Taskmaster, Dragaera, and the Nebulas
I have now been to an in-persong work thing! -- the conference type thing I mentioned in a previous post, which, as I was walking out of the hotel in the evening, I heard someone cheerfully refer to as "my first super-spreader event" XD Also through ~4 hours of public transit commute, all while California is having a surge, the Bay Area is at the forefront of it, and the three counties my commute took me through are #1, 3, and 4 of CA's counties for Covid cases, so we'll see if this is how Covid finally catches up with me, but so far I'm just feeling tired from a long day Thursday.
And what btter way to unwind than to talk about non-RL things, like:
1) Taskmaster has very firmly become the highlight of my week -- I start thinking about new episodes around Tuesday XD
S13 Episode 5
The prize task -- which is at this point more properly Bridget and Greg flirting with each other and some other people also brought in some stuff I guess -- was quite fun! I was not really on board with Sophie's "poor millennial me, I've got no wardrobe, only posh biscuits" take on the task, and am forced to agree Chris deserved the 1 point, but the other three were quite fun. Ardal's squeaky red jacket (which the podcast described as a midlife crisis), Judi's nurse outfit ("You'd wanna come and play" XD), but of course the star was Bridget and her kimono that she bought for Greg 17 years ago. Their whole "I'm not the Scarlet Pimpernel, I live in London! I put it to you--" "No, I put it to YOU--" "No, I put it BACK to you" exchange was wonderful, and Greg in the kimono at the end looked MAGNIFISCENT, omg, good call 17-year-ago!Bridget!
OK, the key and phone two part task -- is this the first time they had a two-part task that was not consecutive? Oh, wait, the podcast mentioned the thing in series 7 when mid-task they had to put on a boiler suit when they heard the siren. Anyway, the main task was quite fun, but I felt like the key-hiding part wasn't scored, which seems unfair. I mean, probably it wouldn't have changed the points, because Bridget, who did not hide it in a difficult place at all came in last anyway, but it's the principle of the thing. The search was nicely mad, and I have to agree that the clip of Bridget lying on the ground with her bin bag of stuffed animals, defeatedly banging her pot (that was a good idea, btw!) is iconic and, like, a perfect summary of Taskmaster and indeed the pointlessness of life in general.
My favorite of the tasks in this episode was the high five one. It's really unusual to have just part of the group there and having to extrapolate from that. And of course they did get three absolutely mad results -- Judi running for it right away (as Ardal predicted), Bridget missing it entirely because she was doing some kind of different task she had made up in her head, and Ardal high-fiving Alex a whole bunch of times for no apparent reason. And Chris and Sophie continue to be REMARKABLY on the same page, with Christ allllmost moving at the same time as Sophie did. Anyway, I was glad that Sophie won, and her little jump-up-and-high-five was adorable.
(Seeing the five of them all lined up through the magic of special effects made me reflect that I actually wish the teams had been assigned as follows: Chris and Sophie (who both seem to regard the other as their serious competition, and so often have similar ideas and approaches), because I'd love to see what kind of synergy they would have together -- I suspect they would have made a terrifyingly effective team; and Ardal, Bridget, and Judi, who would just be engaging in seven different types of madness. OK, that probably wouldn't be fair, but it would be hilarious to watch -- I'm thinking a similar vibe to the series 7 breakdown, where the girls-vs-boys approach produced a team of two with the two most consistently functional contestants and a team of three consisting entirely of maverick weirdos. Alas for what might have been.)
I did not enjoy the way the water level task turned out. First, I felt bad for Chris and Sophie, who got disqualified (and Sophie apparently had a mini-breakdown where she was asking Alex if the Taskmaster would forgive her and was promising to make it right, aww XD). Second, I originally didn't think "a quantity of water" counted as an object, so was thinking that Ardal was on the cheating side of clever with this, but it didn't say objects, it said "things", and I guess I can see water be a "thing", so maybe I'm OK with that after all. My favorite part of this task was Judi's quote about the bananas "floating like two dicks", and subsequent Jaws theme. But also, it's amazing how close Chris came to both finding the EUREKA bricks and, like, hitting on the perfect solution, with his "six Bibles" quip.
Chris is having really rotten luck with the live tasks -- he was either the first or one of the first to get two red balls and then took forever to get the last one (and he mentioned on the podcast, where he was the special guest that week, that he ended up hurting himself during the task, too). This was another mad one, that was frustrating even to watch, let alone participate in.
Before the live task, Christ had overtaken Bridget, but since she won and he came in next to last, she is back in the lead. I do hope it's Chris who wins rather than Bridget, because he is definitely the better competitor. I was listening to some interesting stats on Lou Sanders's "the people's podcast", and Bridget is doing really well on prize tasks and on subjective tasks in general -- so far, on the subjective tasks (i.e. tasks judged by Greg rather than having an objective winner who did something fastest, farthest, etc.), she has the highest score of anyone in all the series (higher than Noel Fielding, who is the top scorer on subjective tasks) -- or, well, she did as of episode 5; episode 6 may well have changed that. Perhaps more surprisingly, she is also doing really well on live tasks, even those are not subjective at all; Lou and Jack Bernhardt hypothesized that perhaps Bridget needs an engaged audience to do well (good thing she wasn't on an audience-less Covid series, then).
As I mentioned above, Chris was the special guest on the episode 5 podcast, and I continue to like him more and more. He revealed the surprising truth that he had actually not watched any Taskmaster before he got invited to series 13 -- because he had heard the concept of the show and it was so perfect for him, he was annoyed that they didn't invite him on earlier, and was boycotting it until they did XD (He compared watching the show without him being on it like having to watch all the other comedians coming to his house and "kissing on me wife" XD) Chris sounded completely adorable on the podcast, and I'm rooting for him to win even more now.
S13 Episode 6
I was quite pleased with the outcome of this episode -- Chris regained his series lead, which I'm happy about, but Sophie won the episode in a tiebreak (greatest voice range), and I'm glad she got to win, because till now it's just been Chris, Bridget, and Ardal as episode winners. It was the episode won with the least number of points this series so far -- only 15 -- but still. Hopefully Judi will also win an episode at some point -- I want to see her celebration.
Prize task: OK, I don't know that I found any of these things particularly calming/relaxing, but Ardal's win with a tea towel is particularly inexplicable. I do feel like Greg consistently overscores Ardal's prize tasks, and at first it looked like pity points, but actually Ardal is not doing badly at this point -- he is fourth, but it's a fairly close separation between the top 4, just 11 points between him and Chris -- so I guess maybe Greg just is genuinely on the same page as Ardal on these things, ineffably. Sophie's "personal massager" was an interesting choice; I would not have guessed that Chris and Judi of all people would go for fairly similar takes (an aquarium and a fountain with plastic fish). I thought Judi deserved more points for her burbling, and I do think Chris won over Greg with his aquarium stats, but I also found that adorable, so no complaints about his high score. I do feel like Bridget was a bit underscored, but I also don't think a cat cafe is particularly relaxing.
The cement mixer task was definitely the highlight of this episode -- or at least Chris's entry specifically was. I'm not surprised at all, at this point, that Chris's idea was to turn the cement mixer into a nonsense sport thing (like he'd done with the duel), but wow, that was hilarious to watch as sausages smacked into their faces, Chris cringed away from his own creation, and Alex gamely attempted to catch a flying sausage in his mouth. A+ content, iconic, etc. The sausage mixer just completely eclipsed what everyone else did, so I agree with Greg about needing to put a gulf between Chris and the others. But I did find Bridget's protest song entertainingly terrible (Bridget was the special guest on the podcast and said this and the meeting with yourself were two of the three lowest points for her on the show, and the third is to come in the next episode), and Sophie and Alex's dynamic continues to also be entertainingly terrible -- I don't know what it is, but there's a particular kind of awkwardness in their interaction that is a different kind of awkwardness than I've seen before on the show. Judi playing bar and Ardal playing hair salon with the mixer were less interesting to me, although I can see Greg's point that the cement mixer bar could be a real hipster gimmick thing. Oh, right, and the start of the task being Alex doing an impression of the contestants -- those were quite terrible, well done (Sohpie did a much better job in her meeting task. Though I wonder if the meeting task followed this task and that's what gave her the idea.)
The "record the highest number on this pedometer" task was so simple in concept, I wonder if it was a promoted tiebreak task that they decided to elevate after seeing a) Bridget take the lateral thinking route and b) Bridget's silly walk. This was a great encapsulation of Bridget an Taskmaster -- an inability to grasp how pedometers work even after Alex tried to explain it to her a bunch of times, doing a ridicuous and ineffectual but visually arresting thing, and somehow winning anyway because her brain works on a totally different wavelength than everyone else's and sometimes that's a real advantage. Judi and Ardal also failed to grasp how pedometers work, it seems, and Judi giving hers a ride on a remote control rat and then getting angry that she lost and accusing Alex of sabotaging her by offering her a remote control rat instead of a puppy was also a thing I'm glad we got to see. I'm very glad Chris did well in this task even though he didn't win the 5 points, because it did look like the poor boy was going to have heat stroke. Sophie going for a drill as a hack to run up the numbers on her pedometer made me think of Liza Tarbuck and her lizard spinning, except that whereas Liza's execution was elegant and seamless, the pedometer kept flying off and Sophie kept having to chase it down again, but I'm glad all this netted her a respectable score.
