I haven't been having much trouble keeping track of what day it is; keeping a daily diary probably helps there. One thing I have noticed being affected is laundry; in olden times, there would be only a few days a week that I had time to do a full load of laundry, which concentrated my attention and made it easier to decide it was time to do it, but now that I can do laundry any day there's less impetus to go "today's the day", and I've repeatedly left it later and later until I had to do it because I was one day away from running out of something.

. As predicted, working at home and having all my evening social groups in suspension hasn't made an enormous difference to how much more I get done around the house nor to how quickly my to-read and to-watch lists have been depleted. I've been thinking about why this is, particularly during moments when I've been lying on the couch moaning "there's nothing to do" and meaning "there's a bunch of things to do, but I don't feel like doing any of them, even the fun ones", and I think part of it is related to how I'm bad at making irrevocable decisions. Choosing to spend a couple of hours watching a particular movie or reading a particular book means choosing not to do any of the other things I might be doing instead, and what if it's a poor choice and I could be spending my time better, and so on and so on. Of course, the same could be said about lying on the couch moaning, or spending four hours on the internet doing nothing in particular, and somehow my brain doesn't have any problem with those. Brains are weird.

. I've been keeping an eye on some of the various theatrical groups that are making portions of their back catalogues available online, but so far have only got around to watching two: the Jesus Christ Superstar with Tim Minchin as Judas, and the National Theatre's Treasure Island with Arthur Darvill as Long John Silver. I thought about watching the National Theatre's One Man, Two Guvnors, which I remember hearing got good notices at the time, but I kept putting it off until it was too late, possibly because it doesn't star any actors I like. Probably the same thing is going to happen with The Phantom of the Opera, which isn't available much longer.

. Our roleplaying campaign has successfully transitioned to meeting online through Roll20. We've had two online sessions so far, completed our first adventure, and picked up a new party member, because it occurred to my sister that the advantage of being stuck playing online instead of face-to-face is that we're not limited to players we know locally, so she's invited a friend who lives miles away to join us.

. Still playing Alto's Adventure. Still charmed by the snow-scooting llamas.

This month with the gaming group I played Dice Forge, Tomb Trader; Antidote, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Parfum, and Carnival of Monsters.

I particularly enjoyed Tomb Trader and Carnival of Monsters. Tomb Trader is a quick-playing card game in which everybody is trying to sneak valuable artifacts out of an archaeological dig, but you have to negotiate with another player if they're after the same artifacts as you (it's kept quick-playing by there being a time limit before the dig's guards show up, at which point anybody still arguing gets nothing). Each player gets a character card at the beginning of the game, which affects which artifacts they're most interested in. Carnival of Monsters is a much longer and more elaborate game, but come to think of it the premise is broadly similar: in this case, the player characters are running expeditions to find rare and mysterious beasties they can show off back home.

I would also happily play Parfum or Arkham Horror CG again. We only got to play the introductory section of the Arkham Horror campaign, but at the end of it the bloke who owned the game packed our character decks away as-is so we could continue it another time. The character card I chose to represent my player character turned out to have flavour text explaining that she was devoutly religious and on a divinely-inspired quest to smite evil, which seemed like an odd character beat for a Lovecraftian horror game, but it does come with a built-in risk of losing your sanity (if you fail the tasks the voice in your head gives), and of course there's no guarantee she's right about where the voice in her head comes from.

In other gaming news, the roleplaying campaign has progressed. We've mapped out most of the tunnel system now, and had an amusing encounter where we interrupted a group of darkmantles, cave-dwelling critters whose signature attack is to drop on their victim from above and envelop his head, leaving him blind and unable to breathe. What made it amusing was that the character they tried this on was mine, who out of the entire party is the one who doesn't breathe anyway.

. Last month at gaming group I played Citadels and Codenames: Pictures.

. We have had two more sessions of the roleplaying campaign, and are well launched on an adventure exploring mysterious tunnels.

. Rehearsals have begun for Hello Dolly!. I'm playing the role that was played by Walter Matthau in the movie, which doesn't surprise me. I was either going to be Walter Matthau or Michael Crawford, and I'm more of a Walter Matthau (and our other main male lead who does musicals is more of a Michael Crawford).

