Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
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.
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.
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.
6/2024
The third of this year’s Philip K. Dick 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.
My Fair Lady (1964): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Henry Higgins is such an ass, Eliza Doolittle is a joy, and the movie, as it always has been, is delightful. It had been quite a while since I’d watched this, and it was a lot of fun revisiting it and refreshing myself on all the little details and moments.
5/2024
The second 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.
4/2024
The first 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.
3/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Pike-era (shortly post-“The Cage”) adventure that has Spock examining his approach to dealing with his mixed heritage while attempting to assist a teenager who as a child had been captured and then raised by Klingons. With a side-order B plot of flu-like virus on the Enterprise, of course. Good insight into Spock that meshes imperfectly, but surprisingly well with the current Strange New Worlds take on his journey.
Day 252: It’s Philip K. Dick Award nominee announcement day! I have five of the books in hand; the sixth was back ordered and should be here next week sometime. Plenty of time to get them all read before the award ceremony on March 29. Looking forward to another good batch of books!
Weirdest Princess Bride remake ever.
(Damsel in distress being rescued by a mysterious stranger, reptiles of unusual size, geysers/fire swamp complete with roasting the ROUS, lightning sand with a dramatic rescue just after immersion, a rope climb up the cliffs of insanity….)
Admittedly, it is somewhat more successful as a SF adventure than it is as a Princess Bride remake, but not by much. Of course, many of the big action set pieces are done in the dark and/or rain, so actual visibility of what’s going on definitely wasn’t a priority. And Adam Driver seems to have forgotten how to smile, which really seems like it would make it difficult for him to bond with the young girl he rescued.
All in all, we spent about as much time rolling our eyes at this and having fun pointing out the surprising number of Princess Bride parallels than we did actually watching.