The usual unplanned, random selection of whatever seems right in the moment.
Geekery
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
🎥 Haunted Mansion
Haunted Mansion (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cute, mildly amusing, and inoffensive. Not outstanding, and certainly not likely to get multiple sequels like Pirates of the Caribbean did, but for a theme-park-attraction-turned-movie, it wasn’t bad. Though I’m mystified by the costuming choices for the kid — I mean, okay, it’s convenient shorthand for “odd socially inept geeky child”, but it was really pushing the concept harder than necessary.
📚 Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon
8/2024
The fifth 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.
📚 These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
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.
My First Mac
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:
- Performa 600/IIvi
- PowerMac 6100
- PowerMac 6500
- Original Rev. A Bondi Blue iMac
- Blue and White G3
- Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5 (the original cheese grater)
- 27″ iMac
- 27″ Retina 5K iMac
- M1 Mac Mini and M2 MacBook Air (my current computers)
Happy 40th birthday, Mac!
More rambling about my digital life in this Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux) post from 2003.
Why No PKD Nominee Book Reviews
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.
📚 The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman
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
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.
📚 Where Rivers Go to Die by Dilman Dila
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.
📚 Wild Spaces by S.L. Coney
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.
