Week in review: Week to 26 September
Sep. 27th, 2026 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. It's been a blah sort of week where I've been having trouble making up my mind to get anything done, as evidenced by how late last week's Week in Review post was. Part of it, possibly even the main part, might be reaction from this being the first week in several months without the everything of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe hanging over me. I've had stressful jobs pending at work and at the committee, which didn't help. (I did get both progressed a reasonable amount here and there.) Having a drainage problem with the shower drain didn't help either. Friday night and Saturday I've spent a bunch of time bundled up and/or napping and I think I'm coming down with something, but I don't think that accounts for the entire week.
. At the weekly board game meet, we played Nemesis: Void Seeders. The standard version of Nemesis is basically The Board Game That Resembles But Is Legally Distinct From Alien; this version has the same setting and basic mechanics but swaps in an original alien race, with less emphasis on claws and jaws and more on hallucinations and mind control. In the last couple of games of Nemesis I've played, I got killed early on; this time I was the last player active. That wasn't entirely a good thing, since it meant I was alone on the ship with the aliens after everyone else had either died or made it to the escape pods, but at least it meant I had something to do all the way through. I almost made it to safety, but in the end I got overcome by the aliens and died.
There were several decisions I made that contributed to my time running out before I reached safety, but most of them were the kind where either option might turn out to have been the right call depending on how subsequent events pan out; the only one I'm annoyed at myself for was passing up a spacewalk card that would have let me fast travel from one end of the ship to the other and bypass the aliens in between. At the time, I didn't realise how often I would find myself completely surrounded by aliens and it seemed more useful to get more ammunition for my weapon instead, but what makes this a case of "I should have known better even at the time" is that, when I got around to reading the card properly, it turned out that the ammunition I'd found wasn't even the kind that my weapon needed.
The lesson for next time (apart from "read the card properly") is that in Void Seeders it's a bad idea to wander off on your own; the game makes it significantly easier to fight off the aliens' influence if there's another human in the room with you, and if you're on your own it's very easy to get surrounded.
. One of the things about churned-out ebooks of public domain works is that often the cover designer hasn't read the book and just slaps on some stock art based on key words, which is how you end up with things like the famous edition of All Quiet on the Western Front with the cowboy on the cover.
A new-to-me example I encountered this week was an edition of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, a 1908 memoir about life on the road, with a cover photo depicting a group of long-haired musicians in the 1970s. (To be fair, it turns out the band is named after the book, but I'd bet that whoever chose the photo didn't know that.)
. At the weekly board game meet, we played Nemesis: Void Seeders. The standard version of Nemesis is basically The Board Game That Resembles But Is Legally Distinct From Alien; this version has the same setting and basic mechanics but swaps in an original alien race, with less emphasis on claws and jaws and more on hallucinations and mind control. In the last couple of games of Nemesis I've played, I got killed early on; this time I was the last player active. That wasn't entirely a good thing, since it meant I was alone on the ship with the aliens after everyone else had either died or made it to the escape pods, but at least it meant I had something to do all the way through. I almost made it to safety, but in the end I got overcome by the aliens and died.
There were several decisions I made that contributed to my time running out before I reached safety, but most of them were the kind where either option might turn out to have been the right call depending on how subsequent events pan out; the only one I'm annoyed at myself for was passing up a spacewalk card that would have let me fast travel from one end of the ship to the other and bypass the aliens in between. At the time, I didn't realise how often I would find myself completely surrounded by aliens and it seemed more useful to get more ammunition for my weapon instead, but what makes this a case of "I should have known better even at the time" is that, when I got around to reading the card properly, it turned out that the ammunition I'd found wasn't even the kind that my weapon needed.
The lesson for next time (apart from "read the card properly") is that in Void Seeders it's a bad idea to wander off on your own; the game makes it significantly easier to fight off the aliens' influence if there's another human in the room with you, and if you're on your own it's very easy to get surrounded.
. One of the things about churned-out ebooks of public domain works is that often the cover designer hasn't read the book and just slaps on some stock art based on key words, which is how you end up with things like the famous edition of All Quiet on the Western Front with the cowboy on the cover.
A new-to-me example I encountered this week was an edition of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, a 1908 memoir about life on the road, with a cover photo depicting a group of long-haired musicians in the 1970s. (To be fair, it turns out the band is named after the book, but I'd bet that whoever chose the photo didn't know that.)
