My father would’ve been 81 years old today. And today is the 40th anniversary of my mother’s death. This is often a rough time of year for me because of those anniversaries, but this year I seem to be more or less okay. Shoulders tense, a little irritable, not sleeping well. But mostly fine. (Though […]
Had an early-by-my-standards meeting this morning, so of course I stayed up too late last night and then woke up extra-early this morning after too little sleep. I attended or watched five hour-long meetings or presentations today. Four of those were for work. (The other one was Apple’s new-Mac announcement.) I actively participated in three […]
Some thoughts: Yay! It’s good to see major news organizations projecting a Biden/Harris win. I said “Biden/Harris” above because I want to affirm Harris’s part in all this, but I’m going to just say “Biden” for the rest of this post for simplicity. It’s worth remembering still that the votes were all cast on or […]
A lot of the phrasing around election results uses a sort of shorthand/metaphor that makes it sound like more votes are being cast as time goes on. “[candidate] is catching up.” “[candidate] is ahead for now, but [other candidate] might pass them.” etc. So I think it’s useful to explicitly note that at this point, […]
This week at work was our annual mini-conference for tech writers from all across the company, called Burning Pen. It’s usually one of the high points of my work year, mostly because it’s really nice to get to hang out with colleagues who I like but don’t see often enough. The talks are often good […]
An incomplete catalog, in no particular order. (I’m making fun of myself a little bit with this, but only fondly and gently; I’m not chastising myself here, just observing patterns.) Here’s a dream I had last night. Cool new tech development! I had a mildly bad customer service experience, and I’m so furious and outraged […]
Here are some things I’ve done lately, in no particular order. (I wrote most of this a week and a half ago, but failed to finish and post it, so have now updated it.) About a third of these items are things that I want to write full posts about, but it seems unlikely that […]
(Spoilers here for various decades-old time-travel stories.) One of my favorite sf stories when I was a kid was Lester del Rey’s 1951 “…And It Comes Out Here,” in which a time traveler goes forward in time and steals a device (from a museum, I think) in the future, then comes back to the present […]
When I was a Strange Horizons editor, we used to occasionally receive stories in which the title gave away a major surprise plot element. I always thought of that as a kind of beginning-writer mistake, but I see now that apparently it was considered a reasonable thing to do in sf written circa 1940. For […]
Kam and I watched the new Mulan, and enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s very clearly intended to be a wuxia movie rather than a musical for kids. I don’t know enough about wuxia to be able to judge it as an example of that genre, but I thought it succeeded as a movie pretty […]
I’ve been playing Blooms on Boardgame Arena, in an asynchronous session where we each play a couple of moves a day. I’m finding it really interesting. The designer of Blooms, Nick Bentley, describes it as “a bit like the classical game Go, but shorter, easier to learn, and more colorful.” It’s an abstract strategy game, […]
Back in 2010, I posted about classic works of literature reworked as movies set in a modern high school. Comments on that post led me to expand my definitions a bit, and I’ve seen a couple more such movies since then. So I thought I would post the updated list: Movie Year Original What I […]