pedanther

. 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.

. 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.

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.

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.