Eclecticism

Another somewhat delayed two-week wrap-up, because…

• 🚀 Worldcon is nigh! Nearly all of my outside-of-work brainspace has been been taken up with Worldcon prep and website updates, as we’ve been in the final crunch before the con kicks off.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

I finished Martha Wells’ Murderbot series with Network Effect and The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 3 (collecting Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse), followed that up with a bit of comic smut with Jonas Goonface’s The Ship of Unsinkable Fools, and then read my next TNG novel, Simon Hawke’s Blaze of Glory.

📺 Watching

I started notes on the last two Star Trek: Strange New Worlds shows, but so far haven’t finished writing them. The short version: still enjoying, great show, good-naturedly grumbling about canon and holodecks showing up far too early.

🔗 Linking

I’ve saved some links, but they’ll get added to the next wrap-up, as I need to get back to prepping to head to the hotel and spending the next week at Worldcon!

A less eventful week this week. I worked and met a friend at Dicks for a nice lunchtime chat on Thursday; my wife stayed home and concentrated on healing. Not a lot to report for this week, really.

📚 Reading

Continuing on my Murderbot binge, I read the first half of The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 3, then hopped over to read Network Effect, since it takes place between Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse, the two novellas collected in Vol. 3. I’m almost done with that (will likely finish it tonight), and then back to Vol. 3 to finish it off.

📺 Watching

One of my wife’s recovery binge shows has been The Tudors, which we finished on Saturday, and then followed that up with a double feature of Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Since we were then in a movie mood but wanted something a bit more modern, we watched Blast from the Past and Clueless for some ’90s comedies.

🎧 Listening

No new albums, but I have been getting some entertaining requests for the Worldcon dance that I’ve had to track down to add to my collection.

🔗 Linking

• Daily HIG (@daily_hig on Mastodon): “Read a link to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines a day, keep your bugs away.” I’m not a programmer, but I followed this account just to enjoy the macOS geekery.

(Posting this one a couple days late and backdating it….)

• ♿️ My wife’s healing has been going well, so this week I went back to heading into the office to work. Well…in theory. The Seattle area was having a bit of a heat wave (high 80s to mid 90s), which threw things off. Mondays I work from home, Tuesday I went in and the building was really warm, Wednesday I went in but we got sent home at noon because the A/C was out, Thursday we were told to work from home while they worked on the A/C, and we work on a 4-10s schedule during the summer, so I didn’t work on Friday. So my first week back in the office was a day and a half! My wife didn’t mind, though. :)

• 🕺🏻 Saturday night a friend of my wife’s came over to spend the night so that I could have a night off from caretaking, so I got to head out to the Mercury for the first time in a couple months. It was a rather slow night (competing with the Capitol Hill Block Party and a Stabbing Westward concert), but picked up a bit towards midnight. No worries, though, as the music was good, and I got to hang out with a friend and chat about convention drama.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

With Worldcon coming up in just a few weeks, I’m binging my way through the Murderbot series by our guest of honor Martha Wells. This week, I read The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 1 (collecting All Systems Red and Artificial Condition), Compulsory, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, The Murderbot Diaries, Vol. 2 (collecting Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy), and Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory.

📺 Watching

🖖🏻 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back with the first two episodes of season three! I enjoyed both episodes…but with reservations (which I posted behind a content warning on Mastodon to protect against spoilers).

🎧 Listening

Two new albums this week:

• The Kpop Demon Hunters soundtrack for DJing the Wednesday night dance at Worldcon (with both “Golden” and “Soda Pop” being strong contenders).

• Peter Gabriel’s Flotsam and Jetsam collection of rarities and remixes.

🔗 Linking

• The ICG Pat and Peggy Kennedy Memorial Archives: Decades of costuming photos collected by the International Costumer’s Guild.

• Kai James at The Conversation: How was the wheel invented? Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago: “It has long been assumed that wheels evolved from simple wooden rollers. But until recently no one could explain how or why this transformation took place. What’s more, beginning in the 1960s, some researchers started to express strong doubts about the roller-to-wheel theory.”

• Ari Daniel at NPR: Stand back! This explosive cucumber is bursting with seeds: “But what the squirting cucumber lacks in palatability, it makes up for in a feat of ballistic seed dispersal.”