Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

On This Day: Jan 2

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 2…

There are 35 posts previously published on January 2nd

  • 2024
  • 2022
  • 2021
    • Happy National Science Fiction day! Right now I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. What SF book are you reading today (or what was the last one you read)? ➡
  • 2020
    • RSS Feed Weirdness and PHP Debugging Successfully debugging PHP code in the WordPress 'Post Today' plugin. I feel accomplished! ➡
    • Happy National Science Fiction Day, everyone! Spend some time with a favorite SF short story, book, TV show, or film to celebrate. 📚🎬🖖 ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 2 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 2 ➡
  • 2019
    • “Sen. Romney’s statement is not a profile in courage. Rather it is another example of the emptiness of the #nevertrump movement — all talk and no action.” ➡
    • Hugo Best Novel Reading I've decided to work my way through reading all of the Best Novel Hugo Award winners over the coming year (or however long it actually takes), and will use this page to track my progress. ➡
    • Book one of 2019: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #hugowinner 📚 ➡
    • Personal goal for this year (or, well, however long it takes): Read every Hugo Award Best Novel (including Retro Hugos). To date, I’ve read 21 of the 73 (28%), but it’s been ages for some, so I might or might not re-read those as I go along. ➡
    • Linkdump for November 29th through January 2nd An automatically generated list of links that caught my eye between November 29th and January 2nd. • 365 IETF RFCs: a 50th anniversary dive • Is Grover swearing? No, it's in your ears. • Against Peter Jackson’s "They Shall Not Grow Old" • On radical kindness (another aspect of hopepunk) • The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk ➡
  • 2016
    • DJ Wüdi emerging from hibernation and prepping for @norwescon #nwc39. Gear is an iPad and @numark_dj iDJ Pro. (2/366) ➡
  • 2015
    • Looking for a Shmoe Bones is one of the better shows on TV right now, but this short little clip from S10E08 made me quite literally laugh out loud. Just a wonderful bit of silliness. ➡
    • This Year’s Health Efforts After letting my exercise regimen fall apart in November, it's time to get going again. For my own accountability, this is some rambling about my current status and what goals I have moving into the new year. ➡
  • 2014
    • Six months of wearing contacts, and they still kinda seem like magic. ➡
  • 2013
    • Housekeeping I did some housekeeping on my Flickr account and severely culled my contacts--from somewhere over 250 to slightly under 90. A little housekeeping every now and then is a good thing. ➡
    • Difficult Listening Hour 02v2 The second of my old collection of mix sessions that I'm posting. A little longer than the last one, and a little more pop-y. ➡
  • 2009
    • Books, Books, Books, and More Books! For a few years now, I've been using LibraryThing to track my book collection. Ever since Prairie and I moved in together, we've been occasionally talking about adding her books to the listing...and now, the project is done: our entire library -- all 1,465 books -- is cataloged! ➡
  • 2008
    • Condescended Still -- not _every_ geek out there works for Microsoft and has a gazillion expendable dollars..._or_ sees the need to toss out a perfectly good (and, actually, very nice) TV set that works fine, aside from not having the ATSC tuner. ➡
  • 2006
    • 2005 Traffic Report I've been using the free traffic monitoring service StatCounter for some time now to get an idea of how much traffic I'm pulling in. Here's a look at the past year's traffic for Eclecticism. ➡
  • 2005
    • Visual Halo Nice and easy, and now I've got my own DVD of Nine Inch Nails videos — and even when they are officially released on DVD, I'd lay good money down that the collection won't include the Broken short film, so I've got that, too. ➡
    • Recycle! According to the Seattle PI, recycling is mandatory. So what to do when my apartment building doesn't offer ways to recycle? ➡
    • DVD-R? DVD+R? Argh! Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible DVD formats, though, especially so similarly named. If I hadn't had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I'd probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary. ➡
    • Rollback A little morbid, but it's just how my mind works at times — when all's said and done, is someone going to have to roll back the World Population Counter by however many hundreds of thousands of people died in the tsunamis and their aftereffects? ➡
  • 2004
  • 2003
    • Top ten web design mistakes Usability guru Jakob Nielsen posted his list of the year's top ten web design mistakes, and while it's aimed more at commercial sites, I thought I'd take a quick gander and see if there are any that I should worry about. ➡
  • 2002
    • Fire your friends Okay, so your friend's passed out from all the booze he drank at your New Years party. Okay, so the old 'hand-in-a-bowl-of-warm-water' or 'shaving-cream-on-the-face' tricks are pretty old. But is dousing his leg in lighter fluid and setting him on fire really the best and brightest idea for a prank? ➡
    • Beyond the rumor sites This time, around, however, Apple -- rather than staying their characteristically silent self -- is doing the online equivalent of tossing a goldfish into a pirahna tank. ➡
    • [From Usenet: 1.2.02 0143] First off, I hope your experiences with OS X continue to improve, as you indicated they had started to in a followup post. Figured I could go ahead and jump in the fray, though... ;) ➡
  • 1995
    • [From Usenet 1.2.95 0638] For those who might be interested, Critters Buggin' played a New Year's party up here in Anchorage, Alaska. Pretty damn good show, too. ➡
    • [From Usenet: 1.2.95 0541] A friend told me that reznor had done some work with them, so I went out and picked up their first album, only to figure out trent was nowhere on that, but was still a really good disc. ➡
    • [From Usenet: 1.2.95 0541] I might as well join in the fray...`` Semi-lurker here...been reading for quite a while, do occasinally post bits and pieces... ➡
    • [From Usenet: 1.2.95 0448] True, Bytet is quite fun...as is Fsunjibleableje (if you ever caught them...great early Einsturzende Neubauten type industrial). The Critter's concert was pretty good, too...even a guest appearance by Stone Gossard. ➡

