2021-07-30 08:19
What have I been doing in the past week? Who knows? Working a lot.
Watching the Olympics this week. I've been following the women's softball team, on my fourth or fifth game now (the final gold medal one). It moves faster than baseball, and I think the different ball and the shorter baselines means there's a lot less rote fly balls and ground outs to first. They also have a lot of rules to keep the game moving faster (like the batter can't step out of the batter's box unless the ball goes out of play). We watched the skateboarding street finals which were a lot of fun too. A few other sports have been less exciting to me, and our current access seems pretty limited.
Played a first session of Offworlders on Sunday. It's sci-fi, kind of Powered by the Apocalypse (there are "moves" though we didn't really end up getting into them). It was a lot of set-up so far, and perhaps too much attention to money and accounts, which seems to be a big part of the game, as the party is the crew of their own hauling spaceship and you have to do jobs to... keep paying for everything I guess.
Read Kawabata's The Lake which I was not a big fan of. The protagonist was a creepy guy who had an affair with a student while he was a teacher and follows this other girl around. One interesting section switched focalization to a woman the man scared in the street, giving us a chapter about her, but then the book never returned to her. It felt a little incomplete in that way.
Read another of Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric & Desemona novellas, a quick enjoyable read. The dramatic climax felt a little too deus ex machina to me, but it worked ok.
Starting to think about beach vacation and what I will take to do for the week. I collected a few books to read but have already started some of them early. I read the first two days of The Decameron and probably will get through more in the meantime. Just started on Soseki's Sanshiro which I was going to take along. There's a new edition of Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun that I may reread.
Moreso than reading I need some kind of project to work on. It won't be coding as I've never managed to get my Chromebook working with a coding app or an ssh connection to a server. Maybe something around that has changed over the past year though. I have a few rpg ideas in various stages of work (I could return to the Ancient Greece inspired stuff I was doing 2 years ago; I was thinking about a "vikings settling in Ango-Saxon England" setting). I could revisit the short story series I was writing last year. I wrote a few comics reviews last year on vacation, which I could do again if I find something that's worth spending time writing about. In the meantime... I don't know.