Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Day 250: While I’m still quite good with going out for a night dancing at a club, it is nice to be fine with taking the next day to be far less active than I would have done in my 20s. After a few morning errands, the rest of the day was devoted lying around and watching a dumb movie and the silly TV shows we like.
Weirdest Princess Bride remake ever.
(Damsel in distress being rescued by a mysterious stranger, reptiles of unusual size, geysers/fire swamp complete with roasting the ROUS, lightning sand with a dramatic rescue just after immersion, a rope climb up the cliffs of insanity….)
Admittedly, it is somewhat more successful as a SF adventure than it is as a Princess Bride remake, but not by much. Of course, many of the big action set pieces are done in the dark and/or rain, so actual visibility of what’s going on definitely wasn’t a priority. And Adam Driver seems to have forgotten how to smile, which really seems like it would make it difficult for him to bond with the young girl he rescued.
All in all, we spent about as much time rolling our eyes at this and having fun pointing out the surprising number of Princess Bride parallels than we did actually watching.
2/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Favorites this month were Chi Hui’s “Stars Don’t Dream” and Marie Vibbert’s “Rail Meat”.
Day 249: Day 249: Out at Seattle’s goth club the Mercury with friends for their Caturday night of musical randomness – my first time since June? July? Something like that. Madonna and Lady Gaga got the evening off to a good start, later followed by Pet Shop Boys, Apoptygma Berzerk, Justin Timberlake, VNV Nation, Wreckx-N-Effect, Debbie Gibson, ABBA, and much more bouncing between stompygoth and random silliness. Good night out!
Day 248: The new main entrance to Highline College isn’t quite done yet, but is looking much better! One of the weird things about this campus has always been that it didn’t really have an obvious main entrance, so this is going to be a very nice change when it’s done. (Even more so once the new light rail station across the street goes into operation sometime in, um, 2025, I think?)
1/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
For a book involving drug addicts suffering paranoia and breakdowns and generally being kind of horrid to each other, it was actually quite a bit funnier than I expected it to be. (I’d never seen the film, so had no preconceived notions of what to expect.) It definitely has Dick’s touch (not least in how the women are treated, which tends not to be one of Dick’s strengths), but there were many of the rambling, somewhat stream-of-consciousness ridiculous conversations among the drug-addled roomies that were perhaps a little too relatable from my less-than-responsible 20s.
Day 247: Our department leadership team took a group photo today, so I made sure to dress in my usual subtle and understated manner. Also, while the black stripes work for the retro bowling shirt design style, on the TOS gold background, I look like a Starfleet Academy PeeChee folder.
Day 246: It’s another “forgot to take a picture until I was at home flopped out on the couch” day. But hey, I’m wearing a cool shirt that I got at The Globe in London during our trip over the summer!
Day 245: My first day back in the office at work after the holidays. I didn’t burn anything down! I do really need to fix that X-Files poster that’s slipped down in the frame, though.
Day 244: The books under the tree this Christmas got me to an exciting (for me, at least) milestone: I now have a complete* collection of Star Trek: The Original Series novels, as tracked by this spreadsheet based off of Wikipedia’s List of Star Trek novels page. From 1968’s Mission to Horatius to 2022’s Harm’s Way, and with 2024’s Lost to Eternity pre-ordered. (“Save the whales! Collect the whole set!”) I haven’t read them all yet, though it likely won’t be terribly long before I hit that milestone as well.
I didn’t originally have this as an actual goal. I’m just a Star Trek fan who reads a lot and tends to keep his books, and at first, the amount of books out there was so overwhelming that on the few occasions I considered trying to get them all, it didn’t seem realistic. But then the years went by, and I realized it was getting harder and harder to find books on the shelves that I didn’t already have, and turned to ordering more online…. Until this year, when I realized as we were doing our annual pre-Christmas book buying binge that I was surprisingly close to having them all. And so, here we are.
(I also have complete collections of Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy novels. However, those are new enough and there are few enough that that’s less notable of an accomplishment. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and the various spin-off series are in various states of completion, but all slowly working their way forward.)
* A few caveats for the hard-core collectors: I’m counting “complete” by the content, not by the various editions.
While I have no great drive to go out and get the “missing” editions listed above, I have to admit, if someone out there were to send them my way, I wouldn’t be terribly put out. But I’m not going to go chasing them down.
(Thanks to my wife for taking the photo, for the shirt, and for putting up with my hobbies and my monopolizing the staircase today.)
Here’s a closer look at the collection:
