Day 150: Update on Goals

Things continue to go reasonably well in 2019, though a lack of sleep is proving rather debilitating. And then there's the one big fly in the ointment... but I can't speak about that.

Anyway, it's time for an update on goals:

• Books: By day 100 I should have read 24.65 books. I'm pretty much right on target - having finished "Anna Karenina" I'm no longer playing catch up on that sublist, so can get back to tracking things normally. My expectation is to end the year on the 60 books I targeted. However, I'm unlikely to get 12 read from The List, and very unlikely to finish off the British part of The List. Still, that's not too bad.
  
• Weight: I've now dropped about half a stone, so this is actually more or less on target. Still, more to do!
  
• Blogging: This is right on target, both here and on the Imaginarium.
  
• Redecorate the Study: This was not done in the Easter holiday, so remains to do. My new expectation is that we'll probably tackle it during the October week, unless it bugs me enough to demand attention between now and then.
  
• The To-Do List: As noted elsewhere, the To-Do List was revisited at the end of the Easter holiday and expanded to eight items. At the time of writing it's back down to four (one of which is the study, as above). My current focus is on the scanning of old pipe band music, which I expect to get done soon. If and when it gets down to just one item (the study) I'm actually going to declare it done, given the separate goal above.

So, that's that - a long-winded way of saying that everything is going pretty well. The next update will be mid-July. My hope by then would be to be able to announce the completion of the To-Do List, but we'll see...

#26: "Marauders of the Dune Sea", by Bruce R. Cordell

That Ludicrous Display Last Night

Last night Funsize and I sat down to watch Scotland's women against Jamaica. (No, obviously not all of Scotland's women. That would be silly. LC doesn't play football.) Funsize made it to half time before being called away on important sleep-related business, at which point I did the washing up before watching most of the second half.

I was both shocked and confused by what I saw.

Not that the women in question were playing football, you understand. That would be silly. But the manner in which they did so...

They won.

I mean, honestly, has nobody explained to them what is expected of a team representing Scotland? We're not supposed to win things! We're meant to go up against teams we're 'supposed' to beat, make painfully heavy weather of it, lose a jammy goal against the run of play, and then console ourselves about yet another glorious failure.

And what's even more shocking is that they're now off to France to go and play in the World Cup!

(After the game the team were given a pep talk by Nicola Sturgeon, Judy Murray, and Steve Clarke, the last being the new manager of the men's team. Given that the men's team haven't been to a major tournament in twenty years, perhaps they should have been giving him the benefit of their experience, rather than the other way around?)

Okay, on a serious note: it was a good game, and our team played very well, especially in attack. One of the goals, in particular, was exceptional. That said, there was some weakness at the back, and it was apparent that we're prone to leaving ourselves vulnerable to being caught on the break. With luck, the match last night has flagged that up and will allow us to clear up the issues prior to meeting England next week.

It's going to be strange following a World Cup with more than an academic interest in how it all pans out...

#25: "Dark Sun Creature Catalogue", by Richard Baker and Bruce R. Cordell

Nothing Has Changed

Ah, the European Elections. Such fun.

As far as I can see, the upshot of those elections is that things are pretty much as they were: England wants Brexit (and a No Deal Brexit if that's what it takes), and are going to take the rest of us along for the ride. Wales also, mostly, wants Brexit, although there's some strong resistance there. Scotland doesn't want Brexit... but also doesn't quite want Independence, which is looking ever more like the only way to escape Brexit. (It will be really interesting to see what happens when people are finally confronted with a need to actually choose: Brexit or Independence.)

And yet, these results are also in some ways absolutely crucial.

Because right now the fate of the country lies first in the hands of Tory MPs and then in the hands of Tory members, and those groups aren't representative of the country as a whole.

And for that group, the election results are absolutely clear: Tory voters want Brexit, and if need be they'll go and vote for another party to get it.

