pedanther

Fiction books
Hazel Gaynor. Before Dorothy (e)
Andy Weir. Project Hail Mary (e)

In progress
Stephen Fry. Mythos (e)
EW Hornung. The Amateur Cracksman (e)

Non-fiction books
Ben Crystal, David Crystal. You Say Potato: The Story of English Accents (e)
James W Loewen. Lies My Teacher Told Me (e)
Jason Morningstar. Fiasco (re-read)

In progress
Simon Lamb. Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes (e)
Keri Smith. Wreck This Journal Everywhere

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

Top of the to-read pile
Caroline Stevermer. When the King Comes Home (e)

. It was a good week at work. I tried a new thing, and was complimented by the boss on how it turned out. Unrelatedly, but also good, the boss has taken action to resolve a significant source of client-related workplace stress.


. We had a weekend session of board gaming, where we played 3 Witches, Quacks of Quedlinburg, and a few rounds of Ticket to Ride Legacy.

( Read more... )


. At the regular weekly board gaming session, we played Liar's Uno and Paperback.

( Read more... )


. My library hold came in for Lies My Teacher Told Me, which I started reading a couple of months ago but had to return when I was halfway through, so that's what I've been reading this week. It continues to be interesting but slow going.


. I've been doing another run through XCOM 2, this time with the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which adds a new story mission that unlocks a new soldier class. I really liked the story mission, and I'm having fun playing around with the tactical possibilities of the new soldier. Definitely worth the money I spent on it.

I also installed two of the other DLC that were included in the bundle, both of which are cosmetic expansions that don't change any of the gameplay but provide new outfits to dress your soldiers in. One of them is going to be uninstalled as soon as this run is finished, because it is badly-behaved and keeps changing my soldiers into midriff-baring tops without asking.


. I'm making progress with the jigsaw puzzle; I'm past the stage where the amount of empty space feels disheartening and into the stage where enough of it is filled in that I can do a piece or two whenever I have a spare moment.

. At the board game meet, I wasn't interested in the big game of the week, so I stayed on the casual table, where we played Cockroach Salad, The Mind, Ingenious, and Tacta. The person who suggested playing Ingenious was actually one of the people I'd played with a few weeks ago, who'd enjoyed it enough to want another go.


. I started a new game of XCOM 2 with the difficulty setting moved down a notch, and have been having a much better time in the sense that I've been zooming through it with no serious difficulties, but I'm not sure how much fun I'm having. It's allowing me to avoid the unpleasantness I was getting mired in when things went badly wrong, but I'm not feeling particularly elated when things go well; I'm not sure whether that's because it now feels insufficiently challenging for the victories to feel significant, or just because I've been having a down week in general.


. I still have a few chapters left to go on the Raffles book, and haven't decided whether it's worth pushing through for the sake of ticking off a reading challenge prompt. For now, I've put it aside to read other more enjoyable things, including Stephen Briggs' stage adaptation of Monstrous Regiment (I've been thinking about proposing one of his adaptations to the Rep Club, but if Monstrous Regiment is typical we're going to have trouble finding a big enough cast).


. The Traitors finale was suitably dramatic and I think the victory was well-earned.


. There was a screening of a documentary film about George Orwell and what he had to say that was relevant to the current state of the world. I was interested enough to get in the car and head to the cinema, but on the way I had second thoughts about whether I really wanted to spend my evening watching a documentary about the current state of the world, so I turned off a couple of blocks early and refueled the car and then went and did something else more fun.


. thedarlingone is doing a series of blog posts where they organise their digital music collection by going through the tracks in alphabetical order and post capsule reviews of each. My digital music collection could do with organising, too; I have not yet made up my mind whether I want to do the same thing, but I've got as far as opening an alphabetical listing, looking at it, and then going in search of an app to fix the metadata on a bunch of tracks.

. There was a heatwave lasting several days, during which the temperature got as high as 45 degrees Celcius and never got below 20 degrees. During the hottest few days, it was too hot to be sitting at the computer and I didn't have much oomph for reading, so I listened to a lot of podcasts and finished my current jigsaw puzzle (and, when it got really hot, took a long nap).


