Day 211: Almost, but not quite, done with Thanksgiving leftovers. Everything but the pie is done, and we just have one more night of that.
Year 50 Day 210
Day 210: Between the 20 degree weather and the thick fog this morning, it was definitely time to switch over to a warmer coat and hat.
📚 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
66/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1993 Hugo Best Novel
Technically a time travel book, but the time travel itself is kind of the least important part, little more than a hand-waved MacGuffin necessary to get the characters in the right places. From there, you have the dual stories of near-future and historical pandemics. And, of course, any pandemic-centric tale can’t help but be read somewhat differently now than it would have been five years ago. In some ways, the near-future part seemed rather prescient, referring to a prior flu pandemic that would have hit in the mid-2010s, only about a decade off from our COVID reality, or the presence of protesters blaming the government; in others, it now seems sadly naïve (now that we know that most people’s reaction to a pandemic too quickly turns to “meh” or outright denial rather than taking it seriously). Both stories are excellently handled, often with a subtle dry humor in the “present day” portion balancing the tragedies of the historical portion.
Year 50 Day 209
Day 209: The joys of remote work: on the one hand, I don’t have to take time off when the car needs to be serviced. On the other hand, I don’t get to take time off work when the car needs to be serviced. On the gripping hand, blogging about this means I’m not really working at the moment…. (Don’t worry. I’ll go back to being responsible after this is posted.)
Year 50 Day 208
Day 208: It’s quite chilly outside, but I’m quite cozy in front of the fire, working on correcting OCR scans of old Norwescon program books to upload to the convention archives while my wife dozes in the chair next to me. Not a bad way to spend the final day of this Thanksgiving break.
Year 50 Day 207
Day 207: In a few months I’ll again be DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon 46, so to make sure I’m not entirely rusty when I set up that evening, it’s time for me to start practicing again. Whenever I do this, I broadcast to Twitch, and so this is what I look like when I’m streaming. Obviously, it’s very serious business.
I’m actually rather proud of the look I came up with some time ago, after a few rounds of tweaking and playing with ideas.
The “turntables” to either side of my head display the art for whatever track is playing (and they rotate as if they were physical turntables), and the audio waveforms behind my head are the waveforms of the playing tracks; deck A (the left side) on the top, and deck B below. Those elements are all pulled from the UI of DJay Pro, the DJ software I use.
The sci-fi cityscape behind me is actually a video clip. I have a small library of interesting looping video backgrounds that I can choose from.
The text in the bottom third is pulled from a text file that I keep open on my screen; as I’m mixing, I take a quick moment to update the text file with the name of whatever track I’m playing at the moment. I think there are ways to automatically pull that info from DJay, but I’ve never quite liked the look of the ones I’ve seen, and this works for me.
The caricature of me on the lower right was drawn for me a number of years ago by Sharii Chankhamma. In the original, I’m wearing an “NSFW” t-shirt; for streaming, I’ve created a small library of shirt designs that randomly update every 15 seconds.
Today’s mix is now available on my Mixcloud page if you’d like to give it a listen, along with many, many hours of other mixes I’ve uploaded in the past. And more will come — I may not do this every week, but I will need to make sure to get some more practice in over the coming months, so I’ll be popping up from time to time.
Difficult Listening Hour 2023.11.25
The usual seat-of-my pants randomness. Starts EBM-y, then gets goofy with some mashups, then darker oontz-oontz again to wind it up.
Year 50 Day 206
Day 206: We spent much of the day taking down fall decorations and putting up our Christmas decorations (colored lights out front instead of the orange lights we’ve had for the past month, swapping out the fall gnomes by the front door for Santa, a snowman, and Christmas gnomes, and putting up the Christmas tree inside). We also wrapped a bunch of presents for a family for the annual giving tree program at work, something we enjoy doing every year.
Year 50 Day 205
Day 205: Happy Thanksgiving, or Friendsgiving, or stuff-your-face-giving, or if nothing else, happy Thursday! We had a nice day of cooking all the usual goodies, and now we’re stuffed full of food and it’s time to spend the rest of the evening moving as little as possible.
📚 Here There Be Dragons by John Peel
65/2023 – ⭐️⭐️
Possibly could have been an interesting take on the Preservers, or a fun TNG-crew-in-a-medieval-society romp, but was marred by bad character decisions (we must stay undercover in a medieval human society, so Geordi and Worf obviously can’t come, but sure, bring the Bajoran Ro and the android Data, that totally makes sense) and overly unfortunately stereotypical plotting decisions (Ro, of course, is nearly immediately stripped naked and placed in jeopardy of sexual assault, and Troi is later threatened with the same, because what other peril would women face?). Even the titular dragons barely make an appearance. Any interesting bits are far overshadowed by the rest.