I'm reasonably sure that what that means is that the new leader will be a hard Brexiteer. I'm very sure that the new leader will have to promise that we're going to leave on the 31st of October, come what may, and will have to deliver on that promise. Otherwise, the Tory party will look to take a major kicking at the next General Election.

(The big problem then is that the new Tory leader is likely to take office in mid-September at the earliest, which gives about six weeks to try to negotiate a new deal. So even if they're inclined to try, the chances of getting a deal that is able to get through parliament in time are negligible.)

I think we now have two chances to avoid No Deal, neither of which look promising:

Firstly, it's possible that there are enough Remain-minded Tory MPs to ensure that the final two candidates in their leadership contest are both soft Brexiteers. In which case the membership will choose between two people they don't much like, and we'll get Theresa May mark II - a period of paralysis, more can kicking and extensions, and nothing being done until that person is finally forced out.

But I don't think there are enough Remain-minded Tory MPs to control both final candidates, and I expect the Tory membership to go for the hardest Brexiteer on offer. Who might well try to negotiate a new deal, but who will certainly head for No Deal Brexit if nothing can be done prior to the 31st of October.

This brings us to the second chance: faced with an imminent No Deal, it's possible that enough Tories will defect to win a vote of No Confidence, and bring about a General Election. The problem being that if they do that then they wouldn't be able to stand as Tory candidates, and so they would be throwing away their political careers to bring about an election that might stop a No Deal Brexit. (Oh, and they'd have to act very quickly - it takes a minimum of seven weeks from a successful No Confidence motion to a General Election, and between mid-September and the end of October there are approximately six weeks.)

(There is one other, very slight, chance of a reprieve. Back in April, it seems that Theresa was all set to go for a No Deal exit. What stopped her was being informed that if she did that then Northern Ireland would leave the UK, and Scotland would almost certainly follow. Faced with the same hard truth, I think the hard Brexiteers would still go for it, but it's just possible that they would blink too.)

The upshot of all of this is that I'm reasonably sure we're now heading for a No Deal Brexit at the end of October. I don't really see any way of stopping it.

Which is a cheery thought for a Monday morning. We should have had the count on Thursday.

#24: "Book of Spells, Part I", edited by Gardner Dozois

Good Things About the "Game of Thrones" Finale

Before I rant properly, I should first note that I've actually been a fan of just about everything in the first five episodes of this season of "Game of Thrones". In particular, the events of the previous episode were something I found quite shocking at the time, but which were actually obvious in retrospect. The only real problem, both with that twist and indeed with the last two seasons as a whole, was just that they were far too rushed - everything was happening so fast that nothing really got a proper build-up. But then, given that too much modern fantasy (including some of the earlier seasons) moves far too slowly, I wasn't too unhappy with that.

Unfortunately...

The finale was almost entirely terrible, but there are at least some good things about it:

Firstly, I particularly enjoyed the bold creative decision to rush the whole of the last two seasons so as to make time in the finale for a 6-hour shot of Arya, Jon, and Sansa slowly walking from the left of the screen to the right. That's the sort of inspired creative genius that's been missing from TV for far too long. Marvellous!

Additionally, this has the big advantage that I now know not to bother with the last two novels in the series, if indeed they are ever published. After all, there are two reasons to read them: to see the end, or to enjoy the journey. But we've now seen the end (and it's not worth it), and the previous two novels have been deeply underwhelming (the series dealt with both in season 5, and they were all the better for that compression). So if neither the journey nor the ending promise to reward the investment, why bother?

Oh, and I also know not to bother with the next Star Wars trilogy either - since Benioff and Weiss are responsible for both the debacle that was the end of "Lost" and the disaster that was the end of "Game of Thrones", why would I think they'll do better with Star Wars?

So that was that. The greatest TV spectacle of the modern age is now over. And it should have ended an hour sooner.

Avengers: Endgame

LC and I finally made it out to "Avengers: Endgame" this weekend. I find I have very little to say about it, mostly because we've waited sufficiently long to see it that just about everything that there is to say has already been said. Suffice it to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a really great culmination to everything in the MCU so far, it put a wonderful capstone on many of the individual stories and plotlines that have been cooking for so long, and it really didn't feel like three hours.

