Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Day 214: This morning we went down to the Kent public library for their fall pop-up book sale, and followed that up with stopping by Page Turner Books. We came home with a nice stack of books for each of us, which are now bundled up and under our tree to be rediscovered on Christmas morning.
Day 213: It’s advent calendar season! One from IKEA, one from Trader Joe’s, and one from…well, Kinder. I don’t remember where we bought that one. Oh, and not pictured is this year’s Lego City calendar. Three chocolates and a Lego goodie every day until Christmas. Not bad at all.
Day 212: I was fiddling around with my phone trying to come up with a photo for the day, when my wife started tapping me in the head with her foot. Kicked in the head because I didn’t have a photo yet! How cruel!
Day 211: Almost, but not quite, done with Thanksgiving leftovers. Everything but the pie is done, and we just have one more night of that.
Day 210: Between the 20 degree weather and the thick fog this morning, it was definitely time to switch over to a warmer coat and hat.
66/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Technically a time travel book, but the time travel itself is kind of the least important part, little more than a hand-waved MacGuffin necessary to get the characters in the right places. From there, you have the dual stories of near-future and historical pandemics. And, of course, any pandemic-centric tale can’t help but be read somewhat differently now than it would have been five years ago. In some ways, the near-future part seemed rather prescient, referring to a prior flu pandemic that would have hit in the mid-2010s, only about a decade off from our COVID reality, or the presence of protesters blaming the government; in others, it now seems sadly naïve (now that we know that most people’s reaction to a pandemic too quickly turns to “meh” or outright denial rather than taking it seriously). Both stories are excellently handled, often with a subtle dry humor in the “present day” portion balancing the tragedies of the historical portion.
Day 209: The joys of remote work: on the one hand, I don’t have to take time off when the car needs to be serviced. On the other hand, I don’t get to take time off work when the car needs to be serviced. On the gripping hand, blogging about this means I’m not really working at the moment…. (Don’t worry. I’ll go back to being responsible after this is posted.)
Day 208: It’s quite chilly outside, but I’m quite cozy in front of the fire, working on correcting OCR scans of old Norwescon program books to upload to the convention archives while my wife dozes in the chair next to me. Not a bad way to spend the final day of this Thanksgiving break.
Day 207: In a few months I’ll again be DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon 46, so to make sure I’m not entirely rusty when I set up that evening, it’s time for me to start practicing again. Whenever I do this, I broadcast to Twitch, and so this is what I look like when I’m streaming. Obviously, it’s very serious business.
I’m actually rather proud of the look I came up with some time ago, after a few rounds of tweaking and playing with ideas.
The “turntables” to either side of my head display the art for whatever track is playing (and they rotate as if they were physical turntables), and the audio waveforms behind my head are the waveforms of the playing tracks; deck A (the left side) on the top, and deck B below. Those elements are all pulled from the UI of DJay Pro, the DJ software I use.
The sci-fi cityscape behind me is actually a video clip. I have a small library of interesting looping video backgrounds that I can choose from.
The text in the bottom third is pulled from a text file that I keep open on my screen; as I’m mixing, I take a quick moment to update the text file with the name of whatever track I’m playing at the moment. I think there are ways to automatically pull that info from DJay, but I’ve never quite liked the look of the ones I’ve seen, and this works for me.
The caricature of me on the lower right was drawn for me a number of years ago by Sharii Chankhamma. In the original, I’m wearing an “NSFW” t-shirt; for streaming, I’ve created a small library of shirt designs that randomly update every 15 seconds.
Today’s mix is now available on my Mixcloud page if you’d like to give it a listen, along with many, many hours of other mixes I’ve uploaded in the past. And more will come — I may not do this every week, but I will need to make sure to get some more practice in over the coming months, so I’ll be popping up from time to time.
Day 206: We spent much of the day taking down fall decorations and putting up our Christmas decorations (colored lights out front instead of the orange lights we’ve had for the past month, swapping out the fall gnomes by the front door for Santa, a snowman, and Christmas gnomes, and putting up the Christmas tree inside). We also wrapped a bunch of presents for a family for the annual giving tree program at work, something we enjoy doing every year.