68/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Standout stories this month were “Morag’s Boy” by Fiona Moore, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Cyborg” by Samara Auman, and “Kill That Groundhog” by Fu Qiang.
Michael Hanscom
Year 50 Day 220
Day 220: Nothing terribly fancy today; I just thought our tree was pretty.
Year 50 Day 219
Day 219: It does amuse me a bit that the goldfish in the pond in this campus courtyard just appeared at some point. I’m not sure how long they’ve been there, nor do I know what will happen to them when the building eventually does get demolished, but they’ve survived this long.
Year 50 Day 218
Day 218: Some weeks, all you want for dinner is big ol’ breakfast burritos.
Year 50 Day 217
Day 217: Almost forgot, so you get a badly lit shot taken with my iPad’s front camera. Not every day’s selfie can be the museum-worthy artwork that I’m sure you all expect.
Year 50 Day 216
Day 216: The label design for these two very different things is entirely too similar. One would go very well poured over a baked potato; the other…not so much. And for some reason, we keep putting them next to each other in our pantry (I think my wife does it on purpose; she’s told me that if I open the pumpkin on accident, I have to make pie).
Year 50 Day 215
Day 215: Saw this lineup of trees as we were out shopping this morning, and all I could think about was how anyone manages to get one of those home without that white fake snow flocking getting absolutely everywhere. What’s wrong with a nice green tree? Leave the snow outside where it belongs!
Searching for a Postalicious replacement
Hey WordPress plugin people: Does anyone know of a working and supported plugin that does what Postalicious used to?
Ideally, I’d like to return to something I used to be able to do: post a daily “here’s what I found interesting today” roundup post. Way back when, I used del.icio.us to save links; those would get picked up by Postalicious, and once a day, they’d be aggregated into a single post (example from 2009 here).
Is there a similar plugin, or other known way (some sort of IFTTT integration, maybe?) to do such a thing? Conceptually, it seems rather simple, but I don’t know what bookmarking services have open APIs or other ways to hook in, and I don’t have the coding chops to create my own.
📚 Sins of Commission by Susan Wright
67/2023 – ⭐️⭐️
Much of the plot revolves around an alien race that broadcasts emotions that affect everyone around them, which means nobody is acting the way they should, so it’s hard for me to tell whether people acting out of character and making decisions that don’t make sense was intentional or not. But by the end, I wasn’t really sure what the reasoning or motivations were for many of the actions taken. Plus, some of the key points (like a small breakthrough in understanding the new aliens) were far too obvious to not be thought about by the characters until halfway through the book. This one is quite forgettable.
Not a Spotify Wrap-up
Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.
Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.
That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….
Top Artists
549 total artists
- The Orb 137 minutes
- Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
- Dolly Parton 128 minutes
- Orbital 124 minutes
- Underworld 89 minutes
- Bonobo 71 minutes
- Hooverphonic 69 minutes
- Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
- Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
- Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
- VNV Nation 50 minutes
- Seabound 50 minutes
- Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
- Rotersand 44 minutes
- Icon of Coil 44 minutes
I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!
Top Songs
Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.
So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.