Day 308: Realized on our way out the door this morning that we’d had a bit of a surprise snow overnight. Not enough for a snow day, unfortunately. Harrumph!
Photos
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📚 Firewall by David Mack
20/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
While Picard is (imho) overall the weakest of the modern Trek series, its literary side is doing quite well. This does a great job of filling in some of the time between when Seven returns to Earth with Voyager and when she appears as a Fenris Ranger, and exploring how the character changed in those years. It’s unfortunate that some are upset that this book discusses Seven discovering her identity as a queer woman; it’s neither propagandistic nor heavy-handed, but simply experiences that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if they were heterosexual. Also a lot of very pointed commentary about what happens when a major power that had been providing very necessary support for a region just up and disappears when something else catches its attention. Definitely worth reading if you’re a fan of the Picard series or (and especially) of Seven as a character.
Year 50 Day 307
Day 307: Just an uneventful day working from home. Absolutely nothing of import worth mentioning.
Year 50 Day 306
Day 306: Been in something of a foul mood all day, but I got myself trimmed up again, and had a good practice DJ session with some really smooth transitions. So I guess it balances out to a solid “meh”?
Year 50 Day 305
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!
📚 Uncanny Issue 57 edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Monte Lin
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”.
Year 50 Day 304
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.
Year 50 Day 302
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.
📚 Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
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).
