Photos

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

To Defy Fate by Dayton Ward

by

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

by
  • 😷 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

by

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

by

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

by

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

Usurpation by Sue Burke

by

Book 13 of 2026: Usurpration by Sue Burke.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: The last book in a trilogy, and does a good job of wrapping things up…or at least coming to an end, as in-world, the story is far from done. I don’t remember how I discovered the first book in the series, I’m glad I did. A fascinating non-human intelligence, and lots of themes of empathy and caring.

Me holding Usurpation

Identity Theft by Greg Cox

by

Book 12 of 2026: Identity Theft by Greg Cox.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Not a bad adventure, and does a decent job of trying to rehabilitate the technology from one of TOS’s more ignominious episodes. However, having one of the primary alien races be essentially humanoid evolved deer, complete with being referred to as bucks and does, and described with their antlers and rubbery noses, meant that my mental image of the entire adventure was basically a Star Trek LARP at a furry convention. Kinda worked against really being able to immerse myself in the story.

Me holding Identity Theft

Wet Visions edited by Cyn Mason

by

Book 11 of 2026: Wet Visions edited by Cyn Mason.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: An anthology of stories by (primarily) PNW authors, all of which are…wet. Rain, oceans, fog, mist, bogs…and occasionally some blood. For me, no major standouts, but a few made me laugh, one made me uncomfortable, and overall not at all a bad collection.

Long-time Norwescon people may be amused at seeing this one pop up — the editor and many of the authors were attending professionals at early Norwescons (around the NWC4 and NWC5 era), and I kept seeing it being mentioned in their bios. Eventually, my curiosity kicked in, and I found a used copy online. Mine is copy #22 of a run of 700. Going with the “wet” theme, the cover uses an altered version of publisher Hypatia Press (“Hywetia Press”), and the book is bound in a dark green and printed on light mossy green paper.

Me holding Wet Visions

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

by

Book 10 of 2026: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Dark and disturbing, but (for me) very enjoyable adaptation of a Brothers Grimm tale (“The Goose Girl”) that I wasn’t very familiar with. The author is the writer guest of honor at next week’s Norwescon, and I wanted to make sure I had read something of hers before the con, and this was the one I stumbled across as we wandered through local bookstores.

Me holding A Sorceress Comes to Call