Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Michael Hanscom 7/2024
The fourth of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
Day 269: Forgot to take a picture until after I was in bed, so, much to my wife’s amusement, and in her words, I’m posting a nudie pic.
Day 268: We needed a new pizza cutter, so we decided to see if our preferred knife company (Henckles) made one. Turns out they do, so we ordered one, but somehow got one shipped from Japan that’s about 2/3 the size of the pizza cutters we’re used to. It should work just fine; we’re just amused at how tiny and cute it is!
Day 267: Yes, it’s a cheesy touristy t-shirt. But it’s a cheesy tourist-y t-shirt that I got in New York, and we really enjoyed our time there on our vacation, so it’s legit.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, lots of people on Mastodon are posting their #MyFirstMac stories. Of course this is something I’m going to join in on!
My first Mac was a Macintosh Classic. Saved up and bought it myself for my senior year of high school. Got the very lowest entry-level version: 1 MB of RAM, no internal hard drive. Booted it up off of one 1.4 MB floppy; a second 1.4 MB floppy had Microsoft Word 4 and every paper I wrote for school that year. Lots of disk swapping!
Since then:
Happy 40th birthday, Mac!
More rambling about my digital life in this Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux) post from 2003.
Day 266: Kicking back in the optometrist’s waiting area, but hey, that’s an interesting background!
Day 265: Watched the first hour of the Antiques Roadshow Alaska episodes. Didn’t see anyone I knew (not surprising, since it’s been almost 23 years since I left), but it was fun to see the Alaska-related artifacts. And I was amused that, while we got the requisite Rolex watch and Fender guitar, the sports memorabilia wasn’t baseball or boxing and was actually very cool and setting appropriate (Susan Butcher’s 1990 Iditarod win trophy), and in what may be a first for any Antiques Roadshow episode I’ve watched, no firearms (particularly surprising given Alaska’s high number of gun owners, but perhaps being a bit far away to have Civil War-era firearms helped)!
Day 264: Amazon finally delivered Eugen Bacon’s Danged Black Thing, completing my stack of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominated books. Three and a half read so far!
Day 263: Some days are cake days. Just because.
Just a little clarification as to why I’m no longer posting my usual star ratings or mini-reviews for the Philip K. Dick Award nominated books I read.
While I’ve been attending the award ceremony at Norwescon for quite a while now, last year I took on the responsibility of being the award ceremony coordinator for the convention. This position gives me no insight or influence over the nominees, the judging, or the selection of the eventual winner. I just make sure the ceremony comes together.
However, as part of organizing the ceremony, I do have contact with the authors and publisher representatives. Once the nominees have been announced, I contact the publishers to get permission to make poster-size reprints of the book covers to display at the ceremony, and I invite the authors to attend the ceremony at Norwescon (and, if interested, to participate in paneling for the convention as well). For those authors who can attend, I’m one of the primary points of contact before and at the con; for those who can’t, I assist with finding a stand-in reader if they don’t have someone they know already planning on attending.
So, then, a theoretical possibility: One of the nominated works is one I just don’t get into and end up giving a poor review. At some point in the next few years, the same author is nominated for a new work. Cue awkwardness! I’d like to avoid that.
I’ve also noted a few times in the past that I have a history of never managing to pick the winner as my favorite. So if I say which was my favorite, even though that actually has nothing to do with the final choice, then I’m (historically, statistically) predicting that that book won’t win.
It just seems prudent to keep my thoughts to myself for these books.