1. Baen Books has recently released ebooks of Janet Kagan's novels
Hellspark and
Mirabile, and
a collection of her short stories (including the Hugo-winner, "The Nutcracker Coup").
Hellspark is a mainstay of my collection of comfort reads, and I'm very much looking forward to making the acquaintance of
Mirabile. The short stories, too; I've only read one up to now - "Standing in the Spirit", a heartwarming Christmas tale that wears its debt to Dickens on its sleeve
without going down the well-worn "visited by three spirits" path.
2. Speaking of Dickens: Still rehearsing
Oliver!. I think I'm managing to get the hang of Fagin's accent now. It seems to be largely a question of holding my tongue right. (Making a face like I smell something bad also seems to help.)
3. At the gaming group this week, the main thing I did was watch a group of people play
X-Wing Miniatures. There were four people who wanted to play, so they set up a big square playing area, with each player starting on one side, and drew lots to see who would attack who. The result of the draw produced two battles going on separately in opposite corners of the playing area, and then the survivors of each battle took each other on. It started out with a wide variety of different ship types (including what I was told was the main ship from
Rebels, which I still haven't seen), but in the end it came down to a couple of X-Wings vs a couple of TIE fighters.
After that we played a few rounds of
Hobbit Love Letter (which is like Batman Love Letter apart from the obvious, and also with an extra card, The One Ring, which is worth 0 points except in one specific situation where it's the second most powerful card in the game) and then it was time to go home.
4. It tends to be the case with movies that either I'll see them in the first week they're in the cinema or the last, because it I don't have a great and specific desire to see a movie, I'll do my usual put-it-off-until-a-deadline-looms thing. (And then sometimes it happens that when the deadline's close enough to see there aren't any screenings left I can actually get to, and then I don't see the movie at all.) I'd been putting off going to see
Zootopia until today's 1pm screening was absolutely my last chance, and likewise the new
Jungle Book movie - also at 1pm. Faced with that decision, I realised that I didn't particularly want to see a new version of a movie that hadn't been that much like
The Jungle Book in the first place, so I'm rereading the book instead and I went to see
Zootopia.
5. The Australian election campaign's started, which means it's time to start hoarding and swapping links for informed voting. (If anyone spots a good run-down of this year's minor Senate parties, let me know, please?)
Vote Compass is available again for this election. If you don't know about it, it's a nifty application where you fill out a questionnaire about where you stand on the current hot public policy issues, and then it shows you where you are compared to the announced policies of the major parties. (I always turn out to be standing pretty much where I expected to be, but it's nice to
know.)
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