37/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A very amusing travel guide for those exploring the English countryside. Of particular interest if you’re a fan of cozy mysteries, either the literary type with punny titles, or the BBC Midsommer Murders type.
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
36/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1995 Hugo Best Novel
Complex in both story and character, this becomes an excellent exploration of the differing personalities of the Vorkosigan brothers in the midst of military adventure and political maneuvering. As with the rest of the series, it’s Bujold’s ability to craft realistically flawed characters, some in very serious ways, while still making them relatable, believable, and often quite funny, that really makes these stand out. Though most of the books in the series are written to be readable on their own, this is one where I’d definitely recommend reading earlier books first.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 58 edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Monte Lin
35/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Favorites this month were “Happily Ever After Comes Round” by Sarah Rees Brennan, “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou, “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra, and “Hands Like Gold and Starlight” by K.S. Walker.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home by Peter Lerangis
34/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
A kid’s adaptation of the fourth movie, illustrated with stills from the film. Serviceable, exactly as expected, no surprises.
Clarkesworld Issue 212 edited by Neil Clarke
33/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
My favorites this month were “The Portmeirion Road” by Fiona Moore and “The Weight of Your Own Ashes” by Carlie St. George.
Year 50 Day 366
Day 366: Oh, you thought this ended with day 365? It’s a leap year, so there’s an extra day!
However, this does bring an end to my project of a photo a day for my 50th year. While as with any year, there have been both ups and downs, overall, it’s been a pretty decent one. Semi-randomly selected highlights of the year included:
- Celebrating my 50th birthday with a trip to the Woodland Park Zoo.
- Getting stuck in a stairwell.
- Hanging out with some goats.
- Visting MoPOP and the Laika animation studio exhibit.
- Relaxing in the backyard on a warm day.
- Heading out to a movie theater to see Barbie.
- The one and only day I forgot to take a photo and had to come up with a suitable “penance” choice.
- Hanging out with con friends at the Norwescon summer volunteer appreciation picnic.
- Our summer vacation:
- Taking Amtrak from Seattle to New York,
- spending a couple days in New York, wandering through Central Park and the Museum of Natural History and seeing Six on Broadway the night before boarding a really big boat,
- spending a week on the Queen Mary II on a transatlantic voyage,
- spending four days in London, staying in a hotel with a gorgeous view of Tower Bridge, seeing Macbeth at The Globe, visiting the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey,
- and finally flying back home to Seattle.
- Starting to plan for Norwescon 46.
- Decorating for Halloween.
- Giving presentations on accessible technology at work.
- Practicing my DJing to prepare for Norwescon.
- Decorating for Christmas.
- Visiting my mom and getting her her holiday lobster.
- Realizing I had a complete collection of Star Trek TOS novels.
- Reading all six of this year’s Philip K. Dick award nominated books.
- Celebrating Leap Day.
- Finally getting a high-quality copy of The Abyss after years of waiting.
- Norwescon 46, including arriving on Wednesday, DJing on Thursday night, hosting the Philip K. Dick award ceremony on Friday night, enjoying the day on Saturday, and wrapping things up on Sunday.
- Exploring the Green River College campus during a week of conferencing.
- And a whole lot of photos of me in my office at work or sitting on the couch at home, because most days are actually pretty routine.
So that’s it for year fifty! Now on to fifty-one!
(Though without the photo-a-day project…I’ll still post photos, of course, but not daily. The real trick will be seeing if I can keep up blogging regularly without having this photo project to keep me going.)
Reclaiming the Web
Excellent article by Molly White looking back at what the web used to be and forward to how we could bring that back: We can have a different web.
As a lifelong lover of the web, it’s hard not to feel a little hopeless right now. […] It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days.
[…] Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.
I’m just one (very small) corner of the ‘net, but I do what little I can to keep my site as clean as possible. No ads, no minimal trackers (EDIT: Huh…Ghostery is telling me I have two trackers on my site. I’ll look into that. I try not to have any, and I’m not sure where these are coming from.), not even any metrics (I have no idea how many — if any — visitors I get here). Like Molly and the people she mentions in the article (I voted in the Mastodon version of the poll that she screenshots), I miss the “good old days”. I hope there are enough other people who also do that we can reclaim some of that outside of the walls of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and others.
This excellent article by @molly0xfff reminded me of the sci-fi trope where everyone in the future lives in a domed bunker & gets told not to go outside because it’s a wasteland filled with Bad People.
Of course the protagonists leave the dome & find that the reality is a bit different: outside can be scary, but it’s not the hellscape they were told.
Big Tech walled gardens are the dome; outside them is a risky wonderland that’s ours for the taking.
Leave the dome.
Year 50 Day 365
Day 365: Had a good afternoon supporting our students with intellectual disabilities, as they tabled and gathered signatures in support of Highline proclaiming today IPSE (Inclusive Postsecondary Education) Day. The proclamation was officially approved later at the Associated Students of Highline College meeting, along with official approval of the college’s new SPICE (Students Promoting Inclusive Culture and Education) club, a student advocacy club for students with disabilities. Great job, everyone!