john_amend_all

. I had a much more productive and satisfying week at work.


. I'm having more trouble finding time to go for a walk or bike ride on weekdays now that it's getting dark so soon after the end of office hours, but I'm still managing to maintain a minimum of three per week.


. At board game club, we played Feed the Kraken, a social deduction game set on board a ship where some of the sailors have secret agendas. I'm iffy about social deduction games; I don't enjoy the ones that are all about being able to read opponents' body language to figure out if they're being dishonest, but I don't mind some of the ones that have some kind of mechanic that provides objective (though ambiguous) evidence of another kind. In the case of Feed the Kraken, that's plotting the ship's course: each of the factions on the ship wants to steer the ship toward a specific destination, so any change in the heading suggests something about the loyalties of the players who were contributing to navigation that round, but each decision involves three players drawing and discarding cards in such a way that it's never clear precisely who's responsible for the outcome. I enjoyed the game a lot, even before I ended up playing a key role in getting victory for my faction.


. I stopped using Duolingo a while back and uninstalled the app, but hadn't actually got around to closing my account, on the off chance that I might want to pick it up again at some point. Given the recent nonsense, I decided this week that that was never going to happen, and deleted my account.


. I have a rented storage unit which I had not had access to for months: the self-storage facility installed a new automatic front gate, and although I got the email notifying me of the upcoming change I never received the promised follow-up email containing instructions on how to open the new gate. And, being me, by the time I'd realised the follow-up email wasn't coming, enough time had passed that I felt awkward about contacting the site manager to raise the subject, a situation which obviously got no better the longer I put it off. I was reminded about this again this week, and decided enough was enough, and now the situation is resolved: I did an end-run around the contact awkwardness problem by driving to the self-storage facility, finding the manufacturer's logo on the housing of the gate mechanism, and googling for instructions. Fortunately for the success of this endeavour, it turns out that all the manufacturer's smart gates respond to a standard app that can be downloaded for free, and when I entered my contact information after installing the app it automatically matched me to the self-storage place's list of users and offered me a button to open the gate. Everything in the storage unit appears to be fine, if a bit more dusty and cobwebby than when I saw it last. (And I really should get around to talking to someone about the pile of stuff I agreed to temporarily store for a colleague until the covid lockdown ended...)


. Picked up Battletech again for the first time in a couple of weeks, and ended up playing it for a few hours. (Part of that was a big boss mission that took about an hour all on its own.) I'm still not sure exactly how much I'm really enjoying it, but there are enough little things that once I start playing I keep going "I'll just finish off this thing" or "I'll just tweak that thing". It's getting to the point I predicted earlier where the difficulty has ramped up enough that if I keep just coasting along with a vague idea of how the systems work I'm going to be in real trouble sooner or later; on the other hand, that leads to memorable events like a mission where I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment. (That mission was followed by a cutscene where one of my colleagues remarked that she wondered if the conflict we'd been taking part in was really worth it, and the team's executive officer gestured at our pay packet and said, "It's worth it to us." And then we needed to spend nearly the entire pay packet on repairs for the mechs that had been shredded in the mission. That's life in the armoured mercenary business, I guess.)

#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I had a couple of false starts, including The Third Policeman, a work of dark absurdist comedy that I found too dark and not detectably comedic, and lost patience with before it even got to the first policeman. (Afterward, I was moved to re-read An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest to confirm that my sense of humour wasn't broken.)

The book I ended up finishing was also my book for May in the Random Book Challenge; the instruction was to sort my TBR by 'Earliest Added' and pick one of the first five books listed. In my case, that didn't actually mean the books that have been waiting longest for me to read them, because when I started keeping a TBR on StoryGraph I first added the books that were on my ebook reader at the time before I went to the physical bookshelves.

Anyhow, the book I selected was A Hangman for Ghosts by Andrei Baltakmens, a murder mystery set in Australia during the convict period. It's an interesting one; the detective character is a convict with a hidden past, so the story's unfolding the mystery of him alongside the mystery of the murder, which he investigates for a variety of reasons - none of which are precisely to see law and order preserved, so neither he nor the audience is sure what he'll do when he does track the murderer down.


#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.

The flip side of the "didn't look at the next prompt" coin: the cover of A Hangman for Ghosts featured a noose and not really anything else. I don't think I have anything else in the TBR with a noose on the cover.

I went to the local library to see what they had, and after confirming that their copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None isn't one of the editions with a noose on it, and failing to locate their copy of Meg Caddy's Slipping the Noose (it turns out the library has shelved it in the Junior Fiction section, despite the subject matter and the publisher putting it solidly in Young Adult), I borrowed a non-fiction book of True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows.