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In my opinion (which is likely to be controversial), Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) has no place in earbuds or headphones intended for outdoor sports. This includes running, cycling, and pretty much any outdoor activity. ANC is a technology whereby earbuds and headphones attempt to subtract outside sounds from entering the listener’s ears, creating a quiet […]
The finalists were announced last month. I had already read four of the six finalists for Best Novel. (That’s how it worked out last year, too.) The two novels I needed to read were The Raven Scholar and The Everlasting. I have read them now, so I could enter my votes at any time. However, […]
I am a couple hours into this audiobook, and I’m struggling to be interested. The whole premise is unbelievable: losing your job apparently means forfeiting your life. A specialized class of contractor whose job it is to fire people, which is so dangerous and prone to violence that a specific martial art is required. The […]
Evidently, no one cooks with forks anymore. When my mom cooked steaks, bacon, and probably a lot of other things, she used a two-tined fork about ten or twelve inches long. As I learned to cook, I did the same thing. I’ve always had two or three in the kitchen. I use them when I […]
I finished the last audiobook of novels eligible for Hugo Award nominations year. That got me thinking about the other novels I’m currently reading, none of which I’m particularly loving. I think I’m going to drop all three. Katabasis by R. F. Kuang is eligible for the Hugo this year. I wanted to like it. […]
This is my second year participating in the Hugo Award. I am not attending the Worldcon (LAcon V in Los Angeles), but I have purchased a World Science Fiction Society membership again this year, and I have been reading eligible novels all year. So far, I have read 17 eligible novels, and I’m hoping to […]
It has been almost ten years since I visited* the Grand Canyon. I dispersed camped in the Kaibab National Forest surrounding the park. There was a subtle alkaline acrid smell everywhere in the area. I never figured out if it was from the stone and soil or some vegetation. I can’t say it was exactly […]
In July, my server at home died. It was a very old FreeBSD system with a Pentium 4 CPU, half a gig of RAM, and the last CRT in the house. I had been using it mainly as a file server. I spun up a VM on my cloud provider, restored a few critical files […]
It turned out to be a vampire novel. Look, lots of people like vampire novels, so when you’re writing the blurb for yours, you should probably use the word “vampire” at least once, and maybe not the word “genre-defying”. There’s no reason to trick the rest of us. One of the early chapters, the one […]
The Jefferson Barracks Bridge carries Interstate 255 across the Mississippi River between south St. Louis County and Illinois. Of all the major bridges in the St. Louis area, this is one of the few remaining that does not carry bike or pedestrian traffic. The area definitely needs a bike crossing here. On the Missouri side, […]
