pedanther: (Default)
. My experiment in journalling this week was to take it offline and write my journal in a plain text file instead of on the 750 Words website. The theory was that, without having to worry about 750 Words policing breaks and interruptions, I would be more inclined to start journal entries even if I wasn't sure I'd have time to write the whole entry in a single sitting.Read more... )


. At board game club, we played Dark Tomb, described as a dungeon-crawl-in-a-box. The box is small enough to fit in a pocket, and includes map tiles, premade characters, monster stats, etc. for an adventure in four increasingly-challenging locations. Read more... )


. I finally got around to setting up the work table again and starting one of the jigsaw puzzles I was given for Christmas. I'd forgotten how nice it is to have a puzzle on the go )


. I haven't started any new computer games, as such; this week, I've been trying out demos of a few new and upcoming games. These included Word Play, Star Birds, Deck of Haunts )


. I refuelled the car and took the opportunity to clean the front and rear windscreens, both of which needed it. I had a slightly weird feeling as I was driving away, because I'm used to there being enough grime around the edges of the windscreen to visually confirm its existence, and now I couldn't see anything between me and the outside world.


. I was poking around in my old Tumblr posts, and found a limerick I wrote years ago. I've been trying to decide if I should put it on AO3 with the Coleridge limericks; maybe I should try my hand at a couple more first? (Hmm. Looking back at the tag, there's also the Shelley limerick...)

My gal's eyes are not like the sun.
In fact, if you take time to run
Her past ev'ry cliché
That romantic folk say,
You will find that she fits not a one.

(But I love her anyhow.)
pedanther: (Default)
. I had a much more productive and satisfying week at work.


. I'm having more trouble finding time to go for a walk or bike ride on weekdays now that it's getting dark so soon after the end of office hours, but I'm still managing to maintain a minimum of three per week.


. At board game club, we played Feed the Kraken, a social deduction game set on board a ship where some of the sailors have secret agendas. I'm iffy about social deduction games; I don't enjoy the ones that are all about being able to read opponents' body language to figure out if they're being dishonest, but I don't mind some of the ones that have some kind of mechanic that provides objective (though ambiguous) evidence of another kind. In the case of Feed the Kraken, that's plotting the ship's course: each of the factions on the ship wants to steer the ship toward a specific destination, so any change in the heading suggests something about the loyalties of the players who were contributing to navigation that round, but each decision involves three players drawing and discarding cards in such a way that it's never clear precisely who's responsible for the outcome. I enjoyed the game a lot, even before I ended up playing a key role in getting victory for my faction.


. I stopped using Duolingo a while back and uninstalled the app, but hadn't actually got around to closing my account, on the off chance that I might want to pick it up again at some point. Given the recent nonsense, I decided this week that that was never going to happen, and deleted my account.


. I have a rented storage unit which I had not had access to for months: the self-storage facility installed a new automatic front gate, and although I got the email notifying me of the upcoming change I never received the promised follow-up email containing instructions on how to open the new gate. And, being me, by the time I'd realised the follow-up email wasn't coming, enough time had passed that I felt awkward about contacting the site manager to raise the subject, a situation which obviously got no better the longer I put it off. I was reminded about this again this week, and decided enough was enough, and now the situation is resolved: I did an end-run around the contact awkwardness problem by driving to the self-storage facility, finding the manufacturer's logo on the housing of the gate mechanism, and googling for instructions. Fortunately for the success of this endeavour, it turns out that all the manufacturer's smart gates respond to a standard app that can be downloaded for free, and when I entered my contact information after installing the app it automatically matched me to the self-storage place's list of users and offered me a button to open the gate. Everything in the storage unit appears to be fine, if a bit more dusty and cobwebby than when I saw it last. (And I really should get around to talking to someone about the pile of stuff I agreed to temporarily store for a colleague until the covid lockdown ended...)


. Picked up Battletech again for the first time in a couple of weeks, and ended up playing it for a few hours. (Part of that was a big boss mission that took about an hour all on its own.) I'm still not sure exactly how much I'm really enjoying it, but there are enough little things that once I start playing I keep going "I'll just finish off this thing" or "I'll just tweak that thing". It's getting to the point I predicted earlier where the difficulty has ramped up enough that if I keep just coasting along with a vague idea of how the systems work I'm going to be in real trouble sooner or later; on the other hand, that leads to memorable events like a mission where I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment. (That mission was followed by a cutscene where one of my colleagues remarked that she wondered if the conflict we'd been taking part in was really worth it, and the team's executive officer gestured at our pay packet and said, "It's worth it to us." And then we needed to spend nearly the entire pay packet on repairs for the mechs that had been shredded in the mission. That's life in the armoured mercenary business, I guess.)
pedanther: (Default)
. I cleaned the bathroom, an event that doesn't occur as often as I might like. Part of it is that cleaning the basin-countertop means finding somewhere to temporarily put all the stuff that usually sits on there, a problem for which I've yet to find a convenient solution. I also have a suspicion that my brain deliberately delays until there's enough dust and whatever that cleaning it off will produce a satisfyingly dramatic visual change; wiping a slightly dusty surface to achieve a slightly less dusty surface just isn't the same.


. At board game club, we played Betrayal at House on the Hill, using my copy of the game; I specifically suggested it because I wanted to test something out. Read more... )


. At work, it's been another week dominated by One of Those Clients. I got to vent about it at the end of the week to my siblings, which helped.


