Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

📚 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

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1/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Fun to re-read this for the first time in at least two decades, especially so soon after reading Gibson’s Neuromancer. It had been long enough that all I really remembered clearly was the Metaverse and the opening pizza delivery sequence; other pieces I halfway recalled as I read, but much was brand-new all over again. Just as with Neuromancer, it’s fascinating to see how these books have influenced modern technology and tech culture. And I always love diving into one of Stephenson’s books. His tendency to cram everything including the proverbial kitchen sink into his books in overly intricate detail mixed with a healthy dose of snark doesn’t work for everyone, but it sure does for me.

Michael holding Snow Crash

🎥 Ticket to Paradise

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Ticket to Paradise (2022): ⭐️⭐️: Unimaginative and entirely predictable, but harmless, and more or less (you choose which of those is most correct) saved by Clooney and Roberts’ undeniable easygoing chemistry.

However:

No points to whoever decided to dress Julia Roberts in a series of jumpsuits. She spent most of the film looking like a 1960s garage attendant.

Also no points to the screenwriters for apparently not knowing that one doesn’t become a lawyer about to start at a prestigious New York firm directly out of “four years of college”.

Nic Cage is a Trekkie

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Here’s a fun snippet of an interview between Nic Cage and Kevin Polowy, where Nic definitively declares himself a Trekkie:

Video originally posted to Twitter by Kevin; I downloaded it to add subtitles. Transcript below as well.

…speaking of Massive Weight, the last time I talked to Pedro, he said he wanted to recruit you into the Star Wars fold. How do you feel about this? Has there been any movement on this?

I’m — No, is the answer, and I’m, I’m not really down. I’m a Trekkie, man, I’m on the Star Trek, I’m on the Enterprise, that’s where I roll.

Oh! Okay — I didn’t know this about you.

Yeah, well, this is the first interview of the new year, you might at well get something that no one knows.

But that’s a fact. I grew up watching Shatner, I thought Pine was terrific in the movies, I think the movies are outstanding, and I like the political and the sociological —

To me what science fiction is really all about, and why it’s such an important genre, is that is really where you can say whatever you want, however you feel, you put it on a different planet, you put it in a different time, in the future, and you can, without people just jumping on you. You can really express your thoughts, like Orwell, or whomever, in the science fiction format. And Star Trek really embraced that, I thought they got into some serious stuff.

This is a great nugget of information, and now we have to make that happen, we’re gonna put this out to the internet: Nic Cage for Star Trek, 2023. It’s gotta happen.

But I’m not, I’m not in the Star Wars family, I’m in the Star Trek family.

Got it, got it. We’ll put it in the record. I’ll break the news to Pedro for you.

Okay, thank you.

Museum of Flight

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Picked up my “real” camera (Nikon D750, as opposed to my iPhone) for the first time in something over three years today…funny how a pandemic-induced lockdown can affect your hobbies, isn’t it?

We went out to the Museum of Flight, which we hadn’t been to for at least 15 years, had a nice day wandering around, looking at all the neat airplanes and space stuff, and I started getting used to the camera again. Felt good!

A few shots here, and more in an album on Flickr.

Museum of Flight: Toy UFO

Museum of Flight: Lunar Rover

Museum of Flight: Amelia Earhart

Museum of Flight: Space Shuttle Trainer

Museum of Flight: D.B. Cooper

🎥 The Menu

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The Menu (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Best watched as if you’re going to a fancy new restaurant for the first time: no reviews, no trailers, just enjoy experiencing what the chef has planned for your evening.

But if you do want a little bit of an amuse-bouche to whet the appetite: It’s kind of the foodie world’s version of Galaxy Quest, by which I mean both that it’s really funny and that it knows its subject very, very well. Though Galaxy Quest approached its genre with love, this is a (very) dark comedy instead of bright and shiny. Reminded me in the best way of the twisted films my friends and I would gather together to watch in our 20s.

Bring Back Blogging

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Monique Judge at The Verge, in “Bring Back Personal Blogging“:

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

I want to go back there.

Hard agree. This blog got its start in the mid-’90s — the earliest “post” I can still verify was on December 29, 1995, and though it now lives in this blog, was originally a hand-coded entry on a static “Announcements” page — back before “blogging” was even a term. In fact, it wasn’t until February 8, 2001 that I first discovered the word “blog”.

So there’s a lot of what Monique writes about that I remember very clearly. And I miss a lot of it. Which seems kind of funny to say, because in a lot of ways, it really hasn’t ever completely died, but the shift to social media definitely impacted the blogging world.

I’m hopeful (if not optimstic) that just maybe the issues at Twitter, the rise of Mastodon, and the general upheaval in online spaces will actually lead to something of a resurgence of people writing for themselves and in their own spaces.

Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.

Bring back personal blogging in 2023. We, as a web community, will be all that much better for it.

2022 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 68. Here’s a quick (?) overview…

2022 Reading Goal of 52 books met! 131%, 68 books. Fantastic! You've exceeded your reading goal by 16 books.

Continuing a trend from the last few years, this year was almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not.

Non-fiction: A few this year, though for the most part, they were very much in line with my usual science fiction choices. The two best were Frederik Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was, encompassing the early decades of SF fandom, and Randall Munroe’s delightful What If? 2, where he once again takes answering silly scientific questions to absolutely ridiculous extremes. Also in this category was a series of books looking at the design work for various Star Trek ships across several series.

Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Only one this year, but that one — Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove — was excellent.

Quality genre fiction: About the same as last year; primarily the Philip K. Dick nominees and my Hugo project, with a few others added here and there.

As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards, and once again, I failed to pick the winner. My personal favorite of this year’s slate was Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven. This is the second time Tade has been nominated for a PKD award, and the fourth novel of his that I’ve read (after The Wormwood Trilogy, the last book of which was a 2020 PKD nominee), and I very much enjoy his work.

I added eight books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 54% of the way through. My two favorites from this year’s set were Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake and William Gibson’s Neruomancer.

Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Almost entirely Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.

Finally Storygraph’s stats on my year’s reading tell me:

A graph of my reading over the year tracking number of books and number of pages. January, November, and December are the busiest months; April, August, and October are the slowest.
On to 2023!