I think the thing that impressed me most was actually some of the quieter moments in the film. I can't say more without going into spoilers (which I'm inclined to avoid here, even now), but there were three character interactions (well, two and a non-interaction) that were particularly good.

All that said, I think I'm done with superhero movies for a while. I'm inclined to skip "Dark Phoenix" and even "Spider-man: Far From Home" in the cinema - I'll catch them on blu-ray. For now, I'm wanting to see something new, something different. Hollywood, please make it so!

#22: "Doctor Who: Wit, Wisdom and Timey-Wimey Stuff", by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright
#23: "Pathfinder: Last Watch", by Larry Wilhelm

"The Orville" and "Star Trek: Discovery"

I was very glad to see yesterday that "The Orville" has been renewed for a third season. I've very much enjoyed the two seasons thus far - it very much reminds me of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" of old, and indeed deliberately so. Though part of me kinda wishes they formally drop the jokes and just go full-on sci-fi - I've found that a lot of the comedy seems to fall flat and that the show is actually at its best when it tackles the more contemplative aspects.

By contrast, I'm not enjoying "Star Trek: Discovery" so much, though it's entirely possible that it just hasn't had enough time to grow on me (I'm nine episodes into the first season). It just seems excessively grim to me. Though part of my dissatisfaction with the show is perhaps partly because it starts with an image of a show that I suspect I'd rather watch - the one where Michelle Yeoh's Captain Philippa Georgiou leads her crew on a voyage of exploration around the galaxy. (And it seems there's a spin-off in the works, so who knows?)

All that said, I'm a little bemused by the arguments over what is the 'true' successor to "Star Trek". In large part because D&D had an identical argument about a decade ago, when the fans split between the controversial 4th edition and the pseudo-clone Pathfinder. (FWIW, my view is "Discovery" is "Star Trek", though a different Trek to what we've seen before. "The Orville" is not Trek, although it is something very close. But neither distinction is anything to do with quality.)

Ultimately, though, I'm inclined to ask: why choose? If you like "Star Trek: Discovery", watch that. If you like "The Orville", watch that. If you don't like either, don't watch either - there's plenty of other things to do. And if you like both, well...

#20: "Transition", by Iain Banks (sadly, not one I'd recommend)
#21: "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", by C.S. Lewis (a book for Funsize; a book from The List)

Watership Down

In the run-up to Christmas I took a look through the TV listings, identified a number of things I was potentially interested in, and therefore recorded the new "Watership Down". We then didn't watch it, largely because we were never in the right mood. Eventually, LC stated that she really had no interest in it, whereupon I watched it last week across four days.

Sadly, it wasn't great. As is so often the case, the book was better.

The funny thing is, I don't really know why the adaptation just didn't impress me. The story was all present and correct, the cast was pretty stellar (far better than it really had any right to be), the animation was pretty solid.

(They even managed to not screw up in their handling of the female characters. One of the features of the book is that all the key characters are male, in a way that modern TV just doesn't do. So when they announced this adaptation, of course they talked about expanding female roles. The problem there is that the fact that so many of the characters are male is an absolutely key plot point. Change that, and you actually do ruin the story. As it turned out they didn't change that - they just vastly fleshed out the roles of those female characters who did appear when they did appear, and did so in an entirely appropriate way. So that was extremely satisfying - a win on every front.)

And yet... meh.

My big takeaway from this is that I'll just have to read the book again. Which is no bad thing.

Also at the Weekend: To Done

Shortly after I revisited the To Do list last month I decided to add a further three tasks. This took it up to a total of eight tasks, some of them fairly trivial. Given that a couple of weeks have now passed, I thought I'd take another quick look:

1. Painting the study: No movement, though I think we have now chosen the replacement computer desk.
   
2. Fixing the wardrobe: No movement.
   
3. Clearing the garage: No real movement. However this is, perhaps surprisingly, a good thing - we've generated several more boxes that need cleared, but which still fit within the "one carload" part of the task. I also now know what to do with the washing machine.
   