. Separately from the book chain, this week I also read Things Unborn by Eugene Byrne. I got it on special years ago, having read and enjoyed some of his short stories, and then proceeded to not read it on account of the front cover suggesting a book I wasn't in the mood for. It turns out that the cover is a complete tonal mismatch for the actual contents of the book )


. I'm also still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. As the focus narrows from the end of the universe down to merely the end of life on Earth, I'm increasingly recognising signs of the book's age; it's slightly older than me, and there's been a lot of scientific discovery in my lifetime. One of the chapters I read this week was about the risk of a large asteroid impact, and there's not a word about the dinosaur-killer asteroid, which was only just starting to be floated as a hypothesis when the book was published and didn't become widely accepted until years after.
pedanther: (Default)
Strictly speaking, this is an octave in review, covering the period from Saturday, 29 March, to Saturday, 5 April. I seem to have settled fairly solidly on doing the weekly blog post on Sunday, and it was getting annoying having to keep reminding myself "no, that happened yesterday, it goes in next week's blog post", so I'm shifting the window.


Our production of Guys and Dolls finished yesterday. It was successful both in the sense that the audiences had a good time and in the sense that the cast and crew got on with each other and also had a good time. The wrap party after the final performance featured karaoke, which, since it was the cast of a musical doing it, was a lot less painful than some karaoke sessions I can remember. I didn't step up to the microphone - I wouldn't have minded, I just couldn't make up my mind to a song - but I enjoyed singing along to the chorus parts and a few songs that the whole room did en masse.


After having never, to my knowledge, ever heard "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan before, this week I've heard three different versions: the original, Rick Astley's cover, and a karaoke rendition done at the wrap party.


The light bulb in the spare room died during the week, which wouldn't be particularly noteworthy except for an incidental consequence. To get a ladder under the light fitting to swap the bulb, I needed to move the boxes that were piled there, and in the process I regained an accurate sense of just how many boxes I have full of books that I'd shoved in a box with the intention of carting them to a second-hand book shop at some point. I now have all those boxes piled in their own space where I can continue to see how many of them there are, and have added another reminder to my phone; whether that results in any of the boxes actually being disposed of any time soon remains to be seen.


At board game club, we played MLEM Space Agency as the main game, and then several different variants of Uno to round out the evening.


I finished reading Comet in Moominland. I didn't vibe with it. I realised afterward that I'd been in a bad mood on the day I read the last third, due to lack of sleep and some life things that I'd been not thinking about, but I don't think it'd have clicked in any case. I liked the first chapter or so, and then the comet shows up and it turns into a string of arbitrary whimsical events - and, mind you, I like a story that's a string of arbitrary whimsical events when it works, but this didn't work for me.


I did Parkrun both Saturdays of the octave, but if I encountered any charismatic fauna, I didn't make a note of it.


The colour-coded exercise tracker I set up in January seems to have hooked into my brain in a useful way, and my consistency of exercise is gradually increasing. In January, I never went an entire week without exercising at least once; in February, at least twice; and in March, I exercised at least three times in every seven-day period, which was the minimum goal I was working toward. So far this month, if it's not too soon to be saying so, I'm on track to never fall below four exercises in a week.
pedanther: (Default)
Finished reading Here Lies Arthur. It's one of those books that takes King Arthur back to his hypothetical roots in post-Roman Britain, though the author's note makes a point of saying that it's meant as an entertaining might-have-been and not as a serious attempt at 'what really happened'. The might-have-been is that Arthur was just one of many warlords trying to become the top dog, and not the most noble or the most powerful, but had the significant asset of being supported by Myrddin, a skilled storyteller who made Arthur a legend in his own lifetime. It's an interesting premise, and produces some reflections on the nature of truth and the power of belief (it's narrated by Myrddin's apprentice, known to posterity as the Lady in the Lake, who has mixed feelings about the wisdom of the entire enterprise). I did find it a bit distracting that many of the stories that are posited as having their origins in actual events of Arthur's life are ones that I'm pretty sure only became attached to the Arthurian legend centuries later, but I suppose when you're writing an entertaining might-have-been you have to use the stories your audience will recognise. I was entertained, and got invested in the characters, and was satisfied by the way it wrapped up.

This week I also re-read The Man Who Made Gold by Barbara Ninde Byfield, a short fantasy novel that was a favourite of mine in younger days. According to the reading log, it's been nearly twenty years since I last read it, but I still remember every story beat and a lot of the dialogue. (I found myself noticing a few turns of phrase that have shown up in my own writing.) Whatever you do, don't feed Frederick!


I've already been to the cinema more times this year than in all of 2024. I went to see two movies this week, Wicked: Part I and Conclave.

Wicked: Part I is the movie adaptation of the first act of the long-running musical inspired by the novel inspired by The Wizard of Oz, telling the story of the young woman who becomes known as the Wicked Witch of the West. It was very good; there were a few places where I thought things that worked on stage hadn't quite translated gracefully to the screen, but nothing I had real trouble with. There were also some elements they'd taken the opportunity to tweak for the better, particularly the characterisation of Nessarose, who gets pushed around (both figuratively and, given the wheelchair, literally) significantly less than in the stage version. I was damp-eyed at times, including at the finale - and, somewhat to my surprise, during the opening scene, where nothing has even happened yet. (Or rather, since the opening scene is setting up a flashback that tells the whole story, everything has happened but you don't know it unless you've already seen Wicked. This is the first time I've seen the opening scene since I saw Wicked on stage, so it was my first time watching it with full knowledge of what's just happened and what's not being said. The added realism of film also means that if you know to look you can see what's just happened in Glinda's face, in a way you wouldn't from twenty rows back in a theatre.) The decision to split the musical over two movies attracted some debate, but it seems to be working so far. I actually wasn't that worried about Part I, because the first act has its own character arc and triumphant finale; I'm interested to see how well Part II works, as the second act not only has to deal with the fallout from Part I but gets lumbered with all the fiddly details of making the story of Wicked dovetail with the story of The Wizard of Oz.

