Week in review: Week to 25 October

Oct. 26th, 2025 09:21 am
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[personal profile] pedanther
I've been working on a system of noting down things for the blog post as I go through the week. Read more... )


At board game club, someone brought along a copy of Finspan, the fish-themed spin-off of the hit game Wingspan. Read more... )

While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, we also played a card game called Tacta. Read more... )


Since I've been playing a few logic puzzle games on the computer lately, Steam has started suggesting more that I might like. I've tried out a few demos, including:Read more... )


I mentioned last week that I'd signed up for a new service that sends notifications when an author has a new book out. I've received several notifications since then; none of them for the authors I'm really interested in, but the level of activity is promising.


Around the World in Eighty Emails continues. Phileas Fogg and his entourage have just set sail from India to Rangoon.

Book Chain, weeks 30, 31, 32 & 33

Oct. 26th, 2025 08:46 am
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[personal profile] pedanther
#31: Read a book that is longer than the previous book.

In the absence of an obvious candidate, I decided this was my opportunity to finally get around to Harley Quinn: Redemption by Rachael Allen, which I've been meaning to read since I finished the previous book of the series last year. Then it took a couple of weeks for the library's copy to come in (during which I read other things, but nothing that fit the prompt), and then another week or so for me to properly get into it -- not because it's not good, but because one of the things it's good at is the sense of dread that pervades the first half, which had me reading a chapter or two and then getting stressed and putting it down again. Once the shoe had dropped and the plot really got going, I finished it in a day.

This was the third and final part of a trilogy, which I read at least partly because I was curious about how Allen was going to manage writing an inspirational young adult trilogy featuring a character whose standard origin story ends with her falling into a murderous cult and becoming a homicidal supervillain. That -- obviously, in retrospect -- doesn't happen in this version, where Harley gets a lucky break that leads to her having a significantly better emotional support network than in the standard version, so she has some wobbles but never loses herself and the darkest she gets is 'vigilante with somewhat questionable methods'. The first two books take an interesting stance that could be summed up as "Harley's standard origin story is what people think they know", so you get to see events that become rumours that resemble the standard origin story, but also see how the rumours are often missing or misrepresenting key details and in some cases are just plain wrong.

The third book has two things to achieve: first, to tell an exciting story about Harley and her allies investigating a series of kidnappings that the police don't seem interested in, which it does effectively, and second, to thread the needle of paying off the story's themes and plot threads while bringing the story to an end suitable for a young adult audience, which I'm not convinced it achieves. The author palms a few cards in order to bring the story to a tidy conclusion, which I found a bit too tidy; it gives up all pretence that this version of Harley is ever going to be a villain, even just in the minds of the public, and lets her settle down and enjoy the rest of her life without any lingering traces of the bad reputation that was gathering around her in the earlier chapters. It feels kind of like it's saying that all Harley's adventures are now over, which feels particularly odd since this version of Harley is still barely out of her teens. I would have appreciated a few loose ends, some indication that although Harley has resolved the main issues she still has adventures ahead of her.

Overall, I did enjoy the trilogy and I'm glad I read it.

Rejected video for Chucky Day post

Oct. 25th, 2025 06:02 pm
neonvincent: For posts about food and cooking (All your bouillabaisse are belong to us)
[personal profile] neonvincent
I found this video too noisy for Drink to 2025 Carolina Crown for a drum corps Halloween.

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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Eight works new to me. Three fantasies, two horror, two SF, and one hard-to-classify RPG. One of the SF books is pretty horrory, so maybe that should be three fantasies, three horror, one SF, and one hard-to-classify RPG.

Books Received, October 18 — October 24

Poll #33761 Books Received, October 18 — October 24
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Abyss by Nicholas Binge (May 2026)
5 (13.2%)

Testimony of Mute Things by Lois McMaster Bujold (October 2025)
20 (52.6%)

Morsel by Carter Keane (April 2026)
3 (7.9%)

The Cove by Claire Rose (May 2026)
5 (13.2%)

Outgunned by Riccardo ​“Rico” Sirignano & Simone Formicola, with art by Daniela Giubellini (December 2024)
4 (10.5%)

And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer (May 2026)
15 (39.5%)

Lightning Runes by Harry Turtledove (March 2026)
6 (15.8%)

A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi Vo (May 2026)
18 (47.4%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
30 (78.9%)

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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


High school student and semi-professional tarot card reader Danika Dizon assists her PI mother to look for a missing person... a teen who vanished after Danika gave her a tarot card reading.

Death in the Cards by Mia P. Manansala
neonvincent: For posts about food and cooking (All your bouillabaisse are belong to us)
[personal profile] neonvincent
I used this for the preview image to 'Food, Inc. 2' worksheet for National Food Day.

neonvincent: For posts about cats and activities involving uniforms. (Krosp)
[personal profile] neonvincent
I used the preview image but not the video itself in Ohio State and Michigan marching bands for National Horror Movie Day.

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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The August 2023 Nightmares Underneath Bundle featuring The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Chthonstone Games.

Bundle of Holding: Nightmares Underneath (from 2023)

About My Interests Here

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:55 am
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[personal profile] dewline
Yesterday, if memory serves, I added Public Health to my profile's list of interests. I consider that choice on my part long overdue.

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:51 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Faraday, Oregon, seems to have a missing persons problem. Its problem is much worse.

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

Quality Experiences

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:11 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.

As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.

Doh! moment in sysadminning

Oct. 23rd, 2025 08:25 am
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[personal profile] pvaneynd
PSA:
This morning I noticed that needrestart was not telling me to reload, which was strange, given the latest security update of intel-microcode

A bit of searching revealed that a long time ago I had set APT::Default-Release "stable";, which will prevent apt from upgrading to security packages!

Removing this fixed the issue of course. Now to reload the server...

Weird things in grocery stores

Oct. 22nd, 2025 10:33 pm
dewline: Interrobang symbol (astonishment)
[personal profile] dewline
I am seeing boxes of Kellogg's product in my suburban Ottawa grocery store. Branded Wednesday and Stranger Things Demogorgon Crunch.

My brain, of course, takes in the packaging on the latter, and flashes back to a first-season episode of Space: 1999 called "Dragon's Domain". Scared the hell out of grade-school-me when I first saw it on CBC Regina TV. I cannot help suspecting that if the the modern marketing mavens at Kellogg's saw that episode of that series, the title critter would be cartoonified on the front of boxes of something called Space: 1999 - Dragon's Delight.

A viral SWTOR video

Oct. 22nd, 2025 04:10 pm
neonvincent: For posts about cats and activities involving uniforms. (Krosp)
[personal profile] neonvincent

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

Oct. 22nd, 2025 08:53 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


A robot muses contentedly on the events that led it to its rapidly approaching doom.

A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-Ran

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