Fails and Successes

[alobear]

I'm still struggling a bit on the books front, and this has now spread to audiobooks, it seems.

Midst Toil and Tribulation by David Weber:
This was a particularly sad experience - sixth book in a series that I started out absolutely loving, but that I gave up on after about 150 pages.  To begin with, the series was about 75% awesome plot and characters and 25% rigging and weaponry.  Annoyingly, in this latest instalment, the ratio seems to have flipped.  I found it increasingly difficult to wade through all the discussions of gun design and eventually decided that skipping pages and pages in an attempt to find the interesting bits wasn't worth it.  A real shame.

The Outstretched Shadow by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory:
I tried reading this series some years ago and didn't get very far with it, but decided to try the audio version to see if that would make a difference.  The narrator was okay but nothing special - but the protagonist really annoyed me and the bad guys were unnecessarily unpleasant, so I stopped listening about a third of the way through.

The Algebraist by Iain M Banks:
One of the first audiobooks I listened to was an Iain M Banks epic (Matter) which was fabulous - mostly due to the excellent narration by Toby Longworth.  This one was narrated by someone else, who was perfectly acceptable to listen to - however, my listening experience was marred somewhat by several occasions where I found it difficult to concentrate properly on the story, and I'm afraid I lost track of it a bit.  Banks isn't the kind of author you can dip in and out of, or pick up as you go along, so unfortunately I had to give on this as I couldn't figure out what was going on.

My birthday weekend was very successful in terms of new games!

Dungeon Petz:
This is by the makers of Dungeon Lords, which is one of my all-time favourite games.  Dungeon Petz is also great fun - a bit less complicated, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps with a little less scope.  You play a family of imps running a pet shop, raising baby monsters to sell to the dungeon lords.  It's extremely silly, but also quite hard - I'm pretty rubbish and came convincingly last both times we played - but it's so much fun, I don't care.  Perhaps if I practise, I'll get better.

Bananagrams:
I hadn't come across this word game before and initially got it mixed up with a different anagram game I played last year and hated.  In Bananagrams, there are 144 tiles very like Scrabble tiles, but without the points printed on them.  Each player takes 21 to start with and you have to make an individual crossword with your letters.  You can dump troublesome letters into the middle, but you have to take three more to compensate.  Once you have used all your letters, you call out "Peel" and everyone has to take another letter.  This continues until there are fewer letters in the middle than the number of players, at which point the first person to use all their letters shouts "Bananas!" and wins.  It's a little pressured, especially if a player gets ahead and starts calling "Peel" every two seconds.  But, because you only have to interact with your own letters, it's almost as if you're just playing against yourself, and I really enjoyed it.  I also got better with every game I played, and eventually won one, which was very satisfying.

Yesterday, I went to Shepherd's Bush for a movie double bill.

Skyfall:
The pre-credits action sequence was really excellent - clever, exciting, very fast-moving - after that, though, I felt the film was a little flat.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great.  It had its moments, but ultimately left me relatively unmoved.

Argo:
Argo, on the other hand, was excellent.  It contained interesting information about history that I had not previously known, had an unusual presentation of US interference in foreign affairs, was a lot funnier than I had expected, and also maintained very effective suspense.  It was well written, intelligent, and very engaging.  There was an annoying and entirely unnecessary chase-type sequence in the middle, which would have been better done in a different way, but otherwise, the film was really good.