pedanther

. I had the whole week off, and spent a lot of it either enjoying having nothing particular to do or feeling crumby due to the well-known phenomenon whereby as soon as I was on holiday and the show wrapped I came down with the mild lurgy I had been steadfastly refusing to entertain because I had things to do.

At a couple of points, I attempted to do some things I'd been putting off on the excuse that they involved getting things done during office hours, only to find (as I frequently have on previous occasions when I've counted on getting things done when I was on holiday) that the businesses I needed to interact with were also off for the holidays.


. On the weekend, we had a long gaming session where we played Mansions of Madness. The scenario we played was an interesting variation on the usual: ( Read more... )


. At the weekly game meet, we played Cockroach Soup, Flip 7 With a Vengeance, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre. ( Read more... )


. Rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown have begun, and are going well.


. I watched the NASA live stream of the Artemis II launch, and have been following its progress.


. I went to Parkrun this week, despite a bit of rain being forecast; I already had a cold, and I didn't have anything I needed to do later in the day, so I figured it wouldn't hurt. In the event, there was only a brief light sprinkling of rain. I got a couple of nice comments from people who had been to see the play.


. My relationship with hot cross buns since I parted ways with the Holy Mother Church has been erratic. Some years, I make a point of eating one on the wrong day, to prove that the Church can no longer tell me what to do; other years, I make a point of only eating them on Good Friday, on the principle that if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing correctly (because I might be a lapsed Catholic but I'm still a practising pedant). This year, the entire question escaped my mind until it was already Good Friday and all the shops where I knew they were on sale were shut for the public holiday, so I bought some at a discount on Saturday morning and had them for morning tea.


. Until recently, I had managed to avoid getting any spam comments on my AO3 fics, but a couple of the fics I wrote for the most recent Three Sentence Ficathon have apparently stuck out enough to become targets for the kind of spam comment that pretends to be a real review before trying to get you to a secondary location. The one I received this week asserted that "i wasn’t expecting much at first but this actually turned out to be a pretty decent read", which is particularly transparent in the context of a fic that's only 37 words long.


. I was pleased to see the announcement that Farah Mendlesohn has been selected as the GUFF delegate to Swancon 50, then spent several minutes trying to remember where I actually know them from. I eventually managed to narrow it down from "overlapping online fannish space of some kind" to "mostly Diana Wynne Jones fandom, when I was still actively interacting with Diana Wynne Jones fandom". (Skimming the list of GUFF voters, I recognised a name from the old DWJ fan group, followed by another name whose owner was not yet born then, let alone old enough to vote; my, how the time etc.)

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.