Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

📚 Bug by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall

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7/2022 – ⭐️⭐️ Philip K. Dick Award Nominee

Unfortunately, this one just did not work for me. The main character is a 10-year-old deaf (and, I believe, possibly autistic) child, and it’s narrated in a first-person, nearly stream-of-consciousness style, which (in-universe) is the child dictating in sign language to a caretaker who translates what he says. In actuality, the book was originally written in Italian, and has been translated to English. So there are multiple levels of abstraction and translation, and I’m at a loss as to how much of the final writing style and choices were the character’s, an artifact of the in-universe translation from sign language, the author’s, an artifact of the real-world translation from Italian, or some combination of all of those. The end result was that I just didn’t enjoy it.

Original Audio? Commentary? Why Not Both?

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I’m watching the new 4K restoration of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and one of the nice things about this release is that not only are there commentaries, but there are subtitles for the commentaries (this is a very rare thing, unfortunately). So I can watch the movie with the original audio, but pop on the subtitles for one of the commentary tracks to read that as I watch.

At which point Prairie looks at me and says, “Oh my god, you’re such a nerd.”

Yup.

🖖

Meatloaf Again?

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Content warning: Morbid, dark humor.

Seems the Weber grill company sends out regular “recipe of the week” emails, which I’m sure are pre-written and pre-scheduled and just go out automatically.

Today’s was for BBQ meatloaf.

Screenshot of a Weber “recipe of the week” email with a recipe for BBQ meat loaf.
Screenshot of a Weber “recipe of the week” email with a recipe for BBQ meat loaf.

They had to apologize.

Screenshot of a Weber email apologizing for sending the BBQ meatloaf recipe on the same day that recording artist Meat Loaf died.
Screenshot of a Weber email apologizing for sending the BBQ meatloaf recipe on the same day that recording artist Meat Loaf died.

“Meatloaf again?”

Riff-Raff, Frank N. Furter, and Magenta around the dinner table in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Riff-Raff, Frank N. Furter, and Magenta around the dinner table in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Also: I honestly did not know until today that Meat Loaf was a vaccine-denying Trumpublican and (at least according to a lot of online scuttlebut) very likely, and unsurprisingly, died of Covid-related complications.

I can simultaneously be disappointed at the death of a long-time favorite musician, be disappointed that he got sucked into MAGAland, and think that it’s his own damn fault for dying that way — which makes it even more disappointing, because it’s quite likely that it was preventable.

PKD Award 📚 Nominees

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This year’s stack of Philip K. Dick Award nominees have arrived! (Actually, nominees plus one — Finna is the precursor to Defekt, and I don’t like starting in the middle of a series.) As usual, this looks like a strong selection of books; of note for me is Far From the Light of Heaven, as this is Tade Thompson’s second time as a nominee, and I enjoyed all of his Wormwood trilogy, the third book of which was the earlier nominated work.

Time to get reading! (And if you’re interested, I’ve created a PKD reading challenge on StoryGraph that you’re welcome to join!)