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Week in review: Week to 21 March
Mar. 22nd, 2026 10:25 am. Our season of short plays opened this week, to successful audiences. There was apparently a positive write-up in the local paper, but I didn't hear about it until it was too late to get hold of a copy. The play I'm in is a collection of skits on Shakespearean topics, with premises such as "What if Julius Caesar had asked the soothsayer for clarification?" and "What if Lady Macbeth had had a really good lawyer?" and "What if Richard III had been taken at his word on the 'my kingdom for a horse' thing?"
. I didn't make it to any board game meets this week because they all clashed with dress rehearsals.
. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice trays has established that using orange juice instead of water makes the ice irregular enough that it doesn't cling to the mould. It also established that I don't really have a regular use for blocks of frozen orange juice shaped like cat heads, so I'm probably just going to stop using the ice tray.
. I didn't get around to watching the National Theatre Importance of Being Earnest during the week it was available free to watch on Youtube. This was partly because I was busy, and partly because, despite the stacked cast, I've never been particularly enthusiastic about this production. My least favourite kind of production of a classic comedy is the kind that seems to think that it won't be funny without a whole bunch of new gags slathered over it, and if this production isn't one of those then the trailers I've seen are doing a bad job of representing it.
. I didn't make it to any board game meets this week because they all clashed with dress rehearsals.
. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice trays has established that using orange juice instead of water makes the ice irregular enough that it doesn't cling to the mould. It also established that I don't really have a regular use for blocks of frozen orange juice shaped like cat heads, so I'm probably just going to stop using the ice tray.
. I didn't get around to watching the National Theatre Importance of Being Earnest during the week it was available free to watch on Youtube. This was partly because I was busy, and partly because, despite the stacked cast, I've never been particularly enthusiastic about this production. My least favourite kind of production of a classic comedy is the kind that seems to think that it won't be funny without a whole bunch of new gags slathered over it, and if this production isn't one of those then the trailers I've seen are doing a bad job of representing it.
Book Chain, etc, Week 12
Mar. 22nd, 2026 09:51 am#9: A book with more pages than the previous book
February: Keyboard Keys
Watership Down by Richard Adams. I'm about halfway through, and enjoying it a lot.
February: Keyboard Keys
Watership Down by Richard Adams. I'm about halfway through, and enjoying it a lot.
Week in review: Week to 14 March
Mar. 15th, 2026 06:42 pm. At the weekly boardgame meet, we played Cockroach Soup (which is like Cockroach Salad but with more slurping, although one player refused to slurp and just said "slurp" instead), Flip 7 With A Vengeance (which is like Flip 7 only more so), Lovecraft Letter (which is like Love Letter with the option to unlock forbidden techniques that are more powerful but increase the chance that you'll go mad and get disqualified), The Mind, and Cheating Moth.
. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice cube tray has established that if I leave it out of the freezer for about fifteen minutes, the ice blocks will melt enough to relent their grip while otherwise retaining their shape. I will probably continue to use the dog tray more often, as I'm not the kind of person to know fifteen minutes in advance that I'll be wanting a cold drink. I have made a mental note to try with fruit juice and see if that affects the grippiness.
. I've played through all the prequel missions in the XCOM 2 "Tactical Legacy" DLC. There's a state I get into sometimes when I'm reading a book that I'm not really enjoying, where I'm still interested in seeing what happens next but what I'm really looking forward to is getting to the point where I've seen what happens next and can move on to something else; that's how I felt when I was doing the last few missions. One thing I can say for them is that they've given me a new appreciation of how the main game works as an ongoing story with a cast of familiar characters who grow and develop over time, with the player getting involved in guiding their development, and isn't just a bunch of arbitrary missions featuring an arbitrary bunch of people with random skill sets.
. Auditions have begun for our next production, which will be the Peanuts-inspired musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I remember auditioning for something years ago (it seems likely it was Putnam County, though it might not have been) with Charlie Brown's kite song from this musical, but I haven't been able to find where I stored the music for it. (I was undecided about whether I would actually audition with it this time, since usually I make a point of not auditioning with a piece from the musical I'm auditioning for, but it would have been nice to find it again regardless.)
. The BBC has announced the recovery of two more missing episodes from early Doctor Who, both from near the beginning of "The Daleks' Master Plan". This means we now have substantially more than we previously had of Adrienne Hill's run as a Doctor Who companion, and of Nicholas Courtney's first appearance on the series.
Coincidentally, the day after the announcement, I was poking around in my digital archive looking for the kite song, when I found a mysterious folder containing a single file with the informative name of "scan0003.jpg", which turned out to be a newspaper clipping from the last time an episode of "The Daleks' Master Plan" was recovered.
. The family walk continues.
. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice cube tray has established that if I leave it out of the freezer for about fifteen minutes, the ice blocks will melt enough to relent their grip while otherwise retaining their shape. I will probably continue to use the dog tray more often, as I'm not the kind of person to know fifteen minutes in advance that I'll be wanting a cold drink. I have made a mental note to try with fruit juice and see if that affects the grippiness.
. I've played through all the prequel missions in the XCOM 2 "Tactical Legacy" DLC. There's a state I get into sometimes when I'm reading a book that I'm not really enjoying, where I'm still interested in seeing what happens next but what I'm really looking forward to is getting to the point where I've seen what happens next and can move on to something else; that's how I felt when I was doing the last few missions. One thing I can say for them is that they've given me a new appreciation of how the main game works as an ongoing story with a cast of familiar characters who grow and develop over time, with the player getting involved in guiding their development, and isn't just a bunch of arbitrary missions featuring an arbitrary bunch of people with random skill sets.
. Auditions have begun for our next production, which will be the Peanuts-inspired musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I remember auditioning for something years ago (it seems likely it was Putnam County, though it might not have been) with Charlie Brown's kite song from this musical, but I haven't been able to find where I stored the music for it. (I was undecided about whether I would actually audition with it this time, since usually I make a point of not auditioning with a piece from the musical I'm auditioning for, but it would have been nice to find it again regardless.)
. The BBC has announced the recovery of two more missing episodes from early Doctor Who, both from near the beginning of "The Daleks' Master Plan". This means we now have substantially more than we previously had of Adrienne Hill's run as a Doctor Who companion, and of Nicholas Courtney's first appearance on the series.
Coincidentally, the day after the announcement, I was poking around in my digital archive looking for the kite song, when I found a mysterious folder containing a single file with the informative name of "scan0003.jpg", which turned out to be a newspaper clipping from the last time an episode of "The Daleks' Master Plan" was recovered.
. The family walk continues.
Book Chain, etc, Week 11
Mar. 15th, 2026 08:24 am#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
Devil in the Mountain: done. The pace picked up toward the end, which is perhaps less a statement about the book itself than about how I had enough grasp of the concepts by then that I wasn't having to keep pausing to process.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Having completed Bleak House, I have to admit that a section in the last quarter fully justifies its inclusion as a detective story, complete with murder, the suspect the police consider obvious but the audience knows didn't do it, the suspect the audience is given every reason to think did it short of actually showing the murder being done, and so on, all the way to the summation in the drawing-room. There's some impressive setting-up of things that will turn out to be important later. There's even a bit where the detective finishes a conversation and pauses on the way out the door to ask one last thing.
I enjoyed the rest of the novel, too, although some of the directions the "heroine is epically clueless about being in love" plot went were, to put it politely, a bit odd.
Miscellaneous
For no other reason than because I reached the front of the hold queue,
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
A collection of essays with the conceit that Green is writing reviews of, and giving ratings out of five to, random things that it would be foolish to give ratings out of five to, such as "Viral Meningitis" and "The Lifespan of the Human Race". Most of the essays end up being about more than just the thing being reviewed and rated: The first essay, for instance, is nominally about the song "You'll Never Walk Alone", but also covers the history of the musical it originated in and also looks at the phenomenon of sports fans adopting club songs and Green's history with football club whose fans adopted this song in particular. Many of them, as the title suggests, end up having something to say about humanity's place in, and effect on, the world.
I'm enjoying the essays, and finding it a useful book on days when I want to keep my reading streak going but don't want to get involved in anything long and complicated.
Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor.
A university history department staffed by Loveable Eccentrics has access to time machines which they use for conducting first-hand historical research. In due course, there is Plot involving people who wish to use the time machines for more selfish purposes.
( Read more... )
I admit that I did get into it in the run-up to the dramatic climax, which I was suitably engaged by, and the same for the second dramatic climax that, due to an oddity of the plot structure, followed several chapters later. However, the blatant sequel hook in the epilogue failed to find purchase, and I don't anticipate continuing with the series.
Devil in the Mountain: done. The pace picked up toward the end, which is perhaps less a statement about the book itself than about how I had enough grasp of the concepts by then that I wasn't having to keep pausing to process.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Having completed Bleak House, I have to admit that a section in the last quarter fully justifies its inclusion as a detective story, complete with murder, the suspect the police consider obvious but the audience knows didn't do it, the suspect the audience is given every reason to think did it short of actually showing the murder being done, and so on, all the way to the summation in the drawing-room. There's some impressive setting-up of things that will turn out to be important later. There's even a bit where the detective finishes a conversation and pauses on the way out the door to ask one last thing.
I enjoyed the rest of the novel, too, although some of the directions the "heroine is epically clueless about being in love" plot went were, to put it politely, a bit odd.
