Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
43/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1983 Hugo Best Novel
I didn’t find this one to be a strong as the original trilogy, and Asimov’s writing style doesn’t seem to work for me in the context of other Hugo winners published around this time as much as it does with his earlier works. He’s still a very good SF writer, but more obviously one of an earlier era, in both style and in his fumbling around with female characters.
Moonfall (2022): ⭐️: Makes Armageddon look like Carl Sagan’s Contact. If you look hard enough, there are a few brief glimpses of some good hard SF ideas somewhere in there, but they’re so slathered in layers of dreck that there’s nothing of real interest left.
If the basic premise of “the moon falls to Earth and things get real bad” interests you, read Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves for an actually intelligent take on the idea.
42/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kirk finds that new allies have some hidden secrets. Another entirely acceptable Trek adventure.
41/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Actually more entertaining than I expected. While it certainly has a number of flaws by modern standards, it wasn’t as bad as I feared. The women, while often very damsel-in-distress being rescued by the heroic men, actually had a bit more agency and capabilities than I expected. The worst aspect, of course, is that the “evolution” from race to race is based in long-outdated theories with a lot of racist underpinnings (darker skin and African features are less evolved than lighter skin and European features). Still, it’s a fast-paced and consistently entertaining adventure in an improbable but enjoyably imagined land. Burroughs definitely had a knack for adventure stories!
One of the side-projects I work on for Norwescon is the convention’s historical archives, my own little effort to preserve as much as possible of the convention’s history.
The project started a little while after I took over as webmaster, when I was poking around in our website’s directory structure and discovered a whole trove of old documents that someone in the past had scanned and stashed away. It seemed like a waste to have them sitting hidden away where nobody else could see them, so I did a little digging, found a good software package to use to manage the archives (Omeka, designed by and for librarians to manage digital archives), and started building the site.
I’ve long since worked through all the original material I found, so now most of what I do is adding new material as it’s produced for the current convention year by year. But every so often I get sent a scan or even some physical artifacts, and I get them processed and added to the collection.
Part of what I do is extracting the text of any text documents (progress reports, newsletters, flyers, program books, etc.) into HTML so that the text lives on the archive page itself as well as in the linked .pdf (as an example, here’s the Norwescon 11 Progress Report from January 1989). Not only is this better for searching, but it’s also far more accessible for anyone browsing the archives.
Of course, to do this often requires running PDFs through an OCR process to recognize the text, and OCR is often an error-prone process, especially when dealing with multi-decade old items. And, of course, OCR output is just a plain text dump, without any formatting. So, to get a good final output for the HTML version, I skim through the output, correcting typos and adding Markdown formatting before converting to HTML and adding to the database.
Which means I’ve read every single one of these items.
And now I have this weird form of pseudo-nostalgia for years and years worth of conventions that I didn’t actually attend.
I moved down to Seattle in 2001, discovered Norwescon in 2006 with Norwescon 29, and joined the ConCom in 2010 for Norwescon 33 — but I now have all these “memories” of when the con was at a different hotel, or when this or that event was added or removed, and things that this or that person who I know because they are still involved with the con did years ago, long before I was ever involved.
I’ve got to admit, though — it’s kind of hilariously on-brand to be self-implanting false memories of a science-fiction convention.
40/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A decent Trek adventure, with some interesting explorations of the Horta. However, yet another instance of Kirk immediately falling in love with a pretty woman from the planet of the week. I know it’s Trek cliche, but I wish more authors would just let Kirk interact with women as people, instead of so predictably and pointlessly as romantic interests.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012): ⭐️⭐️: Much like Brendan Frasier carried the first film, The Rock completely carries this film. Luis Guzman, unfortunately, drags it down, bringing a Jack Black-style over-the-top attitude that kills his lines, even when the lines themselves are funny. A few things kept throwing me off, including that Frasier’s character isn’t even mentioned at any point, and the scaling (up or down) of creatures was confusing. Still, equally as inconsequentially entertaining as the first. The two made a completely acceptable Saturday afternoon double feature, but I’ll never have a great desire to see either one again.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008): ⭐️⭐️: Inoffensively and forgettably entertaining. Occasionally hilariously obviously made during the 2000s 3D resurgence, with objects and effects being flung at the camera. Brendan Frasier is his usual affable self; not up to The Mummy levels, but by far the strongest part of the film.
39/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1982 Hugo Best Novel
High concept interstellar politics and space battles that just never really got me invested. Though I’ll admit, I may have been slightly put off by this particular edition having a lot of typos (usually punctuation, but at least once a misnamed character that made things quite confusing for a bit). Good space opera, but doesn’t rank highly for me among Hugo winners.
Jurassic World Dominion (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: I know the critics were snarky, but we really enjoyed it — and though we hadn’t seen it yet, we went right for the extended edition, and it felt fine. Long, sure, but not obviously or painfully draggy. And a lot of fun nods to moments from the earlier films throughout. Only disappointed that the pandemic kept us from seeing it in the theater!