I haven't been watching the just-finished season of Doctor Who, ( and I was rather put out this morning to be told, by someone who assumed I'd already seen it, how the season finale ends )

In more cheerful TV news, the current season of Taskmaster is very, very good.


At board game club, ( we played Risk Legacy and Century: Golem Edition )

( Computer games: Battletech, The Beekeeper's Picnic, Mark of the Ninja )

( Reading challenges )

( Podcast: The Hidden Almanac )

( I overslept and missed Parkrun )

I've discovered a new word for the list of Words I'd Only Ever Seen Written Down And Was Pronouncing Wrong All This Time. This one is a character name: Methos, a recurring character from the 1990s TV series Highlander. I've been reading about him sporadically for decades, but I've never actually seen an episode with him in, and when I went looking for Youtube clips of Peter Wingfield performances a few days ago I discovered that I've been mentally pronouncing the E wrong: I always figured the first syllable of his name rhymed with "death", but it turns out it rhymes with "teeth".

. 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.)

. I'm pretty happy with the outcome of an election, for once.


. At board game club, we played Kemet, a strategy game with an ancient Egyptian theme. ( Read more... )


. I've now read or re-read all the plays in the Oscar Wilde omnibus I was working my way through. ( Read more... )


. I've played Battletech a bit more ( Read more... )


. I haven't played Ingress all week, and so far I'm not missing it. ( Read more... )

. At board game club, we played Lanterns, Exploding Kittens, Drop It, and Carcassonne. I haven't played Carcassonne in ages, but it turns out I'm still good at it (and, just as importantly, enjoy playing it). I also enjoyed playing Lanterns, which I'm not as good at, and Drop It was okay. I don't remember what the gameplay of Exploding Kittens was like because everything else about it was crowded out by how repulsive the artwork was.

The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic Legacy: Season One with got together on Friday and we played through to the end of the season. I'm kind of glad we're done with it; it was an interesting experience seeing how the game changed over the course of the season, but the story parts continued to be familiar and predictable right to the end. We'd also started to lose track of some of the rule changes, which contributed to us finishing the season on a more successful note than if we'd remembered all the new rules that were added to make the climax of the season more challenging, but I think that even if we had kept perfect track of all the rules we still would have achieved a respectable outcome.

We also played a game called The Isle of Cats.


. Years ago, when we were studying Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, the official text we had to use was an omnibus edition that also included An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. I read An Ideal Husband at some point in the intervening decades, but I never got around to reading Lady Windermere's Fan until last month and it was only this week that I read A Woman of No Importance. Wikipedia says it's generally considered the least successful of the four, and that makes sense to me; unlike, say, Earnest, which is clearly and coherently a comedy, A Woman of No Importance is a bunch of witty dialogue crammed into a drama revolving around a subject that is not in the least funny, and I don't think it all fits together quite satisfactorily.


. There's a new podcast called DC High Volume, which is doing official audio adaptations of classic comic book storylines. They've just finished Batman: Year One (which was not bad, although there were a few scenes, including the climactic action moment, that I don't think quite worked without the visuals), and are following it up with The Long Halloween.


. I've either been having more vivid dreams lately, or just remembering them more clearly when I wake up. It might be something to do with catching up on my sleep debt, or possibly because the weather's turned cold and I've started sleeping with the winter covers on.

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.

Our production of Guys and Dolls opened this week, and has been playing to good-sized and appreciative audiences. My American accent, which had been commuting between New York, Chicago, and some other place that might have been New Jersey, finally settled into place in time for the final dress rehearsal.


This week I retired the Fitbit. The display screen has been on the way out for some time; at first, it was illegible in sunlight, which was annoying from the viewpoint of wanting to know my progress while I was out and exercising but otherwise supportable, but by the end it had got to the point that I had to shut myself in a room with the blinds drawn and the light off to be able to read it at all.

During the time I've been using the Fitbit, Fitbit-the-company was bought out by Google and I have some concerns about how things have been developing since, so I decided to look elsewhere for a new fitness tracker. In the end, for a variety of reasons of which some are more sensible than others, I opted for the Samsung Galaxy Fit3, which I'm liking well so far. (One thing I particularly liked about it was that I could use a stockpile of reward points that was otherwise just going to expire to get it for only $30.) It's actually a slightly better fit for my wrist than the Fitbit was, and the screen is nicely legible in all kinds of light levels. I like the Fit3's version of "maybe it's time to get up and stretch" reminders better, too.