Miscellaneous
For no other reason than because I reached the front of the hold queue,
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
A collection of essays with the conceit that Green is writing reviews of, and giving ratings out of five to, random things that it would be foolish to give ratings out of five to, such as "Viral Meningitis" and "The Lifespan of the Human Race". Most of the essays end up being about more than just the thing being reviewed and rated: The first essay, for instance, is nominally about the song "You'll Never Walk Alone", but also covers the history of the musical it originated in and also looks at the phenomenon of sports fans adopting club songs and Green's history with football club whose fans adopted this song in particular. Many of them, as the title suggests, end up having something to say about humanity's place in, and effect on, the world.
I'm enjoying the essays, and finding it a useful book on days when I want to keep my reading streak going but don't want to get involved in anything long and complicated.
Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor.
A university history department staffed by Loveable Eccentrics has access to time machines which they use for conducting first-hand historical research. In due course, there is Plot involving people who wish to use the time machines for more selfish purposes.
( Read more... )
I admit that I did get into it in the run-up to the dramatic climax, which I was suitably engaged by, and the same for the second dramatic climax that, due to an oddity of the plot structure, followed several chapters later. However, the blatant sequel hook in the epilogue failed to find purchase, and I don't anticipate continuing with the series.
Week in review: Week to 7 March
Mar. 8th, 2026 03:54 pm. We had a long board game meet on the public holiday, where we played Unfathomable, in which the crew and passengers of a ship under attack from Lovecraftian sea monsters is trying to get safely back to port, unaware that some of the people on board are secretly working with the monsters.( Read more... )
After Unfathomable, we played a game of Citadels.
. On the weekend, we played a couple more games of Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )
. I've started a new jigsaw puzzle, and completed most of the edges. I like the artwork on this one better than the previous one, and the introductory booklet doesn't set my teeth on edge the same way. ( Read more... )
. I've completed the story campaign in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The final boss fight went pretty smoothly. ( Read more... )
One of the other DLC includes a set of bonus missions that are supposedly set in the years between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, with a framing device where one of the characters from XCOM 2 is telling stories about past experiences. I've been trying those next, ( Read more... )
After Unfathomable, we played a game of Citadels.
. On the weekend, we played a couple more games of Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )
. I've started a new jigsaw puzzle, and completed most of the edges. I like the artwork on this one better than the previous one, and the introductory booklet doesn't set my teeth on edge the same way. ( Read more... )
. I've completed the story campaign in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The final boss fight went pretty smoothly. ( Read more... )
One of the other DLC includes a set of bonus missions that are supposedly set in the years between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, with a framing device where one of the characters from XCOM 2 is telling stories about past experiences. I've been trying those next, ( Read more... )
Book Chain, etc, Week 10
Mar. 8th, 2026 11:28 am#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
Still making slow progress on Devil in the Mountain. Geology has not been a particular interest of mine, so there are a lot of new concepts to take on board.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book one of your friends gave 4 stars out of 5
After a long pause, I decided to finish off The Amateur Cracksman, in order to check off the challenge prompt and perhaps with some slight hope that the finale would improve my opinion of it.
It is finished. The finale did not improve my opinion. I decidedly do not like Raffles, who is a bad man and a bad friend and not even that good a criminal; I don't really like Bunny, either, but I feel sorry for him, which doesn't help matters.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Attempt two: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. A large and interwoven cast and a complicated mystery involving several mysterious deaths, an orphan with an unknowingly significant parentage, etc.
It's going much better than Mythos was; after three days I'm already over 500 pages in.
One of the reasons I picked it is that it's also the earliest novel on the Haycraft List of Detective Story Cornerstones, which (from my current viewpoint) is a bit puzzling. It certainly involves the unravelling of a mystery, but it's short on detectives: one shows up about a third of the way in, does barely anything in a few scenes, and then disappears and (so far) has not been heard from again. Mind you, during his brief time in the spotlight he does manage to find the time to fit in a dramatic revelation that an innocent bystander was him in disguise, so I suppose one can see a family resemblance to certain later examples of the breed.
Still making slow progress on Devil in the Mountain. Geology has not been a particular interest of mine, so there are a lot of new concepts to take on board.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book one of your friends gave 4 stars out of 5
After a long pause, I decided to finish off The Amateur Cracksman, in order to check off the challenge prompt and perhaps with some slight hope that the finale would improve my opinion of it.
It is finished. The finale did not improve my opinion. I decidedly do not like Raffles, who is a bad man and a bad friend and not even that good a criminal; I don't really like Bunny, either, but I feel sorry for him, which doesn't help matters.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Attempt two: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. A large and interwoven cast and a complicated mystery involving several mysterious deaths, an orphan with an unknowingly significant parentage, etc.
It's going much better than Mythos was; after three days I'm already over 500 pages in.
