Year 50 Day 55

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Me wearing a Nine Inch Nails 2020 tour t-shirt

Day 55: This shirt makes me laugh — for non-obvious, personal reasons.

I discovered Nine Inch Nails right after Pretty Hate Machine came out, and for years, they were my favorite band (as evidence, I present my 1996 “woody’s obsession with nine inch nails” webpage). However, living in Alaska, I never got a chance to see them live, and even after moving to Seattle, they never played close enough at times when I had money and transportation, so I’ve still never been to one of their shows. (Plus, to be honest, while I still enjoy them, they’re not as much of an obsession as they once were, and I’m much less likely to listen to their post-Downward Spiral work.)

So, when the pandemic hit and they had to cancel their tour and put their tour shirts up on their website, it just seemed perfect. If I’m going to have a tour shirt from a band I’ve never managed to actually see on tour, what better one to have than for the tour that got cancelled?

📚 Somewhere to Belong by Dayton Ward

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30/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Taking place not long after the end of season three of Discovery (after solving the riddle of the Burn), this uses an adventure tying back to earlier Discovery moments as a framing device, but also nicely exploring an area that the show rather skips over: how the crew of the ship adjust to their new circumstances. There’s some entertaining lampshading of several DIS events, an interesting answer to why one of the alien races encountered in DIS were never seen in later Trek shows, and some very amusing movie night choices bookending the action.

Me holding Somewhere to Belong

Year 50 Day 54

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Me standing on my back deck with green trees in the background, wearing a black t-shirt with the Star Trek delta made of rainbow stripes, holding a small garden gnome sculpture; the gnome is wearing a rainbow striped hat.

Day 54: Though I didn’t make it out to the parade or festivities, this little nudist gnome (except for his rainbow hat) and I would like to wish everyone a happy Seattle Pride day! Hope you all had a good day, whether at the festivities or elsewhere.

Year 50 Day 53

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My wife and I cuddled up on a couch.

Day 53: Had a nice uneventful Saturday, enjoyed a really good dinner out on our back deck, then curled up for a movie-and-champagne evening (Polite Society is delightful).

Year 50 Day 52

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Me in my living room with an unimpressed expression, holding a plate of hot dogs, beans, and chips.

Day 52: The plan was to get dinner from Aguacateros, which has been our favorite local Mexican restaurant since we moved to this area. But when I got there, I discovered that at some point recently, they’d closed for good — signs down, windows papered over, the works. Really disappointing! So instead of really good Mexican food, we got a “what’s here and easy” meal of hot dogs, beans, and chips. (Admittedly, it wasn’t bad…just not what we’d planned on.) And now we need to find a new go-to Mexican restaurant!

Year 50 Day 51

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Me wearing a black cap and black shirt with a pattern of green alien heads, standing near a herd of goats munching on undergrowth in a wooded area.

Day 51: Every spring the college rents a herd of goats (you’ve heard of goats, right? <rimshot>) to clear out the undergrowth around the trails and pond on the west side of campus. We got word yesterday that they were back, so I started off my lunch break by wandering down to say hello.

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Year 50 Day 50

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A selfie of me, a 50-year-old white man, sitting in the driver's seat of my car, unsmiling, wearing a hat and sunglasses, not smiling, shot from slightly below.

Day 50: I’ve realized that, much to my chagrin, as an opinionated 50-year old white man, I need to update my profile picture across all social media to something more fitting. Because this is ‘Murica and it’s in the Constitution, right?

Year 50 Day 49

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Me standing next to a bookcase; on the shelf beside me is a mannequin head with wavy brown hair wearing a pastel rainbow disposable face mask.

Day 49: Just hanging out with my wife’s Head, which I’m keeping displayed on a shelf in my work office. Just prior to the pandemic, a hairdresser’s dummy head mysteriously appeared in my wife’s faculty office on campus. When she moved to an administrative position at the college, the Head moved with her. Now that she’s moving back from administration to a tenure-track faculty position, she’s switching offices once again, and as she has the summer off, I get to babysit the Head until she can move into her new office. We’re pretty sure the Head is enjoying its change of scenery for the summer.

📚 Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh

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29/2023 – ⭐⭐⭐ 1989 Hugo Best Novel

This one took me a while to get through, and it wasn’t really until the latter half of the book that I really started to feel like I was really getting invested in it. It’s dense, with a lot of the plot revolving around political maneuvering, cloning, and using psychological conditioning to educate, train, and mold the personalities of clones, as well as to influence and adjust both clones and non-clones throughout their lives. I often found myself reading just a few pages or sections at a time before setting it down, rather than just reading my way through. There’s a lot of in-depth, high-concept ideas in here — great if you’re into that kind of thing, but difficult if you’re not. (Right now, I appear to be somewhere in between those two extremes.)

Me holding Cyteen