Who are you? Where are you (virtually)?

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Now that I’m (once again) working on resurrecting my regular blogging here (as opposed to walled gardens like Facebook), and as I’ve opened comments up again, I’d love to know if people are actually stopping by (either directly or through RSS/newsreaders) and paying attention to my rambling—and I’d love to know if any of you have blogs or webspaces of your own outside of Facebook so I can keep up with what you post!

So, please feel free to leave a comment (or, if you’d prefer, ping @djwudi on Twitter, or go old-school and email me) and let me know who you are and what blogs, website(s), podcasts, or other projects you have going on that I can add to my reading list!

And if you’re also looking for ways to expand your world outside of Facebook and the like, may I recommend setting up a blog of your own somewhere? You can post whatever you want, you own the content, and you don’t have to worry about algorithms keeping your stuff from being shown to people who want to see it.

A really easy way to get started that I have been using in conjunction with this site for a while now and can recommend is micro.blog. It lives in a space somewhere between Twitter and more full-featured systems like WordPress, which makes it a perfect way to get set up blogging. It’s inexpensive ($5/month or $50/year for them to host your blog, or free if you can connect it to an externally hosted blog–such as a free basic WordPress.com blog), and has a nice community of users. More information on micro.blog is available on their help pages.

Or if you’re just looking for ways to read what you want to read without depending on Facebook’s algorithms to surface things, I’d like to suggest an RSS newsreader such as NetNewsWire (for macOS, iOS coming soon) or FeedBin (web-based). Just tell the newsreader what sources (websites, blogs, news sites, etc.) you want to read, and they take care of the rest. Newsreaders have been how I’ve read most of my daily news for years now, and it’s a far nicer experience than having to go to each individual website to see what’s new.

Whoever you are and however and wherever you exist online, howdy! Glad you stopped by!

My New Year’s Resolutions

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My resolutions for this year:

  • 5120 x 2880
  • 1920 x 1080
  • 1668 x 2224
  • 1125 x 2436
  • 368 x 448

(That’s my retina iMac, its secondary display, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ‘cause it makes me laugh.)

On This Day: Jan 1

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’ll post a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 1…