Conclave is a political thriller, based on a Robert Harris novel, about the shenanigans surrounding the election of a new Pope. Political maneuvring, dramatic revelations of candidates' secrets, all that kind of thing, wrapped up with some excellent acting and even a few thoughts about justice and faith and the role of the Church in the modern world. In terms of dramatic appropriateness, it's not really a surprise who ends up getting elected, but it's a fun journey seeing how things get to that point.


I've finished my playthrough of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so I started playing XCOM 2. And then I started Not Playing XCOM 2.

XCOM 2 is a substantially tougher game than its predecessor, both in general difficulty and in things like the way it gives each soldier enough individual personality that you care when one of them gets killed. I was doing pretty well at first, and fairly sure I was enjoying it, but then I hit a difficulty spike and kept repeatedly failing missions. I kept playing, but it was getting less and less about the joy of overcoming high odds and more and more about stubbornly throwing myself against the same obstacles over and over. Part of it was that, even when it was going badly, playing the game was a distraction from stressful things happening in real life, but it got to the point that I spent a day playing XCOM 2 in every spare moment and quite a few moments I strictly speaking couldn't spare, not only procrastinating things I didn't want to do but failing to get around to things I did want to do and would have enjoyed. I wasn't enjoying XCOM 2, I realised; I was engaged, but it was more like a weird kind of doomscrolling (and possibly, given how often the success or failure of a mission seemed to come down to the initial random conditions, something unpleasantly like a gambler going back to the table declaring that this time was going to be the winner). So I decided the next day that I would not play XCOM 2 at all, and find other things to do if I needed to procrastinate. I stuck with it, though at first it required some stalling tactics ("At least do the washing up first, then we'll see"), and at the end of the day I felt so much better and had got so much done that I've spent the rest of the week Not Playing XCOM 2. (It didn't all go as well as the first day; there was a day where I was feeling out of sorts and spent most of the day mindlessly faffing about on the internet, but I still think that left me in a better mental state than an equivalent amount of beating my head against XCOM 2 would have done.)

I don't think this is really XCOM 2's fault - I think it just happened to be in the right/wrong place when my mental health wasn't the best. I've enjoyed - properly enjoyed - playing it before, and I probably will again. Just... not right now.


I had the unusual experience this week of going to an unstructured social event and enjoying myself. I usually prefer to get my socialising done in situations where there's some kind of event providing structure - such as band rehearsal, or board game club - because when there's nothing to do but interact with humans, I'm never sure what I should do or whether I'm doing it right. This event was actually a gathering of people from the board game club, and was originally described in the invitation I got as "socialising/boardgames", but by the time I got there it had been decided to hold the event out in the host's back yard, where it was cooler but not very well lit, and to stick to socialising and leave board games for another time. It turned out pretty well; there were enough people to keep the conversation going without any one person being under pressure, and I knew everyone well enough to be comfortable in their company.
pedanther: (Default)
I had a victory against clutter this week. There's been a big pile of boxes in the middle of one room of the house since I moved in, waiting to be sorted out Some Day, and I finally decided that I'd had enough and Some Day had arrived. Some of the boxes got unpacked and some had more appropriate places found for them, and now I can walk straight across the room without circling around a big pile of boxes, which still feels a bit weird.


I read the last of my stack of library books, Stan Grant's Talking to My Country, and the Rivers of London box set I got for Christmas, and a few shorter things, finishing up the year by finally getting around to reading Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows". I hadn't been sure it would live up to its reputation, but it is atmospheric and effectively creepy, and I appreciated the final sentence, which caps it off effectively without trying to carry the whole weight of the story, the way some stories in this subgenre do.

Part of the reason I've been reading so many short things in the past few weeks is that I'd set myself a reading goal for 2024 with a moving target that went up every time I bought a new book, to encourage me to read more of the books I already own, and after keeping ahead of it most of the year I'd sent the target skyrocketing by succumbing to the lure of a Humble Bundle of 30 Ursula K. Le Guin books. At a certain point, I recognised that I wasn't going to catch up to the target without spending the last day of the year grimly slogging through books, and let it go. So I finished the year a few books behind the target, but I still read a respectable number of books for the year and, more importantly, I achieved the real goal of reducing my to-read pile by a significant amount.

The first book of the new year is Here Lies Arthur, an Arthurian legend retelling by Philip Reeve. I'm giving the monthly Buzzwords reading challenge another shot, so this is my book for the January challenge, "'Truth' and 'Lies'". I'm also doing the Random TBR challenge again; the prompt for January is to filter the TBR to fast-paced books under 300 pages long and then pick one of those at random; I ended up on Inside Job by Connie Willis.


On New Year's Day I spent a chunk of the day playing boardgames with my brother and some people we know from the boardgame club. We played Hey, That's My Fish!, Mysterium, Thornwatch, and Ingenious. I didn't win any of the competitive games (Mysterium and Thornwatch are both collaborative, and we collectively won those), but I had a good time. One of the guys offered to buy us all lunch, and got it from Macca's because that was one of the few places that was open; it's the first time in literally years that I've eaten anything from Macca's, and I haven't been missing anything.


