Films

Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)
[#67 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]

TV

Age of Umbra
1x06 The Unforgiving City [1st half]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

But before that...

Critical Role Cooldown
Age of Umbra Episode 5
[Watch it (again) on Beacon.]

Fiction

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
7 The Adventure of the Three Gables

And here is the other single-star Holmes story, and the one that also comes bottom of the poll-of-polls I've referenced in the past. They're both late-era tales, collected in the final volume of short stories — that volume seems to be regarded as the weakest overall, although the Pocket Essentials guide still gives half its stories 4+ stars.

But this is entirely deserving of its low standing. It's not entirely without merit — there's the odd good line — but it's also pretty racist (not in a cruel way, but horrendously casually); and even if you're someone who can accept that as being "of its time", much of the writing is weak or outright poor (I can't quite tell if Holmes is behaving out of character, or if Doyle's conception of Holmes's behaviour just changed a lot down the decades).

The villain's convoluted plot is also thoroughly daft considering the goal they were trying to achieve. That said, it's the kind of dumb decision people make in real-life that comes across as dumb in fiction because we're not making ill-informed decisions in the heat of the moment. But really, as Holmes seems to think highly of the mastermind's intellect, you'd expect them to have come up with a sensible course of action.

As for my goals, that's the two very worst canon stories out of the way. I'll have to think about where to go next — possibly to divisive stories: there are a couple that came at the bottom of the poll-of-polls but Pocket Essentials gives four stars; and, vice versa, one they give two stars is =13th in the poll, and was also in Conan Doyle's personal top ten. Intriguing.

Games

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Sat down to play this thinking I was resuming outside a dungeon, would complete that, maybe play for half-an-hour or so (that's how long they mostly take, people say), and then I'd do other stuff. Well, I was wrong about the resumption point, which led to decision-making and exploring, which meant it was almost an hour before I was at the entrance to a dungeon. After almost two-and-a-half hours, I finally decided I should do something else. This is getting to be a pattern.

I am not knowledgeable or experienced enough to know if this is a "great game", but I'm certainly enjoying the heck out of it.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Just one new addition this week, which turned up today ahead of its release on Monday. There's a bunch of other stuff coming out around about now that I'm interested in, but I haven't got round to ordering it yet — I've been spending too much time (and money) on computer games. More on why that is... soon.*

Number of titles in collection: 3,594 [up 1]
Of which DVDs: 986 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,608 [up 1]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 452 [up 1]

Number of discs in collection: 8,635 [up 2]
Number of films: 4,558 [up 1]
Number of additional cuts: 454 [no change]
Number of TV episodes: 10,172 [no change]
Number of short films: 1,266 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.

* Not that I think anyone (a) reads this, or (b) cares, but hey, maybe future-me will stumble across these in five, ten, twenty, or more years and get a kick out of re-reading it.

TV

Age of Umbra
1x05 Ages of Pain [2nd half 2nd hour]
The fact that it's taken me all week to get through this one episode is ridiculous. Bloody day job actually taking up my working hours... And even now, I finished the episode so late that its Cooldown will be listed tomorrow.
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Games

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Intended to pop into Hinterberg for maybe half-an-hour — do a dungeon, some social stuff, keep my hand in as it's been a few days... Ended up playing for two hours.

I'm slightly worried about two things. One, that I'm not going to finish it before it stops being free on Luna, and then, what, I'll have to buy it and start over, probably? And two, that all the easiness settings I've got turned on here are going to ruin it for me when I try to play another similar game that doesn't let me coast through on, effectively, "story mode". Or maybe all games have these kinds of scaling these days? I'll probably find out at some point. But it works for me, because I'm much more interested in the exploration and character interactions and puzzle solving than the combat. I still like bashing a few buttons from time to time, but I'm glad it can't kill me and ruin my progress left, right and centre.

TV

Age of Umbra
1x05 Ages of Pain [2nd half 1st hour]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Games

Gray Matter
I should be picking this back up properly, but I only played about five minutes today. That's because I've found a new way to run non-Mac games on my Mac, and I used this to test it out. It's definitely superior: I'm pretty sure the game looked better (a lot of it is pre-rendered backgrounds, but the characters are 3D models, and they immediately looked less jagged now), but most importantly the sound played properly (it had a constant repetitive glitch on my previous version) and it worked immediately (I had to faff around for hours before). Hurrah for Heroic Games Launcher. I also think it's going to give me access to games I had no way to get at before (namely, stuff I've got free from Prime Gaming but squirreled away in the Amazon Games app), so that's super... though it's not as if I don't have a big enough backlog as it is.

TV

Age of Umbra
1x05 Ages of Pain [1st half]
Back to Age of Umbies for a bit. Heck, I'm not going to finish C2 before C4 anyway, so I may as well try to finish this miniseries at least.
[Watch it (again) on YouTube or Beacon.]

Fiction

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
1 The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone

I've been reading the Sherlock Holmes short stories in order of publication recently — that was because I'd read a good chunk of each of the first two collected volumes (Adventures and Memoirs) but not finished either, and getting those polished off meant I could count them towards my GoodReads challenge tally. I could just keep going and do the same with the remaining three volumes, but I've barely started any of those so it's less about "finishing them off" as it is simply reading them.

So, instead, I've decided to go back to my previous methodology for a bit: using a ranking to see which stories are great/good/poor and choosing accordingly. My main guide is The Pocket Essential Sherlock Holmes, from which I have unread stories at evey rating level (i.e. 1–5 out of 5); but whereas in the past I used this to read the best of the best, now I'm going to focus on the lower-rated ones, the idea being that I'll eventually end my first-time reads with better-regarded stories.