One of the reasons I picked it is that it's also the earliest novel on the Haycraft List of Detective Story Cornerstones, which (from my current viewpoint) is a bit puzzling. It certainly involves the unravelling of a mystery, but it's short on detectives: one shows up about a third of the way in, does barely anything in a few scenes, and then disappears and (so far) has not been heard from again. Mind you, during his brief time in the spotlight he does manage to find the time to fit in a dramatic revelation that an innocent bystander was him in disguise, so I suppose one can see a family resemblance to certain later examples of the breed.
Bingo card
Mar. 3rd, 2026 04:00 pmI was cleaning old notifications out of my inbox, and was reminded that I have an incomplete ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
genprompt_bingo fic bingo card that I signed up for on a whim and which will be celebrating its 10th birthday in a month.
After dusting it off and filling in the last few years of progress (which has mostly been fills for Three Sentence Ficathon, but some of those do pass the minimum word count), it turns out that I'm closer to completing a line than I'd realised — I have a couple of lines four-fifths complete, lacking only a fic fitting the prompts "Daily Rituals" or "Illness".
I also have a strong three-fifths of a line that could be completed with fics on the prompts "Dread" and, somehow, "Gabon". (I doubt I could manage to write anything substantial about the country, but it would presumably be acceptable to write about a character played by Michael Gabon — although the first such character to come to mind is obviously ineligible for other reasons.)
[edit, 5 minutes later: Except of course that the distinguished actor is Michael Gambon, so I suppose it's the nation or nothing.]
genprompt_bingo fic bingo card that I signed up for on a whim and which will be celebrating its 10th birthday in a month.After dusting it off and filling in the last few years of progress (which has mostly been fills for Three Sentence Ficathon, but some of those do pass the minimum word count), it turns out that I'm closer to completing a line than I'd realised — I have a couple of lines four-fifths complete, lacking only a fic fitting the prompts "Daily Rituals" or "Illness".
I also have a strong three-fifths of a line that could be completed with fics on the prompts "Dread" and, somehow, "Gabon". (I doubt I could manage to write anything substantial about the country, but it would presumably be acceptable to write about a character played by Michael Gabon — although the first such character to come to mind is obviously ineligible for other reasons.)
[edit, 5 minutes later: Except of course that the distinguished actor is Michael Gambon, so I suppose it's the nation or nothing.]
Week in review: Week to 28 February
Mar. 2nd, 2026 07:50 am. The family walk-and-talk has successfully occurred for two weeks running.
. The weekend boardgame group continued to play Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )
. At the weekly game meet, I played Cockroach Salad, 7 Wonders, The Mind, The Royal Game of Ur, and Thirty-One. ( Read more... )
. I have completed the jigsaw puzzle I was working on. It made a bad initial impression which it has not subsequently succeeded in overcoming. ( Read more... ) I have a second puzzle from the same series, and I'm going to do it next because it's there (and I'm curious about whether the nonsense booklet is a regular feature), but it's going to have to work a bit to gain my good will.
. I went to another concert, at the same venue and with mostly the same group of friends. This week it was the Hindley Street Country Club, which is much more my kind of music; I had an okay time last week, but this week I really enjoyed myself, ending with a big grin on my face and at one point going so far as to consider thinking about getting up and dancing. ( Read more... )
. I am continuing to play and enjoy XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's an indication of how much extra content is in the DLC that this first play-through has been going for over two weeks, during which I've been playing fairly often, and I'm still a fair distance from the final boss mission. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the final boss mission; another thing that the DLC adds to the game is a series of mini-boss missions that are less intense versions of the final boss mission and provide opportunities to develop and practice useful strategies. Defeating each of the mini-bosses also results in a reward of a unique powerful weapon that I expect I will be glad of in the final battle.
. The weekend boardgame group continued to play Ticket to Ride Legacy. ( Read more... )
. At the weekly game meet, I played Cockroach Salad, 7 Wonders, The Mind, The Royal Game of Ur, and Thirty-One. ( Read more... )
. I have completed the jigsaw puzzle I was working on. It made a bad initial impression which it has not subsequently succeeded in overcoming. ( Read more... ) I have a second puzzle from the same series, and I'm going to do it next because it's there (and I'm curious about whether the nonsense booklet is a regular feature), but it's going to have to work a bit to gain my good will.
. I went to another concert, at the same venue and with mostly the same group of friends. This week it was the Hindley Street Country Club, which is much more my kind of music; I had an okay time last week, but this week I really enjoyed myself, ending with a big grin on my face and at one point going so far as to consider thinking about getting up and dancing. ( Read more... )
. I am continuing to play and enjoy XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It's an indication of how much extra content is in the DLC that this first play-through has been going for over two weeks, during which I've been playing fairly often, and I'm still a fair distance from the final boss mission. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the final boss mission; another thing that the DLC adds to the game is a series of mini-boss missions that are less intense versions of the final boss mission and provide opportunities to develop and practice useful strategies. Defeating each of the mini-bosses also results in a reward of a unique powerful weapon that I expect I will be glad of in the final battle.
