pedanther

. Went for a bike ride for the first time in a couple of months. My bike is in pretty good condition, although I think the seat needs adjusting to be a bit more comfortable. With the weather warming, I'll need to try to remember to take a water bottle with me if I go on a long ride (my bike came fitted with a carrying bracket for a water bottle, but I've never actually used it).

. The week to 4 October is a big week in the chronology of Dracula, being the week where Dracula's victims start actively fighting back and things begin happening in earnest. In terms of Re: Dracula, there were three days with hour-long episodes and one, the most action-packed day in the entire story, with an episode lasting two hours. I'm generally enjoying Re: Dracula, though continuing to be annoyed by the ads that get stuck on the beginning or end of most episodes (and, in one instance this week, in the middle) and reliably break the mood that the episode is trying to create. I'm also continuing to find sometimes that if I consumed some other dense piece of media already in the day, I'm not ready to listen to the scheduled episode of Re: Dracula as well; the two-hour episode, in fact, I put off until the following morning for that reason.

. The dense piece of media I had been reading on that occasion was "And What Happened After", a long Lord of the Rings fanfic about what became of the hobbits who sailed off to the utmost West with Gandalf and the elves. I was re-reading it so I could write a rec post for fancake, which you can read here if you want to know more.

. The random book challenge for October is "sort your to-read list alphabetically by author and read a book by the first author you haven't read before". The book thus indicated was the first part of a series that I have no access to the later parts of, so I skipped it and went with This Is Improbable, by Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prize.

. I've reached the end of the story mode in Tactical Breach Wizards. At the end of the final battle, the player is given a choice to make - a variation on the standard "bring the villain in alive to face justice" vs "the world would be better off with the villain dead" dilemma that's usual for this kind of story - and the game, I gather, gives different versions of the 'where are they now' epilogue depending on which choice the player makes. Something that struck me is that, due to the circumstances in which the villain is defeated, there are actually three options presented, one in which the villain winds up dead and two in which the villain ends up alive. I don't know if the two 'alive' options are functionally identical, or if they lead to different epilogues; replaying missions skips the story bits, so the only way to get to the final choice and explore a different option is to play the entire game again, and I'm not sure I'm quite that curious.

. On my second week of leave, I did more weeding, focussing on the plants growing up along the front of the house (and making it possible to walk from the front door to the car without having to dodge or step over any tall weeds). I also fixed a pantry door that had come off one of its hinges, and found a remedy for the sagging seat of the sofa.

. Some while back, I signed up to a literary serial Substack called Wildfell Weekly, which presented Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (It wasn't a fully chronological presentation like Dracula Daily; the first few posts were co-ordinated with the dates in the narrative, but then the narrative starts skipping weeks and months at a time - the full story takes place over the course of about a decade - so after that the posts settled down to one a week.) I kept up with it pretty well at first, but I got stuck around halfway through, when the Tenant's backstory starts being revealed (having gone in with just enough knowledge of the premise to dread where the story would go from there), and remained stuck while the serial continued on all the way to the end. Faced with the need to keep up my reading streak without resorting to actually starting The Female Man, I began reading individual chapters, and gradually built up steam and got all the way to the end. I'm glad I've read it now - it's secured Anne the position of my favourite Brontë - but I think perhaps the weekly serial wasn't the best way for me to have read it. (On the other hand, perhaps it was, seeing as the only other option appears to have been me never getting around to reading it at all.)

. During August, I got into a situation on Duolingo where I needed to complete all the daily challenges every day for the rest of the month in order to keep my streak of monthly medals. I've been gradually going off Duolingo anyway (which is partly how the situation arose), with a rising feeling that I'm not getting enough out of it to be worth all the ways it annoys me, so I decided that if I failed to get the August medal I would take it as a sign to walk away. At the end of the month, I irretrievably lost one of the daily challenges that I could easily have won, due to Duolingo not being clear about the requirements for completing the challenge; I decided that was definitely enough for me, and uninstalled the app forthwith. And I have not missed it one bit.

. Saw some people online talking about a new game called Tactical Breach Wizards, and thought it sounded interesting enough to try downloading the demo. It's a turn-based tactical combat thing, and one of the wrinkles is that one of the main characters can see a minute or so into the future, which mechanically translates to you being able to preview the effects of your turn before committing to it, and you're encouraged to try out elaborate or showy moves to see if they'll work. Each of the player-controlled characters is a different kind of wizard, with different abilities and weaknesses; one of the starting characters, for instance, is a weather witch, who begins the game with several kinds of wind spell but nothing that does direct damage, so she has to knock opponents out by slamming them against walls or else remove them from the field of battle by pitching them out of windows. (I haven't played any of the developer's earlier games, but I'm given to understand that defenestration is something of a trademark.) By the time I hit the end of the demo I was sufficiently immersed to forget it was just the demo and be surprised to hit the end, and wanted to know what happened next, so I bought the full game. I've been playing it on and off since; if I'm honest, the gameplay isn't quite my jam, but I'm really enjoying the characters and the dialogue is great.

. There is a tournament currently being held on Tumblr where people were invited to submit their favourite character that they didn't think anybody else had heard of, and the characters face off in one-on-one contests where the winner is the one that more of the audience really hasn't heard of. (It's intended as an antidote to all the other character tournaments on Tumblr where the winner is usually the character most people have heard of, regardless of what the nominal criterion of the tournament was.) One of the competitors is a character from the Liaden Universe, and obscure even for that series: it's Jen Sin yos'Phelium, the keeper of Tinsori Light, who until quite recently had only appeared in one short story and none of the novels. He won his first match-up (against a sapient eyeball from a Youtube video I've never heard of) by a comfortable margin, and is through to the second round.