Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Photos, usually taken by me. May be mirrored or imported from other services.
Book 38 of 2026: Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Death gets fired, and explores life as a mortal being (more or less), while the rest of the Discworld has to figure out what’s going on when Death isn’t doing Death’s job anymore. It’s easy to see why Death is a favorite character in the Discworld series, as Pratchett continues to do a masterful job of using the character to look at life and make death (the concept) a bit less intimidating.
A brief note to begin with: I’ll be including a few iPhone photos here and there, but most of my photography for this trip is being done with my “real” camera. And since I want to focus on enjoying the vacation and not processing photos, those will be waiting until some time after we get home before they make it online. Until then, enjoy what’s here and use your imagination. :)
This was originally planned to be an overnight train trip on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight run, but when an abandoned building burned and was deemed so unstable that it could collapse onto the tracks at any moment, Amtrak cancelled all runs between Seattle and Portland. So, we fly instead!
TSA at SeaTac was fine, and we breezed right through. Found our gate, got some lunch, and settled in to wait to board.
First time flying first class. Not bad at all!
Got to SFO; looks like a nice airport. Started finding out way to the BART station, got on the airport train…and got right back off again — once they manually opened the doors — when it broke down. At least it was still mobile, so it pulled away and another appeared. Got on the BART and went the wrong way, but it was only one stop and then this line reverses to go the other direction, so it was only a minor detour. Taking the scenic route?
Got to the hotel (quite a walk with these backpacks), dropped our stuff off, took a few minutes to rest, and then went out to find food. Wandered up and into Chinatown and discovered that there was a big street market/festival in progress on the main drag. Explored that for a little bit, but it was a bit much after a long day of travel, so we found a good Chinese restaurant for dinner. Walked around a bit more after that, then back to the hotel to crash out.
Our first big walking day! Over 20,000 steps. Started from our hotel (a block away from the Transamerica Pyramid) and went down to the ferry terminal, then slowly walked up along the Embarcadero to Pier 39, pausing to take photos and browse interesting looking places as we went.
Grabbed lunch, then had an incredible catamaran sailing tour of the San Francisco Bay, including going under the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather was perfect the entire way, and we got some absolutely gorgeous views of San Francisco. We can highly recommend Adventure Cat Sailing if you get the chance.
When that finished, we continued our walk north along the Embarcadero, eventually making it all the way up to Victorian Park/the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. That was when we turned around…but not without a detour through Ghirardelli Square to pick up a little chocolate.
We walked all the way back down the Embarcadero to the ferry terminal where we’d started, and then back up to the hotel. By that point it was 7 p.m. and we’d been going pretty solidly since 9 a.m., so it was time to stop so we’d be ready for tomorrow.
A little less walking today…but not by a lot, I still broke 18,000 steps and went almost 9 miles.
We had a fairly slow morning, eventually making our way up to the closest BART station and heading out to the Mission district. Once we were there, we got a small taco brunch using the “first open place we walk past” method, and it worked great.
From there, we headed up to the Mission San Francisco de Asis, and realized we could tour both the old (1776) mission and the “new” (1918) basilica. Both are gorgeous, and as it was Sunday morning, we were able to listen in to the choir at the end of one of the Sunday morning masses in the basilica.
After that we decided to head towards Golden Gate Park, started that way, and a ways along realized that we were about to cross Haight street. So, we turned and walked the rest of the way there along Haight street, enjoying all the old classic San Francisco homes and the many cute little shops and restaurants along the way, stopping in one for a lunchtime burrito, right through the Haight-Ashbury district until we hit the park.
Once at the park, we ended up finding and riding the carousel, listening to a Hungarian folk trio and the Golden Gate Park Band as they celebrated St. Stephen’s Day, and then spending most of the rest of our time there slowly exploring the San Francisco Botanical Garden.
Eventually we could tell we were wearing down, so we headed out of the park. We found local burgers for dinner, hopped on a Muni train back towards downtown, and made it back to our hotel a little after six. Time to rest!
This morning we kept nice and slow. Took our time waking up and getting mostly ready to go, then had a brief outing to get breakfast at a corner place we’d passed a few times that looked good (and it was). Back to the hotel for the final load out, then a quick ride on the BART to get to the airport.
