Happy holidays (part one)!
This past week was, of course, Christmas week. One of the really nice things about working at Highline is that this entire week was designated a work from home week, and Wednesday and Friday (the two days on either side of Christmas) are considered “personal development” days, with a pleasantly broad definition of “personal development”. Email was monitored and work was done, but it definitely makes for a comfortably low-key week.
Our Christmas day was quite nice: Slept in as late as we could, had a fun breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes with chocolate-infused butter and chocolate whipped cream (there was a bit of a theme there…), a comfortable walk around the neighborhood, opening presents, and a lot of relaxing and reading.
📸 Photos
📚 Reading
- I’m on a bit of a Star Trek binge to wrap up the year. Last week (though I forgot to include it in my weekly notes) I read Kij Johnson and Greg Cox’s TNG novel Dragon’s Honor; this week I’ve been working my way through the TOS “New Earth” series, getting through the first two of the six books, Diane Carey’s Wagon Train to the Stars and Dean Wesley Smith and Diane Carey’s Belle Terre. I thought I might get through the third book in the series today, but didn’t end up making it.
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I also “finished” one I’ve been working on for a few months now (since this year’s major gift wasn’t a surprise), Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon Z5II. “Finished” is in quotes because as it’s something of a reference book, there were sections that I skimmed, and this is one that I’ll be sure to keep on my iPad to refer back to whenever I need.
📺 Watching
- As befitting the season, we’ve binged our way through two seasons of The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition, which is just The Great British Baking Show but with American contestants. It’s a little jarring to be in the GBBS tent and hearing American accents, but it’s also really nice to see Americans in a competitive baking show actually being nice to each other (as is the standard for GBBS) rather than being snarky and rude to and about each other (as is the standard for, well, virtually every American reality show out there).
We’ve also watched several movies, two from the stable of holiday favorites, one new holiday favorite, and a couple that we’ve been looking forward to seeing. This week’s lineup was:
- The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which is always good.
- Violent Night (2022), which was new to us, but which we enjoyed more than we thought we would. It lives up to its title, but it’s a very fun holiday action/comedy.
- Die Hard (1988), our annual Christmas Eve tradition (along with many others).
- Fackham Hall (2025) has been on our radar for a while now, and it just became available to rent this week. It’s Downton Abbey meets The Naked Gun, and we laughed a lot — it will definitely eventually be going in our home collection once it’s available on physical media.
- Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the latest Knives Out film, is excellent. Continues the twisty mystery fun of the prior two, and incorporates some really neat political and religious commentary as well. Rian Johnson is so good at what he does (I need to go back and watch Brick again at some point, too).
🔗 Linking
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Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central: Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025): Absolutely devastating zero-star review of James Cameron’s latest “Dances With Ferngully” film. “The indigenous people, the Na’vi, are giant blue cats who literally meld with the natural elements on their planet, Pandora, through their naked mole-rat tails, and boast of a harmonious existence that nonetheless requires a warrior class because those are the two things indigenous people in white fantasies are allowed to be: ferocious warriors and children of the Earth.”
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Randall Munroe’s xkcd: Funny Numbers: “The teens picked a new funny number.”
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Ben Keough at The New York Times‘ Wirecutter: The First Nikon Z-Mount Mirrorless Lenses You Should Buy (archive.is link): Now that I have a new camera, though I can use (and absolutely will be using) my existing F-mount lenses, eventually I’ll be adding newer Z-mount lenses to my collection. Time to start dreaming!
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Barry Petchesky at Defector: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?: The annual report! “This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.”
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Lorraine Boissoneault at Smithsonian Magazine: A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda: I had no idea about any of this.
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Infinite Ball Drop: “On New Year’s Eve, the Times Square Ball drops for only 60 seconds over a measly 139 feet. What if we extrapolated from that and covered the entire year?”
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Robin Buller at The Guardian: How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very: “From emancipation to women’s suffrage, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, mass movement has shaped the arc of American history. Protest has led to the passage of legislation that gave women the right to vote, banned segregation and legalized same-sex marriage. It has also sparked cultural shifts in how Americans perceive things like bodily autonomy, economic inequality and racial bias.”
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Doug Henwood at Jacobin interviews Émile Torres: Tech Capitalists Don’t Care About Humans. Literally.: “…there’s also a kind of capitalist influence, the idea that human beings do not matter in and of ourselves. In this worldview, we matter for the sake of value, rather than value mattering for the sake of us. ¶ …we are just means to an end. The only end is value, this abstract yet quantifiable concept that should be maximized to the physical cosmic limits. We matter only as the conduits through which this value can come into existence.