. The board game club meetups have started up again for the year. This week, the main game I played was Leviathan Wilds, in which the board represents an enormous creature that you're climbing over, trying to achieve goals while avoiding hazards and trying not to slip and fall. Beforehand, we played Let's Dig For Treasure, and afterward we played Ingenious.


. I'm keeping up the regular walking, weather permitting, and I remembered that I have a bicycle and went for a bike ride. I've also resumed the set of muscle exercises that I stopped doing a couple of years ago during a health scare and hadn't got around to starting up again.


. The current season of Jet Lag involves playing hide and seek across England (theoretically the entire UK, but the travel time limits mean they're unlikely to hit the outlying regions, in the same way that the Australian season barely went further west than Adelaide). There have been some fun interactions with the locals, and this week Ben and Adam got sent to Coventry and Sam went to hide in Milton Keynes, on the grounds that it would never occur to the seekers that anybody would voluntarily go to Milton Keynes.


. A couple of list videos showed up in my Youtube recommendations about video games that were set in the year 2026. One such game was Observation, a game which I was initially very enthusiastic about but haven't opened in about five years after I got stuck in one of rather too many frustrating pixel-hunty puzzle sections. Seeing it on the list prompted me to wonder if I should give it another shot, but on reflection I'm happy to let it be.


. I was at a loose end and decided to give XCOM 2 another go, but I'm not in the right frame of mind to enjoy it and avoid getting into another grim spiral, so I've stopped again.


. Our state started a container deposit scheme a few years ago, in which used drink cans and bottles can be dropped off at collection points in return for a small amount of money per can or bottle, thus hopefully reducing the amount of cans and bottles that become litter. I've been accumulating cans and bottles due to uncertainty on my part about where the local collection points are and what the appropriate method is to bag them up before dropping them off, but I managed to get that sorted out and yesterday I dropped off two full bags, with a good start made on filling the next bag.


. Rehearsals have begun for the first Rep Club production of the year. The first read-through was fun.


. I see the End of Year Writing Meme is going around again. My complete output for 2025 was two pieces of flash fic ("Being" and "Flesh and Blood") amounting to a total of seven sentences, so I don't think there's enough material to answer all the questions about "What was your best opening sentence" and so on -- but it's a quantum leap above the last few years when I finished nothing at all.

(I started writing a few other longer pieces, but I think most of them were more about working out how I felt about the plot point in question than about producing a finished story. The exception is the one I started a couple of weeks ago, which might yet amount to something.)

. One of the problems creeping up on the community theatre I'm a member of is that we have a shortage of people who know how to design, rig, and plot theatrical lighting. ( Read more... )


. In one of the online groups I'm a member of, there was a conversation about Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, Black Jack, and Princess Knight, which gave me an opening to introduce more people to the existence of one of my favourite episodes of the 1980s Astro Boy anime, which uses time travel to set up a three-way crossover between the main characters of those three shows, with some bonus cameos from other Tezuka series thrown in.


. I completed my play-through of XCOM 2 without needing any more do-overs, and felt sufficiently confident to start another play-through with the commitment that this time I would push on and not take any do-overs no matter what setbacks might befall. Consequently, I have achieved something in XCOM 2 that has never happened before: I've seen what happens when you lose the game.( Read more... )


. I had my annual dental check-up. No serious issues, though the dentist did note that there are signs I'm brushing too hard on the side of my mouth where the brush is at a comfortable angle, so that's something I need to be conscious of.


. I didn't make it to board game club this week, because I had to go to a meeting instead.


. The supermarket nearest my house has been closed for months, because the space was bought out by a different operator and it's been going through a full refit. The official opening of the new supermarket was this week, and I walked over at lunch time to see what it was like. ( Read more... )


. My November pick for the random reading challenge was Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, which I've been vaguely meaning to get around to for ages. ( Read more... )


. At Parkrun this week, there was a group of visitors who are travelling around the country doing as many different Parkrun courses as they can. Some of them have done 250 or more different Parkruns.


