pedanther

1. In the end, I didn't sign up for Yuletide this year; when it came down to it, I couldn't think of anything to ask for. (Though I thought of a couple of things almost as soon as signups were over, which I've carefully written down somewhere that I'll hopefully be able to find them next year.)

I may yet end up writing Treats or something, and I'm on the pinch hit list, same as every year, although being in this time zone I almost never get to see an unclaimed pinch hit of any kind, let alone an unclaimed pinch hit I can do something with.


2. Rehearsals for the Christmas show continue. Scripts are down. The song list is mostly stable (several songs were thrown out or replaced for reasons of pacing or being blatantly inappropriate to the character and/or situation) and the dances are mostly choreographed. In the big opening song-and-dance number, I'm taking full advantage of the fact that my character is explicitly called out in dialogue as being not a very good dancer.


3. I stopped going to the gym for a few months out a combination of winter and snowballing awkwardness about peripheral business like When Should I Ask For A Follow-Up Meeting With The Trainer? and What Happens When I Run Out of Spaces On This Log Sheet?, but I've started going regularly again, and I'm feeling better than I did when I wasn't.

Also, I managed to organise a follow-up meeting with the trainer (which helped me straighten out some things I'd been doing wrong) and got a new log sheet, which is a slightly different design from the old one and very helpfully includes a space for the trainer to explicitly write down when he expects to hear from me again, so I may be able to avoid a repeat of the snowballing awkwardness.


4. A few days ago, in a fit of procrastination, I downloaded the smartphone game Doctor Who: Legacy, which some of my fannish acquaintances are enthusiastic about. I don't know how much longevity it's going to have for me; in the absence of an intriguing plot (and Doctor Who: Legacy features a near-complete absence of plot), I tend to stick with a game only so long as I can coast without having to put any actual effort into mastering the tactics and strategies of the game mechanics, and I think I've about reached that point already.

[edit to add: And the "gotta collect all the Doctors and companions" aspect isn't doing it for me, because I'm not feeling like there's any meaningful connection between the collectables and the actual Doctors and companions; Rory, to pick an example, is just a cardboard cutout and some numbers and none of the things that made me like Rory-the-character so much. Though I'll admit I was a bit thrilled when Porridge showed up, because having Warwick Davis on the team will never not be a bit thrilling even if it is just cardboard-cutout Warwick Davis.]

(It's been interesting comparing Legacy to Worlds in Time, the last Doctor Who computer game I played with any regularity. The basic game mechanics are very similar, to the point that Legacy might almost feel like Worlds in Time with a lot of bits missing, except for the crucial difference that the bits Legacy does have all work much better than Worlds in Time's bits ever did.)


5. Around Halloweentime, TV Club 10 did a list of ten noteworthy TV vampire stories (limited to one episode per series, to promote variety; Buffy and Angel are represented by "Fool for Love" and "Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been", respectively). Apart from the obvious candidates, the top 10 includes the 1968 Mystery and Imagination version of "Dracula" with Denholm Elliott and James Maxwell in. (There is also a list of honorable mentions, which includes an episode of my favourite underappreciated vampire series, Ultraviolet.)

Fiction books
John M Ford. The Final Reflection (re-read)
John M Ford. How Much For Just the Planet? (re-read)
PC Hodgell. Honor's Paradox (e)
Sharon Lee. Carousel Tides (e)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Mouse and Dragon (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Necessity's Child (e)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Scout's Progress (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Wild Magic (re-read)
George Bernard Shaw. Caesar and Cleopatra
Patricia Wrightson. The Nargun and the Stars

In progress
Tamora Pierce. Wolf-Speaker (re-read)

Abandoned
Rosemary Sutcliff. Sword at Sunset

Non-fiction books
TA Shippey. The Road to Middle-Earth 2nd ed.

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Peter Macinnis. Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World

1. So, a new year.

My new year's resolution last year was to make some progress on figuring out what I want to do with my life, prompted by the realisation that I was about to qualify for long service leave in the job I took temporarily after university until I decided out what I really wanted to do.

