Day 307: Just an uneventful day working from home. Absolutely nothing of import worth mentioning.
Difficult Listening Hour 2024.03.03
Mostly goth/industrial/EBM-y stuff, but with a couple bits of mashup random silliness to break up the gloom.
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.
My New Osborne 1
Thanks to the 3D printing wizardry of @trevorflowers@machines.social, I now have an adorably tiny replica of an Osborne 1 on my desktop!
The Osborne 1 was my first computer (well, my family’s)…and second, and third, as we picked up a couple more from friends as they moved on, allowing me to swap parts around to keep one running.
Two 5.25″ floppy drives, a 5″ 52×20-character green screen, ran CP/M. A “portable” computer, it was the size of a suitcase, weighed 25 pounds, and didn’t have a battery, but because you could flip the keyboard up and latch it onto the front to lug it around, it counted as portable!
I typed early school papers with Wordstar (which coincidentally doubled as early training for HTML, as it used printer control codes to tell our dot-matrix printer to print \bbold\b or \uunderlined\u text; when I discovered HTML, it was an instant “oh, yeah, this makes sense” moment), played Snake before it showed up on Nokia mobile phones, and taught myself the basics of BASIC by translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into a simple text-based adventure game.
Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I’m ridiculously pleased to have this lil’ guy on my desk now.
📚 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).
