dog-days

The budget could lead to a better sequel if they lean into the writing and humour. The CGI action in film one was as dull as most CGI action scenes are to me; they just feel like Teflon. A low budget fight scene could still be a fantastic fight scene with the right choreography. Hope the sequel goes ahead.

I think audiobooks/podcasts might be devalued compared to silent reading because of the idea that they're consumed with less attention, as a kind of white noise in the background to other tasks. And sometimes for me that's been true, but at other times the reverse has been the case. When I used to go jogging regularly along the canal, before I discovered it was messing up my leg, I remember the feeling of listening to audiobooks with an almost white hot level of absorption, a kind of level of focus I don't often get with reading.

Guardian obituary worth reading.

But you don't need to read books to get better at reading. There are also different types of reading. The OP seems to be talking about reading long factual texts critically, which, yes, is a specific skill, but not one that I can see is being eroded by podcasts or audiobooks. I don't believe there was ever a halcyon age when a majority of the population sat down after work with their copy of Gibbon or whatever to improve their mind. Sub-cultures may have. The kind with resources and leisure where the social milieu places value on people doing that kind of thing, rather than believing it's lazy/pretentious/just plain weird.

Asking a from a position of ignorance – would Israel want Gaza as a full part of the state? To maintain a Jewish state, it seems key that a definite majority of the population are Jewish. Not sure what Israel's demographics are like at the moment. Appreciate the idealism of calls for a single mixed state, but given the two thousand years of anti-Semitic persecution, it seems to me a Jewish state is necessary, even if for the sake of the Palestinians, I could wish it weren't Israel.

Thanks, will take a look. Having an evening off before creating yet another social media account! Hoping to bet on the right horse so I don't end up with even more logins.

Deactivated my work Twitter now as well. Does anyone have experience of how the alternatives are faring? Mastodon, BlueSky etc. I've noticed an increase in activity related to an issue I'm interested in on LInkedIn. People posting worthwhile stuff instead of motivational quotes and marketing for their organisations. Shocking.

Watched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Dungeons and Dragons. Both were a lot of fun, if predictable. In the case of Puss in Boots, even if many of the beats felt familiar, the voice-acting and animation gave it a warmth and charm that would have been hard to resist, even if I'd been inclined to try. I was expecting Dungeons and Dragons to be a bit more meta and have a few more laughs, but still enjoyed it, especially Hugh Grant giving a reprise of his villain role from Paddington Bear 2. The CGI action was...fine...yet also as flat as CGI action scenes tend to be. Because I've spent a lot of time in the game-version of Neverwinter, it was really odd seeing it in the film. Way more clean and fairy-tale-like than it is in my head. A hundred years and a cataclysm really smartened the place up.

Finished Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris, which I read authentically and genuinely with my eyes following printed lines on a page, in the correct manner. A photo can be provided as proof if necessary. This novel, which follows the life in America of the fugitive regicides Edward Whalley and William Goffe, and their pursuit by the fictional Richard Nayler, is slower-paced and more loosely plotted than the previous works I've read by the author. If your sort-of heroes spend a lot of time hiding in attics, they have little opportunity to be leading exciting, eventful lives. The sense of confinement is as oppressive as it's intended to be; Nayler's chapters in London offer no escape – you're just trapped along with an awful man surrounded by awful, empty people. The Puritans in the America sections at least have their narrow faith and care for each other; Nayler has nothing, and doesn't seem capable of attaining anything. There were some pretty sickening descriptions of Charles II's revenges on the people who signed his father's death warrant. It's the kind of thing that didn't bother me back when I was a child/teen learning about the English Civil War/Wars of the Three Kingdoms, but does now. The main problem with historical fiction is all the damn history. It prompted a splurge on renting fluffy movies on Amazon.

Closed my personal Twitter account a couple of days ago. The water on the sinking ship was pooling round my ankles. It was time to go. Had better open something on Mastodon now and close the work one too. What a prick.