Book Chain, etc, Week 9
Mar. 2nd, 2026 06:48 am#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Still at it, but it's slow going. It's interesting, but it requires concentration and it's not the kind of book where, when you're not reading it, you're actively looking forward to picking it up again. (At least for me; someone who was more into geology in general might feel differently.)
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Attempt one: Mythos by Stephen Fry. A collection of retellings of stories from Greek mythology.
I have not yet officially given up on it, but I'm less than a quarter of the way through and I have a strong feeling I'm not going to make it to the end. Fry is at a disadvantage with me, because I've been reading various authors' retellings of Greek myths since I was small and I already know most of the stories (and most of the facts he sprinkles in about modern words that derive from them), so it's standing or falling on the execution. I had hopes for the execution -- after all, it's Stephen Fry -- but so far it's not going well. The tone feels inconsistent: it doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind whether it's aiming for a formal register or a colloquial tone, or whether it's recounting the myths as something long ago and far away or getting right up in the action and into the characters' heads, and switches from one to another from sentence to sentence in a way I'm finding rather irritating.
Someone I know is listening to the audio book and enjoying it, and perhaps that would be the way to go; presumably Fry's performance would help.
Anyway, we're still in the early parts of the story, where the world is full of immortal personifications of abstract concepts and humans haven't been invented yet. I'm going to give it until the humans show up, and see if the narrative settles down when there are actual people in it. My hopes are not high, though.
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Still at it, but it's slow going. It's interesting, but it requires concentration and it's not the kind of book where, when you're not reading it, you're actively looking forward to picking it up again. (At least for me; someone who was more into geology in general might feel differently.)
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book you discovered via the 'Similar Users' toggle on the News Feed
Attempt one: Mythos by Stephen Fry. A collection of retellings of stories from Greek mythology.
I have not yet officially given up on it, but I'm less than a quarter of the way through and I have a strong feeling I'm not going to make it to the end. Fry is at a disadvantage with me, because I've been reading various authors' retellings of Greek myths since I was small and I already know most of the stories (and most of the facts he sprinkles in about modern words that derive from them), so it's standing or falling on the execution. I had hopes for the execution -- after all, it's Stephen Fry -- but so far it's not going well. The tone feels inconsistent: it doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind whether it's aiming for a formal register or a colloquial tone, or whether it's recounting the myths as something long ago and far away or getting right up in the action and into the characters' heads, and switches from one to another from sentence to sentence in a way I'm finding rather irritating.
Someone I know is listening to the audio book and enjoying it, and perhaps that would be the way to go; presumably Fry's performance would help.
Anyway, we're still in the early parts of the story, where the world is full of immortal personifications of abstract concepts and humans haven't been invented yet. I'm going to give it until the humans show up, and see if the narrative settles down when there are actual people in it. My hopes are not high, though.
Fiction log - February 2026
Mar. 1st, 2026 10:30 amFiction 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)
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)
Tags:
- alexander hamilton,
- andy weir,
- ben crystal,
- caroline stevermer,
- dashiell hammett,
- david crystal,
- e w hornung,
- elizabeth gaskell,
- fiasco,
- fiction log,
- freeman wills crofts,
- keri smith,
- knives out,
- legends,
- natural six,
- oz: adaptations,
- sneakers,
- stephen fry,
- the blues brothers,
- triangle and robert,
- ursula vernon,
- warwick davis,
- xcom,
- zombies run
Week in review: Week to 21 February
Feb. 24th, 2026 10:30 am. At the weekly board game meet, we played Liar's Uno while we were waiting to see who turned up, and then the main game was Clank!.
( Read more... )
. I went with friends to a concert by the iconic punk rock band The Living End. It's not my kind of music particularly, but my friends were going and it was at a nice outdoor venue in good weather, so I figured I might as well go along and see how it went. I still don't think it's my kind of music particularly, but I had a good time.
. I went on a walk with some of my relatives and we talked about how our weeks had been going. We're hoping to make it a regular event.
. I was looking for new ice cube trays and decided I wanted flexible silicone ones instead of rigid plastic. I couldn't find any regular cube-shaped silicone trays, but I came across a set that made ice blocks shaped like animal heads, and decided that a bit of extra whimsy wouldn't hurt. They were available in dog heads and cat heads, so I got one of each. The dog heads are working a treat, but I haven't been able to get the cat heads out of the trays -- the extra surface area of the whisker details is providing too much grip on the ice blocks.
. Since I'd had to pay for it as part of the bundle, and it had already downloaded itself, I figured I might as well try out War of the Chosen, the big expansion DLC for XCOM 2. I have mixed feelings about parts of it, but on the whole I'm having a positive experience.
( Read more... )
Something I'd expected to dislike, but actually haven't so far, is that several of the obligatory story missions have been revamped specifically to rule out the easy solutions that players had found for achieving the objectives. There's one particular mid-game mission which had become effectively a solved problem where I just had to go through the same sequence of moves each time I played it; the revamped version breaks that sequence of moves, so that I had to actually work at completing the mission, and the result was that I had fun playing it and was interested in how it would turn out. It remains to be seen whether I will have the same response to the final boss mission, which I gather has been rejiggered specifically to remove the strategically-convenient geography that I've been relying on over multiple play-throughs to make the final boss fight much easier than the game designers intended it to be.
( Read more... )
. I went with friends to a concert by the iconic punk rock band The Living End. It's not my kind of music particularly, but my friends were going and it was at a nice outdoor venue in good weather, so I figured I might as well go along and see how it went. I still don't think it's my kind of music particularly, but I had a good time.
. I went on a walk with some of my relatives and we talked about how our weeks had been going. We're hoping to make it a regular event.
. I was looking for new ice cube trays and decided I wanted flexible silicone ones instead of rigid plastic. I couldn't find any regular cube-shaped silicone trays, but I came across a set that made ice blocks shaped like animal heads, and decided that a bit of extra whimsy wouldn't hurt. They were available in dog heads and cat heads, so I got one of each. The dog heads are working a treat, but I haven't been able to get the cat heads out of the trays -- the extra surface area of the whisker details is providing too much grip on the ice blocks.
. Since I'd had to pay for it as part of the bundle, and it had already downloaded itself, I figured I might as well try out War of the Chosen, the big expansion DLC for XCOM 2. I have mixed feelings about parts of it, but on the whole I'm having a positive experience.
( Read more... )
Something I'd expected to dislike, but actually haven't so far, is that several of the obligatory story missions have been revamped specifically to rule out the easy solutions that players had found for achieving the objectives. There's one particular mid-game mission which had become effectively a solved problem where I just had to go through the same sequence of moves each time I played it; the revamped version breaks that sequence of moves, so that I had to actually work at completing the mission, and the result was that I had fun playing it and was interested in how it would turn out. It remains to be seen whether I will have the same response to the final boss mission, which I gather has been rejiggered specifically to remove the strategically-convenient geography that I've been relying on over multiple play-throughs to make the final boss fight much easier than the game designers intended it to be.
Book Chain, etc, Week 8
Feb. 23rd, 2026 05:11 pm#8: A book with a cover in the same colour as the previous book
With some assistance from Talpa – a search engine associated with LibraryThing that can search books by cover features like colour or what's depicted in the cover illustration – I've settled on:
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Simon Lamb is a geologist who has spent decades studying the processes that create mountain ranges. The book is partly an explanation of what is known about those processes and partly a memoir of his field trips to Bolivia studying the geological history of the Andes. The memoir parts remind me of things like David Attenborough's memoirs of making his nature documentaries.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book discovered using ‘Browse Similar Books’ on one of your favourite books
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A small crew of astronauts and scientists are sent on a desperate interstellar mission in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to a problem that threatens all life on the planet. There's a joke I want to make here but I'm not sure if it would count as a spoiler (there's a curveball thrown in at the end of the first act that the blurb of the book just hints at; on the other hand, the trailers for the upcoming film adaptation are making it an explicit selling point).
This is science fiction of the old school, where the plot driver is "Here is an interesting scientific puzzle; watch the protagonists figure it out". There's one big central puzzle – the threatens-all-life-on-Earth problem – and a bunch of smaller ones that they have to overcome along the way. The characters have enough personality to lend colour to the narrative, but there are no real character arcs and nobody ever really does anything except to advance the mechanism of the story.
( Read more... )
With some assistance from Talpa – a search engine associated with LibraryThing that can search books by cover features like colour or what's depicted in the cover illustration – I've settled on:
Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb.
Simon Lamb is a geologist who has spent decades studying the processes that create mountain ranges. The book is partly an explanation of what is known about those processes and partly a memoir of his field trips to Bolivia studying the geological history of the Andes. The memoir parts remind me of things like David Attenborough's memoirs of making his nature documentaries.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book discovered using ‘Browse Similar Books’ on one of your favourite books
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
A small crew of astronauts and scientists are sent on a desperate interstellar mission in a last-ditch attempt to find a solution to a problem that threatens all life on the planet. There's a joke I want to make here but I'm not sure if it would count as a spoiler (there's a curveball thrown in at the end of the first act that the blurb of the book just hints at; on the other hand, the trailers for the upcoming film adaptation are making it an explicit selling point).
This is science fiction of the old school, where the plot driver is "Here is an interesting scientific puzzle; watch the protagonists figure it out". There's one big central puzzle – the threatens-all-life-on-Earth problem – and a bunch of smaller ones that they have to overcome along the way. The characters have enough personality to lend colour to the narrative, but there are no real character arcs and nobody ever really does anything except to advance the mechanism of the story.
