Month: August 2025

Bi-Weekly Notes: July 21–August 10, 2025

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Another somewhat delayed two-week wrap-up, because…

  • 🚀 Worldcon is nigh! Nearly all of my outside-of-work brainspace has been been taken up with Worldcon prep and website updates, as we’ve been in the final crunch before the con kicks off.

📸 Photos

My hand putting a ballot into our mailbox.
I voted! I hope you did too!
A raccoon sitting in a tree on a college campus.
Saw a curious raccoon on campus early one morning.

📚 Reading

I finished Martha Wells’ Murderbot series with Network Effect and The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 3 (collecting Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse), followed that up with a bit of comic smut with Jonas Goonface’s The Ship of Unsinkable Fools, and then read my next TNG novel, Simon Hawke’s Blaze of Glory.

📺 Watching

I started notes on the last two Star Trek: Strange New Worlds shows, but so far haven’t finished writing them. The short version: still enjoying, great show, good-naturedly grumbling about canon and holodecks showing up far too early.

🔗 Linking

I’ve saved some links, but they’ll get added to the next wrap-up, as I need to get back to prepping to head to the hotel and spending the next week at Worldcon!

Blaze of Glory by Simon Hawke

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Book 44 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Rather amusingly, this is the second of two consecutive TNG novels with a piracy theme. This one is much better, because it doesn’t have a Ferengi speaking like they learned English from Disney’s Long John Silver. Otherwise, a perfectly serviceable TNG adventure; nothing really stands out for good or ill.

Me holding Blaze of Glory

The Unsinkable Ship of Fools by Jonas Goonface

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Book 43 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Fun story with a definite anarchistic political sensibility about a group of people (some human, some…less so), trapped on a cursed train…oh, and it’s smut, so there’s lots of explicit sex. One of Iron Circus’s standalone erotic graphic novels, outside of their Smut Peddler line, but with the same gender/sexuality/ability/body type inclusivity that they focus on.

Me holding The Unsinkable Ship of Fools

The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 3 by Martha Wells

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Book 42 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

(Collects Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse.)

The final two Murderbot novellas (so far), though the novel Network Effect takes place between them, so I read the first half of this book, paused to read the novel, and came back to finish this off. As good as the rest, and Murderbot and ART make such a good pair of characters.

Me holding The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 3