Hold a meeting with yourself task -- it seems like 20 minutes (I think that's what they got?) is not enough to pull off something like this compellingly. Even Judi's Jerry Springer thing, which got 5 points for having lots of drama as requested, I felt could've benefitted from more time to think through and set up. I actually found Sophie's the most fun to watch, in particular for her impressions of the other contestants (and of herself) and especially of Greg sitting on his throne (which OMG Greg actually attempted to duplicate, not very successfully XD; Judi covering her eyes in reaction was a great touch I'm glad the camera caught). Anyway, I actually watched Sophie's meeting twice, because I was enjoyng this nonsense (but what's with the obsession with Alex's untimely death? It came up twice in this episode, here, and in the cement mixer ice breaker). I liked watching Chris and Bridget's meetings as well, but do have to agree that there was no drama in them, so understand why they were scored low. But I continue to not really get why Ardal is getting such high points on these kinds of tasks; may be just a divergence in my and his sense of humour, where Ardal and Greg's seem convergent. (I do wonder how Bridget's cumulative subjective tasks score is doing, after she got 1 point on this task, 2 points on the cement mixer, and 1 point on the prize task.)
And finally the live studio task of guessing the guy's name (winner gets 5 points, everyone else gets zero) -- what the hell was that? Like, Chris and Sophie started out asking sensible questions about length and trying to narrow down to a starting letter, but at some point even they seemed to devolve into nonsense. And surely "Quentin" is the first thing you try after confirming that his name starts with a Q! I almost wondered if the others were intentionally leaving it for Sophie to guess, but I just don't think they are that organized XD
Oh, and I thought I had already posted about this, but apparently not -- I also finished out the existing Taskmaster Podcast retrospective episodes, which were series 4 (really, really fun! but it is one of the series I like a lot, and had some of my favorite contestants on as guests) and series 3 (unsurprisingly, my least favorite of the retrospectives, because it is my least favorite series, but actually I liked some of the contestants more as podcast guests than as contestants, so it wasn't as much of a chore to get through as I'd been expecting).
Notes from series 4: It was really fun to get more episodes with Mark Watson and Jack Bernhardt (these were actually their first appearances on the podcast, but I had listened to later episodes withe them already), but I was especially happy to get to the episodes with Hugh, Mel, Iain, and Phil Wang as special guests, since they are all some of my favorite contestants, either in their own series or overall.
I was especially happy to hear from Hugh, who tended to be so laconic on the show itself. I was happy to see he didn't seem particularly traumatized by Greg's treatment of him on the show, and it was just neat to hear him wax rhapsodic about clouds (he really is a fan, lol) and favorite bits. Ed asked him what some of his favorite tasks were, and he said cutting across the bunting to deliver sandwiches to Alex (even though he lost the 5 points the Noel; but Hugh said he was happy any time he got to use knives or similar, which, LOL) and jumping over the gym horse (while wearing Alex's wifebeater, it turned out XD) Ed also asked whether Hugh -- who, according to Jack's spreadsheet is the person to score lowest on prize tasks in the history of the show -- ever tried changing the prizes he had originally picked, once he saw how badly his selections were coming across -- you're allowed to do that, which I surmised when Victoria brought in the Mr Men thing for a second task, based on Greg's reaction to it the first time -- and Hugh said no: he'd stuck to his guns and didn't try to change any of the prizes -- because he figured that anything else he could come up with would still be shit according to Greg.
The episode with Mel was also a blast -- she was just as adorable as she was on the show, and kept sticking up for Hugh, which I also enjoyed. Hugh had revealed on the earlier episode that his actual nickanme at uni was Desk, and it was Mel who, upon hearing it after the fact, turned it into Desky, which is way cuter. Turns out Mel is a big train nerd (Hugh actually shared that part), which is additionally adorable. And she revealed what she did with all the wax seals she'd saved from the task -- she gave all but one to the son of someone she worked with, who was a huge fan of the show, which is just so aww! But she is still worked up about losing the signed vegetable task to Noel's David Suchet's autograph on a broadbean, and ranted about that entertainingly for quite a while. Mel was already a contestant I liked a lot from the show, but her podcast appearance made me like her even more.
I had also been looking forward to Iain's appearance on the podcast, since he was my favorite in series 8, for the character arc and entertainment value, and it did not disappoint. In particular, he had a very fun vibe with Ed, out of recognition that they were both the shouty angry ones overinvested in winning on their shows, with fun riffs like "You would have put on that wet suit properly." "I'd still be wearing it now." I was of course looking forward to what Iain would say about the infamous team task with the hammock, and it was interesting to hear his side of it, which matched what Lou had said exactly: Lou and Iain are good friends, so it was a friend argument ("like building a flatpack with your mate," as Ed put it), not Iain shouting at a random woman. Consequently, he does still seem upset about how that came across, both because he didn't like watching back what was actually there but also because the viewers didn't get that context. Interestingly, Iain also talked about putting on a hypercompetitive persona, having decided that was going to be his thing, which is a decision he seems to regret a bit and also be somewhat baffled by in retrospect. He talked about how Joe Thomas's parents, who are used to seeing him in acting roles, were all "aww, there's our son" after watching him on Taskmaster, while Iain's went "who the fuck was that?" about the persona he had chosen to put on. But he seems at peace about it overall, which is nice.
The last contestant I was really looking forward to getting to was Phil Wang, and I really enjoyed his podcast episode. I did not realize tha tPhil was mixed race (his mother is not Asian). I also did not realize just what a weird laugh he has -- I guess he was mostly trying for deadpan on the show, or when he was laughing, he was laughing along with a whole bunch of other people, so it didn't stand out. Ed asked him about his favorite moments, and Phil talked about using water to get the scale to read an exact weight (to spell out OLLIE) as the most elegant solution which he was very proud of -- which I completely agree with; even though he did not win that task or even come close to, I do think it was the BEST solution, and one of my favorite Phil moments. He shared that he would apparently get into long philosophical discussions in the studio about whether James's pebbles were different objects or not, that would all get cut, because they were very long and not funny, but I'm very amused knowing that. He also shared that the running gag about haggling was true of the original object he told that joke about, but then he decided to turn it into a running joke -- which didn't entirely work, because the studio audience did not get that it was a running gag -- because the episodes are, of course, recorded way before they are aired, so no-one in the studio had seen the earier episodes with earlier installments of the gag. Also, Phil revealed that when Greg smashed up the little box, it was a duplicate that the producers had made that was destroyed, not the original object Phil had broughtin -- which Phil didn't realize, so he was genuinely distraught because that was a present from his sister (and said to Greg, "You destroyed my sister's box!", which XD)
I forget which episode this was in, but in one of these series 4 podcasts Ed shared Alex's list of perfect solutions from the show, which are:
- Hugh Dennis and the ball on the running machine
- Liza Tarbuck and the lizard spinning on the drill
- Tim Key and the tea bag throwing in dog ball
- Richard Osman and the yoga mat on top of the hill
I would add to this:
- Team Funk making Alex more dry than he was when the task started
- Rhod Gilbert tying up Alex so that Alex can't untie him
Since both of these involve doing things to Alex, I wonder if he just thinks of those kinds of tasks as a different category, and that's why they didn't come up -- I feel like it's hard to argue they were not perfect solutions.
I also really enjoyed the episode with Jack Bernhardt the stats guy. I alluded to it above when talking about Bridgtet, but this was the episode where Jack shared that Noel Fielding is the person with the top score on subjective tasks (3.95), and the bottom scorers on subjective tasks are Roisin (1.91) and Hugh is next. On objective tasks, though, Hugh is the best in series 4 (and 7th best overall) and Noel is the worst. Lolly is the best at prize tasks across all series-- her average is 4.25; Hugh is the worst (also across all series). In a recent People's Podcast episode Jack actually shared the factoid that if prize tasks did not exist, either Hugh or Mel would've won series 4, which is neat to think about!
So, as you can see, I thoroughly enjoyed the podcast's series 4 retrospective -- and I also found it interesting that Ed and a lot of the guests who were not series 4 contestants themselves kept saying they had forgotten how good this series was, that it's sort of overlooked -- I guess it's the one just before a lot of people found the show, so people don't think about this one as much. But it was nice to be validated in my choices, as this is one of my favorite seasons and groups of contestants.