I love well-narrated audiobooks. Really don't care if it's 'reading' or not. Romans of wealth and leisure often used slaves as lectores to speak texts to them, appreciating the bloody awful poetic metres all the more because they were read aloud; they loved audiobooks too. (Note: please do not enslave anyone blessed with a good voice and keep them as your reading slave. Based on Zorral's post, it's clear that this is what partners/spouses et al. are intended for.) I suppose audiobooks can feel like a bit of a cheat because, assuming it's fiction, the narrator makes some characterisation choices for you, provides the cadences and quirks that you'd otherwise have to rely on your imagination to provide. On the other hand, by listening to a narrator, you can potentially gain some imaginative range yourself, because you're hearing a version of the work that you would never have created. These days I'm quite jittery and restless; I find it hard to settle to reading on paper/Kindle unless it's something plot-driven. I tend to make slightly less conservative choices with audio, and find it easier to get through the waffly passages in non-fiction with a narrator pushing me. Additionally, there's a huge swathe of people – with types of dyslexia, with visual impairments, blind – who access all kinds of writing entirely through audio*, and don't seem to suffer for it in the least. eta * or braille

Conservative makes reasonable suggestion that doesn't involve stomping on asylum seekers. Gove to relax rules in England to allow more shops to be converted into homes. Most of the time, Gove fits into the Tories just fine; it's just now and again he has some kind of cerebral fit and tries to do something useful. I love the idea of a row of small shops within walking distance of home that aren't just betting shops, off-licences or takeaways. And you do get them sometimes, often in the richer areas, or in some remote towns. But for over a decade now, I've been walking past empty premises or coffee shops that change hands twice a year because the local market can't support them, and at this point I'd rather see them converted to housing than wait for the Second Coming of the high street.

It's been quiet here for almost a month since a problematic housemate left, having been served with a two-week eviction notice after smashing a neighbour's window with a hammer. Now water is pouring through the kitchen ceiling after someone had a shower in the new bathroom that was finally installed at the start of June. This happened a couple of hours after the hot water was fixed; it had been off for the last five days. As a result, I am an expert in sponge baths, and have another skill to add to my LinkedIn profile. I'm not really bothered about the ceiling...just grateful hammers don't seem to have been involved again.

Played turn-based in the first instalment of the Banner Saga, and it was okay. But Banner Saga was a short game with a limited number of set-piece combats. I'm not sure I'd want to go through a 100-hour campaign on a pure turn-based system; it would be too slow, lacking the excitement of simulated RT action. Will give it a go, naturally.

Twitter now charging for access to the API apparently.

Read Hippolyta Napier number 7 by Lexie Conyngham, the latest in her series of books set in Ballater, a spa town in Aberdeenshire, during the reign of William IV of England/III of Scotland. I imagine the author wrote it with a certain amount of glee since it is announced at the end that the old King has died, to be replaced by Victoria. Ballater is eight miles from Balmoral. I bet Conyngham has plans. Probably involving the epidemic of complex murders that plagued the area on an annual basis during the 1820s and 30s, about which unaccountably few historical studies exist. That said, we still have five years to go, and maybe five books, till Victoria's first visit with Albert. I'm fine with that. The murder plots are fun, but they're also largely an excuse for some entertaining social observation and a light but precise attention to the details of the period. I toy with the idea of giving Sanderson or Tad Williams a go now and again. I mean, if I like them, that's my reading plans sorted for a few years!

Admit I'm tempted. Especially the idea of going in sparkly pink to the Oppenheimer showing, then heading to Barbie in a suit with a cigarette and martini.

So Sunak expects the teachers' pay rises to come out of existing budgets. How on earth will that work? "Good news, kids. Mrs Trelawney has decided not to resign and go work as a private tutor for another year. Also, today we will be learning how to make some delicious, healthy stew from grass cuttings, and Mr Slater from the IT team will be demonstrating how to light a cooking fire the ecological way by using our stock of broken iPads to reflect the sun's light onto last summer's Year 3 art projects."

Starkess, if you do try Tchaikovsky again, you might like Guns of the Dawn – it was the first book I read by him, and is still probably my favourite. I think it's a bit more disciplined than his sci-fi.