. On Saturday evening, I went to a concert by a touring group who performed sea shanties and related works (including a rendition of Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage"). The music was nice (they harmonised beautifully), but it was also a valuable experience in that it got me out of the house and socialising with the other audience members, many of whom I knew well enough to be comfortable chatting with, and some of whom I haven't had a chance to talk with in ages.

I'd been feeling rather grim all week, and I think part of it was a lack of opportunities to interact with people in a non-goal-oriented way. Anyway, whether it was the music or the social interaction (or just that the weather had finally broken), I felt much better when I got up this morning.

. Computer games:

- I've been playing Invisible Inc. some more. ( Read more... )

- After I completed the campaign in Invisible Inc., I've started playing XCOM 2 again. ( Read more... )

- In between, I had another crack at the the demo of Alien Cartographer. ( Read more... )

- At that, a plain UI with no decorative elements or characters would have improved the other puzzle game demo I tried this week, ( Read more... )


. Board games: At board game club, we played Betrayal at Baldur's Gate and then Bomb Busters. ( Read more... )


. Jigsaw puzzles: I've finished the jigsaw puzzle I was working on, ( Read more... )


. TV: I enjoyed the finale of The Celebrity Traitors. I had several theories about how the final showdown might play out, and all of them turned out to be wrong.


. Books:

- Volume 3 of Asadora! came in at the library, which I'd been waiting for since I read the first two volumes. ( Read more... )

- Another book that I've been waiting for at the library is Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, ( Read more... )

- One of my picks for the Random Book Reading Challenge was Tales of True Adventure, ( Read more... )

- In Around the World in Eighty Emails, Phileas Fogg and his companions are about to make landfall in Japan. ( Read more... )

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.

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.

. A good number of years ago, I backed the original set of Magic Puzzles 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles on Kickstarter, and then they sat around unopened because I never got around to setting up a space where I could work on them. A week ago, I finally hauled one out to have something to do with my hands while watching a Youtube stream (which was celebrating the third anniversary of its Youtube channel, and therefore nearly the third anniversary of the first time I said to myself, "You know, I could probably do one of those Magic Puzzles to have something to do with my hands while watching these"), and I've been working on it in spare moments. I finished it this morning, and am now trying to decide how long to leave it out and admire the artwork before I clear it away so I can get started on the next one. (I was a bit worried that the puzzle's gimmick, advertised as a "mind blowing magical ending", would end up being a fizzle; in the event, I think that description is overselling it a bit, but it is pretty neat.)


. The thing about the XCOM games is that, while I enjoy them, I'm not terribly good at them, or at least I wasn't at first, and I've never got all the way through one without saving before every mission and shamelessly reloading if everything goes pear-shaped. When I first started, this was necessary to avoid complete mission failure and my entire team getting wiped out on the regular, but as I've improved I've also been increasingly tempted to stretch the definition of mission failure, a tendency that was shown up when I found myself taking a mulligan on a mission which had gone entirely according to plan right up until the last-moment death of a single soldier who just happened to be one of the ones I was sentimentally attached to. After that, I promised myself that on my latest runthrough I would only replay missions that were complete disasters and specifically would keep the result of any mission where the objectives were successfully achieved no matter how many soldiers got killed doing it. I have kept to that resolve, even for the mission that ended with only two soldiers still standing; it's been challenging, and included long stretches where I was struggling to field a team for missions (and at least two points where I had to automatically fail missions because I literally didn't have enough active soldiers to do them), but it was very satisfying when I overcame that and started building up the team again. There's some kind of life lesson in that, probably. The funny thing is that, although there were those stretches where it felt like we were limping along, in the end the campaign has taken about the same amount of time as all my earlier ones; I reached the end game in roughly the same number of missions and within a month, in-game time, of my previous longest campaign. Presumably that had something to with the fact that I still took do-overs on the missions that I completely failed; doing a run where I kept the result of every single mission, no matter how disastrous, would be an even more interesting challenge, but one that I don't think I'm a good enough player yet to survive.