I have much less of substance to say about the series 3 retrospective. It was interesting to hear that Dave Gorman not only still denies he cheated with the pea, but actually admitted to another spot of cheating at which he hadn't been caught -- he added some saliva to the sweat-collecting task. But in general Dave was an entertaining podcast guest, and I was amused by his lament that he wishes he'd taken his phone with him to the tasks, which is not forbidden, but he left it behind out of some kind of spirit of pure competition or something. I also enjoyed the Al urray episode more this time around than the previous (later) episode I'd heard him on; I still don't actually like him much as a contestant, but he seemed to have more sense of humour about himself this time around. There was the interesting tidbit that the balloons with the Morse code task was the first task they did, which may explain why Al didn't figure it out -- Ed's hypothesis is that Alex was counting on him to be the one not to just spot it but actually decode the message. I even disliked the Paul Chowdhry episode less this time around than his previous apperance during series 10 -- maybe he was trying less hard to be weird, or maybe I just knew what to expect more. But, yeah, I don't think I have anything more to say about the series 3 podcasts. Glad I'm done with series 3, sad there's no more podcast backlog for me to listen to when washing dishes... But at least I have the rest of series 6, series 7 (one of my very top favorites, and I very much hope Ed will have Rhod on for that, as well as James and Phil back, and I'm sure Kerry also), and of course series 9 eventually.
Also, stashing here for my own reference a link to Jack Bernhardt's amazing stats spreadsheet (which currently goes through series 12, but I'm eagerly awaiting the addition of series 13)
On one of the People's Podcast episodes Jack also shared the analysis prompted by a fan comment that the people sitting in the first chair disproportionately do not win Taskmaster. That is, there have been 12 winners across the 12 finished series, and they're 3 from chair 2, 3 from chair 3, etc. -- 3 from each chair, except from chair 1, where no-one seated there (Frank Skinner, Doc, Al Murray, Hugh, Aisling, Alice, James Acaster, Iain, David Baddiel, Daisy, Charlotte, Alan Davies) has won. And, like, most series Bob Mortimer would've been in the first chair, but he wasn't on series 5, when he won. Jack's hypothesis is that the first chair person is the furthest from Greg, and so Greg cares about them less and suboncsiously awards them fewer points in the subjective tasks. But I don't know that this is at all borne out by the subjective task scores -- Hugh is the only one of those whose scores are disproportionately low, although Alice and Asim were also lower than everyone else in their series. But it does seem like something is going on, given the disproportionate distribution... *
2) I have been really enjoying getting a chance to talk about Morrolan Dragaera with scytale again and with cowsruletheworl, so I jumped at the chance to ramble about Dragaera to scytale's prompt:
- how and if your thoughts on the [Dragaera] series or individual books have changed over time and different reads!
This is such a great question for this series! Because my thoughts have definitely changed over time / over different reads, and I think it's one case where that's the result of (mostly) deliberate choices made by Brust, and/or him choosing to lean in to those kinds of things when they happened naturally, and that's really neat!
So I've definitely mentioned this elsewhere, but I have a very unusual-for-me trajectory with this series: I was low-key following it, reading books when I came across them, for, oh, over ten years, probably. I found Jhereg in the library paperback stacks and enjoyed the first person smartass, and must have read several more books around the same time. I wasn't keeping track of reading as formally in the early days of LJ, but I have a record of reading Issola in early 2004, just a couple of months after I started LJ, and I remember this was me coming back to the series after something of a break. My main takeaways look to be "I quite like the Vlad Taltos books, but they have a very distinctive style, which I find just slightly over the top." and "not enough Morrolan" (this, at least, I've been very consistent about XD) Then there was another pretty long break until Dzur three years later (2007), and that seems to have kick-started something, because I went on to reread Taltos and Phoenix (and at that time was thinking I must have started reading the series way back when with Taltos, although I have no idea why I thought that / am not sure that's true), made Dragon one of my "catch up on series books my library doesn't have" reads of my summer of 2007 sabbatical, and picked up a discounted copy of the Book of Jhereg omnibus in 2008, which facilitated additional rereads in 2009. By Jhegaala, I was reading each new book as it was released. And then in early 2011 I read Iorich and something shifted imperceptibly and took the series from "book series I quite enjoy dipping into when the opportunity arises" to full=blown obsession. I tracked down and read the Paarfi books and the Vlad books I'd been missing till then (Athyra and Orca), reread the earlier books, searched out everything I could find on the internet about this fandom (fic, fanart, cosplay, LJ RP logs, Brust's blog), which took me through the Tiassa release -- this was the first one I caved and preordered, and basically never stopped being obsessive about it since.
And the thing is, I don't think it's anything special about Iorich itself that triggered this shift -- I wouldn't even list Iorich as a particular favorite -- but I think this series is doing something really interesting and unusual with how the books fall in relation to each other: the individual books are fun and many can be read as stand-alones (I certainly read them in very weird order) -- but the real amazing stuff is visible when you've read a bunch and can take a sort of zoomed out view and see how things said or unsaid in one book highlight something about a different book, how the unreliable narrators (whether they are Vlad at different times in his life or Paarfi or someone else) interplay -- it's very cool! Like those composite portraits where the "pixels" are individual pictures themselves (I guess this is called a "photo mosaic"?), you know?
So that's the general ramble, but you asked about individual books, and I've definitely noticed that, too, since I have reread many of these a bunch of times.
One interesting experience was reading Vlad again right after 'discovering' the Chronicles of Amber, because, wow, suddenly a lot of things about the voice and the aesthetic made a lot of sense! (I knew by that point that Brust was a fan of Zelazny, and had read some Zelazny myself, but not Amber) And it wasn't a negative, "oh, I see where he's cribbing this cool stuff from" thing, more just it was neat to see how an author took a thing I liked (that he was a huge fan of, clearly, what with his firstborn being named Corwin) and filtered it through his own way of doing things and turned it into a different thing I liked.
Vlad spoilers from here
I find that the order in which I read the books almost invariably highlights something new, if I haven't read a pair in that combination before. For example, when I first read Dragon, I found it OK but kind of disappointing on the whole -- too much army tedium -- but I was reading it almost like a standalone, surrounded by non-Vlad books. Much later, I had just finished rereading Taltos and decided to roll into Dragon in internal chronology order, and OMG, I loved the first part so much! Because reading them right after each other is what throws into relief that Morrolan has gone from "ugh, this asshole Sethra is annoyingly not letting me slaughter for terminal rudeness" to "hey, Vlad, want to come on an adventure? want to invite me in? how about coming to a state funeral as my +1?" in, like, a matter of weeks, and it's a delight both to watch Morrolan be all "VLAD! BUDDY!" and Vlad being extremely "???" about this turn of events. But the books are so self-contained, and are spaced so far apart in publication order, I don't think you notice that really unless you're reading them back to back. Similarly, rereading Teckla right after Jhereg for the first time was also a really eye-opening experience, because in Jhereg Vlad is obliviously happy in his marriage and joking about buying Cawti a castle -- and meanwhile she's neck-deep in revolutionary activity and drifting away from him, and the funny lines and moments of quiet intimacy in Jhereg that had seemed like the bedrock of a solid marriage suddently turn tragic. Now, I'm guessing that the thing with Dragon is intentional; I'm pretty sure that the thing with Jhereg isn't, because at that point Brust did not realize he was writing a series (and I think also was happily married himself). But that's the really impressive thing about Teckla -- it feels believable to me as Vlad discovering a major blindspot and having to fit his worldview around the new information, and not being gracious about it -- but it never feels like a swerve from the author, just as something the character has to come to terms with.
One of the reasons I'm really looking forward to Tsalmoth (hopefully less than a year left at this point!) is that it's set between Yendi and Jhereg, and not only do I really love young Vlad, but it'll be really interesting to revisit this period from this point in the series. And Brust talked vaguely about discovering something major that Vlad had not mentioned till now, and working on how to fit it in the story so that it makes sense that Vlad would not have mentioned it before, and I'm extremely curious to see what it is and how it's explained -- and how it will invariably change the way I see some events in earlier pubished books, because that's exactly the kind of thing this series excels at and that I trust Brust to do very well.
I remember seeing somewhere that Brust has said that not only is he mindful that people may be reading the books in publication and internal chronology order, but he thinks that once the series is complete, it should be possible to read the books in Cycle order -- and I'm really looking forward to trying that some day. I'm sure I'll find something else interesting that way which hasn't jumped out at me yet.