Mazarin Stone is one of only two 1-star stories, according to Pocket Essentials. It ranks low on fan polls, too. And it is pretty bad: much of it is a pathetic circular argument between Holmes and the villain; as well as being argumentatively repetitive, the quality of the dialogue isn't very good; there's not really any mystery to be solved; a central conceit is recycled from an older story; and the twist denouement is insultingly implausible. It's based on a stage play, and apparently on stage the lights went out to facilitate the switcheroo, but in this adaptation, Holmes just... pulls it off without anyone noticing. It doesn't hold up.

Well, at least that's that out of the way. My plan is working. Next up: a story that seems to be pretty roundly regarded as the worst of the worst...

Bit of a footnote: the Wikipedia page for Case-Book lists this as story 3 in the book, because it cites the order they were presented in the first British collected edition. My copy uses the order the stories were original published in magazines, as does Pocket Essentials, so I've decided to number based on that.

Games

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Another hour or so today. Did another dungeon, but I kinda enjoy the town stuff more. Maybe this speaks to the kind of games I'd like to play in the future (though having the puzzle-y action-y dungeon stuff does also make for variety, so...)

Films

The Power of the Dog (2021)
[#66 in The 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2025]

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

Seven new titles this week, including the delayed Arrow 4K UHD release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which replaces both the previous 4K release I'd imported from the States, and — by completing the "Dollars" trilogy in 4K — also supplants my old box set. As always with such things, it does some slightly funny things to the numbers, albeit masked by the six other brand-new acquisitions.

Number of titles in collection: 3,593 [up 5]
Of which DVDs: 986 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 2,607 [up 5]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 451 [no change]

Number of discs in collection: 8,633 [up 7]
Number of films: 4,557 [up 4]
Number of additional cuts: 454 [up 2]
Number of TV episodes: 10,172 [up 12]
Number of short films: 1,266 [up 7]

And all of that was just in time for the monthly running time update...

Total running time of collection (approx.):
605 days, 3 hours, and 20 minutes.
(Up 1 day, 22 hours, and 3 minutes from last month.)

See you next week, faithful reader.

TV

Critical Role
2x111 New Homes and Old Friends [3rd hour]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, Twitch, or Beacon.]


Talks Machina
#147 Discussing Up to 'New Homes and Old Friends' (with Liam & Ashley)
#148 Discussing up to 'New Homes and Old Friends' (with Marisha & Taliesin)

"We're all kinda used to talking to each other on Zoom so much that this is, sorta, just like one of those things, except that, um, this one lives on the internet forever." Well, it would have done… Except, of course, it still does, just in different, less official places, so I guess he was still correct. (Similarly, when Liam jokes about a restraining order... oof! I swear half the reason they took these down is not just because BWF's present, but because of all the jokes they make about how bad he is.)

Anyway: two episodes — whaaaat? Yeah, at this point Talks was supposed to be fortnightly (i.e. one after every other episode of CR), but, for reasons I haven't been able to unearth, between episodes 111 and 112 there were two episodes of Talks (I guess CR had to take an unexpected longer break? Maybe they mention it at the start of 112, because they didn't at the end of 111). Plus, from this point they seem to have abandoned the idea that episodes of the chat show are about an hour long. So, whereas pre-Covid there would've been c. one hour of Talks between episodes 111 and 112, in our reality there were three-and-a-quarter hours. And I watched it all today. Fun times.

[Watch #147 and #148 (again) on Internet Archive.]

TV

Critical Role
2x111 New Homes and Old Friends [2nd hour]
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, Twitch, or Beacon.]

Games

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Got new batteries, played for two-and-a-half hours — yeah, I guess I'm enjoying it.

I say "guess" because in all that time I only actually played one dungeon, and the rest of the time indulged in exploring the overworld and town of Hinterberg. That's definitely part of the game too, but I guess it's also my point-and-click-adventure nature coming out: I mostly want to look around the locales and talk to people, not just solve button-pushing puzzles and fight monsters (although there are still semi-random fights outside of the dungeons, some of which would have proved fatal if I didn't have those difficulty-lowering options on — all games should have that for people like me!) I guess I'll go back into the actual dungeons at some point, still.

TV

Critical Role
2x111 New Homes and Old Friends [1st half]
“Well, that’s the easiest hour I’ve ever had to Dungeon Master.”
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, Twitch, or Beacon.]

Games

Dungeons of Hinterberg

Because what I really needed was to start playing another game. Also: so many games I’ve bought and ought to get round to, but I keep going for free ones! Well, I say “free”: it’s free to Amazon Prime members (which I do pay for) via Luna, where it’s time-limited (until the start of next month), so we’ll see if I like it enough to stick at it and complete it by then.

I will say: I played for a little over an hour, and only stopped because my Luna controller ran out of batteries (and the spares I put in were actually flat), so that’s got to be a good sign. Especially as I’m not the greatest at this kind of game, in part because I’ve never really played a lot of them (and certainly not recently), but I gave this a go because I liked the art style and the setting/story piqued my interest.

Fortunately for me, it has a “story mode” which makes fights easier and means you can’t actually die (other than by running off a cliff or something, at which point it reloads where you left off), both of which are big plus points for me. I guess some people object to easy modes and the like because it’s not as challenging, but I don’t actually play games to be challenged — I find them entertaining in other ways — so nowadays I’m happy to plump for an easy setting. (Unless it’s a point-and-click adventure where a higher difficulty adds puzzles or something. That’s different.)

TV

Critical Role
2x110 Dinner with the Devil [2nd half]
“I wish for you, in the future, to find someone who will mourn you when you are gone.” Gotta be one of the coldest putdowns in the history of... everything.
[Watch it (again) on YouTube, Twitch, or Beacon.]