I follow several Youtube channels whose thing is gameplay videos of computer games designed to be played by multiple players (either competitively or co-operatively). Usually there's a variety of games represented, with some channels focussing on new releases and others being more into old favourites, but it happened twice this week that a recently released or recently updated game showed up on two of the channels at the same time.

One was Make Way!, a racing game where the players build the race track as they go along, which looked like it would be fun to play with the right group of people but could be a bit difficult to follow as a spectator.

The other was Split Fiction, a two-player co-operative game, and I don't have any opinion of the gameplay because the video I watched included the opening cinematic that sets up the premise, which was so stupid that I got bored and quit the video just as it was getting to the playable part. (The stupidity was a mixture of clichéd characters and situations - it's the kind of story that features a sinister machine called The Machine, with audible capital letters - and a few bits of blatant plot convenience. The one that really sticks in my head is that one of the protagonists is presented as being suspicious of the situation she's entering, but doesn't get around to demanding answers about what's going on until after she's compliantly gone through the induction process and it's basically too late to avoid getting forced to take part; it's particularly jarring because the induction includes changing out of her own clothes into a jumpsuit with all kinds of mysterious electronic attachments, which if I was her would have been the point where I refused to go any further without an explanation.)


I didn't go to Parkrun on Saturday, or board game club on Monday, because my sleep patterns had been thrown off and I wasn't feeling well. I did get a good amount of other exercise in the course of the week, with several long walks and bike rides.


I finished reading The Friendship Factor; I don't have anything I want to say about it that I didn't already say last week.

I've already posted about the run-up to the election, and about the books I read this week.


The Randomize Your TBR book challenge has continued to assist me in reducing my to-read collection by methods other than reading. When I went to pick the random book for March, the first random selection was a book that I realised I was no longer interested in reading, so I moved it straight to the box of books that I'm going to dispose of one of these days, and tried again until I got a book I was interested in reading. On a separate occasion, I had a go at one of the bonus prompts, which says to select a random book only after spending half an hour going through the to-read and pulling out books that have been there for a while and you're not interested in anymore. I spent the length of a podcast on it and moved another dozen books to the disposal box.


We had another public holiday on Monday. In the morning, I did some yard work that involved being up on a ladder, which wasn't as terrifying as I expected. (I'm usually very bad at being up on ladders, because my sense of balance gets wonky. One of the things that seemed to help on this occasion was that I was wearing good shoes that gave me a firm grip on the ladder.)

In the afternoon, there was another long afternoon session of the board game club. We played Eclipse again, and then a game of Dominion.


At the Rep Club, we did the first full run-throughs of both acts of Guys and Dolls this week. There were definitely places that needed improvement, but on the whole they went more smoothly than I'd expected. (I nevertheless sang the traditional Three Weeks Song at a moment when it seemed apposite.)

It's getting close to the dress rehearsal stage, so I went and got a hair cut and have shaved my beard off. This got a variety of reactions when I showed up for the next rehearsal, running the full spectrum from no reaction at all to "who is this stranger?". One of the other cast members remarked that she thought this was the first time she'd ever seen me clean-shaven, which I don't think is quite true, because we were both in another show a couple of years ago where I'm sure I remember that I was clean-shaven, but I think it is true that there hasn't been another time in the intervening years where I haven't had facial hair of one variety or another. I wasn't sure I recognised the person in the mirror myself at first, though later in the day I caught sight of myself in the mirror and instinctively smiled like someone meeting an old friend whose face one hasn't seen in a while.


I'm keeping up with my exercise, and have been on several long and interesting bike rides.

My second attempt at a random book for February, Perfume by Patrick Süskind, came to the same end as the first: fifty pages in I didn't care about any of the characters (apart from maybe a couple who had appeared in one scene each and I was confident would not be appearing again) and I had no curiosity about where the plot, such as it was, was going, so I abandoned the book and moved on. Perfume struck me as a book that might appeal to the kind of reader who enjoys bathing in written language: parts of it are beautifully crafted, and there was some interest in the way the narrative was centred on the sense of smell instead of something more usual like sight or sound, but I'm not that kind of reader and I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it that rewarded the time I was spending on it.

