A good second half to the far-future grand-scale space opera of Hyperion, moving away from the Canterbury Tales-inspired pilgrim’s tales to spend more time with the rest of the universe as the story progresses. Definitely best seen as the second half to a singular work than as a sequel.
NOTE: Given Simmons’ descent into right-wing politics, including Islamophobia and publicly attacking Greta Thunburg, he has earned a space on my “milkshake duck” virtual bookshelf, collecting those authors whose work I discovered, enjoyed, and might still enjoy, before later realizing that they are what I consider to be rather horrible people.
Day 90: The latest addition to the ridiculous t-shirt collection. We thought it would be my wife’s, but the cut wasn’t quite right for her, so I got it instead. She’s a bit disappointed, but I’m not!
Day 89: Started the day with another nice morning walk, this time three miles along the Soos Creek trail. Then off to a little shopping, an excellent lunch (and later dinner with some leftovers) at El Piketon, dozing on and off while watching one of the Women’s World Cup games and World Aquatics Championship events, and a convention planning session in the evening. All in all, not a bad day.
Day 88: Shopping in the morning, a mid-day nap, and then house work in the afternoon which had me busy and running up and down the stairs multiple times. Spining in place to get a good motion blur on the background seemed a good way to capture the feel of the afternoon.
Day 87: Started off the day with a nice four-mile walk along the Green River. The only thing I don’t like about having 4-on/3-off weeks during the summer quarter is knowing that I’ll go back to standard 5-on/2-off weeks come fall.
Day 86: Another day where nothing much happened, and no particularly interesting photo was taken. So rather than interesting subject matter, you get this throwback to the one-bit dithering of early Mac graphics, thanks to the Iconfactory’s BitCam app. My kind of gimmickry!
Day 85: Nothing of any particular import or interest today. Another decent but uneventful day at work, now at home and soon to have dinner. Nothing wrong with a day that’s just a regular day.
Day 84: My mother-in-law is visiting for a couple days. After a pleasant dinner and walk around the neighborhood, we came downstairs to watch the World Aquatic Championships and work on a puzzle for a while.
Day 83: Well, it was bound to happen eventually – not only did I forget to post, but I forgot to even take a photo on this day! As penance, a shot from my childhood, as my mom introduces me to the wonderful world of pornography.
This YouTube video shows how impressive of a job the Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover did with reworking the opening credits in the Lower Decks style.
But part of what stands out to me is how well this highlights how woefully under-lit the live-action Enterprise is. There’s a ton of detail in the animated version that I’m sure is drawn directly from the live-action version (especially since, really, they’re both animated versions, just in different styles), and it’s gorgeous!
I understand that it’s a stylistic choice on the new shows (Discovery and Picard also did this a lot) to go for more “natural”/”realistic” lighting on their ships, and a ship traveling through deep space isn’t likely to have a convenient light source nearby to make it all pretty and shiny.
But — spoiler alert — none of this is real! (I know, I know, I struggle with this as well.) I’m entirely okay with adding “we can actually see the ships even when they’re in space” to the same base-level suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying visual science fiction in general.
Update: Thanks to @kamartino@mastodon.online for pointing me to this video from Douglas Trumbull where he discusses directing the space dock sequence in The Motion Picture. At four minutes in, he specifically notes that they wanted to create a lighting design so that the Enterprise appeared to light itself, so even when the Enterprise was out in deep space, it would still be visible.
