Year 50 Day 110

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A dark photo of my wife and I, both wearing masks, sitting in auditorium seats. People around us are half-visible and blurred due to the long exposure.

Day 110: Today included watching England fall to Spain in the final match of the Women’s World Cup (to great dismay among the fans gathered in the ship’s onboard pub), the first in a series of four talks by astrophysicist Prof. Nathan Mayne of the University of Exeter about our search for habitable extrasolar worlds, a (somewhat entry level) planetarium show, a live performance by acapella-with-drums vocal performance group ODY-C (technically fine but missing any real spark, making them dull and lifeless; basically Pentatonix for people who don’t want to risk raising their heart rate), closing out with big band music on the big dance floor and dancing to a fun pop cover band and DJ in the ship’s nightclub.

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🎥 Strange Days

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Strange Days (1995): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Almost 30 years later, and this still packs a hell of a punch, and is still amazingly topical for the present day. I remember when this came out being pretty convinced that, save the sci-fi device, it was quite possibly an eerily accurate prediction of where we’d be societally at the turn of the century. Turns out that while the SQuID hardware still isn’t a thing, the rest was somewhere between right on point and just a couple decades too early. Plus an all-around stellar cast (I mean, come on: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, Michael Wincott, Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Vincent D’Onofrio, Glenn Plummer, and Angela Bassett at her badass best, all in one film?) and a killer soundtrack.

Year 50 Day 109

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My wife and I in formal dress on the balcony of our stateroom with a calm ocean behind us. I'm wearing a white dress shirt with gold vest and bow tie, she's wearing a black dress with red wrap and jewelry.

Day 109: We’re on a boat! The Queen Mary II, to be precise, the only currently running ocean liner (as opposed to cruise ship). We departed from New York City yesterday, and are working our way out into the Atlantic Ocean. Tonight is the first of the trip’s two “gala nights”, this one with a “Red and Gold” theme, so we made sure to dress for the occasion.

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Year 50 Day 108

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My wife and I outside on Brooklyn’s Pier 12 cruise ship terminal. Behind us is the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner.

Day 108: We’ve taken a transcontinental train trip and spent two nights in New York City…but this trip isn’t over yet! The destination…well, perhaps may be guessed? Hope you’re having fun playing our game!

Though it should be noted that further photo-a-day posts will likely not appear for about a week; I’ll backdate them when they get posted.

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Year 50 Day 107

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Me, wearing black shorts, purple Converse, and a navy blue shirt that says “RITOS”, holding a camera, and standing on a rock in front of a large grassy field in New York City’s Central Park. Some of NYC’s old buildings can be seen in the distance.

Day 107: Last night, after posting yesterday’s photo for the day, we went to look at Times Square at night and ended up hopping on a very fun open-air double-decker bus tour of major NYC landmarks before coming back to the hotel and crashing. Today, after finally enjoying a night’s sleep in actual human-size beds, we walked from our hotel up to Central Park, stopping off on the way to get bagels for breakfast. We spent a couple hours just wandering through the park, and then headed to the Museum of Natural History. Another couple hours there, and then (12,000+ steps and nearly six miles later) gave our feet a rest and caught a taxi back to the hotel. Now resting before heading off for this evening’s entertainment.

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Year 50 Day 106

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My wife and me standing in the main lobby of New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall. It is a large space with steel and glass roof.

Day 106: Hello New York City! We have completed our transcontinental railway journey, from sea to shining sea (though we haven’t yet seen the sea on this side of the continent yet, we expect we probably will soon). We left Chicago yesterday evening on the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited, slept through Indiana (my apologies to my Indiana relatives), woke up midway through Ohio, got a brief glimpse of Pennsylvania, and then worked our way down the Hudson River until ending in NYC. Our hotel is less than half a mile from the train station, so we decided to walk (in hindsight, perhaps a minor miscalculation in 72° weather, but we made it), and the first thing we saw outside of the train station was Madison Square Garden. Now we’re enjoying relaxing in our hotel room (for all people chatter about tiny NYC hotel rooms, first, this isn’t that much smaller than most hotel rooms I’m used to, and second, three nights in an Amtrak sleeping cabin make this look positively palatial). The adventure continues!

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📚 Clarkesworld Issue 203 edited by Neil Clarke

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39/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’m using our vacation time to focus on eBooks, including finally diving into my ever-growing backlog of SF/F magazines. For me, the standout stories in this most recent issue of Clarkesworld are Stephen Case’s “Every Seed is a Prayer (And Your World is a Seed)” and M.J. Pettit’s “Empathetic Ear”.

Me holding my iPad with Clarkesworld Issue 203

Year 50 Day 104

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Me in a sleeper cabin on a train. An Amtrak station flying a Montana flag is visible through the window behind me.

Day 104: Our train has made it to Glacier Park, Montana. Sitting in our private sleeper cabin and watching the country roll by outside the window is proving to be an incredibly pleasant and relaxing way to travel.