Punctuation: A guide for editors and proofreaders, by Gerard M.F. Hill – booklet from the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. Unlike most punctuation guides, which are either ludicrously technical or else spend ages going into details which everyone knows (well, all editors anyway), this is surprisingly fun to read and focuses on those issues where you need to use editorial judgement – that is, when there aren't rules to tell you what to do and you actually have to think about what you're trying to achieve. Examples: when you have to decide whether commas are helpful or intrusive, or whether to use dashes, brackets or commas for parenthetical clauses. Also full of recondite but important facts, such as that in some commonly used fonts an italic full stop is different from an upright full stop and an italic space is a different width from an upright space. Who knew?
The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams (review here) – amusing novel, really a sort of extended joke for word-enthusiasts, in which the action swings between an unhappy member of a team of lexicographers in late Victorian Britain compiling a supposedly definitive encyclopedia / dictionary (he is so alienated from his colleagues that he pretends he has a lisp - ironically he is working on the letter ‘S’) and an editor in the present day preparing the never-finished dictionary’s digital edition. The problem for me is that, despite being a lover of language, as I thought, I didn’t find the language jokes particularly funny, and the mountweasels (spurious made-up words) which the Victorian inserts surreptitiously into the dictionary strike me as pretentions. It’s actually easy to invent words for things, especially if (like him) you keep using Latin and Greek roots; it’s much harder to create neologisms which people actually want to use. Which is what is required for a word to be an addition to the language, surely?
Syberia, Syberia 2 (reviews here and here) – classic (and classy) adventure games, which I’m replaying in preparation for playing the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4. (Syberia 3 seems to be generally regarded as a washout, but I will play it anyway to get the story sequence.) It’s an interesting return: some of the execution now seems a little clunky, but the story, writing, characters, voice acting and especially the artwork (Benoit Sokal, the creator, was originally a graphic artist) are as great as ever – at least in the first game (some of the writing doesn't flow so naturally in the second).
Tangle Tower (review here) – truly excellent comedy detective game, the sequel to Detective Grimoire: smoother, deeper, funnier. This time Grimoire is accompanied by his sidekick Sally, and the repartee between them is a large part of the fun. Pretty good mystery too, with a murder at a stately home, the only obvious suspect being a character in a painting holding what seems to be a bloody knife. Lovely interface for keeping track of clues and witness statements without effort. All games should be this good.
How Star Wars was saved in the edit – fun and illuminating video detailing the major editing changes made to Star Wars to create the final version which we know, covering the deleted scenes in the first act, changes to the intercutting, the fine-tuning, and the re-pacing of the final battle.
But see also How "How Star Wars was saved in the edit" was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really), which sets out to defend Lucas’s reputation from the implication of the above video that he made a bodged film which had to be rescued by his film editors and points out some important errors (the rough cut showing to Brian de Palma, Stephen Spielberg and others of Lucas’s film-school friends was not the disaster claimed, and the revised and improved text of the opening crawl had already been written; George Lucas had his own reasons for deleting Luke's early scenes of Luke and delaying his appearance till the droid auction; Marcia Lucas did less than the video attributes to her). Most importantly, it reminds us that it is normal for films to have major editing changes between their rough cut and their release version. However it spends far too much time making fun of the first video author's reconstruction of the reasoning behind the edits without itself putting forward a better account of the editing process. On the whole, it has a bitter and unpleasant tone: the view of an offended fan rather than a film maker.
Florence (review here) – charming little game, about a young woman who falls in love, falls out of love and moves on. Similar in theme and style to When the Past Was Around, but the gameplay is less about puzzles and more about interactions to mirror the emotional beats of the story. It short but beautifully crafted: the first game from this Australian indie studio ('Mountains'); it'll be interesting to see what they do next.
Coming Back to Life, by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown – a manual for workshops on 'the work that reconnects': engaging with and responding to the global environmental crisis spiritually, emotionally and practically. It doesn't really work to read it; you need to go through a workshop to feel its impact. But interesting as a model of how to write a workshop manual, with a chapter on facilitation has some excellent advice which would be applicable to many types of workshop.
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