Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
72/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
It felt rather rushed and busy for a good portion of the book, as there were several different threads going on that the authors switched among rather quickly, and while the details took some time to come to light, the basic mystery as to what was going on wasn’t all that mysterious, being obvious to the reader (if not the characters) within the first couple chapters. Not a stinker, but not a standout, either.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023): ⭐️⭐️
Having now watched the purported fifth film in the Indiana Jones franchise, the best thing I can say about it is how glad I am that, much like Star Wars, the creators knew that they could never recapture the magic and success of the originals and never tried to make anything beyond the original trilogy. (Highlander also falls into this category, though it had a single self-contained story rather than a trilogy.)
Too long (that did not need to be a nearly three-hour movie, and tightening it down to right around two hours would have helped the pacing greatly), not nearly the humor of the originals, and felt very much like it was made due to cynical studio greed in an effort to pander to Gen X-ers rather than out of any real love for the franchise or strong belief in having a good story.
Really, the best thing about this is that I now know that when I get around to upgrading my Indiana Jones DVDs to Blu-Ray or 4K, I can just get the trilogy films individually and not bother with any sort of full collection box set. Might save me a little money that way.
71/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
According to my reading history, I read this 13 years ago. I have no memory of this, even while reading it this time; and after reading it, I’m not terribly surprised that I don’t remember it. Not that it’s bad, it’s just…not really my thing, I guess? I’ve enjoyed urban fantasy, and noir, and noir urban fantasy, so I don’t think it’s the parts, but they’re not summing up as well as they have in other books I’ve read. It was entertaining enough that I’ll likely read at least another one or two in the series to see how it progresses; this is a first book, after all, and the series has gone on long enough and has enough fans that there’s a chance I’ll find later installments more engaging.
70/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This one surprised me in good ways. I wasn’t optimistic at first, with its focus on Ferengi, who can be annoying (especially in the pre-Quark days), and with it bringing back an (intentionally) annoying character from the show. But it handled both of these elements surprisingly well; the primary Ferengi antagonist is a little more thoughtful than most of the era, and the returning character is actually given some depth and is able to use his traits and quirks in ways that advance the story. Add in some amusing Worf/Riker bits and Wesley actually being treated like a worthwhile character as he forms a friendship with an alien ensign, and this (notwithstanding some confusion over how the Federation handles money and an “offscreen” sexual assault that wasn’t really necessary) is definitely an above average entry in the series.
69/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to read military SF about a Scotch/Irish former fighter pilot who turned spaceship engineer after being wounded and losing a hand, written by a former soldier and pilot turned actor who played a Scotch spaceship engineer after being wounded and losing a finger, then this is definitely the book for you! Aside from the rather amusing list of similarities between Doohan and his protagonist, and the curiosity of reading SF co-authored by Doohan, it’s fairly standard military SF, combining interstellar war with a “who’s the saboteur” mystery.
Day 227: Well, this is a first. In the midst of troubleshooting some ongoing network issues at home, I realized that this lil’ five-port Ethernet switch was failing. I don’t know how long I’ve had it, but while I didn’t know these things could fail (I mean, sure, entropy happens, and there is the eventual heat death of the universe to consider, but they’re just so plug-and-play, set-it-and-forget-it that they seem eternal), it seems this one’s time has come. Its new seven-port replacement is in place and doing just fine.
(That’s both “the Apple Music service” and “using Apple devices to listen to music”, to be clear.)
For all the things Apple does well that I like and appreciate, and that keep me as a customer, some things absolutely drive me up the wall.
I have a big music collection, so I’m particular about how I keep things arranged on my computers and my iPhone. I have a bunch of custom smart playlists, keep my phone set to only sync certain playlists, and do not automatically sync my entire library. I simply have too much music to do that, and I don’t want to have to scroll through every playlist to find one of the few that I use on my phone.
Because of this, for a long time, I avoided Apple Music. (For other reasons too, including that I am particular about my metadata and have spent ridiculous numbers of hours making sure it’s correct, and Apple has a particularly annoying habit of overwriting user-defined metadata if you give it full access to the on-device library.) I finally signed up a few years back when the Apple One collection of services hit a good cost/usefulness ratio. It has come in handy (particularly for my wife), but I make sure to keep the “sync library” setting turned off, so that I know that I’m the only one managing the music on my phone.
For a long time, this worked fine. 95% of my phone-based listening was from my on-device library; the 5% of the time that I actually used Apple Music (I like their “Get Up!” playlist when I’m making breakfast in the morning, and will sometimes pop on their “Chill Mix” or a downtempo or trip-hop station as background music when I’m reading or relaxing before bed) was a nice way to get a mix of stuff I knew and stuff I was unfamiliar with. I’ve found some good new (or new to me) tunes that way as well, so even when it’s only a small part of my listening, Apple Music has been helping with music discovery as well.
So this was working. When I listened to Apple Music and heard something I liked, I’d “favorite” it. This would both help to train Apple Music so it would find more stuff I liked, and allowed me to go back and find the things I liked so that I could then go back and actually buy the full tracks or albums from the iTunes Store. As someone who doesn’t trust streaming services and regularly purchases the media that I enjoy so that I know I have a copy and don’t have to worry about it magically disappearing when licensing agreements change (I want to own my media, not rent it while being told I’m buying it), this seems like exactly the kind of use that Apple and the studios and artists would want. Streaming, like radio, is a way to find new things that I then go and spend more money to own (and send a more reasonable number of pennies back to the artists).
Unfortunately, for some reason, they’ve made an obnoxious change with iOS 17. Now, every time I try to “favorite” a song, I’m told that I have to turn on the “sync library” setting. Apparently, Apple no longer really considers your Apple Music library and your on-device library to be separate things. The first time this happened, not realizing what would happen, I made the mistake of turning on the “sync library” setting, and while I could then favorite tracks in Apple Music, it also completely screwed up what was on my phone. I had every playlist that I have on my computer on my phone instead of just the ones that I manually select, but for some reason, they were all empty, and therefore useless. There was still a lot of music on the phone in the “Downloaded” list, but the playlists didn’t show anything, and it was incredibly difficult to figure out what was actually on my phone and what was in the cloud somewhere without digging through that “Downloads” list. That got disabled again after a couple days of trying to figure out a way to make it work.
I really don’t understand this change, and why Apple Music can no longer learn about my tastes without completely screwing up the systems I’ve had working for years for keeping just the music I want on my phone. But the end result is that Apple Music is now far less useful to me than it has been, and I’m less likely to use it (but, of course, Apple’s unlikely to care, because I’m just going to keep paying for it as part of the Apple One subscription…).
Apple does a lot well. But I really wish they’d put a little (well…a lot) more thought behind the entire music experience, especially for people like me with large libraries that we’ve put a lot of effort into sorting, tweaking metadata, and generally futzing with to make sure they’re set up just as we like.
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.
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.
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.