There are longer 'arc' things of course, too, beyond just which two books you read one after the other. Like, I think it's so neat that we hear a bunch of flippant explanations for what happened to Vlad's finger before we get to understand what actually happened in Jhegaala -- it was always a character detail how Vlad chose to talk about it, but knowing the truth changes subtly what kind of character detail it is, if that makes sense? The Orca spoiler is another big one, of course -- there are so many lines and scenes in the earlier books that come into a different kind of focus once you know the Orca spoiler. My favorite is Sethra's amazing, "For one thing, we don't know any thieves" line, but there is also so much goodness in Vlad and Kiera's conversations in and around Taltos, where Kiera reassures Vlad she would avenge him if Morrolan ends up killing him, or when Kiera is jokingly warning Vlad about going after a wizard because of what happened last time (that being the raid on Loraan's keep) -- and these were fun banter and heartwarming Kiera-Vlad friendship moents from the start, but once you have the Orca spoiler context, it's really funny/trolly... but also makes you wonder what kind of long game Sethra was playing with Vlad back when he was a kid, to cultivate that relationship. Some of it I'm sure was seeded from the start/from early on, and some of it is probably Brust "discovering" new things about Vlad as he was writing the more recent books and asking himself the question, why has this not come up before? (given the first person narration) Some of these answers are more elegant than others (I'm not a huge fan of "Verra's been messing with Vlad's memories" as an excuse for inconsistencies), but I really admire the commitment to playing with this as much as possible throughout the series.
Vague/minor Paarfi spoilers from here
And THEN there's the interplay with the Paarfi books. I read Tiassa and the later books after the Paarfi ones, so I didn't get to see those in a different light from previously, but it definitely added some context to Issola (Morrolan's backstory in the East, knowing Teldra so much better, actually knowing Adron as a character so the idea that he may still be around in the Lesser Sea of Chaos with some kind of consciousness really hit home), everything around Adron's Disaster in the Vlad books, and so on. Getting to know Zerika in Paarfi changed the way I reacted to Phoenix and made me like the book more than I previously had, because by that point Zerika was a favorite character of mine, and knowing the history between her and Khaavren makes the background things like Khaavren quitting and coming back imbued with sudden meaning. Oh, and I almost forgot one of my favorite examples, Fentor in Jhereg and his role in accidentally getting Morrolan killed -- I had previously not paid any attention to Fentor, he was just a named flunky who did a stupid thing for good reasons, and Morrolan was nice a about it, but the Paarfi books have some great backstory for Fentor and Morrolan when they first met, and knowing it made the scene and subplot in Jhereg so much more interesting and meaningful. And there's even illumination by the LACK of things, a kind of negative space storytelling. Like, one thing that came into focus for me after Paarfi is how oddly hilarious it is that Morrolan keeps pinging Vlad for witchcraft advice. I mean, Vlad is an extraordinary witch, to be sure! But at the time of Paarfi, Morrolan has a tower full of witches, which I'm sure he kept around into the present (why wouldn't he? and why would they leave?) -- so why does Vlad never meet them? (or never tell us about them, at least?) And furthermore, LoCB suggests Morrolan and Laszlo would know each other quite well -- as two people in Zerika's entourage who are both witches, I can only assume they are good friends still -- so why isn't he bugging Laszlo for which blood to use or whatever? Having seen Morrolan's other witches and Laszlo/Brimford in Paarfi made me headcanon Morrolan coming to Vlad, whom he essentially just met as of Dragon and Yendi, for witchcraft tips as the equivalent of asking your crush to tutor you in math to have an excuse to spend time with him, which just cracks me up no end.
Oh, OH! And the amazing spoiler in Baron of Magister Valley, which is not Orca-level of course but still left me fairly pole-axed. I actually have not reread the relevant Vlad books since finishing BoMV, but am looking forward to doing that and seeing if anything new and interesting jumps out at me.
I guess the one thing I haven't talked about in terms of rereads, or just in the 20+ years I've been reading this series, is: has my perception about anything in the series changed because *I* have changed? And, I don't know... The universe is so stylized, I don't relate to it in a realstic way -- like, Vlad being an assassin doesn't bother me even though IRL, you know, I wouldn't want to be friends with someone who killed people for money. There are other series where, as I reread the books when I was older, I understood some characters better or symapthized with them more than on a first read (most notably this would be Komarr in the Vorkosigan Saga), but I can't think of anything like that here. I appreciate the incremental, hard-won growth Vlad shows over the course of the series so far, but I still prefer to read about young punk Vlad. So actually I think my perception of the series on my end (as opposed to due to new canon I came across) has been remarkably consistent through the years. Not sure what gives it that stability, but I do think it's actually another reason that I enjoy rereading the Vlad books as much as I do -- it adds up to a great mix of new things to notice (because of new canon or just because the books are so dense with quips and Easter Egg type allusions) and recapturing very closely the feeling of readin the series for the first time decades ago.
*
3) I was checking Brust's Twitter to see if there was any more news on Tsalmoth pub date for the ramble above, and instead learned that today was the Nebula awards, which I then proceeded to watch online, despite the fact that I read, like one nominated thing in full and didn't like it much XD But I just enjoy these SF community awards as their own thing, and had a great almost-two-hours watching the livecast and liveblogging it at Best Chat, because even though I wasn't super familiar with the nominated works, I knew a fair few of the authors and presenters.
Connie Willis was MC-ing from a Physics office in Colorado full of science books behind her, and I enjoyed her stories of discussions and fights of SFWA meetings past. There was some kind of bit where Neil Gaiman was apparently a time traveler; I joined the livestream a few minutes late and so missed out on the explanation for this and was low-key confused.
Mercedes Lackey was inducted as the latest Grandmaster, which was nice to see even though I've drifted away from her recent books.
I was happy to see Sarah Pinsker win another Nebula -- she's never won for short story before, so was really excited about that, which was cute. The story, "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather", is also up for Hugo this year, so I really should get around to reading it already. Based on cahn's write-up of it, it should have a lot of the things I've enjoyed about Pinsker's other work.
It was announced that Henry Lien (author of the Peasprout Chen books) would be presenting the Norton YA/MG award, and I thought to myself, I wonder if he is going to have a little song -- and of course he did XD About all the nominees, and also including the rhyme of fiction/bitchin', which I don't think really works. But you do you, Henry XD Anyway, Darcie Little Badger won for Snake Falls to Earth, which I have not read yet, but I enjoyed her Elatsoe last year, and she was adorable verklempt in her acceptance speech, so aww!
John Scalzi presented the dramatic presentation award (apparently he used to be a film critic). I don't think I've seen him speak before -- he looked and sounded weirdly like a program manager in tech XD This was actually a category where I had some opinions, having loved Encanto and WandaVision and enjoyed Loki, and watched a little bit of Space Sweepers even. I think I would've preferred Encanto to win, but was pretty happy with WandaVision, and it was cool that the whole nominated team (virtually) showed up to accept.
I have no intrinsic interest in the games category, but the presenter was last years winner, the guy behind Hades, and I enjoyed listening to his very faint, not even accent, but this specific way my compatriots who are Russian speakers who came to the US as preteens speak. Also, he was one of the few people who did not have a bookshelf behind him when talking, and in fact seemed to be livestreaming from a cupboard under the stairs -- which made me wonder if he was in the Bay Area, where I would definitely believe that a Nebula-winning indie game guy can't afford a proper office -- and, sure enough, he seems to be based in Mill Valley XP
What felt like a very long In Memoriam section this year :( -- although the only people whose work I was familiar with whose names I saw were Anne Rice and Patricia McKillip, both of whom I already knew about. And Priscilla Tolkien, apparently, which I hadn't heard, but I don't know anything about her work, just her connection to JRRT. I was particularly touched by Connie Willis paraphrasing Terry Pratchett (a person is not dead while their name is spoken -- or their books are read, she added) in closing out that section.
The novelette winner was Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, whom I have not read before, and also did not realize he was Nigerian-in-Nigeria. Which is why he was not able to join the livecast at first, but fortunately they were able to loop back around to him just before closing. They didn't have power where he was, but he managed to get transmission going, so the audio could be heard pretty well, he was just in pitch blackness -- but still, glad that worked out.
Martha Wells presented the novella award (having turned down a nomination for Murderbot to give someone else a chance at winning). I was fully expecting Becky Chambers to win, and I'm guessing so was the actual winner, Premee Mohamed, who was like, “I was eating dinner because I assumed someone else would win, so give me a sec."
I was also expecting A Desolation Called Peace to win for novel (presented by CL Polk), and had steeled myself for that, but instead it was A Master of Djinn that won! I'm in the middle of reading it right now, but I've read the short story and novella that preceded it, and some of P.Djeli Clark's other work courtesy of the Hugos, and like his style, so he was the one I was rooting for -- yay! He opened with, “So like Premee I was going to go eat because I didn’t think this was going to happen”, and gave a very cute speech, complete with thanking the readers for getting him to write a novel set in this world when he never planned to, thanking his editor for saying "meh" about his original ending and encouraging him to go big, and thanking hiw wife and daughter "who had to go to sleep [it was close to 10 p.m. Eastern at this point]. Look what Daddy did, girls!" Also, and possibly most adorably, he apparently has custom Funko pops of his Cairo djinn-verse characters, Fatma and Siti.