Saw Nimona last night. Not familiar with the graphic novel, but really enjoyed it as uncomplicated fun. Highlight was Riz Ahmed's voice-acting and the character design and animations. Lively and expressive without the slightly grating Instagrammy perfection of styles like Arcane. Riz Ahmed's been one of my preferred Doctor Who candidates for years.

Police are currently saying that there's no criminal case to answer. While it sounds as if Huw Edwards's behaviour has been lousy, if it's been so only in his use of dating apps and faithlessness then it was none of the public's business and the Sun should never have run the story. But there are complications: if he's been bullying subordinates and if the accusations of bullying are substantiated and go further than him being a bit grumpy because of broadcast pressures, the BBC needs to act. Unfortunately I suspect that without the huge wave of media attention, the BBC like other big organisations would sweep the allegations under the carpet. if he broke a Covid lockdown to pursue an affair. That was a criminal offence, and is rather worse for him than for others in that he was on TV every night telling the public to stay at home. The context and extent of the kind of abusive/threatening language he's said to have used in his dating app activity is also important. If it was part of an argument with the other party giving as good as they got, that's one thing. If it was extreme and used plausible threats, that's another. From what we know so far, I don't think the Sun should have run the story. If they'd had any sense of ethics or the bomb they were sticking under Edwards's career when he has no legal case to answer, they could have waited, worked with the police, pressured the BBC behind-the-scenes. They've easily got the clout for it. But as we learn more, I expect I may need to revise that opinion. I was sorry to hear it was him because I like him as a journalist and enjoyed the bits of his History of Wales series that I've seen. He also seemed to be one of the few senior journalists left at the BBC who wasn't by instinct a Tory. I'm also sorry that he's been hospitalised and is apparently suffering very much from his mental health troubles. At the same time, plenty of people with depression and anxiety managed not to break lockdown and don't make a habit of bullying those lower down the pecking order.

Perhaps he's just not for you? I don't think anyone's made big claims about Tchaikovsky's originality. Speaking for myself, I don't go to fiction for originality. And if I wanted an in-depth character study I guess I could pick up some experimental literary fiction to fall asleep over to admire. What he does do is create engaging novels and novellas drawing on a variety of influences that retain a kind of zest for existence without pretending that humans are any better than they are.

Ah, crap. Welsh Twitter's going to go crazy, or what's left of it post Musk will.

I can handwave plenty of illogicalities if the writing is strong enough, but the extract you posted sounds as if it was written by robot on a bad day. Lawyers of various stripes can make great genre fiction writers (Sansom was a solicitor, Adrian Tchaikovsky did something related to the law), though not in this case. Thinking back to some of the law students I met while working in a law library, Caldicott may have browbeaten his editor into submission rather than the other way round. Finished A Face like Glass by Frances Hardinge. Deceit, treachery and highly explosive cheeses. When I started, I thought that this book, full of whimsy as the setting was, might be for younger children as opposed to her cross-over YA books I've previously read (The Lie Tree, Deeplight), but the tone became complex quickly, and I ended up liking it just as much if not more than the other two. The setting is an underground city, and the key feature of the people who inhabit it is their lack of facial expression. They have to deliberately acquire expressions, often buying them, with the wealthy members of the court mastering a large range and using them to manipulate and gain power, while the lowest rungs of the working class have just one or two at their disposal. For anyone who has struggled with human social relationships, the book is particularly resonant and powerful. As ever, Hardinge's style is immaculate. The main villains could have done with a little more depth, but that's a pretty minor quibble given how much she packs into one not hugely long book.

Didn't know Larian had gone for so many different approaches. It sounds to me as if they're spreading themselves too thin and will end up compromising the experience of all three main routes, but the BG3 sample is already hugely popular, so guess I'll wait and see. Option three sounds completely uninteresting to me, but at least it's not compulsory. Option one sounds very Icewind Dale (a bit of a bore). Option two is typical of my favourite games; tends to keep a better balance between freedom and narrative interest.