I've achieved it, kind of. I still don't really know what I want to do with my life, but I do know where I want to be in two years from now, which is more than I've managed before. Conveniently, it's geographically the same place I am now, but at least I have a positive reason for wanting to be here instead of just drifting along in the direction I was already going. And the nature of the reason is suggestive of what I might want from life, so there's room for further development there.

I don't have a formal resolution this year, just an intention to keep on with last year's, with a side order of getting back on the wagons I've fallen off with respect to morning-ness and exercise and suchlike.


2. Boy, it's hot. I've been spending large portions of the day inside, with the blinds drawn against the nuclear-powered fury of the sun, reading Yuletide fics and playing online games.


3. Speaking of Yuletide, author's names have now been revealed, resulting in the discovery that two of the fics that particularly impressed me this year were both written by the same author, RecessiveJean, who furthermore has written two more fics as well, for a total of four excellent fics, in six fandoms. (Captain America, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Jurassic Park, Narnia, The Rocketeer, The Scarlet Pimpernel. So yes, that means at least one superficially-unworkable crossover.)

T-Rex was in Kentucky, although he didn’t know it. He hadn’t brought a map, and if he had, he probably would have tried to eat it by now, anyway.


4. Speaking of online games, I've reached the final story arc in Doctor Who: Worlds in Time. The Doctor has traced the source of the time disturbances back to the planet Skaro - which, as he points out, is a disturbance in itself, since Skaro is supposed to be utterly destroyed.

The new iDaleks look even less threatening as two-dimensional cartoons than they did in "Victory of the Daleks", incidentally.


5. Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer: the life of Herbert Dyce Murphy sounded promising, but I had to give up on it before the end of the fourth chapter.

The first strike against the book is that it's a work of non-fiction written as if it were a novel, studded with details the author couldn't possibly have known about what the people involved did and thought on such-and-such an occasion. To be fair, some of these are marked as supposition, but that just draws attention to the places where the author did the same thing without marking it. And it prompts one to consider whether the supposition adds anything to the account, to which my answer was generally negative.

The third strike is that on top of being written like a novel, it's such a twee novel. It's all very comfortable and superficial; despite supposedly being real people, they've got (or at least are granted by the author) less depth and complication than many fictional characters I've known. The point where I gave up was when I realised that the author had somehow managed to make the story of a man who lived as a woman in Victorian England dull.

So much for the style. Are the underlying facts any good? Well...

The second strike was awarded to a ten-word parenthesis that single-handedly destroyed my faith in the author's fact-checking. The author reports that when Murphy was living in Oxford and preparing to enter the University, he was tutored by a man named Montgomery Bell, "said to be the original of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes".

Fiction books
(anthology). Kitties
(anthology). Liavek
Lois McMaster Bujold. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (e)
John Masefield. Sard Harker
Tamora Pierce. The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (re-read)
Bram Stoker. The Jewel of Seven Stars

In progress
John Masefield. Odtaa
Tamora Pierce. Lioness Rampant (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Alain de Botton. The Consolations of Philosophy

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
John Masefield. The Taking of the Gry

1. I have achieved one of my occasional victories against clutter, boldly slaying the mess on the desk in my study. It started with just sorting out the Pile of DVDs To Be Watched (no small task in itself), but that left one small tidy corner of the desk that nagged at me until I tidied the rest of it too.

The Pile of DVDs To Be Watched was bidding fair to be taller than me, and had become completely useless because I'd lost track of what was and wasn't in it. It's been replaced by a proper DVD rack next to the desk, where I can see everything it contains, with positions of prominence given to the remaining discs of the six TV series I've started and not finished.

My next job might ought to be the back corner of the study that's been eaten by the Pile of Things That Might Come In Handy Some Day (which is not quite as tall as me, but makes up for it by taking up more floorspace than me-lying-down). That would make room for another bookshelf, and also proper shelves for my CDs and the rest of my DVDs.