So, I'm glad I watched it, and it's made me more motivated to check out a couple of the winners, which is all to the good.
And what btter way to unwind than to talk about non-RL things, like:
1) Taskmaster has very firmly become the highlight of my week -- I start thinking about new episodes around Tuesday XD
S13 Episode 5
The prize task -- which is at this point more properly Bridget and Greg flirting with each other and some other people also brought in some stuff I guess -- was quite fun! I was not really on board with Sophie's "poor millennial me, I've got no wardrobe, only posh biscuits" take on the task, and am forced to agree Chris deserved the 1 point, but the other three were quite fun. Ardal's squeaky red jacket (which the podcast described as a midlife crisis), Judi's nurse outfit ("You'd wanna come and play" XD), but of course the star was Bridget and her kimono that she bought for Greg 17 years ago. Their whole "I'm not the Scarlet Pimpernel, I live in London! I put it to you--" "No, I put it to YOU--" "No, I put it BACK to you" exchange was wonderful, and Greg in the kimono at the end looked MAGNIFISCENT, omg, good call 17-year-ago!Bridget!
OK, the key and phone two part task -- is this the first time they had a two-part task that was not consecutive? Oh, wait, the podcast mentioned the thing in series 7 when mid-task they had to put on a boiler suit when they heard the siren. Anyway, the main task was quite fun, but I felt like the key-hiding part wasn't scored, which seems unfair. I mean, probably it wouldn't have changed the points, because Bridget, who did not hide it in a difficult place at all came in last anyway, but it's the principle of the thing. The search was nicely mad, and I have to agree that the clip of Bridget lying on the ground with her bin bag of stuffed animals, defeatedly banging her pot (that was a good idea, btw!) is iconic and, like, a perfect summary of Taskmaster and indeed the pointlessness of life in general.
My favorite of the tasks in this episode was the high five one. It's really unusual to have just part of the group there and having to extrapolate from that. And of course they did get three absolutely mad results -- Judi running for it right away (as Ardal predicted), Bridget missing it entirely because she was doing some kind of different task she had made up in her head, and Ardal high-fiving Alex a whole bunch of times for no apparent reason. And Chris and Sophie continue to be REMARKABLY on the same page, with Christ allllmost moving at the same time as Sophie did. Anyway, I was glad that Sophie won, and her little jump-up-and-high-five was adorable.
(Seeing the five of them all lined up through the magic of special effects made me reflect that I actually wish the teams had been assigned as follows: Chris and Sophie (who both seem to regard the other as their serious competition, and so often have similar ideas and approaches), because I'd love to see what kind of synergy they would have together -- I suspect they would have made a terrifyingly effective team; and Ardal, Bridget, and Judi, who would just be engaging in seven different types of madness. OK, that probably wouldn't be fair, but it would be hilarious to watch -- I'm thinking a similar vibe to the series 7 breakdown, where the girls-vs-boys approach produced a team of two with the two most consistently functional contestants and a team of three consisting entirely of maverick weirdos. Alas for what might have been.)
I did not enjoy the way the water level task turned out. First, I felt bad for Chris and Sophie, who got disqualified (and Sophie apparently had a mini-breakdown where she was asking Alex if the Taskmaster would forgive her and was promising to make it right, aww XD). Second, I originally didn't think "a quantity of water" counted as an object, so was thinking that Ardal was on the cheating side of clever with this, but it didn't say objects, it said "things", and I guess I can see water be a "thing", so maybe I'm OK with that after all. My favorite part of this task was Judi's quote about the bananas "floating like two dicks", and subsequent Jaws theme. But also, it's amazing how close Chris came to both finding the EUREKA bricks and, like, hitting on the perfect solution, with his "six Bibles" quip.
Chris is having really rotten luck with the live tasks -- he was either the first or one of the first to get two red balls and then took forever to get the last one (and he mentioned on the podcast, where he was the special guest that week, that he ended up hurting himself during the task, too). This was another mad one, that was frustrating even to watch, let alone participate in.
Before the live task, Christ had overtaken Bridget, but since she won and he came in next to last, she is back in the lead. I do hope it's Chris who wins rather than Bridget, because he is definitely the better competitor. I was listening to some interesting stats on Lou Sanders's "the people's podcast", and Bridget is doing really well on prize tasks and on subjective tasks in general -- so far, on the subjective tasks (i.e. tasks judged by Greg rather than having an objective winner who did something fastest, farthest, etc.), she has the highest score of anyone in all the series (higher than Noel Fielding, who is the top scorer on subjective tasks) -- or, well, she did as of episode 5; episode 6 may well have changed that. Perhaps more surprisingly, she is also doing really well on live tasks, even those are not subjective at all; Lou and Jack Bernhardt hypothesized that perhaps Bridget needs an engaged audience to do well (good thing she wasn't on an audience-less Covid series, then).
As I mentioned above, Chris was the special guest on the episode 5 podcast, and I continue to like him more and more. He revealed the surprising truth that he had actually not watched any Taskmaster before he got invited to series 13 -- because he had heard the concept of the show and it was so perfect for him, he was annoyed that they didn't invite him on earlier, and was boycotting it until they did XD (He compared watching the show without him being on it like having to watch all the other comedians coming to his house and "kissing on me wife" XD) Chris sounded completely adorable on the podcast, and I'm rooting for him to win even more now.
S13 Episode 6
I was quite pleased with the outcome of this episode -- Chris regained his series lead, which I'm happy about, but Sophie won the episode in a tiebreak (greatest voice range), and I'm glad she got to win, because till now it's just been Chris, Bridget, and Ardal as episode winners. It was the episode won with the least number of points this series so far -- only 15 -- but still. Hopefully Judi will also win an episode at some point -- I want to see her celebration.
Prize task: OK, I don't know that I found any of these things particularly calming/relaxing, but Ardal's win with a tea towel is particularly inexplicable. I do feel like Greg consistently overscores Ardal's prize tasks, and at first it looked like pity points, but actually Ardal is not doing badly at this point -- he is fourth, but it's a fairly close separation between the top 4, just 11 points between him and Chris -- so I guess maybe Greg just is genuinely on the same page as Ardal on these things, ineffably. Sophie's "personal massager" was an interesting choice; I would not have guessed that Chris and Judi of all people would go for fairly similar takes (an aquarium and a fountain with plastic fish). I thought Judi deserved more points for her burbling, and I do think Chris won over Greg with his aquarium stats, but I also found that adorable, so no complaints about his high score. I do feel like Bridget was a bit underscored, but I also don't think a cat cafe is particularly relaxing.
The cement mixer task was definitely the highlight of this episode -- or at least Chris's entry specifically was. I'm not surprised at all, at this point, that Chris's idea was to turn the cement mixer into a nonsense sport thing (like he'd done with the duel), but wow, that was hilarious to watch as sausages smacked into their faces, Chris cringed away from his own creation, and Alex gamely attempted to catch a flying sausage in his mouth. A+ content, iconic, etc. The sausage mixer just completely eclipsed what everyone else did, so I agree with Greg about needing to put a gulf between Chris and the others. But I did find Bridget's protest song entertainingly terrible (Bridget was the special guest on the podcast and said this and the meeting with yourself were two of the three lowest points for her on the show, and the third is to come in the next episode), and Sophie and Alex's dynamic continues to also be entertainingly terrible -- I don't know what it is, but there's a particular kind of awkwardness in their interaction that is a different kind of awkwardness than I've seen before on the show. Judi playing bar and Ardal playing hair salon with the mixer were less interesting to me, although I can see Greg's point that the cement mixer bar could be a real hipster gimmick thing. Oh, right, and the start of the task being Alex doing an impression of the contestants -- those were quite terrible, well done (Sohpie did a much better job in her meeting task. Though I wonder if the meeting task followed this task and that's what gave her the idea.)
The "record the highest number on this pedometer" task was so simple in concept, I wonder if it was a promoted tiebreak task that they decided to elevate after seeing a) Bridget take the lateral thinking route and b) Bridget's silly walk. This was a great encapsulation of Bridget an Taskmaster -- an inability to grasp how pedometers work even after Alex tried to explain it to her a bunch of times, doing a ridicuous and ineffectual but visually arresting thing, and somehow winning anyway because her brain works on a totally different wavelength than everyone else's and sometimes that's a real advantage. Judi and Ardal also failed to grasp how pedometers work, it seems, and Judi giving hers a ride on a remote control rat and then getting angry that she lost and accusing Alex of sabotaging her by offering her a remote control rat instead of a puppy was also a thing I'm glad we got to see. I'm very glad Chris did well in this task even though he didn't win the 5 points, because it did look like the poor boy was going to have heat stroke. Sophie going for a drill as a hack to run up the numbers on her pedometer made me think of Liza Tarbuck and her lizard spinning, except that whereas Liza's execution was elegant and seamless, the pedometer kept flying off and Sophie kept having to chase it down again, but I'm glad all this netted her a respectable score.
