geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

🎥 Abigail

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Abigail (2024): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The “demon baby” genre is a particular favorite of ours, and this one is a lot of fun. A bit of Agatha Christie, a bit of The Ransom of Red Chief, and a lot of blood (it is a vampire movie, after all). The creepy kid is nicely creepy, the unfortunate criminal crew of misfits is appropriately dysfunctional, and everyone understands the assignment. Absolutely worth a watch.

📚 Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

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54/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This is one of those that, while unquestionably good, was difficult for me to really get into and ultimately just didn’t resonate with me. Impressively (and sometimes depressingly) prescient in some ways, I think that a lot of it was simply too directly relatable to present social and political realities that it was hard for me to enjoy it.

Me holding Forever Peace

📚 Smut Peddler X: Ten Years of Impeccable Pornoglyphics edited by Andrea Purcell

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53/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I picked up the original version of this book ten years ago, during its Kickstarter campaign, when an online acquaintance who contributed a story was promoting it. I enjoyed it then, and it was fun to revisit it a decade later, especially as I hadn’t re-read it since then, so had forgotten the majority of the stories, and the new content looking back at the original project was a nice addition. As with the six other books that now exist in the “Smut Peddler” series (seven if you count this 10th anniversary version separately), all of which live on my shelves, it’s a very enjoyable collection of fun, inclusive, explicit sexytimes.

For fun, my review of the original release: “I actually read this last year when I got the .pdf version from the Kickstarter project, the physical book was delivered earlier this year. I found the Kickstarter when one of my friends announced that she was contributing a piece to the project. Perhaps not my usual reading material, but I really enjoyed all of it — I don’t remember there being a bad entry in the bunch, and quite a few extremely good stories. Not at all disappointed to have it in my collection, and I’ll be adding the second volume when it’s Kickstarter project goes live.”

Me holding Smut Peddler X

📚 Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox

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52/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Almost four stars…but not quite. There are three connected storylines (it’s not a spoiler if it’s in the back cover blurb, right?): A modern-day (2024) true crime podcaster investigating the mysterious disappearance of one Gillian Taylor in 1986, Kirk and company in the third year of their original voyage rescuing an abducted scientist, and Kirk and company escorting envoys to a conference shortly before the events of The Undiscovered Country. Of the three storylines, I found the latter two to be fairly standard Trek adventure, and would occasionally get confused as to which point in time I was in for a moment when I switched chapters. However, the first storyline, as the podcaster tracks down various minor characters from The Voyage Home to try to figure out what happened to Gillian is great. I really enjoyed the glimpse into what happened on Earth after the events of the movie, and it was a lot of fun to build on many of the gags from the film. That storyline is by far the strongest, and the middle story is the weakest, with yet another “landing party beams down to a pre-industrial society and — surprise! — makes a complete hash of the Prime Directive” situation.
Still, even the weaker parts are entertaining, and Cox ties in lots of little nods to a lot of Trek true canon and beta (book) canon.

(This reaches my goal of 52 books read this year, nice and early! We’ll see how many I end up with in a few more months.)

Me holding Lost to Eternity

Legacy lenses and a bit of privilege

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(Collecting and editing together a Mastodon thread. Nothing new to see if you follow me there.)

This past weekend I went down to Portland to visit my mom, and all the photos I took were shot using lenses from her dad’s (film) Konica Minolta, attached to my Nikon D750 using a lens adapter. The lenses date from sometime after 1976, according to what I’ve been able to determine from a little web research), and require shooting all manual (which is a good skill to brush up on from time to time anyway), and it was a lot of fun to do.

A Nikon D750 DSLR sits on a coffee table. Attached to it is an 1970s Konica lens, while a Vivitar lens from the same era sits nearby.

The weekend’s photos are now in a Flickr album. I really like the quality of these; they’re definitely not as “clean” as I get with more modern lenses, but the flaws of the older glass produce some neat effects, particularly in lower-light situations where I’m shooting wide open. Not an everyday lens choice, to be sure, but definitely worth bringing out from time to time.

Portland Weekend July 2024

And finally, a funny-but-serious (to me, in retrospect) story about this photo:

A pane of shattered glass, with cracks radiating out from a central impact point; a smaller impact point is just to one side. Behind the glass and artfully out of focus are sparkling pieces of jewelry.

After spending the morning at the Pittock Mansion, mom and I needed lunch, and wanted to find someplace air conditioned, since it was a 90°+ day in Portland. So we went to a close-ish mall, the Lloyd Center, not knowing that it is virtually abandoned — I’d be surprised if it was at 30% capacity. Empty space after empty space, with just a few stragglers trying to hold on, mostly grouped around the ice rink at the mall’s center.

After eating some mediocre Orange Julius chili dogs and watching a bit of a Willy Wonka on Ice production on the ice rink (because, sure, why not toss some random Roald Dahl in), we were wandering on when we passed a jewelry store. One of the display case windows of the store had been shattered by something, leaving a very prominent starburst pattern in the glass. This caught my eye, and I figured I’d see what kind of shot I could get, with the cracked window and the sparkle of the jewelry behind it.

Being in “absent minded art brain” mode, I didn’t even think about what this might look like until, through the viewfinder, I noticed the store employees looking at me and gesturing in my direction. Suddenly very conscious of the situation, I put the camera down as a pleasant looking lady came out to talk with me. As it turns out, as soon as I apologized for not thinking about the optics of the situation and explained what I was doing, it turned out that she was also a bit of an amateur photographer, and we had a nice little chat about the window, how the shatter effect looked, and what sort of shots I might get. And then, after another little laugh about the whole thing, we all moved on.

But as we walked away, I couldn’t help but think about the rather stark privilege in the experience. Wandering through a down-at-heels mall, passing a jewelry store that someone had likely tried to rob, blithely taking photos of the damage, and walking away with a pleasant conversation and funny story. I have to think that would have turned out differently if I hadn’t been a 51 year old white man wandering around with his disabled mother in a powered chair. But in the moment? I just thought it would be a neat photo.

📚 Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin

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51/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Myth series has been on my radar for years, so when I saw the first five books at the local library sale a couple months ago, I snapped them up. This first one is…ehh. It’s okay. It’s not bad, but neither did it wow me. Maybe it’s because it’s the first in the series, maybe because it was written in ’78 and I’m reading it in ’24, maybe because I’m more of an SF reader, maybe it’s because I’ve fairly recently read the first few Discworld books and enjoyed them more than I did this, and maybe it’s some combination of all of those factors, but I was somewhat underwhelmed. As long as I have the next four, I’ll keep reading and see if they improve, though. (Also, why is Aahz about two feet taller than he should be on the cover art?)

Me holding Another Fine Myth