( Read more... )
Week in review: Week to 14 February
Feb. 15th, 2026 01:42 pm. 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.
. 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.
Notes on a music collection, part 1
Feb. 14th, 2026 10:14 pmAccording to my music player, my digital collection consists of 2,542 tracks, with a total running time of 143 hours and 39 minutes.
The phrase "a song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks" is going to show up often enough that I should probably come up with a snappy abbreviation.
( Read more... )
The phrase "a song I don't particularly care for from an album I got for one of the other tracks" is going to show up often enough that I should probably come up with a snappy abbreviation.
( Read more... )
Week in review: Week to 7 February
Feb. 8th, 2026 11:53 am. At board game club, we played Cockroach Salad, 27th Passenger, and Dixit.
27th Passenger is a deduction game in which the aim is to identify which of the other passengers on a train are the other players in disguise and eliminate them before they do the same to you. I did well; I achieved the first successful elimination, and arguably the second, although it would be difficult to say definitely who was second since that round was a bloodbath that saw three more players eliminated, leaving only me and one other player standing. The other player turned out to be a step ahead, and got me one round before I would have got him.
. After a bit of a break, I'm making reasonable progress on another jigsaw puzzle, though I'm not getting as big into it as with some others I've tried. This is the first puzzle I've attempted from this manufacturer, and I'm not impressed by the engineering quality of the pieces (they're a fair bit better than the one I had to give up on partway through, but that's a very low bar to clear). I'm also not finding myself engaged by the picture; it's one of the kind with lots of famous fictional characters hidden in it, but I don't recognise all of them and I'm not feeling very enthused about the ones that I do recognise.
. Continuing to make progress with Natural Six; this week I watched the episode "The Last Ride of Calypso Moonrise", which was a lot of fun and in no way like what I had expected from the title.
. I finished my run-through of XCOM 2 on the easier difficulty, and, as generally happens when a run goes well, immediately wanted to start another run.
There's a big sale on Steam for the XCOM games this weekend, because it's the tenth anniversary of the launch of XCOM 2, so I took another look at the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which I've wanted to try for ages but put off because it can only be bought as part of a pricey bundle with a bunch of other DLCs that don't interest me. The bundle was down to around ten dollars, which I decided was a reasonable price I'd be willing to pay for just "Shen's Last Gift", so I bought it.
What I hadn't anticipated was that Steam would immediately start downloading and installing all the DLC in the bundle without asking me first, which would have been mildly irritating without the fact that the bundle includes the big update that changes things throughout the game and adds several new fully-voiced characters and weighs nearly as much as the base game itself. It was still downloading when I went to bed.
27th Passenger is a deduction game in which the aim is to identify which of the other passengers on a train are the other players in disguise and eliminate them before they do the same to you. I did well; I achieved the first successful elimination, and arguably the second, although it would be difficult to say definitely who was second since that round was a bloodbath that saw three more players eliminated, leaving only me and one other player standing. The other player turned out to be a step ahead, and got me one round before I would have got him.
. After a bit of a break, I'm making reasonable progress on another jigsaw puzzle, though I'm not getting as big into it as with some others I've tried. This is the first puzzle I've attempted from this manufacturer, and I'm not impressed by the engineering quality of the pieces (they're a fair bit better than the one I had to give up on partway through, but that's a very low bar to clear). I'm also not finding myself engaged by the picture; it's one of the kind with lots of famous fictional characters hidden in it, but I don't recognise all of them and I'm not feeling very enthused about the ones that I do recognise.
. Continuing to make progress with Natural Six; this week I watched the episode "The Last Ride of Calypso Moonrise", which was a lot of fun and in no way like what I had expected from the title.
. I finished my run-through of XCOM 2 on the easier difficulty, and, as generally happens when a run goes well, immediately wanted to start another run.
There's a big sale on Steam for the XCOM games this weekend, because it's the tenth anniversary of the launch of XCOM 2, so I took another look at the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC, which I've wanted to try for ages but put off because it can only be bought as part of a pricey bundle with a bunch of other DLCs that don't interest me. The bundle was down to around ten dollars, which I decided was a reasonable price I'd be willing to pay for just "Shen's Last Gift", so I bought it.
What I hadn't anticipated was that Steam would immediately start downloading and installing all the DLC in the bundle without asking me first, which would have been mildly irritating without the fact that the bundle includes the big update that changes things throughout the game and adds several new fully-voiced characters and weighs nearly as much as the base game itself. It was still downloading when I went to bed.
Other reading in Week 6
Feb. 8th, 2026 10:18 amNo progress on finding a colour match for the book chain, but I've got other reading done:
January: Title containing "Before" or "After"
Before Dorothy, Hazel Gaynor. A historical novel telling a version of the life of Dorothy Gale's Auntie Em.
