Photos

Photos, usually taken by me. May be mirrored or imported from other services.

Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb

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Book 18 of 2026: Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently I’d read this one 15 years ago and entirely forgotten. A sequel to the somewhat notorious Bimbos of the Death Sun, it’s a bit more reserved, swapping snarking on ‘80s SF fandom to looking back on ‘50s Golden Age fandom. It has much of the same obvious mix of affection for and exasperation with the SF scene, but also has many of the same drawbacks as Bimbos, particularly where women characters are concerned. As with Bimbos, it’s an enjoyable but definitely flawed bit of fluff that would be better if it spent more time laughing with its subjects (as Galaxy Quest does for Star Trek) instead of at them.

Me holding Zombies of the Gene Pool.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

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Book 17 of 2026: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo Best Novel)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Reading this for the first time in 2026, twenty years after it was published, when it’s set in 2025, it’s fascinating to see where we’re heading towards what Vinge envisioned and where we’re not. Similarities to Stephenson’s Snow Crash in the ubiquitous virtual worlds, but using augmented reality rather than full VR. Privacy and security are greater considerations as well. Overall, a pretty fascinating take on what’s now an alternate present day.

Me holding Rainbows End

Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue

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Book 19 of 2026: Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Excellent history of Apple, from its earliest days to today. Covers the ups and downs, with a ton of neat stories about the genesis of a whole slew of technologies, many of which I hadn’t really realized Apple’s involvement with. Admittedly, something of a niche subject (even if it’s a fairly large niche these days), but if you’re an Apple fan, it’s well worth the read. And as a long-time Apple user who got started with Apple IIs back in elementary school and got my first Mac (a Mac Classic) in 1990, it was a lot of fun to revisit and get more of the background behind the many things I remembered.

Me holding Apple: The First 50 Years

To Defy Fate by Dayton Ward

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Book 18 of 2026: To Defy Fate by Dayton Ward.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Wesley Crusher, now an experienced Traveller, needs to work with several of his old friends to keep the timeline from fragmenting disastrously from a mysterious meddler’s machinations. Though released as part of the Picard continuity, the timeline jumping brings in characters and events from so much of the Trek universe that it feels (in a good way) like this was something of a stealth “60th anniversary celebration” novel. Some very fun deep cuts sprinkled in among the more obvious references, too.

Me holding To Defy Fate

Weekly Notes: May 4–10, 2026

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  • 😷 A fairly low-key week for the most part, as I was working as best as possible while getting over the cold I got last week.
  • 🚀 Saturday I did make it out to our final staff meeting for Norwescon, where we close out this year’s convention with going over our “onions and roses”; the things that could have gone better, and the things that went well. After that was the post-convention social. Nice way to wrap up the week.

📸 Photos

Me sitting on our couch with a wooden TV tray on my lap. On the TV tray is a partially completed Lego starship Enterprise; I'm in the midst of taking a photo of it with my iPhone.
I started working on assembling the LEGO USS Enterprise I got for my birthday. In-progress construction photos are being posted in this Mastodon thread as I go.
A wide aspect shot of a garden with a bronze sculpture of a young girl swinging on a rope swing.
A sculpture in the garden of the home where we had the Norwescon post-convention social.

📚 Reading

Finally got around to getting to the next book in my Hugo Best Novel reading project and finished Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin.

🎧 Listening

This week’s new album was Laibach’s just-released Musick, which I am very much enjoying. They’ve gone full-on electropop, while still being very Laibach, leaning into the “taking over the top goth-industrial seriousness to hilariously ridiculous extremes” aesthetic that they’re so good at. Definitely pushing my “perkygoth” buttons.

🔗 Linking

  • The M2x2: A neat 3D-printed enclosure for a Mac Mini, designed to look like a classic LEGO computer brick.

  • Alexander Hanff at That Privacy Guy: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.: “Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.”

  • Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero: Google Chrome Secretly Downloads Huge Local AI Models: Includes pointers for removing the 4 GB file, though you’ll need to figure out where to add the backslashes in the file path.

  • Kai Kupferschmidt at Science: Reality Check: “[Hany] Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change.” Includes some good tips on using real-world geometry to spot some common errors in AI-generated images.

  • whatcable: “macOS menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do.”

  • Terry Godier: The Boring Internet: “Personal sites are coming back. RSS feeds are coming back. Webrings are coming back. Mastodon is, for all its quirks, a federated SMTP-shaped thing for short messages and not a platform in the old sense. Small internet radio stations still broadcast from servers with ugly URLs. Newsletters still arrive through SMTP. Software projects still publish changelogs through feeds. ¶ Communities still gather in places too small to be interesting to investors.”

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

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Book 17 of 2026: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006 Hugo Best Novel)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: It seems I read this 13 years ago; oddly, I have no memory of that, though I rated it four stars back then. High-concept SF (the Earth is suddenly enclosed in a bubble where time passes at a drastically reduced rate as the rest of the universe goes on) that allows for exploration of how we (as a species and as individuals) cope with impending Armageddon, cosmic mysteries, and relationships with each other.

Me holding Spin

Purgatory’s Key by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore

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Book 16 of 2026: Purgatory’s Key by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Good wrap up to this 50th anniversary trilogy. A bit of a bummer that one of the villains was so similar to one in the prior book (a woman so obsessed with a particular goal that she makes increasingly irrational and ill-considered decisions), but otherwise does a good job tying things up with the rest of the books. Overall, the trilogy does well in touching on a lot of TOS and incorporating hints of things to come.

Me holding Purgatory's Key

Captain to Captain by Greg Cox

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Book 14 of 2026: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: The first of a trilogy, this is primarily centered on Number One (now more well known from Discovery and Stranger New Worlds) when she was earlier in her career, serving on the Enterprise under Captain April. It’s kind of amusing, as this was written just shortly before her appearances in the modern shows, so it’s definitely Majel Barrett’s version rather than Rebeca Romijn’s. The adventure is fairly standard, with the common-for-modern-novels callbacks and references; nothing groundbreaking so far, but not bad.

Me holding Captain to Captain