. I wanted a mental palate cleanser after the disappointing end of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, so I went back to the novels that were the Star Wars sequels before Lucasfilm decided to make more movies. I read Aaron Allston's X-Wing novels for the first time, and then re-read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy that launched the novel series, for the first time since... come to think of it, since before the prequel trilogy movies came out (more on that in a moment). The X-Wing novels were interesting because I could feel them getting more self-assured and better written as they went along; I wasn't entirely sure about them after the first one, but by the end of the second one I was solidly hooked. The Thrawn trilogy stands up very well after nearly thirty years, although there's a major plot point involving the Clone Wars that conspicuously suffers from ol' George having changed his mind later about Star Wars prehistory. After I finished re-reading the Thrawn trilogy, I thought about going on and reading the duology Zahn wrote later as a sequel to it, but it occurred to me that if I was disappointed by it I was going to be back where I started, and the trilogy ended in a satisfying place, so I decided to leave it at that.

. I don't have an opinion on how the latest season of Doctor Who ended. I lost enthusiasm somewhere around the third episode, so I haven't seen anything past that. I've heard bits here and there, and none of it has reacquired my interest; there's a limit to how much pull even an intriguing story hook can exert if you don't trust the writer to take you somewhere worth the journey.

This month at the gaming group, I played 7 Wonders: Duel and Elder Sign: Omens of the Deep.( Read more... )

This month we also had the second session of the RPG campaign.( Read more... )

This month at gaming group, I played Quadropolis, Space Base: The Emergence of Shy Pluto, and at least one other thing that I forgot to note down and now can't remember.

Also this month, we had the first session of a roleplaying campaign my brother is running, ( Read more... )

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. At the gaming group this week, we played Carcassonne and Splendor. First we played a two-player game of Carcassonne, which I won convincingly, then another person arrived and we played a three-player game, which I lost even more convincingly. Then we played two three-player games of Splendor, and I lost both times.

At the end of the evening, everybody happened to finish up early except the role-playing group, who were in the middle of battling a kraken that was trying to sink their ship. I hung around to see how that turned out; how it turned out was that the kraken destroyed the ship, but the adventuring party did manage to rescue most of the people on board by stuffing them inside some kind of hammerspace pocket their wizard conjured up. On the one hand: Lots of survivors, yay! On the other hand: Lots of survivors stuck in a hammerspace pocket hovering in midair over open ocean with no chance of anybody happening along to rescue them... The wizard explained that he had a theoretically sound plan for getting everyone back to dry land in one piece, but the venue was closing up so we didn't get to find out yet how well that was going to go in practice.

2. The local music school runs a small choral group for adults that I've been vaguely aware for a while, but hadn't got around to checking out due to having other things on and general shyness about putting myself into new situations. Recently I've had some more free time due to not being in any shows at present, which happened to coincide with the beginning of a new school term, so it seemed like a good time to check it out. I am enjoying it so far.

3. In a rare burst of decluttering enthusiasm, I've done something about the pile of Things I Put Down For a Moment Intending to Deal With Them Later that was gradually engulfing my study. It's now sorted into three boxes: things to be put away when I figure out where they go, likewise but with a good chance I'll be wanting them again before then, and things that actually need dealing with. Next step: dealing with the things in the third box.

In a bit of carry-over, I also did a thing with the box that's been sitting in the kitchen since I moved in, which nominally contained things that needed to be unpacked in the kitchen. It's now been separated into a small box of things that really do need to be unpacked, and a larger box of things I never actually used in the old kitchen and don't see myself using in this one either. Next step: Figure out how to usefully get rid of the second and larger box.

4. The new online community platform Imzy recently moved from closed to open beta, in case anyone's interested in checking it out. (Can't have communities without people in, after all...) My impression is that so far the more broadly-drawn communities, like Fantasy, are making more of a go of it than the communities based on more specific topics, but that may change as more people get involved.

5. Fanfic rec: Working Backwards by Starlightify. In which Clark Kent wakes up in Lois Lane's bed and has to figure out how he got there, and also who Lois thought he was at the time. Normally I find stories with this kind of premise acutely embarrassing, but this is written with a great deal of warmth and empathy and I enjoyed it unreservedly.

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pedanther

May 2025

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