My third attempt, The Visitors by Clifford D. Simak, was more successful, in that I read nearly fifty pages in just the first sitting and went on to read the whole thing before consigning it to the box of books I intend to get rid of. It's a story about the arrival on Earth of a group of very alien aliens, and how the people of the United States (where the first one happens to land) react to the situation. In the first part of the story, when everyone's just trying to figure out what the first arrival is, I found myself less interested in the aliens than in the detailed account of a group of reporters and photographers covering the landing (I wasn't surprised when the opening sentence of the author's bio at the back of the book turned out to be "Clifford D. Simak is a newspaperman"). Later, we get more detail about the aliens, but I felt a lack of drama, partly because the presentation is very dry (lots of scenes of people in conference rooms telling each other things the author wants the reader to know) and partly because both the aliens and the key humans are so darn reasonable about the whole business. In the last third of the novel, the author starts developing the idea that the aliens might cause a lot of trouble with the best of intentions, just by not understanding the economic and political consequences of their attempts to be helpful, but the novel ends without the author committing to the idea, and trails off into more scenes of people in conference rooms talking about what might happen next. Even the obligatory last-second sting in the tail happens thirty pages before the end and gets talked to death before the novel's finally over. There's a kind of half-baked attempt to compare the aliens to the European colonialists in the New World, both early on when people are afraid the Visitors plan to move in and take over Earth without regard for its existing population and again later when they start handing out advanced technology, but it doesn't go anywhere deep or insightful and in the meantime it means we get stuck with a bunch of scenes of white people talking about Native Americans with varying degrees of knowledge and sympathy, including a character going on a four-page rant about, among other related topics, how the Europeans were doing the Native Americans (he doesn't say "Native Americans") a favour by stealing their land off them. (That guy isn't meant to be sympathetic, and he's only in that one chapter, but it left a bad taste).


At the board game group this week, I played Chomp (arrange tiles with dinosaurs and landscape on them so that the dinosaurs that will score you points don't get eaten, starve, or fall into tar pits), Ticket to Ride: Europe (lay out the best train routes on a map of Europe), and Santorini (build towers and be the first to have a worker at the top of a tower while preventing your opponents from completing their own towers or stealing yours).


During the periods when I've been using 750 Words regularly, I've mostly been using it as a place to keep a journal, but one day this week I used it for the original intended purpose of furthering creative writing. I'd been reminiscing about a story idea I had years ago, as a spin-off from another story I also never completed, and decided to dig out my old story notes and see if I could add to them. I looked in the folder on my computer and found the story notes for the original story idea, but there weren't any notes about the sequel story. So I decided that my 750 Words session for the day would be a brain dump of everything I could remember about the story idea, including the bits and pieces I could remember having made up for WIP memes and things over the years. When I was done, I tried a word search on my computer to try and find a scene fragment I knew I'd written out at some point; I didn't find that, but I did find that I had, after all, written an extensive set of notes on the story idea - I'd stashed them in a separate folder, because I was trying to make it work as a standalone story instead of a sequel, under a code name that I'd subsequently forgotten referred to that story. I don't think the brain dump was a wasted exercise, though, because it's useful to have a record of which parts of the idea have stuck with me over the fifteen years since I wrote the original story notes; in the unlikely event that I do ever write the story, that'll give me an indication of which parts of the story are the ones that really resonate with me.

I'm still mostly doing my 750 Words sessions in the mornings. I'm not happy about how it cuts into the time I could be using for morning exercise or other useful things, but one day this week I did the session at night because I hadn't found time earlier in the day, and was reminded how much of a struggle it was to do when I was tired.

My random book for February was Devil May Care, a James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks - or, as the cover had it, "Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming". That would usually mean that the book was originally published under Fleming's name before Faulks's authorship was acknowledged, but I gather that in this case the author credit has been in exactly those words right from the first edition, and indicates that Faulks made a conscious effort to mimic Fleming's manner of writing instead of employing his own. I found the result felt slightly exaggerated, not to the level of parody or caricature but enough to be a bit offputting, especially since it highlighted some of the aspects of Fleming's novels that I never much liked in the first place. It also had a few new faults of its own, including that thing you often get when a setting is pastiched by a writer decades later who can't resist throwing in a bunch of references to historical events and people that the original author wouldn't have considered relevant or appropriate to include. All of which I could probably have forgiven if it had succeeded in endearing me to the characters or engaging my interest in the plot; as it was, I hit page 50 and still didn't give a fig for the fate of the world or any of the characters, so I ditched it and went to read something more fun.

