Paul Gadzikowski

I was cleaning old notifications out of my inbox, and was reminded that I have an incomplete 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.]

. 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.

Fiction 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)

. 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.

#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... )