. After I completed the latest runthrough of XCOM 2, I decided it was time for a change of pace, so I've been playing a platformer called SteamWorld Dig 2, which I assume I got in a bundle at some point because I don't remember ever specifically deciding to buy it. I've been playing it often enough to start seeing it behind my eyelids, and enjoying it a lot, and it's reminding me how much I also enjoyed playing the last platformer of this kind that I played (the excellent Yoku's Island Express), so I'm thinking maybe I should play this genre more often.


. Another thing I've been really enjoying lately is a new D&D Actual Play series called Natural Six, which put out some preview/prequel episodes a while back and released its official Episode 1 last week. The players are all charming and invested in their characters, and they and the DM all bounce off each other really well. New episodes are being released fortnightly, on Youtube or as a podcast, alternating with episodes of an after-action series where the players talk about the previous week's session.


. The random book selection for April was based around picking one of the oldest books on the to-be-read list – which in my case didn't actually result in one of the books that's been waiting to be read the longest, because I already had a large stack of unread books when I joined StoryGraph and I didn't make any effort to list them chronologically. Actually, it looks like I started by adding the unread books on my ereader, which necessarily are all more recent than when I got the ereader about a decade ago. I definitely have paper books that have been waiting longer than that.

The book that was randomly selected for me was The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, a young adult time travel story that I think I picked up as part of a special offer and had no idea what it was about until I started reading. There were some parts that I felt lacked the subtlety that I would have expected if it were a book for not-young adults, but on the whole I enjoyed it well enough and found it satisfying in the end. (Speaking of the end, it makes some interesting choices about which questions it leaves unanswered – although I've noticed that, because of the time travel, at least one of those questions is actually answered in the first chapter before the reader knows what the question is yet...)

The theme challenge for April is "a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming", and I haven't picked a book for it yet.

. I didn't agree with everything in the three Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials, but I enjoyed all three, and I'm excited to see what comes next in a way I haven't been for years, so as far as I'm concerned they're a success.


. We did not, in the end, achieve the feat of doing a full run-through more than a week before the show opened, but the show was a success anyway. We even got a reasonable write-up in the local paper, complete with front page photo. Next year, the big focus is going to be on doing a musical, which will be Mamma Mia.


. The reading challenge for December was "a book about somebody who is gifted"; I started reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, got bogged down, read the much shorter Rhianna and the Wild Magic by Dave Luckett instead, and then, having removed the pressure to finish, was able to also finish reading The Calculating Stars.


. I first read Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart's novel about the adventures of Number Ten Ox and his friend Li Kao, the scholar with a slight flaw in his character, when I was in university. I re-read it recently, and then finally got around to reading the two sequels, The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen - and I'm not sure whether I wish I hadn't. It's one of those situations where turning a one-off story into a series involves tweaking the premise to open it out, and in this case I felt like some of the things I'd loved about the original were lost in the process. One of the changes is that there's a subtle but significant shift in genre: Bridge of Birds is a series of whimsical adventures in which Master Li and Ox solve a number of apparently unrelated puzzles and problems which turn out in the end to be interconnected; the sequels are detective stories, in which Master Li is presented at the start with a mystery that takes the whole book to solve. There are still whimsical incidents along the way, but they don't land the same because one feels obliged to interrogate them about how they fit into the main plot instead of just enjoying them and letting it be a bonus if they fit into the plot at all. There's also a change in Ox's personality: in the first book, he's a naive young man going on the adventure of a lifetime to save people he cares deeply about; in the sequel, he's become a seasoned adventurer, a development which happened entirely off the page between books and left me feeling for a while like I wasn't sure I recognised him (and for even longer like, if he doesn't care so much about how the adventure turns out, why should I?).


. I decided about a month ago that it was about time I tried a long-form computer game again, and picked XCOM: Enemy Unknown out of my large pile of unplayed games on Steam. It's already cracked my top 10 most hours played. (Which is, I have to admit, partly due to there having been some stressful days in the past month where it was helpful to be able to submerge myself for a few hours in solving problems with no real-world consequences, but that's not the whole reason.)