Casting has been set for the Rep Club's next big production. Rehearsals haven't started yet, because some people are still away on holiday, but I've collected my copy of the script and vocal score. I should probably be spending more time practicing the songs than I have been.
pedanther: (Default)
Stuff happened, but a lot of it isn't relevant to people who aren't me or my immediate family. I watched a lot of internet videos (and went to the cinema to see Catvideofest, a 75-minute compilation of cat videos from the internet with ticket proceeds going to charity), made some substantial progress through the omnibus of "Classic Tales of Science Fiction" (which I'll get to in a separate post at some point), and took part in an Ingress event which was a good excuse to go bike riding regularly. I am keeping on top of the washing up, and I succeeded in putting away all of the backlog of clean laundry. I continue to be thankful for the new air conditioner, which is making life in the hot weather much more pleasant.
pedanther: (Default)
. At the beginning of last year, I read Harley Quinn: Reckoning, the first in a trilogy of YA novels retelling the origin story of the Batman supporting character (and increasingly a headline character in her own right) Harley Quinn. It was very good, although I found it stressful, and had to read it in short bursts with long breaks between, because of it being a prequel and having certain events from Harley's canonical backstory hanging over it. After I finished it I immediately put a hold request on the sequel at the library - and then spent the next year and a half putting it off, and flipping the hold every time the book became available, because it was apparent from the blurb that this was going to be the volume in which those canonical events started happening, and I was dreading seeing how they played out. This week I finally bit the bullet and started reading Harley Quinn: Ravenous; the first few chapters were heavy going, but once it reached a certain point and it became apparent how the author was going to handle Harley's story a lot of the dread evaporated and after that I got through it much quicker. (It does an interesting thing where it treats Harley's usual origin story as just the rumour that got around later; by the end of Ravenous, you can see how people started telling that story, but some of it is exaggeration or misrepresentation and some of it is quite plainly the result of people who weren't there adding assumptions to incomplete information and jumping to entirely incorrect conclusions.) I'm still going to need a breather before I tackle the final book of the trilogy, but I'm not dreading it in the same way.


. This week was an anniversary of the the first local Parkrun event, which reminds me that I haven't kept up on reporting my progress there. I'm still doing Parkrun regularly, and have passed a few more official milestones: I've now participated in over 250 individual Parkrun events, and am working my way toward 500. My record as an event volunteer is much more spotty, because when I can make it to an event I usually prefer to be out on the course getting my exercise and not standing around by the finish line, but for the anniversary event I volunteered to scan membership barcodes. I remarked to the event organiser that this is one thing that has changed over the years: when I first joined, the barcode scanners were rudimentary and nobody was allowed to participate without showing an official member barcode card printed in the regulation size and format, but now the scanning is done with a smartphone app that can recognise a wide variety of sizes and formats, including official Parkrun wristbands and keyring fobs, not to mention the people who just have a copy of the barcode on their own smartphone. (Or smartwatch. At the event, there were several people who presented their barcode on a smartwatch; some of the watches displayed it very small to fit it on the face of the watch, and some displayed it as a square QR code instead. I was relieved when the app was unfazed by either challenge.)


. I went for a long bike ride this week, most of it through the park where Parkrun is held but exploring some of the many trails that aren't part of the Parkrun course. It was quite a warm day, and I had reason to be glad I'd remembered (for, as far as I can remember, the first time ever) to pack a water bottle in the bike's water bottle holder. It was nice to be out amid the nature for a bit.


. I've been doing very well lately at getting the washing up done regularly. Perhaps by way of compensation, I seem to be getting worse at putting the clean laundry away in a timely manner. (The sticking point appears to be the t-shirts. I thought I'd found a solution, but now that's not doing it either.)


. The café near my house does bubble teas in a wide variety of colours and flavours, but due to the discouragement of single-use plastics they're always served in an opaque cardboard vessel with a sealed lid. I understand the practicalities, but it does rather suck a lot of the fun out of having a brightly-coloured bubble tea when you can't see it.
pedanther: (Default)
. Did some more weeding, around the back and far side of the house, and the part of the front that I hadn't done yet. One of the goals was to create clear space around the outdoor parts of the split-system air conditioning units, which was a good idea in any case but (see earlier post about self-motivated scheduling) had been given a boost by the landlord notifying me that there would an aircon tech around at some point to make sure all the units were working before summer sets in. I ended up clearing around the last unit in a hurry after receiving a phone call to say the tech would be there in half an hour; one of the brain weasels tried to make something of the fact that I'd put it off until the last moment, but was firmly rebutted by a more sensible part of my brain which pointed out that the important thing is I'd been organised enough to do most of it already on other days, so that there was less than half an hour's work left to do.

. All the air conditioners are, as expected, in good nick except for the one in the living room that squeaks loudly when it's running; the tech says that something's worn out and how quickly or cheaply it will be replaced depends on whether the replacement parts are still available for a unit that old (it may end up being easier, or necessary, to replace the whole thing).

