She closed her eyes, reciting line after line of every poem, song, and book she could remember, desperately trying to reinforce her mental defenses against the earworm’s attack. Unfortunately, humanity had yet to find a working defense against “It’s A Small World, After All.”
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
📚 forty-eight of 2020: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome by Joan D. Vinge ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Better than I expected for a novelization of an ‘80s action flick. Makes me want to re-watch the film again to see if it’s better than I remember, or if Vinge just did a particularly good job.
When he was younger, the future was a bright, shiny goal that he couldn’t wait to get to. Now that he was here, though it all seemed so sadly pedestrian and banal. Even personal transporters and alien coworkers lost their fascination after a few years of everyday encounters.
The ball had progressed beautifully. As each reveler grew tired and departed, whether alone or with one or more partners for more private entertainments, they drew a mask from the bin by the door, placed it over their face, and returned to the safety of everyday life once more.
📚 forty-seven of 2020: Exiles by Howard Weinstein ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #startrek #tng 🖖
The best of the early TNG novels so far. The characters felt right, and there was a good mix of serious plot and humor throughout. An obvious final solution, but that’s forgivable.
Once the initial breakthrough was made, time-travel was actually fairly simple…as long as you were going backwards. After all, that had all already happened. But going forwards was a much larger dilemma due to the difficulty in targeting any one of the infinite possible futures.
While spell development was superficially similar to most any other sort of creative process, the fine-tuning was killer. There were just so many variables to know what to adjust — ingredients, gestures, words, tone of voice — that those final touches could be quite dangerous.
Space, as we all know, is silent. Sound can’t travel through a vacuum, it’s simple science.
But then the great bird of the galaxy appeared at the outer rim of the system, opened its vast beak, and uttered a call that used the very fabric of spacetime as a medium for its cry.
Twenty Years of Blogging
Twenty years ago today, I became a blogger.
Admittedly, the date could be argued a bit, as I’d had my own website since 1996, and even back then had been in the habit of making short, dated updates that were usually site-related, but sometimes just personal ramblings. And I didn’t come across the term ‘blog’ until a few months later in February of 2001.
But on November 25, 2000, I moved from hand-coding updates into a static HTML page to using a script called NewsPro to manage and automate posting updates. So that’s what I’ve been using as my “official” blogging start date.
In the past 20 years, my posting frequency has waxed and waned (waning more often than waxing, admittedly) but has never disappeared altogether. I’ve moved platforms from self-hosted (first NewsPro, then MovableType) to hosted (TypePad) back to self-hosted (WordPress). Sometimes self-hosted meant on a server in my apartment; these days I use DreamHost as my hosting provider, but I still use a manual installation of WordPress rather than using the WordPress.com hosted service. I don’t tinker as much as I used to, but it’s still nice to get into the nuts and bolts from time to time.
Most of the time I’ve been doing this, I’ve just been another one of the many random voices on the ‘net, never one of the Big Names. The closest I ever came to breaking out of that…well, you can look back if you want, but I’m just glad that it’s in my past. Maybe I’ll have more to say in another three years on that twentieth anniversary, maybe not. Generally, I’m fine with just tossing my occasional thoughts on Apple, Star Trek, politics, and whatever else pops into my mind into the electronic void to see if anyone picks up on it.
If you’ve been stopping by and checking out my ramblings from time to time over the years — thanks! If you’re a new visitor, thanks to you too, especially if you’ve made it this far through this post. You might want to check out this somewhat random collection of notable posts, or just see what was posted on this day in the past (which will work for whatever day you read this).
And, of course, there’s my alter-ego DJ Wüdi side project to be promoted: A weekly (except when it isn’t) Twitch broadcast where I play an eclectic mix of music (mostly focused on alternative dance genres like goth, industrial, EBM, and various flavors of electronica, but with a fair amount of other stuff tossed in as I feel like it). Tune in to Difficult Listening Hour on Saturdays at 1 p.m. Pacific time, or cue up my past archives (plus more mix sessions) on my MixCloud page.
Twenty years down — and hopefully, twenty (and more) yet to come!
They’d finally managed to convince the supply chief to provision enough supplies to ensure they’d have a reasonable chance of making it across the wastelands. As long as the anti-grav units held out, at least, since replacement parts were more and more scarce every year.