Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Photos, usually taken by me. May be mirrored or imported from other services.
Day 305: We had a hankering for soft-serve today (because what else do you do on a 40° F day?), and we finally managed to find some on our third try. The first try from a Menchi’s was weirdly gritty and got tossed, second try from Dairy Queen was oddly tasteless and so melty we just shoved ’em in the freezer when we got home to see if they eventually improve, but then we remembered a new place down the road from us, give it a shot, and had success!
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”.
Day 304: Somehow, Mariner’s sarcastic back-handed Vulcan salute just seems appropriate when wearing my Swear Trek t-shirt.
Side note: I actually had to think about the least-icky way to link to Swear Trek, since my choices seem to be either the X/Twitter account (which, well, obvious) or the Tumblr account (who just announced they’re selling all their user data for AI training, on an opt-out basis, of course). I went with Tumblr, but I wish there was a non-ethically-horrifying place to link to.
Day 302: Proof that I was back in my office today! Every office should have a T-rex somewhere in it. Size, construction, and level of risk up to the owner of the office.
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).
Day 301: I actually went to work today! And then was busy enough that I totally forgot to take a picture to prove that I was feeling well enough to leave the house, so my wife snapped this shot on our way home.
Day 300: Heard something dropping on the roof, looked outside, and realized it was snowing and hailing simultaneously — snailing! So I had to go out and stand in the snail.
Day 299: More work on prepping for DJing at Norwescon. Today I was working on making sure I had a good video output setup with OBS to send to the projection screen that will be behind me on stage during the dance. It’s a variation on what I use when streaming, and I really like the way it comes out.
Day 298: I have more energy, but still have a head full of goo. Spending some of my downtime on prepping my music library for DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon.
Which involves more swearing at Apple than this long-time Apple user would like it to. I really wish they’d give the Music app the love and care it so desperately needs, particularly when it comes to people like me, who have a large library of owned music and care about metadata, and are not interested in cloud features. I just want an app that concentrates on organizing, managing, and playing what’s on my computer. iTunes in its early days did a great job of that, but it (or its current “Music” incarnation) hasn’t been solid in years.
