. At board game club, we played Cosmic Encounter, which would have gone quite differently if anybody had read the rule book first; most of us were relying on the player who'd proposed the game to remind us how it went, and it turned out his memory of the rules wasn't quite as solid as he'd thought.


. I fell behind on Natural Six back in November, when my long service leave ended and my week was suddenly much less well supplied with opportunities to watch three-hour-long episodes, and what with one thing and another the backlog got significantly larger before I started actively trying to catch up, so I've been trailing behind ever since. ( Read more... )


. Another thing I'm all caught up with is Sesska's Doctor Who reactions - just in time for her to go on a break and not be posting any more for a while.


. I read A Room with a View by E.M. Forster for the Buzzword reading challenge (this month's prompt was "with"). It took me a while to get into it, but by the halfway mark I really wanted to see how things turned out. (I've repeated often enough the saying that no novel can survive the words "I don't care what happens to these people"; the thing that kept me going through this novel is that, once I got to know her, I did care what happened to Lucy.) ( Read more... )


. I had brunch in a cafe on Saturday morning, and was hit by not one but two surcharges. One was the usual surcharge when a business chooses to pass on the fee for paying electronically, but the other - which is new since last time I ate at that cafe - was a surcharge for It's Saturday. ( Read more... )


. One of the saints' days mentioned in The Hidden Almanac this week was the feast of Saint Caliper, the patron of those who travel the dreadful roads between ebook formats.


. Several times in the past few weeks, when I've popped into the local shop to get bread or whatever, my eye has been caught by a display of large varicolored marshmallows, imported from the US. This week I succumbed to temptation and bought a bag. They tasted terrible.

. I reached the ending of Monument Valley III, and my primary reaction was "Wait, was that the ending?". The narrative elements never did come together to form a satisfying story; where previous games have had minimalist but satisfying stories, this one just felt incomplete. The puzzles included some interesting new mechanisms, but did less with them than I feel earlier games in the series would have.


. At board game club, we played Great Western Trail: New Zealand, a game in the "moving little cubes around on a player mat" genre, which I've had mixed experiences with. ( Read more... )


. The Serpent's Egg is an early work by Caroline Stevermer, whose later and more polished fantasy novels include A College of Magics and half of Sorcery and Cecelia, both of which I've previously read and admired (and, I suppose it would be wise to remember, also The Glass Magician, which I bounced right off).( Read more... )

On the whole, it's colourful and messy and I don't think all the pieces really fit together - but I enjoyed it throughout, and after some of the reading experiences I've had lately, that's something to be grateful for.


. I was introduced during the week to a Youtube channel called ITV Retro, an apparently official collection of old ITV shows. The available selection apparently varies by region; from here, I can see episodes of Sapphire and Steel, Press Gang, The Prisoner, The Persuaders, several marionation shows including Thunderbirds, and something called Rising Damp.


. Among the reaction videos I watched this week was one for 1985's Ladyhawke, which stars Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer as star-crossed lovers and Matthew Broderick as the plucky wisecracking sidekick. (It's a bit of departure from Rutger Hauer's usual kind of role; I've read somewhere that he was originally cast as one of the villains, and then given a shot at the lead when the original lead actor pulled out.) I loved Ladyhawke when I was a kid, and it's still entertaining, though I always forget when I haven't seen it for a while just how aggressively 1980s the incidental music is.


. I mentioned a while ago that I was having trouble getting started on the latest jigsaw puzzle, and seem to have neglected to mention that I did get into it after a while. I finished it this week, and left it on display for a few days before packing it away yesterday. While I was disassembling it, there was a moment when I thought I'd dropped a puzzle piece off the edge of the table, and when I looked down there was a puzzle piece peeking out from under the sofa - but when I picked it up, it was a piece from the previous puzzle, that I finished a month ago.


. Recently, between the weather and some foot trouble, I haven't been getting out for a walk as often as I'd like, to the point that if I hadn't made a deliberate effort to avoid it last week would have been the first week since January that I only went for a walk once. This week has been much better, and I'm back up to my high-water mark of going for a walk five days out of seven. (I thought for a bit that I'd managed six days out of seven, for the first time since I started keeping the current records, but then I realised I'd miscounted the days.)