The usual unplanned, random selection of whatever seems right in the moment.
🎥 Haunted Mansion
Haunted Mansion (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cute, mildly amusing, and inoffensive. Not outstanding, and certainly not likely to get multiple sequels like Pirates of the Caribbean did, but for a theme-park-attraction-turned-movie, it wasn’t bad. Though I’m mystified by the costuming choices for the kid — I mean, okay, it’s convenient shorthand for “odd socially inept geeky child”, but it was really pushing the concept harder than necessary.
📚 Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon
8/2024
The fifth of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
Year 50 Day 271
Day 271: I keep telling myself I need to start devoting a little time on the weekends to practice mixing before the Thursday Night dance at Norwescon so I don’t spend the entire time trainwrecking. Today I actually managed to do it!
The setup is a Pioneer DDJ-400 mixer, the OBS video streaming software on the bottom monitor, and Algoriddim’s djay Pro on the top monitor (plus Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback and Audio Hijack running in the background to capture the audio stream so I can later upload it to my Mixcloud account).
Year 50 Day 270
Day 270: Lunch and a book on a grey, drizzly Seattle winter day.
📚 These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
7/2024
The fourth of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
Year 50 Day 269
Day 269: Forgot to take a picture until after I was in bed, so, much to my wife’s amusement, and in her words, I’m posting a nudie pic.
Year 50 Day 268
Day 268: We needed a new pizza cutter, so we decided to see if our preferred knife company (Henckles) made one. Turns out they do, so we ordered one, but somehow got one shipped from Japan that’s about 2/3 the size of the pizza cutters we’re used to. It should work just fine; we’re just amused at how tiny and cute it is!
Year 50 Day 267
Day 267: Yes, it’s a cheesy touristy t-shirt. But it’s a cheesy tourist-y t-shirt that I got in New York, and we really enjoyed our time there on our vacation, so it’s legit.
My First Mac
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, lots of people on Mastodon are posting their #MyFirstMac stories. Of course this is something I’m going to join in on!
My first Mac was a Macintosh Classic. Saved up and bought it myself for my senior year of high school. Got the very lowest entry-level version: 1 MB of RAM, no internal hard drive. Booted it up off of one 1.4 MB floppy; a second 1.4 MB floppy had Microsoft Word 4 and every paper I wrote for school that year. Lots of disk swapping!
Since then:
- Performa 600/IIvi
- PowerMac 6100
- PowerMac 6500
- Original Rev. A Bondi Blue iMac
- Blue and White G3
- Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5 (the original cheese grater)
- 27″ iMac
- 27″ Retina 5K iMac
- M1 Mac Mini and M2 MacBook Air (my current computers)
Happy 40th birthday, Mac!
More rambling about my digital life in this Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux) post from 2003.