Now we’re all checked in, through TSA, lunched, and kicked back at our gate, ready for the next part of our summer adventure….
Book 37 of 2026: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
⭐️: Actively disliked this one; a rare instance where I came very close to bailing out and DNF’ing, and only stuck it out because it’s part of my Hugo Best Novel reading project.
A dystopic future where fossil fuels have run out (and, apparently, renewable options like wind (except for sailing ships), solar, hydro, etc. just…aren’t a thing? anywhere? for no discernible reason?) and power comes through kinetic energy stored in ‘kink springs’, and the resulting societal collapse combined with ecological change has devastated food supplies worldwide. The overall background is basically colonialism; substitute genetic engineering agriculture companies for the East India Tea Company and Thailand for India, and you’ve got the gist. Genetic engineering has progressed enough that there are now “New People”; genetically created intelligent artificial life that is genetically encoded to be servile.
One of these New People is the titular “windup girl” (who isn’t actually windup, but New People are intentionally given a way of moving that mimics stop motion/clockwork creations), a sex slave who is repeatedly abused over the course of the story, with some of these instances being explicitly detailed across multiple pages of the story. The first instance within the first few chapters was more than enough for me, having it happen again and in greater detail and length later on was when I almost bailed out of the book entirely. Instead, I just skimmed past and kept skimming through the rest of the book just to get it done with.
Obviously enough people liked it and found it worthwhile for it to win a Best Novel Hugo award, but I can’t recommend it.
Book 36 of 2026: Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall.
⭐️⭐️⭐️: An entertaining adventure as a Star Trek convention becomes ground zero for the zombie apocalypse. A few things here and there that bothered me a bit, but mostly nothing really major. The biggest thing for me was that the authors couldn’t resist giving nearly every person and place very obvious Trek nods for names (the hero is Jim Pike, the hotel is the Botany Bay, and many, many others), and yet, somehow, it seems that none of the die-hard Trek fans at the convention ever notice this or think it’s at all noteworthy. While identifying the names was a fun mini-game as I read, within the context of the story, it broke my suspension of disbelief (apparently, zombies are fine, but insufficiently observant and pedantic Trekkies is over the line).
Book 35 of 2026: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: A fun send-up of Hollywood and our tendency to lose ourselves in the “magic” of cinema, as told through the magic of Discworld. Got quite a few laughs out of this entry in the series.
Book 34 of 2026: The Enterprise Logs Volume 2
⭐️⭐️⭐️: As with the first, it’s not so much about the actual quality as the cringe entertainment value.
Book 33 of 2026: Eric by Terry Pratchett
⭐️⭐️⭐️: A shorter book, this is a relatively quick romp through a mashup of three wishes, Discworld’s version of The Odyssey (rather amusing, as I read this just as Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey film was in the theaters), and the joys of mid-level bureaucracy. Not bad, but not a standout.
Book 32 of 2026: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
⭐️⭐️⭐️: Dragons large and small, guards of somewhat questionable repute, and, of course, evil schemes for power. Another fun adventure with Pratchett’s undercurrent of social commentary throughout.
Book 31 of 2026: Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs
⭐️⭐️⭐️: Look – by just about any realistic objective measure (script, plot, science, fidelity to nearly any aspect of Star Trek, printing quality, etc.), these are bad; two stars would be generous. But as artifacts of 1970s Trek comics medium, they’re certainly entertaining, if in a very cringey sort of way. Not really worth looking for unless you’re a Trek and/or comics collector, but if you run across them and are curious, you’ll likely get some chuckles.
Book 30 of 2026: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: This was excellent. Funny (many bits had me quite literally laughing out loud), but with an increasingly serious undertone as it goes. A valet robot kills his employer for reasons he does t understand, and embarks on a quest to figure out why, and then joins with a partner out to determine why society collapsed. From reliance on AI to what actually constitutes consciousness and personhood, there’s a lot of good stuff here, wrapped up in a mismatched buddy adventure. My favorite of Tchaikovsky’s books that I’ve read so far. Highly recommended.
