Books

So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!

• 🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.

• ♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….

• 🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.

  • We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.

  • Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.

📸 Photos

Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.

📝 Writing

• Just one non-media related blog post this week: a sneak peek at the video backdrop I’ve assembled for my Thursday night dance at Norwescon, along with some details on how I’ve put it together.

📚 Reading

Finished one book, read all of a second, and started a third.

• Finished my fourth of the six Philip K. Dick Award nominated works for this year, Tara Campbell’s City of Dancing Gargoyles.

• Read all of my fifth PKD nominated work, Brenda Peynado’s Time’s Agent.

• Started my sixth and final PKD nominated work, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

📺 Watching

• Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.

• RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).

• Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.

• NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.

🎧 Listening

• I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.

• For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.

  They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

  “Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.

Linking

1. WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

   Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.

2. Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
3. Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem
   

   Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.