Harmonies and Counterpoints

. When we did the family walk on Sunday morning, I suggested we walk in a direction where I'd seen a mass of bright orange flowers blooming when I drove past the previous afternoon, but when we got there the orange blooms were nowhere to be seen. One of my siblings identified the plants as something in the daisy family that closes up for the night and apparently hadn't opened up for the day yet. We saw some other nice flowers, though, and a few interesting birds.


. At the weekend gaming session, we were missing one of the players for Ticket to Ride: Legacy again (a different one from last time), so we played Sequoia and Dark Tomb. I remember thinking, the first time I played Dark Tomb, that playing it again would quickly start to feel repetitive, and this proved to be the case even though were were playing a different scenario from last time.


. At the weekly gaming meet, we played Finspan. It's only the second time I've played it, and I'm still not very good at it, though I did at least avoid coming last.


. I saw a thing online mentioning that if you buy an ebook for Kindle that has a notice saying something along the lines of "At the request of the publisher, this ebook is available DRM-free", there's a way to download a separate copy of the ebook, if you can find where that option has been hidden away, and it occurred to me that the same was probably true of the Kobo store. So now I've downloaded separate copies of all the ebooks I've bought through the Kobo store where that's an option; I don't really have any plans to read them not-on-my-Kobo, but it feels reassuring to know that they're there. I kind of wish I'd figured this out earlier, before Humble Bundle did a bundle last year that included all the Murderbot books, and I bought it at least partly in order to have copies of the Murderbot books that weren't tied to my Kobo; to be fair, though, there were enough other interesting books in the bundle that I'd probably have bought it anyway.


. I've started another run on XCOM 2. I've had one disastrous mission, where I got complacent and wound up bringing the combined might of every enemy unit in the area down on my head at once, but apart from that it's been going well.


. Saturday gave us the first foggy morning of the autumn, at least as far as I've noticed; I haven't been consistently sticking my head out of doors early on these cold mornings, and only did so on Saturday because I had to go to Parkrun. If I hadn't had to get to Parkrun, I'd have been tempted to stop and take a photo of the fog lurking atmospherically over the cemetery. (Except that, see above, I wouldn't have been outside to notice the fog over the cemetery in the first place.)

#20: A book whose title has more letters than the title of the previous book
May: Make/Making

Third attempt: How Comics Were Made by Glenn Fleishman. An illustrated history of the various complicated methods by which newspaper comics have been transferred from the artist's drawing board to the newpaper page. I'm reading my backer copy of the Kickstarter-funded first edition; a second edition has subsequently been released by a major publisher with the title changed to How Comics Are Made, presumably because the publisher in question also owns one of the largest surviving comic syndicates and doesn't want people getting the idea that newspaper comics are a thing of the past.

(The Genghis Khan book just hasn't been holding my attention, and will probably end up going back to the library with not much more of it read.)


Miscellaneous

Reading all the Penric stories one after another may not have been a wise decision; they were written to be able to stand alone and be read as and when a person came across them, which means among other things that each one has to set up the premise and characters for what might be a first-time reader, and that gets a bit repetitive when read all together. There are also some other recurring narrative effects that are fine within the context of individual stories but can get to be a bit much in the aggregate, and a few things one notices when reading them in chronological order when that wasn't always the way they were written.

Despite all that, the stories themselves are very good.


I also finished reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, which I've been reading on and off since March. The amount of time I've taken to finish it isn't a knock against the quality of the book; it's just that it's the kind of book where you read an essay and let it digest for a while before starting the next one, and also a good book to read a bit of on days when I wasn't feeling like tackling a whole book. And every now and then it had to go back to the library and I had to wait a couple of weeks for it to come around again on the hold queue.