2. When I call work to let them know I'm off sick, I always feel slightly awkward if whoever-it-is uses "How are you doing?" or something like it as a greeting. Taken at face value, it's an obvious opening to explain that actually I'm not doing at all well, and that's why I'm calling; but greetings aren't always meant to be taken at face value, and I've know people to get confused if their polite question receives an actual answer.

(I'm much better now, thank you for asking.)


3. The Rep Club's final production each year is traditionally a bit of knockabout dinner theatre in a pantomime vein. I usually beg off on the grounds of having too much to do at this time of year; I still have too much to do (if anything, I have more to do this year than usual) but I've somehow ended up roped into this year's show anyway. This year's show is a version of Snow White; I've been cast as the heroine's father, who in the usual way for fairy tale fathers if they're not actually dead is well-meaning but basically useless. It's been a while since I've done any acting in a broad comic mode; hopefully it'll come back to me.


4. I've finished reading The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, and immediately began re-reading The Dragon Hoard, Tanith Lee's comic fantasy novel featuring a protracted spoof of the Quest for the Golden Fleece (with the eponymous Dragon Hoard in place of the Fleece). It's one of my favourite books since childhood, and it's still just as good as I remember.


5. Further field notes from Starship UK:

- The character model for Liz X has arm articulation that none of the other characters have, specifically so that she's capable of doing the "Basically, I rule" pose.

- Characters who speak entirely in cryptic verse: rarely a good idea. (I'll give 'em this, though: A valiant effort on fitting the obligatory technobabble into the verse scheme. There can't be very many rhymes for "quantum entanglement".)

- Other characters in Starship UK include women named Sladen and Tamm. And also Tamm's friend Caroline, who I assume is part of the set despite not fitting the pattern, because if she did she'd be named John, which you can see why that might have been confusing.

1. The season of one-act plays has successfully reached its conclusion. The tradition in the Rep Club is that each director is presented with a commemorative spoon at the after party, but apparently they weren't ready yet, so we were each handed a teaspoon from the tea-and-coffee concession and promised that the real thing would be forthcoming at a later date. I managed to hold onto mine for most of the evening, but the others had vanished by the time I went looking for a second spoon later. (By that point, the party had evolved into a sing-along arranged around two people with guitars and one person with a ukulele, and it was late enough that adding a bit of spoon-playing to the mix seemed like a good idea. When I was only able to come up with one spoon, one of the actors raided the kitchen and found a fork, but it just wasn't the same.)

Each of the directors also got a copy of the official cast photo for their play, and I was also presented by my actors with a copy of the unofficial cast photo for mine (the photographer having had some time on his hands and a photo he'd taken at the zoo of a family of chimpanzees), along with a picture book about monkeys in which the cast had written messages of appreciation and drawn arrows from their names to the three silliest-looking monkeys on the first page.


2. Last week, I managed to lock myself out of the house again. On the way out the door in the morning, I got distracted at just the point when I would have gone over to pick up the keys from the table where I usually leave them, and realised as soon as the front door had locked behind me that they were still on the table. I got the bearer of the spare key to meet me after work, so that was all right, but it being the second time I've locked myself out of the house that way, I decided I needed to rethink where I keep the keys. They're now hanging from a lanyard hooked over the inside doorknob of the front door.


3. I've just started playing Portal 2 again, after a break of several weeks. I hadn't been in a hurry to get back to it, because the plot had been going through another slow patch. So of course it turns out that there was a major plot development about three minutes after the point where I'd stopped.


4. I don't watch much live TV except on Sunday evening, when for reasons that are unlikely to become clear again at the moment it's easier to watch TV than not. Currently that means the new Sinbad TV series. Not terribly enthused about it so far. I'm finding Sinbad himself less interesting than his supporting cast, and they're mostly familiar stereotypes. (He's also leading the field in Failing To Be Convincing As An Inhabitant Of Whatever Century This Is Supposed To Be, which appears to be something of a national sport; it was several minutes into the first episode before I was sure this wasn't a modernised setting of the story.)

This week's episode guest starred Sophie Okonedo, walking off with every scene she was in, appropriately as a pirate queen. Basically, Sophie Okonedo rules.


5. Speaking of which, the Doctor Who online game, Worlds in Time, recently added a new story arc set on Starship UK and featuring Liz X (who, you will recall, was played by Sophie Okonedo in the TV series). One of the first plot points to be revealed is that Starship UK has a king now, which had me worried that something had happened to Liz, but she's still around, and rather annoyed that, after all the trouble she's been to sorting out the old autocratic regime, somebody's stolen the crown with the intention of setting up a new autocratic regime. Somebody had fun writing this story arc: Liz X pronounces her surname differently these days, and her associates in resisting the new order are collectively known as -- what else? -- the London Underground. [ETA: Also, there's an alien starship captain going Ahab on the star whale. And the leader of the Underground? Call him Ismail.]

Favourite moment in Worlds in Time so far:

Investigating goings-on at the Sisters of Plenitude hospital, we discover the existence of a sinisterly-named secret ward deep below the hospital. After gaining access we find a row of heavily-secured rooms, each protected by two different kinds of lock. After breaking the locks on the first one, we open the door to reveal...

...a broom closet.

(The secret laboratory for investigating things what man was not meant to wot of was in the next heavily-secured room over.)

A nice bonus was that this wasn't just a random gag: a bit later in the plot, knowing where the broom closet was became a tactical advantage.

1. I'm re-reading the last few volumes of Sandman along with Mark Reads Sandman. (To start with I just dipped into the books when I wanted to check a detail, then I started re-reading bits, and now it's definitely a continuous re-read.)

I don't think I've mentioned Mark Reads here before, though I keep meaning to. The general premise is that Mark reads a popular work of fiction that he doesn't know anything about, one chapter a day, and after each chapter he writes and blogs a post reacting to the events of the chapter and trying to predict where the story's going next.
( Read more... )
Things Mark has read include Harry Potter, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, and The Hunger Games. He also has a companion blog, Mark Watches, where he's currently episode-by-episoding his way through Buffy and Angel.


2. I've more or less given up on the multiplayer aspect of Worlds in Time, the Doctor Who online multiplayer game, and am working my way through the storyline as if it were single-player mode, accompanied only by the computer-operated assistants. ( Read more... )


3. Meanwhile, Portal 2 has an actual single-player storyline that I've been working my way through. ( Read more... )


4. For my thoughts on Brave and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, see my previous Five Things post.


5. I went to see Steel Magnolias mainly because I had several friends in the cast; I wasn't at all sure it would be my kind of thing. As it turned out, I liked it a lot. This suggests that there may be whole unexplored areas of fiction that have drifted by me because they seemed on the surface to be not my kind of thing. If so, I'm not sure I want to know; it's not as if I don't have a large enough pile of things to read and watch as it is.

(There's probably some clever way to tie this back around to point 1, since one of the things Mark Reads is built on is Mark discovering and falling in love with works that he'd previously drifted by because they superficially appeared to be not his kind of thing. But it's late, and I'm tired, and I'm not going to bother.)

Fiction books
Verlyn Flieger. Pig Tale
Murray Leinster. The Forgotten Planet
Ellis Peters. The House of Green Turf
Ellis Peters. The Knocker on Death's Door
Ellis Peters. Mourning Raga

Non-fiction books
Verlyn Flieger. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Di Trevis. Being a Director

Fiction books
Bennett Cerf, Roy McKie. Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles
Marianne de Pierres. Code Noir
Marianne de Pierres. Crash Deluxe
Marianne de Pierres. Nylon Angel
Phyllis Ann Karr. The Idylls of the Queen
Anthony Price. Our Man in Camelot
Brandon Sanderson. The Way of Kings

In progress
Murray Leinster. The Forgotten Planet

Non-fiction books
Declan Donnellan. The Actor and the Target

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Verlyn Flieger. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology