pedanther

. I have a book in mind for the next link of the Book Chain challenge, but I'm waiting for it to come in at the library, so instead I've been tackling the backlog of the monthly Random Book challenge.

For September, I read A Tremble in the Air by James D. Macdonald. It's a mystery novella, in which a psychic investigator is called in to investigate a ghostly apparition, and uncovers a murder. ( Read more... )

For August, I read A Moment of Silence by Anna Dean. This is also a murder mystery; this time the gimmick is that it's set in Regency times - the Kirkus review features the phrase "if Jane Austen had written Miss Marple", which gives a fair idea of what it's aiming for. ( Read more... )

For July, I'm reading Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, which is an interesting experience because every other time I've read a Dickens novel I've gone in basically knowing the story already, but this time I had no idea what to expect. ( Read more... )

Little Dorrit would also work as the next link in the Book Chain, but I have a feeling I'm going to be a while getting through it, so I'm keeping it in mind as a fallback but if something quicker comes along I'll use that instead.


. Unrelated to any of the book challenges I'm doing, I'm also participating in Around the World in Eighty Emails, an online book club that's doing Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in sections attached to the dates on which the novel's events take place, starting on 2 October and finishing eighty days later in mid-December. I wasn't sure before I started if I'd ever read an unabridged version of the novel before, but I'm thinking I hadn't; the general outline of events is familiar, but a lot of the details are new to me.


. I finished the jigsaw puzzle early in the week, and what with one thing and another I haven't got around to packing it away and starting a new one yet.


. At Monday Knights, we had a long weekend session that started in the early afternoon. We began with The Mind as a warm-up, spent several hours playing Arkham Horror, and finished up with a few rounds of Concept. ( Read more... )


. I was listening to music on my earbuds while I did something in the yard, and I wanted to skip to the next music track but I'd left my phone (which was acting as the music player) inside. I had a vague memory that the earbuds had a way of signalling the phone to skip to the next track by pressing one of the volume buttons the right way, so I started randomly pressing buttons to see if I could find it. ( Read more... )


. I've added a new category to my monthly fiction log. ( Read more... )


. Another thing I've been doing to take my mind off things is playing a computer game called Squeakross, in which you solve picross puzzles in order to earn clothing and furniture items to decorate a cartoon mouse and its habitat. ( Read more... )


. Some years ago, I agreed to store some stuff for someone I knew, on the understanding that they'd come and pick it up next time they were in town. What with one thing and another (including, to be fair, several actual family crises), it never seemed to be the right time for them to come, so the stuff's been sitting in my storage unit for years, but this week finally they arranged for somebody to come and get it. I'm hoping to ride the momentum and take the opportunity to reassess my own stuff that's been sitting in the storage unit, and see what can be disposed of or shifted to somewhere less expensive.


. Yesterday I went to the pool and swam laps for the first time in quite a while. I enjoyed it, though unsurprisingly I don't have the stamina I used to have when I was doing it more regularly. Afterward, I got an interesting foot cramp that may or may not have been related.


. Another for the Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down and Thought I Knew How to Pronounce file: prions, the biochemical whatsits responsible for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and mad cow disease, are correctly pronounced pree-on. The way I've been pronouncing it for the last thirty-odd years, with the same first syllable as "pry bar", is apparently common enough that I may well have heard it pronounced that way in the wild, but is not the original pronunciation and is not officially considered correct.

. I didn't write a full journal entry all week. Fortunately, my habit of making brief notes about my day is solidly ingrained, so I still had something to work from for this blog post. ( Read more... )


. At the board game club, we played Bomb Busters again. We got through three missions, completing two successfully on the first attempt and requiring a second attempt for one after I lost track of one of the conditions and blew everyone up by cutting a wire that I was incorrectly certain was safe.


. This week, I read a couple of the short children's books that have been lurking unread on my shelves for longer than I can remember (though probably not since I was a child myself; I'm pretty sure both are books I picked up from secondhand book sales). ( Read more... ) The Island on Bird Street was my September pick for the Randomize Your TBR reading challenge; Jacob Two-Two didn't fit any of the pending challenges, I just saw it on the shelf and decided it would make a nice break from the kind of thing I'd been reading lately.


. During the time that my immediate precursors were occupying this house, the bathroom was remodelled and new fittings installed. ( Read more... ) There's something about that which feels emblematic of the modern world we live in.


. I nearly managed to finish my latest jigsaw puzzle in under a week - I've been catching up on a lot of podcasts lately - but last night I found myself with three spaces left in the puzzle and three leftover pieces which each seemed to be the right shape and colour for a space but didn't... quite... fit. ( Read more... )


. On Tumblr, there was a poll asking "What is the longest book series you've read?" My first thought was the Liaden series, currently at 27 novels with at least one more on the way. Then I remembered that I've read the entire Discworld series from beginning to end, and that's 40+ novels depending on how you count them. And then I recalled that I've done the same with the Doctor Who New Adventures, which is just over 60 novels. So far I haven't thought of anything else longer than that.


. From the CinemaStix youtube channel, a two-part video essay on the making of the movie Gladiator, with a focus on how much the key through-lines of the story were constructed in production and post-production: part 1 is about the script and part 2 is about the editing. One of the things covered in part 2 is how they rearranged the final act of the movie to cover for the untimely death of one of the actors, something that was achieved so successfully that, although I knew it had happened, it had never occurred to me until I watched this to wonder what his character would have done differently if the actor had survived.

. At board game club this week, the main game we played was Night of the Ninja, a hidden-roles/social-deduction game where each player is a member of a ninja clan trying to take out the leaders of the opposing clan while protecting the leaders of their own clan - with the added wrinkle that because ninjas are so sneaky, nobody knows at the start who else is in the same clan or who the leaders are. ( Read more... )


. Monument Valley III had its Steam release in the past week, and I've enjoyed the first two games enough to buy it straight away, instead of waiting for a sale to roll around. ( Read more... )


. Another reaction channel I've been watching lately is Marie-Clare's World, which I started following when she was working her way through Doctor Who. Now she's watching Babylon 5, and has just reached the end of the first season. ( Read more... )


. I've been having trouble with my printer for months - something was up with the release mechanism for the black ink, so that if I printed a document in black-and-white it came out illegibly faint, but anything with colours still came out at full strength. ( Read more... )


. I've been trying out a new tea blend this week, having picked up a packet on a whim while I was grocery shopping. It's labelled as "orange and cinnamon", with the small print mentioning that the base component is rooibos (as opposed to it being an entirely non-tea herbal blend like the peppermint or the lemon-and-ginger). It's quite nice, and a warm and comforting thing that suits the cold and uncomfortable weather we've been having lately.


. There was rain for a lot of the week, which led to me not getting as much outdoor exercise as I'd have preferred and also to ongoing trouble finding a good day to do the laundry. ( But I got a good walk on Saturday ) During the afternoon I also finished the laundry, did the washing up, and dealt with some paperwork that had been hanging over me all week (and printed it out successfully). After all that, for one reason or another, I felt much brighter and more optimistic than I had for days.

. 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.)

. 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.

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.

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.

. 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?"

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.)

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.