It's a straight historical, with no fantasy elements; one of the things it takes from the 1939 movie is the idea that Dorothy's trip to Oz was a dream inspired by things and people encountered in the waking world. Consequently, the cast of characters includes real-world analogues for the Wicked Witch (very similar to the movie's version), the Wizard (signficantly different), Glinda, and so on. Another thing it takes from the movie is that Tornado Day happens in the 1930s, allowing the author to make use of the Dust Bowl and the Depression; I was mostly able to roll with it but did occasionally blink at the inclusion of things that my head considers definitely post-Oz. (There's just something weird about the idea of Dorothy Gale sitting in Kansas reading Anne of Green Gables.)
I'm not sure how it would read as a straight historical for someone who wasn't familiar with The Wizard of Oz and didn't notice the references; I was initially rather distracted going "that's from that bit in the movie" and "that's from the book", and more interested in collecting clues about how the author was planning to deal with Tornado Day than in the characters for their own sake, but I did start getting involved in it once I'd settled to my satisfaction what kind of story to expect. My initial reaction when I realised what the driving question of the climax was going to be was "oh, this again?", but in the event I was sincerely invested in how it would play out.
I do think it could have done with another editing pass specifically to assess which of the references were actually contributing something worth keeping in; not every mention of circus animals need to include "lions and tigers and bears" (four separate times, I counted), and it felt like every red thing was ruby and just about every green thing was "emerald" -- though, having said that, I was struck by a moment near the end when one of the things I would have expected to be emerald was merely "green", which effectively undercut the moment in a way that I would like to think was deliberate.
Miscellaneous
Fiasco by Jason Morningstar. The source-book for a narrative role-playing game/long-form improvisational exercise for creating stories of "powerful ambition and poor impulse control", inspired by films like Fargo and Blood Simple. This was a re-read; I've owned the book for years, since I saw a demonstration game, but have never had any success at rounding up some people to play it with (nor the requisite impressively-large number of dice required).
You Say Potato: The Story of English Accents by Ben & David Crystal. Ben is an actor, David is a linguist, both have a professional interest in accents and how they develop and what they signify. The book includes a section about their work in the Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation project, which is where I first encountered them. I'm about halfway through, and have not yet reached the section promised on the back cover which addresses the vital question: "Has anybody ever actually said 'po-TAH-to'?"
The style is very conversational, and I have a feeling the audio book version would be a lot of fun to listen to.
January: Title containing "Before" or "After"
Before Dorothy, Hazel Gaynor. A historical novel telling a version of the life of Dorothy Gale's Auntie Em.
It's a straight historical, with no fantasy elements; one of the things it takes from the 1939 movie is the idea that Dorothy's trip to Oz was a dream inspired by things and people encountered in the waking world. Consequently, the cast of characters includes real-world analogues for the Wicked Witch (very similar to the movie's version), the Wizard (signficantly different), Glinda, and so on. Another thing it takes from the movie is that Tornado Day happens in the 1930s, allowing the author to make use of the Dust Bowl and the Depression; I was mostly able to roll with it but did occasionally blink at the inclusion of things that my head considers definitely post-Oz. (There's just something weird about the idea of Dorothy Gale sitting in Kansas reading Anne of Green Gables.)
I'm not sure how it would read as a straight historical for someone who wasn't familiar with The Wizard of Oz and didn't notice the references; I was initially rather distracted going "that's from that bit in the movie" and "that's from the book", and more interested in collecting clues about how the author was planning to deal with Tornado Day than in the characters for their own sake, but I did start getting involved in it once I'd settled to my satisfaction what kind of story to expect. My initial reaction when I realised what the driving question of the climax was going to be was "oh, this again?", but in the event I was sincerely invested in how it would play out.
I do think it could have done with another editing pass specifically to assess which of the references were actually contributing something worth keeping in; not every mention of circus animals need to include "lions and tigers and bears" (four separate times, I counted), and it felt like every red thing was ruby and just about every green thing was "emerald" -- though, having said that, I was struck by a moment near the end when one of the things I would have expected to be emerald was merely "green", which effectively undercut the moment in a way that I would like to think was deliberate.
Miscellaneous
Fiasco by Jason Morningstar. The source-book for a narrative role-playing game/long-form improvisational exercise for creating stories of "powerful ambition and poor impulse control", inspired by films like Fargo and Blood Simple. This was a re-read; I've owned the book for years, since I saw a demonstration game, but have never had any success at rounding up some people to play it with (nor the requisite impressively-large number of dice required).
You Say Potato: The Story of English Accents by Ben & David Crystal. Ben is an actor, David is a linguist, both have a professional interest in accents and how they develop and what they signify. The book includes a section about their work in the Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation project, which is where I first encountered them. I'm about halfway through, and have not yet reached the section promised on the back cover which addresses the vital question: "Has anybody ever actually said 'po-TAH-to'?"
The style is very conversational, and I have a feeling the audio book version would be a lot of fun to listen to.