4. Mounting the pinboard: No movement. That's one of the tasks for this coming weekend.
   
5. Building the shelves: I did this at the weekend, so it can now be removed from the list.
   
6. Scanning old photos: One more niggly little bit of decluttering I have to do is to take some old photos I have accumulated over the years, scan them into digital form, and then get rid of almost all of the originals - they're mostly but not entirely just clutter, so I want rid. This is the other task for the coming weekend, though it may be over-ambitious to do it in one.
   
7. Scanning old bagpipe music: This is something I mostly did many years ago. However, I have since accumulated quite a lot of additional music that I'd like to scan and shred (mostly). I'm also quite keen to compile the existing files into more convenient PDFs.
   
8. MP3 cleanup: Before I did either the digital declutter or the scan-and-shred, my first big cleanup task was to take my accumulated music files and better arrange them. However doing so left a few things in a less-than-satisfactory state. Since it was bugging me, I set myself a task to clean these up, which I achieved at the weekend. Which of course means that the first time I'm mentioning this task is when I'm removing it from the list, but there it is!

In theory, it should be possible to tackle all of these except the study over the next three weeks (and if I get to the point where the study is the only remaining task I'm going to drop the list). In practice, I fear it will take considerably longer - there's a reason some of these tasks have been lingering for quite some time now. Still, this weekend represented good progress, so if it can continue that will be promising.

Star Wars Day

In days of yore, when the world was young and I was about seven or so, it was our wont of a Saturday morning to get up early and watch "Star Wars". We had it on an old Betamax tape, and watched it so often, week by week, that the tape eventually wore through. And that was the end of that. (I then wouldn't see "Star Wars" again until I was sixteen. I call those the wasted years.)

Saturday was the fourth of May, and therefore Star Wars Day. This provided a good opportunity to correct a significant oversight - although Funsize has seen two "Star Wars" films, they were "The Last Jedi" and "Solo", neither of which is exactly great.

So on Saturday we resurrected an old tradition, made new by time and technology, and got up early and watched "Star Wars". It was a shiny new (ish) blu-ray. And it's still good.

Oh, one more thing: whether it is at the end of "The Rise of Skywalker" or when the Disney inevitably decide to mess with the original "Star Wars" again, it is long since past time to give Chewie a medal. Especially in light of the passing of Peter Mayhew.

You Can't Look Away in Time!

I try really hard to avoid spoilers, to the extent that I now don't read reviews until after I've actually seen the film/TV show/whatever to which they refer - far too many reviewers believe it is their job to discuss key plot details, often without prior warning. But I'm also well aware that there are reasonable limitations to how long you can expect people to hold the secret (indeed we're nearing, if not past, that point with "Avengers: Endgame", one of the reasons I'm so keen to get out to see it).

I'm reasonably sure, though, that we haven't yet reached that point with the episode of "Game of Thrones" that aired in the small hours this morning. At the very least, that one doesn't run out until some time tonight.

So imagine my frustration when I opened Google on my phone this morning, was idly scrolling through the news items it had selected for me, and found a major spoiler for that episode sitting right there in one of the headlines. Honestly, how am I supposed to avoid that?

Thanks a bunch, you guys.

Anna Karenina

After a mere four months (and a bit), I've finally finished the last novel I started in 2018. I made the mistake of starting "Anna Karenina" on the flight out to France, when I really should have chosen something easier to read. I then made the further mistake of thinking I would read a part at a time, taking a break between for other things. What I should have done, and what I ended up doing for the latter half of the book, was reading a few chapters every day while reading other things in parallel.

Anyway, it's done now.