Hold a meeting with yourself task -- it seems like 20 minutes (I think that's what they got?) is not enough to pull off something like this compellingly. Even Judi's Jerry Springer thing, which got 5 points for having lots of drama as requested, I felt could've benefitted from more time to think through and set up. I actually found Sophie's the most fun to watch, in particular for her impressions of the other contestants (and of herself) and especially of Greg sitting on his throne (which OMG Greg actually attempted to duplicate, not very successfully XD; Judi covering her eyes in reaction was a great touch I'm glad the camera caught). Anyway, I actually watched Sophie's meeting twice, because I was enjoyng this nonsense (but what's with the obsession with Alex's untimely death? It came up twice in this episode, here, and in the cement mixer ice breaker). I liked watching Chris and Bridget's meetings as well, but do have to agree that there was no drama in them, so understand why they were scored low. But I continue to not really get why Ardal is getting such high points on these kinds of tasks; may be just a divergence in my and his sense of humour, where Ardal and Greg's seem convergent. (I do wonder how Bridget's cumulative subjective tasks score is doing, after she got 1 point on this task, 2 points on the cement mixer, and 1 point on the prize task.)
And finally the live studio task of guessing the guy's name (winner gets 5 points, everyone else gets zero) -- what the hell was that? Like, Chris and Sophie started out asking sensible questions about length and trying to narrow down to a starting letter, but at some point even they seemed to devolve into nonsense. And surely "Quentin" is the first thing you try after confirming that his name starts with a Q! I almost wondered if the others were intentionally leaving it for Sophie to guess, but I just don't think they are that organized XD
Oh, and I thought I had already posted about this, but apparently not -- I also finished out the existing Taskmaster Podcast retrospective episodes, which were series 4 (really, really fun! but it is one of the series I like a lot, and had some of my favorite contestants on as guests) and series 3 (unsurprisingly, my least favorite of the retrospectives, because it is my least favorite series, but actually I liked some of the contestants more as podcast guests than as contestants, so it wasn't as much of a chore to get through as I'd been expecting).
Notes from series 4: It was really fun to get more episodes with Mark Watson and Jack Bernhardt (these were actually their first appearances on the podcast, but I had listened to later episodes withe them already), but I was especially happy to get to the episodes with Hugh, Mel, Iain, and Phil Wang as special guests, since they are all some of my favorite contestants, either in their own series or overall.
I was especially happy to hear from Hugh, who tended to be so laconic on the show itself. I was happy to see he didn't seem particularly traumatized by Greg's treatment of him on the show, and it was just neat to hear him wax rhapsodic about clouds (he really is a fan, lol) and favorite bits. Ed asked him what some of his favorite tasks were, and he said cutting across the bunting to deliver sandwiches to Alex (even though he lost the 5 points the Noel; but Hugh said he was happy any time he got to use knives or similar, which, LOL) and jumping over the gym horse (while wearing Alex's wifebeater, it turned out XD) Ed also asked whether Hugh -- who, according to Jack's spreadsheet is the person to score lowest on prize tasks in the history of the show -- ever tried changing the prizes he had originally picked, once he saw how badly his selections were coming across -- you're allowed to do that, which I surmised when Victoria brought in the Mr Men thing for a second task, based on Greg's reaction to it the first time -- and Hugh said no: he'd stuck to his guns and didn't try to change any of the prizes -- because he figured that anything else he could come up with would still be shit according to Greg.
The episode with Mel was also a blast -- she was just as adorable as she was on the show, and kept sticking up for Hugh, which I also enjoyed. Hugh had revealed on the earlier episode that his actual nickanme at uni was Desk, and it was Mel who, upon hearing it after the fact, turned it into Desky, which is way cuter. Turns out Mel is a big train nerd (Hugh actually shared that part), which is additionally adorable. And she revealed what she did with all the wax seals she'd saved from the task -- she gave all but one to the son of someone she worked with, who was a huge fan of the show, which is just so aww! But she is still worked up about losing the signed vegetable task to Noel's David Suchet's autograph on a broadbean, and ranted about that entertainingly for quite a while. Mel was already a contestant I liked a lot from the show, but her podcast appearance made me like her even more.
I had also been looking forward to Iain's appearance on the podcast, since he was my favorite in series 8, for the character arc and entertainment value, and it did not disappoint. In particular, he had a very fun vibe with Ed, out of recognition that they were both the shouty angry ones overinvested in winning on their shows, with fun riffs like "You would have put on that wet suit properly." "I'd still be wearing it now." I was of course looking forward to what Iain would say about the infamous team task with the hammock, and it was interesting to hear his side of it, which matched what Lou had said exactly: Lou and Iain are good friends, so it was a friend argument ("like building a flatpack with your mate," as Ed put it), not Iain shouting at a random woman. Consequently, he does still seem upset about how that came across, both because he didn't like watching back what was actually there but also because the viewers didn't get that context. Interestingly, Iain also talked about putting on a hypercompetitive persona, having decided that was going to be his thing, which is a decision he seems to regret a bit and also be somewhat baffled by in retrospect. He talked about how Joe Thomas's parents, who are used to seeing him in acting roles, were all "aww, there's our son" after watching him on Taskmaster, while Iain's went "who the fuck was that?" about the persona he had chosen to put on. But he seems at peace about it overall, which is nice.
The last contestant I was really looking forward to getting to was Phil Wang, and I really enjoyed his podcast episode. I did not realize tha tPhil was mixed race (his mother is not Asian). I also did not realize just what a weird laugh he has -- I guess he was mostly trying for deadpan on the show, or when he was laughing, he was laughing along with a whole bunch of other people, so it didn't stand out. Ed asked him about his favorite moments, and Phil talked about using water to get the scale to read an exact weight (to spell out OLLIE) as the most elegant solution which he was very proud of -- which I completely agree with; even though he did not win that task or even come close to, I do think it was the BEST solution, and one of my favorite Phil moments. He shared that he would apparently get into long philosophical discussions in the studio about whether James's pebbles were different objects or not, that would all get cut, because they were very long and not funny, but I'm very amused knowing that. He also shared that the running gag about haggling was true of the original object he told that joke about, but then he decided to turn it into a running joke -- which didn't entirely work, because the studio audience did not get that it was a running gag -- because the episodes are, of course, recorded way before they are aired, so no-one in the studio had seen the earier episodes with earlier installments of the gag. Also, Phil revealed that when Greg smashed up the little box, it was a duplicate that the producers had made that was destroyed, not the original object Phil had broughtin -- which Phil didn't realize, so he was genuinely distraught because that was a present from his sister (and said to Greg, "You destroyed my sister's box!", which XD)
I forget which episode this was in, but in one of these series 4 podcasts Ed shared Alex's list of perfect solutions from the show, which are:
- Hugh Dennis and the ball on the running machine
- Liza Tarbuck and the lizard spinning on the drill
- Tim Key and the tea bag throwing in dog ball
- Richard Osman and the yoga mat on top of the hill
I would add to this:
- Team Funk making Alex more dry than he was when the task started
- Rhod Gilbert tying up Alex so that Alex can't untie him
Since both of these involve doing things to Alex, I wonder if he just thinks of those kinds of tasks as a different category, and that's why they didn't come up -- I feel like it's hard to argue they were not perfect solutions.
I also really enjoyed the episode with Jack Bernhardt the stats guy. I alluded to it above when talking about Bridgtet, but this was the episode where Jack shared that Noel Fielding is the person with the top score on subjective tasks (3.95), and the bottom scorers on subjective tasks are Roisin (1.91) and Hugh is next. On objective tasks, though, Hugh is the best in series 4 (and 7th best overall) and Noel is the worst. Lolly is the best at prize tasks across all series-- her average is 4.25; Hugh is the worst (also across all series). In a recent People's Podcast episode Jack actually shared the factoid that if prize tasks did not exist, either Hugh or Mel would've won series 4, which is neat to think about!
So, as you can see, I thoroughly enjoyed the podcast's series 4 retrospective -- and I also found it interesting that Ed and a lot of the guests who were not series 4 contestants themselves kept saying they had forgotten how good this series was, that it's sort of overlooked -- I guess it's the one just before a lot of people found the show, so people don't think about this one as much. But it was nice to be validated in my choices, as this is one of my favorite seasons and groups of contestants.