. The Hidden Almanac is a podcast that ran from Friday the 13th, September 2013 to Friday the 13th, September 2019. Each episode is a few minutes long and presents a couple of historical anniversaries, a potted biography of a saint whose feast day it is, some seasonal gardening tips, and a message from the episode's sponsor -- all of which are the product of the imagination of fantasy author Ursula Vernon. (Well, except for... let's say many of the gardening tips, because Ursula Vernon is a keen gardener and knows what's what. Especially when it comes to the zucchini problem.) I fell off listening partway through the first time I gave it a try, but 2024 sees the return of Friday the 13th of September, which seemed like an appropriate occasion to give it another shot. This time I'm planning to stick to listening to one episode at a time, on the appropriate date, because from what I remember the problem I ran into last time was that I kept trying to catch up by listening to a whole bunch of episodes at a time and suffering from overdoing it. So far it's working much better at the intended pace; each episode is a bright moment in the day and doesn't outstay its welcome.

. At the boardgame club, I got to play my first game of Captain Sonar, a game in which two teams take on various roles of crew members in a submarine, and each crew attempts to locate and sink the other submarine before the other submarine does the same to them. I had the role of planning our submarine's route to avoid giving away too many clues about our location or putting too much stress on the boat's systems; I did an all right job of it. The real MVP of our submarine was the crew member whose job was to collect clues about the other sub's activities and plot its possible locations; she made very detailed notes, kept her head at a point where I would probably have decided the sub had given me the slip, and managed to pinpoint its actual location just as it surfaced for repairs, allowing us to chase it down and put two torpedoes into it before it could do anything to stop us.

. The Songs of Penelope trilogy by Claire North is about the aftermath of the Trojan War from the point of view of the women whose views on the whole thing tend to be underrepresented in the epics. The central character is Penelope, wife of Odysseus, left to keep his kingdom together for years while he's off doing the Iliad and the Odyssey, with a supporting cast of women who mostly don't get mentioned in the epics at all. There are also a few high-profile guest stars: the first book of the trilogy revolves around the fate of Clytemnestra, the self-made widow of King Agamemnon, and the second gives an answer to the question of what happened to Helen of Troy after she was brought home from Troy that turns out to be more complicated than it first appears. Penelope gets an uncontested spotlight in the third book of the trilogy, which retells the last part of the Odyssey from the moment Odysseus arrived back on his native shore, with a lot more attention than the epic poets gave to questions like "How much did Odysseus really understand about the situation he was coming home to?" and "What kind of future is there for a husband and wife who haven't seen each other in twenty years and barely had a chance to get to know each other before that?"
pedanther: (Default)
I've been on long service leave for a month now. It's mostly consisted of doing not-very-much around the house; I've got a lot more reading done. I had ideas about starting new craft projects, or learning a musical instrument, or travelling to the city to catch up with people, or travelling somewhere farther afield, but none of them have really gone anywhere. Part of the problem is that I've always been bad at self-motivated scheduling; if I don't have a specific deadline or a specific event to co-ordinate with, if it doesn't particularly matter exactly when something gets done, then I can't decide when to do it, until either a deadline comes to the rescue or it's too late. (I'm the same with going to the cinema; if I'm really keen on a movie, I'll go in the first week, but if I'm not I'll keep going "maybe next week" until there's no next week, and I either go to one of the last showings or I realise that I can't make it to any of the last showings and I've missed my chance.)

There's a similar issue on the 'travelling farther afield' side, in that I don't know what to do with myself if I go to a new place on my own; I usually travel with people I know, or to visit people I know, or at least to attend a specific event, and every time I say to myself "I could go to (as it might be) New Zealand!", I don't have an answer to the follow-up question of "And do what?" When my long service leave was originally scheduled, the answer to "And do what?" was going to be Wellington Worldcon, but we all know what happened then.

I abandoned this post for a bit to write a different one on the subject of "I've got a lot more reading done", and after I posted it, it occurred to me that the self-motivated scheduling issue is also visible in my blog posting history: I've got a regular routine going with the monthly log posts, and the monthly reading challenges have enough structure that I want to keep providing progress updates, and from time to time there will be specific events like a theatre production, but whenever I think about writing something about more general life events, I always think "I can do that later" and then later never happens.

Oh, one other thing I have achieved with my first month of long service leave: I used the start of it as a push (specific event again, see) to start doing 750 Words again. Mostly I've just been writing down what I did during the preceding day; I'd hoped I'd get more blog posts out of it, but the journal is a lot of "then I did this and then I did this" that's barely interesting even to me, so I'd have to go back through it and pick out the interesting bits, and (all together now) I Can Do That Later. It does seem to be starting to have some effect on my ability to get things written, though; I wrote a quite a long (for me) review on StoryGraph recently, and I suspect this blog post would never have been written if I hadn't had this morning's 750 words to get me warmed up.
pedanther: (Default)
One of life's little mysteries: A little bit over a week ago, when I was getting in supplies for the New Year's party, I bought a bottle of soda water which vanished as soon as I got it home. I had a distinct memory of taking the shopping bag containing the bottle out of the car, but I couldn't remember specifically what I'd done with it inside the house, and I couldn't find it anywhere. It wasn't a small bottle, either.

I found it this morning. It was still in the shopping bag, which had been sitting in plain sight on the living room floor the whole time.

The thing is, I keep my living room mostly tidy by means of having a designated area of allowed clutter, which I work on when I can and which my brain skips over the rest of the time. When I was bringing the shopping in, I'd put down that one bag for a moment too close to the clutter, and it had instantaneously been absorbed into the mass and become invisible.

It became visible again this morning because I was adding some empty bottles (including the bottle of soda water I'd bought to replace the one that went missing) to the bag where I collect empty bottles for the deposit return. As I did, I noticed another bag nearby with a bottle-shaped lump in the side, and decided to check it to make sure I hadn't accidentally started two separate bottle collections.

