Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Recent Netflix Spooky Shows

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After finishing off Mayfair Witches S1, Interview With the Vampire S1, and A Discovery of Witches S1-3, we decided to stick with the theme and started watching Evil again.

TV show posters for Interview With the Vampire, Mayfair Witches, A Discovery of Witches, and Evil.

Mayfair Witches was a fun way to get back into Anne Rice’s universe. I was pleasantly surprised to see Harry Hamlin, and we’ve consistently enjoyed Alexandra Daddario in everything we’ve seen her in.

I’d seen good things about the new Interview show, but even with that, I was really impressed. I’m really enjoying the way they’ve updated it, keeping the bones of the story while making a lot of fascinating updates…and ditching anything remotely resembling subtext.

A Discovery of Witches we knew nothing about and grabbed on a whim, but it sucked us right in. Fun take on creatures, lots of political maneuvering, and we really liked the magical effects. Good enough that we now have the book trilogy on our to-read shelves.

We’d watched S1 of Evil, but didn’t keep up with it, so decided to just restart from the beginning. This show is a lot of fun, the daughters are so adorable, and Leland is such a great creep. It’s a perfect balance of creepy and really funny.

Clarkesworld Issue 219 edited by Neil Clarke

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Book 2 of 2025: Clarkesworld Issue 219, edited by Neil Clarke. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Favorites in this issue were “Souljacker” by Shari Paul, “Driver” by Sameem Siddiqui, and “The Coffee Machine” by Celia Corral-Vásquez.

I realized last week that somehow I got a month behind with my Clarkesworld reading, so this is actually the December issue, and the January issue is coming up next.

Me holding Clarkesworld 219 on my iPad.

Uncanny Magazine Issue 62 edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, Monte Lin, and Betsy Aoki

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Book 1 of 2025: Uncanny Magazine Issue 62, edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, Monte Lin, and Betsy Aoki. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Favorites this month were “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch, a hilarious take on kaiju stories, and “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson, which was perhaps a bit predictable, but very nice.

Me holding Uncanny Issue 62 on my iPad

This is a test…

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…this is only a test. I think I’ve found a way to automatically publish blog posts to my Bluesky account. We’ll see if this works.

I already have a plugin that’s doing a good job of sharing my posts to Mastodon (Share on Mastodon), but I hadn’t found one for Bluesky yet. (Well, I’d found one, but it apparently only works if you have a featured image, which I don’t usually do here.)

But Buffer offers a free level for personal use that connects to BlueSky, and I’ve recently found the WordPress to Buffer plugin.

So now, in theory, blog posts here will get piped to my Bluesky account via Buffer. Here goes the test!

2025 Resolutions

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My resolutions for this year:

  • 3840 x 2160
  • 1920 x 1080
  • 3024 x 1964
  • 1668 x 2224
  • 1179 x 2556
  • 396 x 484

(That’s my Mac mini’s primary 4K monitor and secondary display, my MacBook Pro, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh.)

2024 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 76 books. Here’s a quick (?) overview…

Screenshot from The Storygraph showing my reading goal of 52 books at 146% complete with 76 books, exceeding my goal by 24 books.

Once again, the trend of the last few years holds true, with another year almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not. Have you seen…everything?

Non-fiction: Three books, counting for 4% of my reading. A silly little guide to surviving visiting quaint English villages, a comic anthology of plans and schemes that didn’t quite work out, and a really good look at menopause, which I’d recommend to anyone dealing with it personally or who knows someone who is dealing with it personally (I fall into the latter category, being a 50-something cis man who knows a lot of women “of a certain age”, as the old saying goes).

Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Not much, but a little bit. Frederik Backman’s books are always a delight, and this year I really enjoyed Anxious People. Also in this category is the tenth anniversary re-release of Smut Peddler, an erotic comic anthology (another release in the Smut Peddler series was also on my reading list this year, though that one counts as genre fiction).

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. However, I’m no longer posting my thoughts or review on the nominees, as I am the coordinator for the Philip K. Dick award ceremony at Norwescon. While I have no input into selecting any of the nominees or the eventual winner, I don’t want to give any appearance of impropriety. So, I’ll just read and enjoy each year’s nominees, and you all will have to make your own judgements as to your favorites.

I added seven books to my Hugo reading project and decided to skip re-reading three milkshake ducks, bringing me up to 77% of the way through. This year’s selections were all good — I continue to very much enjoy Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy was excellent hard SF, Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel books are delightful, and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age continues to hold its place as my favorite of his books.

Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Lots of Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024, 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. I did hit the somewhat silly but still notable milestone of having read every officially physically released standalone TOS Star Trek novel published to date (this excludes eBook only releases and TOS books that are part of a larger, multi-show series) — basically, on Wikipedia’s list of Star Trek novels, everything in the Bantam Books and Random House sections and everything in the Simon & Schuster section up to where it starts listing TNG books.

Continuing from last year is reading more digitally than in the past, with my two SF/F magazine subscriptions (Uncanny and Clarkesworld) and the ease of bringing ebooks along when vacationing landing me at a split of 70% physical, 30% digital for the year, compared to 78/22 last year.

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

Graph of my books and pages read over the year. I read the most in February and April, the least in March, June, October, and December.

 

On to 2025!

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

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75/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A two-century prequel to the Vorkosigan saga, as the Quaddies — humans genetically engineered for zero-G, complete with a second pair of arms rather than legs — make a break for freedom. Not quite as good as later Vorkosigan books, but also one of the earliest written, and still very enjoyable, with some neat feats of sci-fi engineering balancing out the less well-developed characters.

Me holding Falling Free

Carry-On

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🎥 Carry-On (2024): ⭐️⭐️

This really wants to be a modern Die Hard — complete with opening with a shot of a plane landing directly overhead — but having just watched Die Hard (as we do every Christmas Eve), I can safely say this is no Die Hard. It’s paced a bit too slow for an action/suspense film (Die Hard is 15 minutes longer, but this one feels longer), Edgerton only seems to have one expression and doesn’t remotely embody the relatable “everyman” that Willis did, and too much of what happens happens because the plot needs it to happen, not because it makes sense. The most interesting part was a fun action sequence that’s shot entirely from within a car (which doesn’t involve any of the main characters). But at least the TSA gets their “no, really, they’re just good people trying to do their Very Important Jobs” propaganda in for the holidays!

(Spoilers follow…)

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Harm’s Way by David Mack

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74/2024 – ⭐️⭐️

Though officially a TOS adventure, this is really mostly a part of the Vanguard spinoff book series, which I read so long ago as to have forgotten both characters and key points. As a result, it felt like I was reading a mid-series book, and missing much of the necessary context. The primary foe is so overwhelmingly powerful that there’s an extended battle sequence in the latter half of the book that feels very out of place; perhaps it works within the greater Vanguard storyline, but to me, it was just troubling and very un-Trek. Klingon characters include pre-“Day of the Dove” Kang and Mara, which does expand their characters in interesting ways and hints at background motivations for future Federation/Klingon developments, but also doesn’t really mesh with what I remember of Kang and Mara’s actions in the episode (though, admittedly, it’s been a few years since I watched it, and I’m relying partially on Memory Alpha’s plot summary here). All in all, an uneven Trek adventure, and not one of my favorites.

Me holding Harm’s Way