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This month, I have finished watching the last of Star Trek: Enterprise, The Newsroom, and Penny Dreadful, as well as the latest season of Sherlock. In the case of both The Newsroom and Sherlock, the first two seasons were excellent, and then they began to be disappointing. The later seasons of Sherlock in particular have […]
(or, relatively well-off first-world people borrowing trouble from others because their own suffering is insufficient to justify how sorry they want to feel for themselves.) The Danse Macabre, as ritualized by so-called goths, was once described to me as, “mourning death.” Not any particular person’s death, but simply the existence of death as a fact […]
Flannel bed sheets are pretty awesome in the winter, but now there are little fuzz balls everywhere. I finally got my car put back together after having replaced the broken engine valve. I still had to have the catalytic converter replaced, which was damaged by all the unburned fuel that was dumped into it. However, […]
Anyone who tells you that Cat’s Cradle is science-fiction is fucking with you. Or else they don’t know what science-fiction is. Yes, it contains a bit of science-fiction as a plot element. Yes, the science is reasonably sound. It also contains a made-up religion, but no one categorizes it as a religious text. It is […]
I have rather suddenly developed an interest in local history. Most specifically, I’ve decided I want to know all there is to know about Flamm City, a place that was probably never actually any kind of a city, but which has intrigued me for many years. I’ve discovered a ton of historical resources at the […]
My reading progress this month has been rather poor. I was stuck on The Raven Boys for three weeks because it took that long to catch my interest. Every time I tried to read a little, it made me sleepy, which is never a good sign. The characters developed slowly, and I guess I don’t […]
A couple weeks ago, I went to a meet-up of writers in Jefferson County. It was a small group, and I enjoyed it. A couple of published authors, and a fairly loose discussion of things we’re working on. I discussed the space station murder mystery I am planning, and while I didn’t receive a lot […]
At work, we use monitoring systems to alert us to problems with the system, so that we can react to them quickly. We take the monitoring systems quite seriously. Today, on one of my personal servers, I discovered that a service had crashed, and I hadn’t noticed for fifteen hours. It was quite a shock […]
A defining characteristic of hard-boiled detective fiction is cynicism. The protagonist in such a novel has a necessarily cynical world view and makes cynical observations about the world. Many such novels are set in Los Angeles. I thought that was just a cliché trope, until I started thinking about how the setting contributes to the […]
The other weekend, I had time and inclination to find a new trail to walk. I drove down to Valley View Glades Natural Area and hiked the 2.6 mile loop. I had stopped in there once before, just to check the place out as a possible hunting location, but I hadn’t gone far. It’s a […]
