Uncanny Magazine Issue 63 edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas

Book 14 of 2025: Uncanny Magazine Issue 63 edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

My favorites this issue were “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills, “Butterfly Pavilion” by G. Willow Wilson, and “Infinite Halves by J.L. Akagi.

Me holding Uncanny 63 on my iPad

A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley

Book 13 of 2025: A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Historian Lucy Worsley looks at the growth of murder (fictional and real) as entertainment in British media. Fascinating and a lot of fun to read; if you’ve ever enjoyed one if Worsley’s TV historical documentaries (we’ve become big fans), this has the same humor, and it’s decidedly her voice.

Me holding A Very British Murder

Weekly Notes: Feb 17-23, 2025

  • 🇺🇸 On Monday we took advantage of having the day off to hop the light rail into downtown Seattle and go to the Save the Civil Service / 50501 protest in front of the Federal building. Lots of people showed up, which was great (though I do wish we didn’t need to do this). I uploaded a Flickr album with photos of signs and the crowds.
  • 🤖 I’ve added a short AI disclaimer for this blog to the sidebar. In short: No generative AI, traditional/iterative AI for video captions (first pass only, then manually reviewed and corrected before finalizing).

📸 Photos

Protesters carrying signs stand on a wet plaza under buildings that seem to loom and bend over them.

Protesters are seen reflected upside-down in a puddle on a herringbone pattern brick plaza.

Even at protests, I can get a little arty with my photos sometimes.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Finished three books (well…a graphic novel, a government pamphlet, and a magazine) this week:

And I’ve started reading Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder. It’s good to get at least one non-fiction book in each year.

📺 Watching

  • Our current reality show is season 19 of Project Runway, and then we’re continuing to get caught up on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and NCIS. All three of these shows are great for watching people having worse days than us. Scrubs continues to keep things a little light.
  • After a long pause, I picked back up with my ongoing project to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order (current progress 30.57% complete), and started season two of TNG. Two episodes in (“The Child” and “Where Silence Has Lease”), many, many to go.

🎧 Listening

  • I’m finally getting started practicing for DJing at Norwescon this year, and as always, I’m recording and posting my sessions. Here’s Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22. These are always random, seat-of-the-pants, unplanned sessions, so the song selections are a bit all over the place.
  • I also decided to sunset my DJ Wüdi blog (one gig and a few practice sessions a year doesn’t really need its own separate blog), and moved all of the posts that were there over onto this blog. All my mashups and mixes are now part of everything else here on Eclecticism.

🔗 Linking

Clarkesworld Issue 221 edited by Neil Clarke

Book 12 of 2025: Clarkesworld Issue 221 edited by Neil Clarke: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

My favorites this month were “King of the Castle” by Fiona Moore and “The Hanging Tower of Babel” by Wang Zhenzhen, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan.

Also, this is the fourth consecutive story by Fiona Moore, all in the same world and with the same central characters (particularly Morag and her repurposed security robot Seamus), that has ended up as one of my favorites when they appear in Clarkesworld. She’s writing the kind of post-apocalyptic stores that really resonate for me, where the immediate post-apocalyptic part and all associated Bad Things That Happen have already happened, and society has moved on to finding ways to reconnect and rebuild. Post-post-apocalyptic, I suppose. Much more my style of story than the standard post-apocalyptic tale of people trapped in bad situations and having to cope with horrible things happening to them.

The stories I’ve read (I haven’t yet dug to see if there are more in this world) are:

Me holding Clarkesworld 221 on my iPad.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual by the United States Office of Strategic Services

Book 11 of 2025: Simple Sabotage Field Manual by the United States Office of Strategic Services: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A fascinating little World War II artifact that in some ways can still be quite relevant. Sure, much of this is very much of its time, and many of the more specific suggestions are technologically obsolete now. But the broad strokes, and especially the oft-screenshotted section advising office workers on ways to slow down beaurocratic functions, are as useful today as ever. If, of course, you ever happen to find yourself in a situation where an autocratic fascist regime is in power and you have reason and opportunity to do what you can to gum up the works. (Ahem.)

Me holding the Simple Sabotage Field Manual on my iPad

Indiginerds edited by Alina Pete

Book 10 of 2025: Indiginerds edited by Alina Pete: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A short but very solid anthology of comics dealing with the intersection of modern indigenous life and nerd interests. Several good stories in here; my personal favorite is Alina Pete’s “Dorvan V”, addressing Star Trek TNG’s colonialist underpinnings and how one fan’s relationship with it changes over their life.

Me holding Indiginerds