I have much less of substance to say about the series 3 retrospective. It was interesting to hear that Dave Gorman not only still denies he cheated with the pea, but actually admitted to another spot of cheating at which he hadn't been caught -- he added some saliva to the sweat-collecting task. But in general Dave was an entertaining podcast guest, and I was amused by his lament that he wishes he'd taken his phone with him to the tasks, which is not forbidden, but he left it behind out of some kind of spirit of pure competition or something. I also enjoyed the Al urray episode more this time around than the previous (later) episode I'd heard him on; I still don't actually like him much as a contestant, but he seemed to have more sense of humour about himself this time around. There was the interesting tidbit that the balloons with the Morse code task was the first task they did, which may explain why Al didn't figure it out -- Ed's hypothesis is that Alex was counting on him to be the one not to just spot it but actually decode the message. I even disliked the Paul Chowdhry episode less this time around than his previous apperance during series 10 -- maybe he was trying less hard to be weird, or maybe I just knew what to expect more. But, yeah, I don't think I have anything more to say about the series 3 podcasts. Glad I'm done with series 3, sad there's no more podcast backlog for me to listen to when washing dishes... But at least I have the rest of series 6, series 7 (one of my very top favorites, and I very much hope Ed will have Rhod on for that, as well as James and Phil back, and I'm sure Kerry also), and of course series 9 eventually.
Also, stashing here for my own reference a link to Jack Bernhardt's amazing stats spreadsheet (which currently goes through series 12, but I'm eagerly awaiting the addition of series 13)
On one of the People's Podcast episodes Jack also shared the analysis prompted by a fan comment that the people sitting in the first chair disproportionately do not win Taskmaster. That is, there have been 12 winners across the 12 finished series, and they're 3 from chair 2, 3 from chair 3, etc. -- 3 from each chair, except from chair 1, where no-one seated there (Frank Skinner, Doc, Al Murray, Hugh, Aisling, Alice, James Acaster, Iain, David Baddiel, Daisy, Charlotte, Alan Davies) has won. And, like, most series Bob Mortimer would've been in the first chair, but he wasn't on series 5, when he won. Jack's hypothesis is that the first chair person is the furthest from Greg, and so Greg cares about them less and suboncsiously awards them fewer points in the subjective tasks. But I don't know that this is at all borne out by the subjective task scores -- Hugh is the only one of those whose scores are disproportionately low, although Alice and Asim were also lower than everyone else in their series. But it does seem like something is going on, given the disproportionate distribution... *
2) I have been really enjoying getting a chance to talk about Morrolan Dragaera with scytale again and with cowsruletheworl, so I jumped at the chance to ramble about Dragaera to scytale's prompt:
- how and if your thoughts on the [Dragaera] series or individual books have changed over time and different reads!
This is such a great question for this series! Because my thoughts have definitely changed over time / over different reads, and I think it's one case where that's the result of (mostly) deliberate choices made by Brust, and/or him choosing to lean in to those kinds of things when they happened naturally, and that's really neat!
So I've definitely mentioned this elsewhere, but I have a very unusual-for-me trajectory with this series: I was low-key following it, reading books when I came across them, for, oh, over ten years, probably. I found Jhereg in the library paperback stacks and enjoyed the first person smartass, and must have read several more books around the same time. I wasn't keeping track of reading as formally in the early days of LJ, but I have a record of reading Issola in early 2004, just a couple of months after I started LJ, and I remember this was me coming back to the series after something of a break. My main takeaways look to be "I quite like the Vlad Taltos books, but they have a very distinctive style, which I find just slightly over the top." and "not enough Morrolan" (this, at least, I've been very consistent about XD) Then there was another pretty long break until Dzur three years later (2007), and that seems to have kick-started something, because I went on to reread Taltos and Phoenix (and at that time was thinking I must have started reading the series way back when with Taltos, although I have no idea why I thought that / am not sure that's true), made Dragon one of my "catch up on series books my library doesn't have" reads of my summer of 2007 sabbatical, and picked up a discounted copy of the Book of Jhereg omnibus in 2008, which facilitated additional rereads in 2009. By Jhegaala, I was reading each new book as it was released. And then in early 2011 I read Iorich and something shifted imperceptibly and took the series from "book series I quite enjoy dipping into when the opportunity arises" to full=blown obsession. I tracked down and read the Paarfi books and the Vlad books I'd been missing till then (Athyra and Orca), reread the earlier books, searched out everything I could find on the internet about this fandom (fic, fanart, cosplay, LJ RP logs, Brust's blog), which took me through the Tiassa release -- this was the first one I caved and preordered, and basically never stopped being obsessive about it since.
And the thing is, I don't think it's anything special about Iorich itself that triggered this shift -- I wouldn't even list Iorich as a particular favorite -- but I think this series is doing something really interesting and unusual with how the books fall in relation to each other: the individual books are fun and many can be read as stand-alones (I certainly read them in very weird order) -- but the real amazing stuff is visible when you've read a bunch and can take a sort of zoomed out view and see how things said or unsaid in one book highlight something about a different book, how the unreliable narrators (whether they are Vlad at different times in his life or Paarfi or someone else) interplay -- it's very cool! Like those composite portraits where the "pixels" are individual pictures themselves (I guess this is called a "photo mosaic"?), you know?
So that's the general ramble, but you asked about individual books, and I've definitely noticed that, too, since I have reread many of these a bunch of times.
One interesting experience was reading Vlad again right after 'discovering' the Chronicles of Amber, because, wow, suddenly a lot of things about the voice and the aesthetic made a lot of sense! (I knew by that point that Brust was a fan of Zelazny, and had read some Zelazny myself, but not Amber) And it wasn't a negative, "oh, I see where he's cribbing this cool stuff from" thing, more just it was neat to see how an author took a thing I liked (that he was a huge fan of, clearly, what with his firstborn being named Corwin) and filtered it through his own way of doing things and turned it into a different thing I liked.
Vlad spoilers from here
I find that the order in which I read the books almost invariably highlights something new, if I haven't read a pair in that combination before. For example, when I first read Dragon, I found it OK but kind of disappointing on the whole -- too much army tedium -- but I was reading it almost like a standalone, surrounded by non-Vlad books. Much later, I had just finished rereading Taltos and decided to roll into Dragon in internal chronology order, and OMG, I loved the first part so much! Because reading them right after each other is what throws into relief that Morrolan has gone from "ugh, this asshole Sethra is annoyingly not letting me slaughter for terminal rudeness" to "hey, Vlad, want to come on an adventure? want to invite me in? how about coming to a state funeral as my +1?" in, like, a matter of weeks, and it's a delight both to watch Morrolan be all "VLAD! BUDDY!" and Vlad being extremely "???" about this turn of events. But the books are so self-contained, and are spaced so far apart in publication order, I don't think you notice that really unless you're reading them back to back. Similarly, rereading Teckla right after Jhereg for the first time was also a really eye-opening experience, because in Jhereg Vlad is obliviously happy in his marriage and joking about buying Cawti a castle -- and meanwhile she's neck-deep in revolutionary activity and drifting away from him, and the funny lines and moments of quiet intimacy in Jhereg that had seemed like the bedrock of a solid marriage suddently turn tragic. Now, I'm guessing that the thing with Dragon is intentional; I'm pretty sure that the thing with Jhereg isn't, because at that point Brust did not realize he was writing a series (and I think also was happily married himself). But that's the really impressive thing about Teckla -- it feels believable to me as Vlad discovering a major blindspot and having to fit his worldview around the new information, and not being gracious about it -- but it never feels like a swerve from the author, just as something the character has to come to terms with.
One of the reasons I'm really looking forward to Tsalmoth (hopefully less than a year left at this point!) is that it's set between Yendi and Jhereg, and not only do I really love young Vlad, but it'll be really interesting to revisit this period from this point in the series. And Brust talked vaguely about discovering something major that Vlad had not mentioned till now, and working on how to fit it in the story so that it makes sense that Vlad would not have mentioned it before, and I'm extremely curious to see what it is and how it's explained -- and how it will invariably change the way I see some events in earlier pubished books, because that's exactly the kind of thing this series excels at and that I trust Brust to do very well.
I remember seeing somewhere that Brust has said that not only is he mindful that people may be reading the books in publication and internal chronology order, but he thinks that once the series is complete, it should be possible to read the books in Cycle order -- and I'm really looking forward to trying that some day. I'm sure I'll find something else interesting that way which hasn't jumped out at me yet.