(The bottle of soda water is fine, as far as I can tell. Being left out for a week doesn't do much to soda water. The loaf of bread that was also in the shopping bag is, alas, not so lucky.)
pedanther: (Default)
Our next production is Ladies in Black, an Australian musical that debuted a few years ago (just before covid came along and limited its prospects for becoming more widely known). I wasn't planning to do two musicals back-to-back, but as usual there was a shortage of men willing and able to sing, so I got roped in. I'm playing the male half of the main romantic subplot, which is a change from my usual (character roles and, in Alan Rickman's phrase, "very interesting people"), and has been taking me into new territory. The rehearsal period has been a bit crunched because of the way the Rock of Ages season was extended, but we had our final dress rehearsal/preview last night and were pleased and relieved to discover that, while there are still some rough patches, we do indeed have a show.

At work, I haven't maintained my focus to the same remarkable level, but it's still pretty good. As I got back into things after the covid isolation, what I've been noticing is the way it's affected by how much else I have on my mind (for instance, it's taken a dip just lately because a lot of my spare time and brainpower has been focussed on preparing for the opening of Ladies in Black). That seems kind of obvious, now that I say it, but it's not something I was really consciously aware of before in the same way.

My complaint about not having anyone to share my The Sandman experience with has had a happy epilogue: I was catching up with my brother on the weekend, and he mentioned that he's also watching The Sandman and, as it turned out, was up to exactly the point I'd been up to when I was most miffed about not having anybody to talk to about what it was like to be up to that point. So we got to have a long conversation about what we thought of it so far.

I was all set to say that I think I might be done with this set of monthly reading challenges, having whiffed June, July and August, but then I checked my reading log and discovered that in fact I've completed the August challenge entirely by accident: the challenge was "a book with an object in the title", and I happened across The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and other stories at the library and decided to give it a go without remembering about the challenge. The challenge for September is "a book with LIGHT or DARK in the title", so we'll see how this goes.

The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and other stories is one of a series of collections reprinting the short stories Terry Pratchett wrote very early in his career for the children's section of his local newspaper. They're trifles, but they're amusing and they have their clever moments. It was also fun spotting the first appearance of ideas that he revisited later on: there's a story in this collection that uses a version of the premise of Johnny and the Dead, and another which is unmistakeably a complete miniature version of the plot of Truckers (and even has some of the same jokes).
pedanther: (Default)
Rock of Ages has opened, and ran for two very successful weekends -- it was going to be three, but then several key cast members tested positive for covid. So there's been a hiatus, and the final weekend will be next week instead, if nothing else befalls us. Covid aside, it's been a lot of fun, with a cast and crew who have got on really well together.

Speaking of the covid, I have had a run-in. I got off fairly lightly; apart from one really rough day and night (for a value of "really rough" that didn't extend to needing to leave the house or seek medical assistance), it was mostly just achiness and fatigue and annoying coughing and sniffling. I didn't even end up taking any days off work (which is a desk job that I do from home), although I probably would have taken the worst day off if I'd known in the morning how bad it was going to get, and in the event I spent much of that afternoon unofficially zonked out on the couch.

In fact, I was weirdly productive at work for the entire rest of the week I was in isolation... and have continued to be weirdly productive since. Something about it, perhaps the combination of being well enough to get a reasonable amount done but ill enough to have no guilt about not getting more done, seems to have reset the way my brain handles work-related stress. I've had an ongoing problem with procrastination, where if I wasn't sure how to start tackling a big or unusual job I'd avoid doing it, and then I'd feel guilty about putting it off and that made me avoid it even harder, and then it would be weeks later and it still wasn't done. But that set of brain weasels seems to have gone away, or at least quietened down a lot, and in the past few weeks I've successfully tackled several big tasks; not always immediately, sometimes I've decided that I'm not up to that today, but then instead of going into a guilt spiral I've been able to look at it again the next day and think, yes, today I am up to it. I don't know if this is going to last, but I'm glad of it while it does.

In other news, I have now read all of Raymond Chandler's novels, including the last one, Playback, which I had not read before. I found it disappointing, which may have been due to bringing inappropriate expectations of what it meant to be The Last One. And to be fair it was always going to have a tough act to follow coming after The Long Goodbye. But The Long Goodbye has one of the best endings in the series, and would have been a strong ending for the series, and Playback failed to convince me that it had anything to offer that made it worth giving that up.

I didn't manage to complete the reading challenge for June, which was a book with "All" in the title. I started reading a couple of different books that would have qualified, but didn't get very far into any of them. The challenge for July is a book with "Book" (or some other related word such as "Page" or "Library") in the title.
pedanther: (Default)
. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the best thing I've seen in a cinema in a very long time. It's a showcase of the dramatic and creative possibilities of the medium, but more importantly it's all in service of an emotionally resonant and satisfying story. The cast are all great, too. I would happily have added it to the very short list of films I've gone to see in the cinema more than once, but the local cinema only did a single screening. Actually, to be fair, they've recently announced a second single screening, but unfortunately it's on a night when I have rehearsals.


. Rehearsals are continuing for Rock of Ages. I've also been roped into a part for another production, partly on condition that it's a small role and I don't have to attend every rehearsal but it still means that there aren't a lot of nights left that I don't have rehearsals.


