Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
24/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Set seven years after the events of Star Trek VI, this does a good job of fleshing out Valeris and exploring the motivations and rationale behind her actions. It also follows up on some of the practical and political fallout for the Klingon empire of the events in the film. Definitely one of the stronger Trek novels I’ve read.
23/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Fascinating story of colonists struggling to survive on a new planet and working to communicate with the intelligences already on this world. Rather than a single central protagonist, the first few chapters are almost individual standalone stories, jumping a few decades at a time, before events accelerate towards the latter half of the book into a somewhat more traditional narrative. Really neat ideas on how very different species might find ways to communicate with each other. Enjoyed this enough that I just ordered its sequel.
Pre- and post-ceremony background music for the 2023 Student Employee of the Year celebration at Highline College. Much poppier than my usual style, heavily (and welcomely) influenced by suggestions provided to me beforehand by the organizing committee. Thanks to the SEotY committee for inviting me to help with the event!
Confess, Fletch (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Not having seen the prior Fletch films, I can’t compare Jon Hamm to Chevy Chase, but this was amusing and enjoyable. Hamm’s ongoing incredulous bemusement at the situations he’s in works quite well.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
An entertaining-in-the-moment but oddly paced and ultimately forgettable take on the classic “country manor house murder” mystery. Lee Pace’s involvement was a pleasant surprise, though.
22/2023 – ⭐️⭐️
Much of the story focuses on McCoy being forced to deal self-doubt driven by his past mistakes. While it’s meant to be an exploration into McCoy’s psyche and history, it ended up just kind of dragging on and getting monotonous.
Cocaine Bear (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Exactly what it says it will be, exactly what you think it’s going to be, and exactly what we wanted for a lazy Saturday afternoon. The only thing I didn’t like was how underlit the climactic 10 minutes were (I swear movies used to have scenes at night that you could actually see). But aside from that, it’s an ideal 90 minutes of ridiculous characters getting mauled by a bear high on cocaine.
21/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Not bad, but it as it turns out, I definitely prefer Brin’s novels to his short fiction. To my mind, he does better when he can really dive into something. His shorter works are missing a certain spark.
The Washington Post has published an article looking at the websites used to train “Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA.” If you scroll down far enough, there’s a section titled “Is your website training AI?” that lets you drop in a URL to see if it was scraped and included in the data set.
I checked three strings — “michaelhans” (to cover both this site and its prior address at michaelhanscom.com), “djwudi” (for my DJ’ing blog), and norwescon (which I’ve written or tweaked and edited much of the content for). All three of them are represented.
For the record, I’m not terribly excited about this. I’m also under no illusion that anything can be done; this stuff is all out on the open web, and as it’s free for actual people to browse through and read, it’s also free for bots to scrape and ingest into whatever databases they keep. Sometimes this is a good thing, for projects like the Internet Archive. Sometimes it’s unwittingly helping to train our new AI overlords.
20/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1988 Hugo Best Novel
I find it kind of fascinating that Brin wrote his first three Uplift novels (particularly the second and third) as obviously connected and part of the same universe, but not directly continuing the story, even when the story is obviously unfinished. The events of Startide Rising are referred to and influence the events of this story, and the same overall mystery is a major driving element of both, but they’re otherwise unconnected. It’s a neat way to approach a very fully realized universe. I also really enjoy the way Brin creates aliens (both extraterrestrial and terrestrial) and other intelligences; close enough to human to be relatable, but also different enough to be alien. I’ve really enjoyed all of his first three Uplift novels, and one of these days plan to continue on to the second trilogy.