There are longer 'arc' things of course, too, beyond just which two books you read one after the other. Like, I think it's so neat that we hear a bunch of flippant explanations for what happened to Vlad's finger before we get to understand what actually happened in Jhegaala -- it was always a character detail how Vlad chose to talk about it, but knowing the truth changes subtly what kind of character detail it is, if that makes sense? The Orca spoiler is another big one, of course -- there are so many lines and scenes in the earlier books that come into a different kind of focus once you know the Orca spoiler. My favorite is Sethra's amazing, "For one thing, we don't know any thieves" line, but there is also so much goodness in Vlad and Kiera's conversations in and around Taltos, where Kiera reassures Vlad she would avenge him if Morrolan ends up killing him, or when Kiera is jokingly warning Vlad about going after a wizard because of what happened last time (that being the raid on Loraan's keep) -- and these were fun banter and heartwarming Kiera-Vlad friendship moents from the start, but once you have the Orca spoiler context, it's really funny/trolly... but also makes you wonder what kind of long game Sethra was playing with Vlad back when he was a kid, to cultivate that relationship. Some of it I'm sure was seeded from the start/from early on, and some of it is probably Brust "discovering" new things about Vlad as he was writing the more recent books and asking himself the question, why has this not come up before? (given the first person narration) Some of these answers are more elegant than others (I'm not a huge fan of "Verra's been messing with Vlad's memories" as an excuse for inconsistencies), but I really admire the commitment to playing with this as much as possible throughout the series.
Vague/minor Paarfi spoilers from here
And THEN there's the interplay with the Paarfi books. I read Tiassa and the later books after the Paarfi ones, so I didn't get to see those in a different light from previously, but it definitely added some context to Issola (Morrolan's backstory in the East, knowing Teldra so much better, actually knowing Adron as a character so the idea that he may still be around in the Lesser Sea of Chaos with some kind of consciousness really hit home), everything around Adron's Disaster in the Vlad books, and so on. Getting to know Zerika in Paarfi changed the way I reacted to Phoenix and made me like the book more than I previously had, because by that point Zerika was a favorite character of mine, and knowing the history between her and Khaavren makes the background things like Khaavren quitting and coming back imbued with sudden meaning. Oh, and I almost forgot one of my favorite examples, Fentor in Jhereg and his role in accidentally getting Morrolan killed -- I had previously not paid any attention to Fentor, he was just a named flunky who did a stupid thing for good reasons, and Morrolan was nice a about it, but the Paarfi books have some great backstory for Fentor and Morrolan when they first met, and knowing it made the scene and subplot in Jhereg so much more interesting and meaningful. And there's even illumination by the LACK of things, a kind of negative space storytelling. Like, one thing that came into focus for me after Paarfi is how oddly hilarious it is that Morrolan keeps pinging Vlad for witchcraft advice. I mean, Vlad is an extraordinary witch, to be sure! But at the time of Paarfi, Morrolan has a tower full of witches, which I'm sure he kept around into the present (why wouldn't he? and why would they leave?) -- so why does Vlad never meet them? (or never tell us about them, at least?) And furthermore, LoCB suggests Morrolan and Laszlo would know each other quite well -- as two people in Zerika's entourage who are both witches, I can only assume they are good friends still -- so why isn't he bugging Laszlo for which blood to use or whatever? Having seen Morrolan's other witches and Laszlo/Brimford in Paarfi made me headcanon Morrolan coming to Vlad, whom he essentially just met as of Dragon and Yendi, for witchcraft tips as the equivalent of asking your crush to tutor you in math to have an excuse to spend time with him, which just cracks me up no end.
Oh, OH! And the amazing spoiler in Baron of Magister Valley, which is not Orca-level of course but still left me fairly pole-axed. I actually have not reread the relevant Vlad books since finishing BoMV, but am looking forward to doing that and seeing if anything new and interesting jumps out at me.
I guess the one thing I haven't talked about in terms of rereads, or just in the 20+ years I've been reading this series, is: has my perception about anything in the series changed because *I* have changed? And, I don't know... The universe is so stylized, I don't relate to it in a realstic way -- like, Vlad being an assassin doesn't bother me even though IRL, you know, I wouldn't want to be friends with someone who killed people for money. There are other series where, as I reread the books when I was older, I understood some characters better or symapthized with them more than on a first read (most notably this would be Komarr in the Vorkosigan Saga), but I can't think of anything like that here. I appreciate the incremental, hard-won growth Vlad shows over the course of the series so far, but I still prefer to read about young punk Vlad. So actually I think my perception of the series on my end (as opposed to due to new canon I came across) has been remarkably consistent through the years. Not sure what gives it that stability, but I do think it's actually another reason that I enjoy rereading the Vlad books as much as I do -- it adds up to a great mix of new things to notice (because of new canon or just because the books are so dense with quips and Easter Egg type allusions) and recapturing very closely the feeling of readin the series for the first time decades ago.
*
3) I was checking Brust's Twitter to see if there was any more news on Tsalmoth pub date for the ramble above, and instead learned that today was the Nebula awards, which I then proceeded to watch online, despite the fact that I read, like one nominated thing in full and didn't like it much XD But I just enjoy these SF community awards as their own thing, and had a great almost-two-hours watching the livecast and liveblogging it at Best Chat, because even though I wasn't super familiar with the nominated works, I knew a fair few of the authors and presenters.
Connie Willis was MC-ing from a Physics office in Colorado full of science books behind her, and I enjoyed her stories of discussions and fights of SFWA meetings past. There was some kind of bit where Neil Gaiman was apparently a time traveler; I joined the livestream a few minutes late and so missed out on the explanation for this and was low-key confused.
Mercedes Lackey was inducted as the latest Grandmaster, which was nice to see even though I've drifted away from her recent books.
I was happy to see Sarah Pinsker win another Nebula -- she's never won for short story before, so was really excited about that, which was cute. The story, "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather", is also up for Hugo this year, so I really should get around to reading it already. Based on cahn's write-up of it, it should have a lot of the things I've enjoyed about Pinsker's other work.
It was announced that Henry Lien (author of the Peasprout Chen books) would be presenting the Norton YA/MG award, and I thought to myself, I wonder if he is going to have a little song -- and of course he did XD About all the nominees, and also including the rhyme of fiction/bitchin', which I don't think really works. But you do you, Henry XD Anyway, Darcie Little Badger won for Snake Falls to Earth, which I have not read yet, but I enjoyed her Elatsoe last year, and she was adorable verklempt in her acceptance speech, so aww!
John Scalzi presented the dramatic presentation award (apparently he used to be a film critic). I don't think I've seen him speak before -- he looked and sounded weirdly like a program manager in tech XD This was actually a category where I had some opinions, having loved Encanto and WandaVision and enjoyed Loki, and watched a little bit of Space Sweepers even. I think I would've preferred Encanto to win, but was pretty happy with WandaVision, and it was cool that the whole nominated team (virtually) showed up to accept.
I have no intrinsic interest in the games category, but the presenter was last years winner, the guy behind Hades, and I enjoyed listening to his very faint, not even accent, but this specific way my compatriots who are Russian speakers who came to the US as preteens speak. Also, he was one of the few people who did not have a bookshelf behind him when talking, and in fact seemed to be livestreaming from a cupboard under the stairs -- which made me wonder if he was in the Bay Area, where I would definitely believe that a Nebula-winning indie game guy can't afford a proper office -- and, sure enough, he seems to be based in Mill Valley XP
What felt like a very long In Memoriam section this year :( -- although the only people whose work I was familiar with whose names I saw were Anne Rice and Patricia McKillip, both of whom I already knew about. And Priscilla Tolkien, apparently, which I hadn't heard, but I don't know anything about her work, just her connection to JRRT. I was particularly touched by Connie Willis paraphrasing Terry Pratchett (a person is not dead while their name is spoken -- or their books are read, she added) in closing out that section.
The novelette winner was Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, whom I have not read before, and also did not realize he was Nigerian-in-Nigeria. Which is why he was not able to join the livecast at first, but fortunately they were able to loop back around to him just before closing. They didn't have power where he was, but he managed to get transmission going, so the audio could be heard pretty well, he was just in pitch blackness -- but still, glad that worked out.
Martha Wells presented the novella award (having turned down a nomination for Murderbot to give someone else a chance at winning). I was fully expecting Becky Chambers to win, and I'm guessing so was the actual winner, Premee Mohamed, who was like, “I was eating dinner because I assumed someone else would win, so give me a sec."
I was also expecting A Desolation Called Peace to win for novel (presented by CL Polk), and had steeled myself for that, but instead it was A Master of Djinn that won! I'm in the middle of reading it right now, but I've read the short story and novella that preceded it, and some of P.Djeli Clark's other work courtesy of the Hugos, and like his style, so he was the one I was rooting for -- yay! He opened with, “So like Premee I was going to go eat because I didn’t think this was going to happen”, and gave a very cute speech, complete with thanking the readers for getting him to write a novel set in this world when he never planned to, thanking his editor for saying "meh" about his original ending and encouraging him to go big, and thanking hiw wife and daughter "who had to go to sleep [it was close to 10 p.m. Eastern at this point]. Look what Daddy did, girls!" Also, and possibly most adorably, he apparently has custom Funko pops of his Cairo djinn-verse characters, Fatma and Siti.
So, I'm glad I watched it, and it's made me more motivated to check out a couple of the winners, which is all to the good.