Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Day 335: I always take the Monday after con off so that I can rest and recover. I got a full normal night’s sleep plus an extra couple hours after my wife left for work, unpacked my suitcase and did laundry, made some con website and social media updates, and processed and posted the audio from the Thursday night dance. A nice low-key day to transition from the con world back into my normal routines.
Just for fun, here’s a little peek at going to (and being rather heavily involved in the production of) Norwescon as recorded by my Apple Watch.
For each graph, I’ve set it to display a month’s worth of data to make the variations nice and visible.
My standard goal for a day is 400 calories burned through movement. Most days I at least get close, many I go slightly over. I more than doubled that goal for each of the four days of con.
My exercise goal is 30 minutes, which, admittedly, I haven’t been regularly reaching for quite some time (though that’s something I intend to work on now that the weather is improving again). Hit that easily all weekend without even trying, and more than doubled it on one day.
My stand goal of 12 hours is one I usually hit pretty easily, but though not as visible, there is an increase here as well.
I live in a three-story condo, so I do get a few flights of stairs climbed every day, and walking around the college campus where I work, which is on a hill and where I do intentionally take stairs fairly often, helps. But at Norwescon, I get a room on the third floor of the tower, and as the elevators are often quite busy and I’m still fairly able-bodied, it’s usually faster and easier to take the stairs. Looks like I hit about 37 flights climbed on Friday this year!
Most of the time, my wife and I are on a pretty set schedule. Since we both work a pretty regular 8-5 schedule, we get up between 4:30 and 5 a.m., go to bed at 8 p.m., and turn out the lights at 9 p.m. (I joke sometimes at how disappointed 20-something me would be at 50-year-old me…but 20-something me was working swing shifts during the week and DJing dance clubs on the weekend, so it’s not really a fair comparison). At con, though? Somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m. to bed, and though my body tried to keep my 5 a.m. schedule in the mornings, I’d stubbornly doze as long as I could. Most days I hit my goal of a minimum of 5 hours of sleep, supplemented by one or two naps during the day (without which I would not be able to function).
I’m not particularly sedentary (most days), usually getting around 5,000 steps per day. Could certainly be more, but it’s okay. And then suddenly I’m getting a minimum of more than 10,000 steps, peaking at somewhere above 17,000 steps (and that was on Wednesday, as I was packing, arriving, moving in, and then helping with setup). Norwescon weekend is a pretty constant “go” weekend, and I’m always on the move.
So there’s a bit of a data-driven look at the past four days. I’m definitely ready to rest now, but I’m also looking forward to doing it all over again next year. :)
Day 331: Norwescon day one is done! (So done, in fact, that I’m actually posting this on Friday morning, though I’ll backdate the post so it shows up on the right day on my blog.) Most of the day was running around, socializing, and helping out where I could, and then the evening was me DJing for the Thursday night dance. The dance went well for a Thursday night (since it’s the first night and still in the work week, it’s always a little more sparsely attended), and as always, I’ve recorded the full thing and in a few days will have it posted for anyone who wants to listen to four hours of music (with only a few fumbles).
22/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1994 Hugo Best Novel
The colonization and terraforming of Mars continues, as does the high quality of Red Mars. Managing to balance the hard sci-fi of the terraforming processes and effects and the associated technological advances with political maneuvering among multiple parties across two planets and the interpersonal conflicts and relationships of multiple generations of Martian residents is no mean feat, and Robinson pulls it off well. Easily as good as the first book, and I’m looking forward to when I get to the next and final book in the trilogy.
Day 318: It’s Abyss day! The Abyss has long been a favorite film of mine (particularly the special edition cut), but the best quality release it’s had for years was the 2000 DVD release, which was a non-anamorphic presentation. Even at the time that was a disappointment, but as the years passed, and there was no word of an anamorphic release, and then no word of a Blu-ray release, it got more disappointing. As recently as 2020, many people figured that was all we’d ever get. So it’s quite exciting to finally have it released and in my hands!
Amusingly, it’ll likely be next weekend before I actually watch it. My only 4K drive is attached to my computer, and I use it to rip movies, not watch them directly. So before I can watch it, I have to get it onto my media server, and my particular process is, admittedly, somewhat time-consuming (rip both versions of the film in both 4K and HD, plus all the special features in whatever quality they are, extract the subtitles from all of them, OCR and correct the subtitles, compress the .mkv files to .m4p, and move everything onto the media server). I’ve waited 24 years for a better release, I can wait another week.
21/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
“A Brief Oral History of the El Zopilote Dock” by Alaya Dawn Johnson was the standout story for me this month.
20/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
While Picard is (imho) overall the weakest of the modern Trek series, its literary side is doing quite well. This does a great job of filling in some of the time between when Seven returns to Earth with Voyager and when she appears as a Fenris Ranger, and exploring how the character changed in those years. It’s unfortunate that some are upset that this book discusses Seven discovering her identity as a queer woman; it’s neither propagandistic nor heavy-handed, but simply experiences that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they were heterosexual. Also a lot of very pointed commentary about what happens when a major power that had been providing very necessary support for a region just up and disappears when something else catches its attention. Definitely worth reading if you’re a fan of the Picard series or (and especially) of Seven as a character.
19/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Favorites for me in this issue were Lavie Tidhar’s “The Robot” and Annalee Newitz’s “The Best-Ever Cosplay of Whistle and Midnight”.
Thanks to the 3D printing wizardry of @trevorflowers@machines.social, I now have an adorably tiny replica of an Osborne 1 on my desktop!
The Osborne 1 was my first computer (well, my family’s)…and second, and third, as we picked up a couple more from friends as they moved on, allowing me to swap parts around to keep one running.
Two 5.25″ floppy drives, a 5″ 52×20-character green screen, ran CP/M. A “portable” computer, it was the size of a suitcase, weighed 25 pounds, and didn’t have a battery, but because you could flip the keyboard up and latch it onto the front to lug it around, it counted as portable!
I typed early school papers with Wordstar (which coincidentally doubled as early training for HTML, as it used printer control codes to tell our dot-matrix printer to print \bbold\b or \uunderlined\u text; when I discovered HTML, it was an instant “oh, yeah, this makes sense” moment), played Snake before it showed up on Nokia mobile phones, and taught myself the basics of BASIC by translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into a simple text-based adventure game.
Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I’m ridiculously pleased to have this lil’ guy on my desk now.
18/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Excellent account of the settling and first steps of terraforming Mars, taking place over a few decades. Good hard sci-fi, with fascinating ideas on how it could be done and the effects, both micro (on the people involved and their immediate society) and macro (on the larger sociopolitical societies of Earth and Mars as it grows, and the physical effects on Mars). Fascinating from start to end; very much looking forward to continuing through the trilogy.
Also interesting reading this at a time when Mars is often in the news as an eventual destination once again, both realistic (NASA) and unrealistic (Musk), not long after reading and seeing Andy Weir’s The Martian and its film adaptation, just after finishing season four of For All Mankind, which is set on Mars, and while seeing Zach Weinersmith frequently post about his recent book looking at how Mars colonization is more difficult and dangerous than most people think. I wonder how much of what we know has changed since this part of the trilogy was written and how it might affect the underlying story if it were written today (I’m assuming that the Green Mars and Blue Mars sequels, being necessarily further extrapolated and less dependent on current real world science, would be less affected).
