Another day of wandering around a museum, enjoying the pretty sights, and getting back into practice with my camera. Once again, five of my favorites from the day below, and more in an album on Flickr.
🎥 Enola Holmes 2
Enola Holmes 2 (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Like the first, it was a cute and entertaining adventure, though not quite as good as the first.
Museum of Flight
Picked up my “real” camera (Nikon D750, as opposed to my iPhone) for the first time in something over three years today…funny how a pandemic-induced lockdown can affect your hobbies, isn’t it?
We went out to the Museum of Flight, which we hadn’t been to for at least 15 years, had a nice day wandering around, looking at all the neat airplanes and space stuff, and I started getting used to the camera again. Felt good!
A few shots here, and more in an album on Flickr.
🎥 The Menu
The Menu (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Best watched as if you’re going to a fancy new restaurant for the first time: no reviews, no trailers, just enjoy experiencing what the chef has planned for your evening.
But if you do want a little bit of an amuse-bouche to whet the appetite: It’s kind of the foodie world’s version of Galaxy Quest, by which I mean both that it’s really funny and that it knows its subject very, very well. Though Galaxy Quest approached its genre with love, this is a (very) dark comedy instead of bright and shiny. Reminded me in the best way of the twisted films my friends and I would gather together to watch in our 20s.
🎥 Everything Everywhere All At Once
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Well, now I see what all the fuss has been about — and how richly deserved it is. That was the most confusing, bizarre, hilarious, unexpected, touching, and sweet film I’ve seen in ages. So glad I went in knowing next to nothing about it. Just excellent, on every level.
Bring Back Blogging
Monique Judge at The Verge, in “Bring Back Personal Blogging“:
In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.
I want to go back there.
Hard agree. This blog got its start in the mid-’90s — the earliest “post” I can still verify was on December 29, 1995, and though it now lives in this blog, was originally a hand-coded entry on a static “Announcements” page — back before “blogging” was even a term. In fact, it wasn’t until February 8, 2001 that I first discovered the word “blog”.
So there’s a lot of what Monique writes about that I remember very clearly. And I miss a lot of it. Which seems kind of funny to say, because in a lot of ways, it really hasn’t ever completely died, but the shift to social media definitely impacted the blogging world.
I’m hopeful (if not optimstic) that just maybe the issues at Twitter, the rise of Mastodon, and the general upheaval in online spaces will actually lead to something of a resurgence of people writing for themselves and in their own spaces.
Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.
Bring back personal blogging in 2023. We, as a web community, will be all that much better for it.
2023 Resolutions
My resolutions for this year:
- 3840 x 2160
- 1920 x 1080
- 2560 x 1664
- 1668 x 2224
- 1125 x 2436
- 368 x 448
(That’s my Mac mini’s primary 4K monitor and secondary display, my MacBook Air, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh.)
2022 Reading Round-Up 📚
Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 68. Here’s a quick (?) overview…
Continuing a trend from the last few years, this year was almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not.
Non-fiction: A few this year, though for the most part, they were very much in line with my usual science fiction choices. The two best were Frederik Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was, encompassing the early decades of SF fandom, and Randall Munroe’s delightful What If? 2, where he once again takes answering silly scientific questions to absolutely ridiculous extremes. Also in this category was a series of books looking at the design work for various Star Trek ships across several series.
Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Only one this year, but that one — Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove — was excellent.
Quality genre fiction: About the same as last year; primarily the Philip K. Dick nominees and my Hugo project, with a few others added here and there.
As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards, and once again, I failed to pick the winner. My personal favorite of this year’s slate was Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven. This is the second time Tade has been nominated for a PKD award, and the fourth novel of his that I’ve read (after The Wormwood Trilogy, the last book of which was a 2020 PKD nominee), and I very much enjoy his work.
I added eight books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 54% of the way through. My two favorites from this year’s set were Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake and William Gibson’s Neruomancer.
Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Almost entirely Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.
Finally Storygraph’s stats on my year’s reading tell me:
- I’ve read 21,228 pages read across 68 books, with November and December being my reading-est months.
- Longest book: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (708 pages)
- Shortest book: The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories by Kel McDonald et. al. (120 pages)
- Most shelved book: A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (148,547 readers)
- Least shelved book: Star Trek: Designing Starships Volume 3: The Kelvin Timeline by Ben Robinson (2 readers)
On to 2023!
📚 Sacrifices of War by Kevin Ryan
68/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Wraps up all the threads quite nicely, in a way that I didn’t expect when I started the first book – by revisiting Errand of Mercy. While the episode always mentioned that the Federation and the Klingon Empire were at the brink of war, the combination of TOS’s weekly adventure format and ‘60s TV styles always meant that it never really felt that dire. By exploring the buildup of tensions between the powers over six books and several bloody encounters in space, on the ground, and on space stations, the events of the episode, and even Kirk and Kor’s frustration at being prevented from going to war, gain much more weight and solidity.
📚 Demands of Honor by Kevin Ryan
67/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
As we approach the end of this hexology, it’s worth noting that it’s doing a really neat job of exploring the state of affairs with and within the Klingon empire from both Starfleet and Klingon viewpoints. While these are some of the more violent Trek novels I’ve read, it works well to give weight to the interactions hear referenced and see onscreen in TOS episodes.