There are 43 posts previously published on January 1st

  • 2025
  • 2024
    • Year 50 Day 244 I now have a complete* collection of Star Trek: The Original Series novels. ➡
    • 2024 Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh. ➡
  • 2023
    • Bring Back Blogging I'm hopeful that the upheaval in online spaces will lead to something of a resurgence of people writing for themselves and in their own spaces. ➡
    • 2023 Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh. ➡
  • 2022
    • We watched two films today. If we can keep up this momentum, we’ll watch 730 over the next year! To be clear, we are _not_ going to keep up this momentum. ➡
    • 🎥 No Time to Die Definitely one of the top two Daniel Craig Bond films, and a good end for his arc. ➡
    • 🎥 The Matrix: Resurrections While it doesn’t reach the heights of the first, there was more about it that I liked than that didn’t work for me. ➡
    • 2021 Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, cause it makes me laugh. ➡
  • 2021
  • 2020
    • Baby Yoda and ‘The Dark Crystal’ Prove We Still Need Puppetry in the Age of CGI: “Frankly, I don’t always want my entertainment to look effortless. Instead, I want to stand in awe of these feats of creation: painstakingly crafted miniature worlds, marionettes that fire arrows, extraterrestrial tots that beg you to scoop them up ... Read more ➡
    • Who are you? Where are you (virtually)? Community building: Let me know where your blogs and online spaces are! ➡
    • My New Year’s Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ‘cause it makes me laugh. ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 1 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 1 ➡
    • Happy New Year! She's Barbara Walters, and this is… ➡
  • 2019
    • 2019 Resolutions My resolutions for this year: 5120 x 2880 1920 x 1080 1668 x 2224 1125 x 2436 368 x 448 (That’s my retina iMac, its secondary display, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, cause it makes me laugh.) ➡
    • Happy New Year, all! I hope you all had a good and safe time last night, however you celebrated, and that the coming year is better than the last. ➡
  • 2018
    • Book two of 2018: Superman: Miracle Monday, by Elliott S. Maggin. 🌟🌟🌟 #superman ➡
    • Here’s my #2017bestnine! ➡
    • Book one of 2018: Superman: Last Son of Krypton, by Elliot S. Maggin. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #superman ➡
    • Happy New Year! ➡
  • 2017
    • Book one of 2017: Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture, edited by Stephen H. Segal. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2016
    • Considering making another stab at a photo-a-day run this year. Since I just thought of this now, you get a scruffy, tired me, in bed at the end of the day…being teased by my wife about posting naked selfies to the Internet. Seems as good a way to kick off the new year as anything ... Read more ➡
    • Hey @fredmeyerstores: Is $1.03 off really enough to count as “clearance” pricing? I’m afraid we weren’t terribly tempted by your sale techniques. ➡
  • 2015
    • In today’s episode of ludicrously unnecessary gendering: Bounce dryer sheets FOR MEN. Make sure all your clothes carry the scent of PURE SPORT FOR MEN. MANLY MEN DOING LAUNDRY. ➡
    • My 2015 Resolutions 640×1136, 2,048×1,536, and 5120×2880. Yes, I make this joke somewhat annually. But...it amuses me, so I'll probably continue to do so. ➡
  • 2014
    • Freshly shaved and all prettied up for the new year. ➡
  • 2013
    • Input-Only iPad As the iPad _does_ have the capability to be far more than just a portable idiot box, it's time to start taking advantage of that. I've got the iPad, a text editor, a nice little wireless keyboard, and a whole mess of lately underused grey matter rattling around in my skull. In theory, I should be able to put those together and, perhaps, get back in the habit of babbling on a semi-regular basis. ➡
    • Ranking Bond One of the gifts I got for Christmas was the 50th anniversary James Bond collection on Blu-ray. While it will take a while to get through them all, I figured I'd start ranking the films as we watch. ➡
    • Difficult Listening Hour 01 The first of a few old mix sessions I'm re-posting. I hope to have something new to post in the not-terribly-distant future, but for now, this will get things started. ➡
  • 2008
    • The Ratings Game #2 Seeing as how the point is really just about the silliness of the MPAA's ratings rationales, I'll just toss one up whenever I feel like it. I won't immediately give away which movie the rating comes from, but you can click through the rating to figure it out. It's all just for fun, after all! ➡
    • 2008 Banned Words or Phrases As compiled by Lake Superior State University... ➡
  • 2007
    • Goodnight, Dr. Frankenstein I do believe that 'The Post-Modern Prometheus' just vaulted to the top of my 'favorite X-Files episodes' list. ➡
    • Goodbye Vogue, Hello 2007 There've been both good and bad points to 2006, but overall, Prairie and I are _both_ looking forward to closing it out and getting a new year under our belts. Here's to that New Year. Hopefully this will be a good one for everyone. ➡
  • 2005
  • 2004
    • Cheaper By the Dozen Prairie's been reading it off and on all evening as I've been dinking around on the computer, and I'm constantly hearing her start to giggle (or out and out laugh) at one passage or another. I love it when something I loved so much when I was younger gives someone else the giggles as they read it for the first time. ➡
    • Exploring the new Seattle Library Thanks to a pointer from mahalie, I finally have some idea at what I've been looking at all these months — and not only does it make sense, but I really like what it looks like the end result will be. ➡
  • 2003
    • Happy New Year! Here's to you, here's to me, friends shall we ever be. Should we ever disagree — fuck you, and here's to me! ➡
  • 2002
    • Happy New Year! Welcome to 2002! We actually made it through, despite everything that went on this year...kinda cool, huh? I've been having a nice relaxing weekend...it's nice to have four days in a row that I could just kick back and relax, with no real plans or schedule. ➡
  • 2001
    • Happy New Year! Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2001 -- the real new millenium. Woohoo! ➡
  • 1996
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📚 sixty-two of 2019: Enterprise, by Vonda N. McIntyre. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

An earlier look at Kirk’s first mission after talking command of the Enterprise. Very different characterizations of the crew—and the Klingons—than what we now know…but then, it was 1986. 🖖

