pedanther

. The weather continued hot and unpleasant for the first part of the week, but has been quite nice for the last few days.


. At the board game club this week, we played: Selfish, a game in which players are competing to safely traverse shark-infested waters and nab the only life raft; Bang!, a game representing a shoot-out between a sheriff's posse and some outlaws, in which I shot the sheriff but I did not shoot the deputy; and No Thanks, a game in which the aim is to avoid getting stuck with the highest score.


. Spent several days this week binge-watching the season of The Traitors that just finished. I'd actually been hoping to watch it in real time, and maybe compare notes with a few people I know in the UK who were watching it, but the local streaming service didn't start carrying the current season until the finale aired and then they released the whole season in one go. The intrigue was intriguing and the finale suitably dramatic.


. Went to the cinema again this week, to see the movie Sing Sing, which is a dramatisation of a true story about a group of inmates in a maximum security prison putting on a show as part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. Most of the inmates in the program are played by actual real-life RTA alumni, though I'm not sure how many of them were in the group that the movie is based on. During the end credits, there are clips of home video footage of the show the real-life inmates put on, which I found interesting because, among other reasons, the movie's director didn't always make the same choices in staging the re-enactment as the original director did. I was impressed by the movie, and glad I had that experience, and a bit sad that I hadn't known enough about it beforehand to enourage the other local theatre people I know to go and see it too.


. There's a feature on 750 Words where, along with the more objective stats like words-per-minute and so on, it analyses each entry and offers its guess about what emotional state you were in when you wrote it. Recently, there was a feature update so that now you can read a list of the keywords it used to make its decision. This has revealed some fairly predictable shortcomings, like blindness to context - if you use the word "wicked", it has no idea whether you're calling someone or something wicked, or reporting the use of the word by someone else, or using an obsolete slang term of approval, or just mentioning the title of a famous musical - along with some others that I wasn't expecting. My favourite is that it's prone to reading into surnames that begin with words it knows, so that you can improve your perceived emotional state by talking about James Joyce or GLaDOS, or lower it by mentioning Albus Dumbledore or Dorothy Kilgallen.


. A channel on Youtube is doing a series of videos presenting the whooshing-starship opening titles of various Star Trek series as if the theme music were being blared from the starship as it flew past the camera. So far they've done the original series, The Next Generation, and Voyager.

Fiction books
Aeschylus, tr. Robert Fagles. The Oresteia
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e) (re-read)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

Abandoned
Richard Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish (eight deadly words)

Non-fiction books
Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Salvage Right (e)

Fiction books
L Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (e) (re-read)
Susan Cooper. The Boggart
Susan Cooper. The Boggart and the Monster
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
RA MacAvoy. The Grey Horse (e) (re-read)
Arthur Upfield. The Bone Is Pointed
Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e)

Because I'm trying to get out of the habit of assuming that the latest cool thing I've discovered (in this case, rediscovered) is something you all know already:

Thirty Second Bunny Theater: Classic movies in 30 seconds (and re-enacted by bunnies)

A sampling:
Casablanca
March of the Penguins
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
The War of the Worlds (the 1950s version)