Sadly, I wasn't overly impressed. Mostly, my issue was that it was an awfully long novel in which not a great deal happened, with slightly more than half of it not even being about Anna at all, but rather about the young nobleman Levin's search for love and fulfilment. And while that was fine, it wasn't all that interesting - I'm afraid I found Pierre Bezukhov's quest in "War and Peace" rather more compelling.

The other big problem is that I really couldn't find much sympathy for Anna herself. While I understand and can accept the unfairness of her situation, and indeed the hypocracy of Society in that their judgement falls on her and not men in a similar position, my big problem is that she spends most of the book making everyone around her miserable. Even her death isn't actually a result of Society's unfairness towards her, but rather a spiteful attempt to make her lover feel bad. (After which there followed another fifty pages of Levin's story as he plods through a spiritual revelation.)

The upshot is that where "War and Peace" could just about be crammed into a 6-hour mini-series quite well (apart from the unfortunate shoehorning in of an incestuous sub-plot, since everyone wants to be "Game of Thrones" these days), "Anna Karenina" can quite comfortably be chopped down to a 2.5 hour film starring Keira Knightly.

Oh well, it's done now.

#19: "Anna Karenina", by Leo Tolstoy (a book from The List)

Desk Woes

In addition to repainting the study, we're quite keen to replace the computer desk. Said desk is still working fine, but it's fourteen years old and rather beaten up (having survived four house moves). The keyboard tray is unfastened on one side, there's a CD holder wasting space, and its position in the room means that the tower nook is on the wrong side. All in all, it's okay but not great.

Unfortunately, it appears that in addition to PC sales dropping like a stone, sales of computer desks are likewise tumbling. Either that, or people just delight in creating many variations of the same really bad desk design. (My particular favourite is that there are loads of desks that would be quite good if the two sides were switched, but no signs that that desk is actually produced anywhere.)

The upshot is that the selection of a new desk is inevitably going to be a compromise, and very likely a downgrade from what we have currently. And we don't even have the option of just getting an exact replacement of the existing desk - which wouldn't be great either, but would at least have the effect of undoing fourteen years of abuse.

I've even started to think the unthinkable, which would be to make my own desk to better match what I really want/need. But then a remembered that I have absolutely no skill with DIY, and so would just end up hurting myself and producing something ugly and useless. But apart from that it would be a great idea.

In the meantime, I have at least found what I think may be the least objectionable compromise...

Email Zero

Due to my sense of neatness, I try to maintain a state of "email zero" - a state where my Inbox has no outstanding emails needing attention. (Due to a quirk in Outlook, I actually find it beneficial to have a single placeholder email in there. But that's a detail that doesn't affect the underlying principle.)

As a result of this, my first task each morning is to deal with any emails that have arrived during the night. Many of these are routine and can just be deleted, some just want read and then filed, some need a reply (in which case I try to reply immediately). And then there are some that require some sort of action that, for whatever reason, can't be performed immediately.

For the most part, I deal with these by translating the email into a Task, then clearing the email from my Inbox - having recorded the Task I'll not forget it, but I'll get to it later.

However, it doesn't do to be too dogmatic about things. Just as any good filing system should have a "Miscellaneous" or "Other" section, for things that just don't go anywhere else but are sufficiently unique not to warrant their own section, any process for dealing with things is stronger, not weaker, if it includes a mechanism for dealing with exceptional cases that just don't fit. Sometimes, very occasionally, there's an email that requires some action, the action can't be dealt with immediately, but where it's better not to translate it into a task. And that means that sometimes, very occasionally, an email will hang around, and Email Zero will remain elusive.

About six months ago, I received one such email - it needed an action, there was a fairly detailed set of instructions for that action (so turning it into a Task was a pain), so I left it. "I'll get a suitable file tonight and do it tomorrow," thought I.

This was not the great plan I had thought. I finally remembered the appropriate file on Monday, dealt with the email yesterday, and thus was able to file it (in my "from 2018" folder, no less!), and reached Email Zero after a mere six months.

Which is perhaps not the most exciting story, but it was my big achievement of yesterday so I figured it was worthy of note...