2019 Reading Round-Up 📚

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Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 62. Here’s a (not very) quick overview…

My 2019 reading stats from Goodreads

Non-fiction: More than last year, when I just read one, but this still isn’t a category I gravitate towards terribly much — and even when I do, there’s a good chance it’ll be related to geekery or fandom in some way, such as with Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series, or Randall Munroe’s How To, which is technically non-fiction, but very, very geeky non-fiction. Definitely the best of this year’s non-fiction was Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, a narrative of the sinking of the Lusitania (which I read while on a cruise ship for this year’s vacation, because that just seemed appropriate), but Art Spiegelman’s Maus graphic novel about his father’s experiences in the concentration camps of WWII was a very close second. (I’m also bemused that for someone who’s not really into military or World War stuff, my top non-fiction reads were both World War-related.)

Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Not a single one this year.

Quality genre fiction: Arguably (depending on one’s definition of “quality”, at least) the majority of my reading, in large part because while this is already my general wheelhouse, this year I decided to read my way through all of the Best Novel Hugo Award winners. Over the course of the year I read 21 of the 75 winners (28%), and while many haven’t aged particularly well, and I’ve discovered that I am not a fan of early Heinlein, I’ve been enjoying the journey through classic SF and am looking forward to continuing with the project this year.

Of course, the year kicked off with reading this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees, which are always worth reading, even when individual nominees don’t work for me. This year, my personal favorites were Ian McDonald’s Time Was, Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards, and Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. As usual, my pick for the winner (Ambiguity Machines) didn’t get it, but the actual winner (Theory of Bastards) was well deserved.

Outside of award winners and nominees, I particularly enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or: Dodge in Hell…admittedly, not a huge surprise, as I’m a big fan of Stephenson’s work, and he’s currently the one author whose works I’ll pre-order in hardback to ensure I get them as soon as possible every time.

Fluff genre fiction: The rest. As usual, dominated by Star Trek novels, as that’s my “comfort food”, and is always good for a break between choices that, as has been happening with the Hugo winners, are either high-concept brain-stimulating SF, or so dated that they’re painful to read, however well they were received at the time. Outside of Trek, I did particularly enjoy Diana Rowland’s White Trash Zombie series. I found the first four at Goodwill, and then tracked down the last two once I’d made it that far through the series. They’re a fun addition to the zombie zeitgeist, and are worth the read if they catch your eye at all.

Finally, some stats on my year’s reading, according to Goodreads:

The Rise of Skywalker

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A few more brief non-spoilery thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker, while it’s still fairly fresh in my mind.

I thought the first hour or so of the movie was far too rushed. There was no time to breath, to take anything in, and it felt like Abrams was concerned that if he gave the audience time to actually think about what we were watching, instead of just reacting, the film would fall apart. Which, in a lot of ways, it would.

This Twitter thread by @ZenOfDesign raises a lot of good points and questions about The Rise of Skywalker, many (but not all) of which came to my mind as I was watching it. Obviously, spoilers all through the thread, and if you absolutely loved the film, maybe you don’t want to click through.

It was very pretty, of course, and I was generally entertained. However, there were so many moments (like many of those in the above-linked Twitter thread) that pulled me out of the film that I never really got truly invested. I’ve seen other people comment on how fanservice-heavy the film was, and I’m very much in agreement; I think it was so concerned with trying to 1) touch on as many pieces of the saga as possible, and 2) satisfy as many fans as possible (unfortunately, particularly those most vocal about not liking The Last Jedi) that it hindered more than helped.

I also think it shares some DNA with Avengers: Endgame in that it was so wrapped up in being the end of a saga that there’s simply no way the film can stand on its own. Neither of these films are comprehensible at all without having watched some (and, preferably, all) of the films that came before them, and as such, suffer when thought of as single entities rather than as chapters in a larger work. These certainly aren’t the only films to be in such a position, of course, but it seems particularly the case for these.

Of course, that saga theoretically stretches over nine films, but I was very amused that everything about the end of TRoS calls back to the original trilogy, and there’s actually very little at all in the film that is a direct or even offhand reference to the prequel trilogy (one line about Gungans is all I’m immediately remembering). It’s very possible to ignore the prequels entirely, and just view episodes IV-IX as a complete story.

In the end, as I noted just after seeing it, it is an entertaining film, and an acceptable, though not incredible, end to the Skywalker saga. But it’s definitely the weakest of the three new films (with The Last Jedi being the strongest).

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Well, now. That was definitely a movie!

Spoiler-free mini-review: It’ll do as an acceptable end to the Skywalker saga (and rather amusingly, you really don’t need the prequels at all; this could easily be a six-movie story), but also the weakest of the latter three films. 🎬