My new random book for February is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, which I haven't started reading yet.


The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic: Legacy with managed to get together on the weekend and play a few more rounds for the first time in a few months. I'm still finding the unfolding legacy plot familiar and predictable, though I appreciated that a document that was revealed this session provided context for an earlier plot development I'd been unhappy about and established it as something that we're intended to not be happy about. I was also amused when the same cache of documents contained an in-story explanation for a game mechanic that's necessary for game balance but hadn't, until now, made a great deal of sense within the fiction of the game.

At the same session, we also played Western Legends, Raptor, and Schotten Totten. In Western Legends, the board is a map of a territory in the Wild West and each player takes on the role of an outlaw or lawman (or stays neutral, but you earn victory points for being a notorious outlaw or a successful lawman and there's no reward for doing neither) and moves around completing activities like prospecting for gold, fighting bandits, robbing banks, or driving cattle, according to personal preference and the character's secret goal cards. Raptor is an asymmetrical game where one player controls a family of dinosaurs and the other controls a group of hunters trying to capture them. In Schotten Totten, two families are fighting over a property line and players win skirmishes by putting together the best three-card combinations.

At the usual Monday evening session, we played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong and Forgotten Waters. In Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, I was the clue-giver once, and succeeded in leading the investigators to the murderer; and the witness once, and succeeded in getting the murderer caught without being identified and nobbled; and a regular investigator once, and achieved nothing of distinction. Forgotten Waters is a pirate game with narrative elements that's intended to be played over several sessions; we started a game about a year ago which fell apart quickly for a number of reasons, so this time we were starting again from scratch with a partly different group of players. That meant that a lot of the story bits we got to were familiar, but the game went well and we remembered to record the game state at the end of the evening so we could pick it up again another time.


Rehearsals have fully started for Guys and Dolls. I'm enjoying the singing, and mostly managing to remember the dance steps.


Still bike riding regularly. Somewhat complicated by the fact that there's an ongoing project to resurface the city's bike trails, and on a couple of my regular routes this has got as far as digging up the old cracked tarmac but not yet progressed to laying down the new smooth tarmac. A couple of days ago, when I was out riding in the morning, I saw a kangaroo, which stood a few metres from the bike trail and watched me go past.

The weather was very hot, and the effects could be felt even indoors with the air conditioner cranked up.

I'm working my way through Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, and, on the days where the heat got to me and I didn't have the mental presence for Powers, reading a few entries from The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook.

At board game club, I played Psycho Killer, Mayan Curse, and Waking Shards.

I came up with a new motivational tool for my cardio exercise this week. I've been keeping track on a paper calendar of which days I did some kind of cardio exercise, and ticking off weeks where I reached a target number of days, but it occurred to me that if I kept track in a computer spreadsheet instead, I could get it to automatically calculate not just each calendar week but a running total for any given seven-day period, and generate a coloured strip that changed from red to orange to green to show how well I was doing at hitting the target. One of the unexpected effects was that, because of the way I set up the coloured strip, it doesn't just show the past but also a vision of the future, with the seven-day period following today lit up in the colour it would remain if I didn't do any further exercise in that period. Marking off a day makes the entire following week shift up in colour in a way that's very satisfying. It's too soon to tell if it's leading to me exercising more consistently, but it feels like it is.

I did start playing XCOM 2 again, beginning a fresh game from the beginning. It's been going a lot better; I'm still failing missions occasionally, but it's been pretty apparent each time what went wrong and usually it's only taken a second attempt to get back on track. (The big recurring problem, which has been one of my faults ever since I first started playing XCOM and the source of a lot of strife that I've been prone to blame on the RNG, is a tendency to be impatient even in untimed missions and push on with unnecessary haste - which is a particular problem when, as it often does, it results in being faced with a fresh wave of enemies just when one has used one's last action point for the turn.) I've also been getting more resilient in the face of failure: there have been missions that have gone so badly that the me of a month ago would have given up entirely, but I've pushed on and turned them into successes; and there have been times when a mission did end up going badly, or even failing, and I've kept the result and things have nevertheless turned out well on the larger strategic level.