. In the annals of small personal victories, I hired a lawnmower for an hour and tamed the overgrown grass in my back yard. I've known where the hire place is for months, but I kept putting it off on the excuse that they didn't stock small lawnmowers and I didn't know if the ones they had would fit in the back of my car. Turns out it was fine once we folded up the handle. The staff were very helpful, and in all it was definitely a better experience than any of the other ways I've dealt with the overgrown yard in the past. (Most often by hiring an entire person to come and do it, which is stressful and rather more expensive and it keeps happening that when I like the work a person has done, they've gone out of business by the time I want them to come and do it again.)

As a fun side note, I noticed when I was done that my Fitbit was registering an elevated heart rate (probably mostly from hoicking the mower in and out of the car, rather than the bit where I pushed it around), and wondered if the automatic exercise logger would make something of it. It did: it marked it down as a period of bicycle riding, presumably on the basis that the arm with the Fitbit on had spent most of the period in question in a handlebar-holding position.


. For this month's reading challenge (book with a direction in the title), I'm reading James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. It's a collection of stories set in the Pacific theatre of World War 2; a couple of them, combined, were the inspiration for the musical South Pacific. I haven't got up to either of those stories yet; the ones I have read so far have been less cheery than I remember the musical being. One of the ones I have read is set on Norfolk Island, which was interesting; I don't often see American writers writing about Australian history.


. I have finished the extended story mode of Invisible, Inc in Expert Plus difficulty, and consequently I've now garnered every in-game achievement except the gimmick achievement that it's literally impossible to attain while actually playing the game. I'm glad I took the time to work on Expert Plus difficulty; I don't want to sound like one of those "You haven't really played until you've beaten the game on the highest difficulty" gamers (particularly since the game itself describes Expert Plus difficulty as 'a bit ridiculous') but my experience was that once I started getting the hang of it the extra level of challenge made it more immersive, and finishing the story mode came with a real sense of accomplishment.
pedanther: (Default)
. Poking some more at the thing I wrote last time:

On reflection, I don't think it's about "using time well" for the brain weasels; I think that's too big and complicated a concept for them. They care about doing particular tasks well -- or, more precisely, worry about doing them badly. Contemplating a purposeful and productive task creates anxiety about whether I'll successfully achieve the purpose, which makes it hard to get started. Aimless activities like meandering around on the internet or flumping on the couch might not be a good use of time, but they don't generate the same level of anxiety because where there's no aim there's nothing to feed anxiety about failing to achieve the aim.

Interestingly, my brain weasels apparently don't consider watching TV or a movie to be sufficiently aimless: I know people who, if they want to kill time, can just pick something out and sit down and watch it, but I don't have the trick of it. Apparently there's a wrong way to watch a TV show? Or maybe the barrier to entry is the task of choosing which show to watch.


. Relatedly, I saw a post on Tumblr recently that resonated with me, where someone said that when they found themselves surrounded by new things to read or watch and couldn't summon up the motivation to read or watch any of them, it was because starting a new novel or series or whatever required a minimum amount of spare emotional investment and all their emotional investment was currently occupied, either with things they were already reading or watching or with things going on in real life.

At the moment, I seem to have about enough spare emotional investment for one thing at a time; in the last few weeks, I've watched a couple of theatrical streams and a few movies and re-read an old Modesty Blaise novel, one at a time, and in all that time I didn't pick up The Master and Margarita because it was only by leaving it on the back-burner that I had room for anything else. This suggests that if I want to take advantage of all these theatrical streams with their time-limited offers, I'm going to have to be careful with my time management and not start any new long novels or series (or narrative-heavy video games).


. The movies I watched were the three James Bond movies from back when I was the age to start being interested in James Bond movies -- Timothy Dalton's The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan's GoldenEye. Of the three, on this rewatch, I liked The Living Daylights the most; GoldenEye was a lot of fun but felt somehow more hollow than I remembered, and Licence to Kill has good bits but also the problem of being the one where Bond goes on a personal vendetta and gets a bunch of people killed and the movie never quite settles the question of whether everyone would have been better off if he'd just stayed home. (There's a hint that undercover narcotics agent whose operation Bond inadvertantly tramples over might have been about to mess things up for himself anyway, but the movie never follows that idea up because it's got explosions to do.) The Living Daylights, apart from a few moments I found jarring, is charming and has a bunch of actors I like in it, and of the three is the one that to me felt most like Bond and his young lady actually cared about each other and weren't just ticking off boxes on the "young lady in a Bond movie" checklist.


. I picked up The Master and Margarita again this weekend -- it turned out I'd stopped just as the title characters were about to be introduced -- and have now finished it. I said before that it reminded me of The Man Who Was Thursday; with the whole thing under my belt, it also reminds me of Carnivalé, partly because of the moments of people having everyday reality yanked out from under them and partly because it has a similar structure where the first half throws a lot of concepts at the audience and raises a lot of questions and then the second half settles down to start properly explaining how it all fits together. (Which, as the example of Carnivalé taught us, is a perfectly fine way to run a story but it may be a good idea to make sure the audience knows that's what's happening if you don't want them giving up before the explanations arrive.) There was also an interesting shift of mood in the second half where it stopped being nightmarish and became, in places, laugh-out-loud funny; the same kinds of things are happening as in the first half, but now the audience is in on the joke. Despite a somewhat confusing beginning, I found the novel pretty satisfying in the end.


