Day 251: Just a quiet Monday working from home. Today’s the first day of classes for the quarter, so there was plenty to do, it just all pretty much looked like this.
Year 50 Day 250
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.
🎥 65
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.
📚 Clarkesworld Issue 208 edited by Neil Clarke
2/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Favorites this month were Chi Hui’s “Stars Don’t Dream” and Marie Vibbert’s “Rail Meat”.
Year 50 Day 249
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!
Year 50 Day 248
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?)
📚 A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
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.
Year 50 Day 247
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.
Year 50 Day 246
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!
Year 50 Day 245
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.