. I got stuck on a crossword for several days because I couldn't figure out what the compiler was after with "Queen of whodunits (6)". "Agatha" had the requisite number of letters, but I couldn't get any of the words that crossed it to work. Ditto "Sayers". After that, I was inclined to think that whatever the compiler was thinking was obviously wrong, but when I did get enough of the cross-words to figure it out -- which was at "_ _ L _ _ Y" -- I had to admit he had a point.
pedanther: (Default)
. 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.

pedanther: (Default)
All my regular social groups have battened down: the brass band has suspended rehearsals entirely, as has the theatre group. I assume the gaming group has stopped meeting too, if not before then when the official shutdowns expanded to include venues like the one where we meet, but I don't know for 100% sure because they're committed to the belief that anybody who needs to know what's going will be on Facebook.

Up until this week, I've still been going to work, where even in normal times I spent all day alone in an office and didn't see anybody except in passing on the way in and out. Yesterday, however, head office handed down instructions that everyone who wasn't already working from home should start, so this is day one of serious hermiting and we'll get to see how much of an effect it's going to have to be deprived of even those brief social interactions. I've been equally bemused by people posting about running out of things to do and by people posting about how now they have time to watch/read/play all the stuff they couldn't before; as an accomplished procrastinator, both of these conditions are unknown to me because whatever I'm doing and however much time I have on my hands I'm always aware of something else I should be doing instead, but now I'm getting into proper hermit mode we'll see if that changes.

Last time, I joked that with the big events cancelled I might have no alternative but to spend Easter with my family; since then, I've realised that even that's probably not going to be an option.

On a more cheerful note, I've been spending a bunch of time playing Alto's Adventure, a mobile game I saw mentioned in a conversation about ways to pass time when hanging out with friends is off the list. It's a free-runner game, in this case involving snowboarding down a beautifully-rendered mountain, dodging obstacles and collecting power-ups. The in-game controls consist only of "tap screen" or "press screen", the trick being to know when and for how long; getting a feel for that requires trial and error, which was frustrating when I didn't seem to be making progress and then very satisfying when it came together. The other denizens of the mountain include a herd of llamas, who are quite cute and especially so when one of them loses its footing on a steep slope and slides to the bottom on its bottom. It's free, for the version of free where if you play it with data active it pushes ads at you between games until you throw a couple of bucks at it to stop; I've mostly been playing offline, so that hasn't been much of an issue, but I'm probably going to throw it a couple of bucks anyway because it's worth it.
pedanther: (Default)
Today's interesting discovery: while hunting through the bathroom cupboard for something else, a bottle of eco-friendly floor & surface cleaner that must have come with me from the old house, been shoved in the cupboard, and then promptly forgotten about.

I can think of numerous occasions in the last few years when it would have helped to be aware that I had that. It would have made things a fair bit easier during the big spring-clean earlier this year -- assuming that that would even have been necessary. "But we don't have any floor & surface cleaner!" has been one of the common defenses used by the brain-weasels against the threat of Housework Getting Done. Which only goes to show how much they know.
pedanther: (Default)
It tends to be one of the first things to pile up when things get on top of me, so I'm pleased to be able to say that I have once again achieved the pleasant state of having Nothing Left to Wash Up.

What seems to be working at the moment is to do the washing up first thing in the morning, when I wander into the kitchen to get a glass of water and get started on breakfast.

Actually, that seems to be the best way to get anything done that I'm procrastinating on: get on it first thing in the morning, before I have time to distract myself with anything else. And by "anything else", I mainly mean "Tumblr and blogs and such". I might have to try banning myself from social media in the mornings, but the problem with that is that the reason I started catching up on all my social media in the mornings was to stop myself doing it at night, when I would get just as distracted and ruin my sleep patterns. Hmm. This is going to require further thought.
pedanther: (Default)
1. I have continued to do Parkrun each weekend, including last weekend when I got held up doing something else and didn't arrive at the park until fifteen minutes after the run started. I'm quite pleased with myself that I never seriously considered giving it a miss, and just figured that I might as well walk the course anyway even if I didn't get counted as having participated, or get an official time for it. As it turned out, the timers were still on duty at the end of the course when I got there, so I did get counted and did get a time (although since it was counted from when the run officially started, it was significantly longer than usual). I wasn't even in last place: near the end, I overtook a family with a small child who was lagging behind. The weirdest bit was actually near the beginning: the first kilometre and the last kilometre of the course overlap, so as I set out fifteen minutes late, I kept getting passed by the people who take the "run" part of "Parkrun" seriously and finish the course in twenty minutes.


2. The washing up briefly got on top of me again after the storm; having the power out for a few days threw me off my stride. I'm getting it back in hand, though.


3. I have completed the storyline in Invisible, Inc. in Expert Mode. While I was doing that, the DLC with an extended storyline was going cheap, so now I'm trying that out. I've just got up to the bit where the extended storyline diverges significantly from the original one, and about to start the first completely new mission. Another interesting thing about the DLC is that it includes four new playable characters, the top agents of the organisation that preceded Invisible, Inc. -- including Invisible's founder and her right-hand man, both of whom were already playable characters from the original game. So here I am about to do a mission with six agents of whom four are older and younger versions of the same two people.


4. The improv group is still going, and did another performance recently as part of a local festival.


5. When I'm sitting in the office at work, I occasionally hear a mysterious sound of rushing water. Water rushing through pipes, that is, not water gushing out into the open. Except that this week there was a day when I did hear water gushing out into the open, and when I went to investigate I learned that the control box for the building's garden watering system is on the wall just outside my office, and one of the hoses had come loose. So I went and told the building manager about the hose, and now I know what the mysterious water noises are about.

Profile

pedanther: (Default)
pedanther

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:59 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios