So this week I consulted the Gods of Randomness and they instructed me to reach into my big file of rejection letters and pull item #9 out of folder “F”. There aren’t a lot of papers in this folder, and there would be even fewer if I had decided to file rejections from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under “M” instead of under “F”, but for whatever reason I went into the prepositional clause to sort this one. I know I sent a lot of stuff to F &SF (none of which was accepted) and there are only three rejection slips from them under “F”, so maybe I was inconsistent and there are more under “M”. We’ll find out at some point I guess.
Continue reading “Random Rejection: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “The Light””Not A Review Of “Six Feet Under”
So not long ago, having recently finished Mr. Robot, a show that, perhaps surprisingly, my wife really liked:
Wife: “Poor Elliot. His life sucks.”*
We started casting around for another program to become or “main course”, a position previously occupied by such luminaries as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Halt and Catch Fire (my personal favorite, because computer nerds), The Wire, and Treme (but not The Magicians). Someone somewhere recommended another show we missed the first time around, Six Feet Under, so we decided to give that one a try.
Chuckle Fireball
So the other day, I happened to notice in of my feeds where someone posted a joke Magic: The Gathering card for Chuck Norris:
Teaser Tuesday: Clifford D. Simak, “Way Station”
So this week (well, probably several weeks ago by the time this post appears) I was reading Way Station, a classic SF novel from the 1960s by Clifford D. Simak:
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: Clifford D. Simak, “Way Station””
That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2023 Edition
Last week I posted my 2023 reading report from Goodreads; this week, it’s time for my 2023 listening report from Last.fm. What was playing this year? If you guessed it’s largely the same as what was playing last year, you won’t be too far off. Let’s start with the big report, shall we?
Continue reading “That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2023 Edition”That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2023 Edition
So this year, as it does every year, Goodreads compiled a list of the books I read, making a nice little ― or not so little ― tapestry of covers, along with a few details. You can check out the list at Goodreads here, or look at the screen shots below. The advantage of visiting the list at Goodreads is that you can interactively click on individual books to see their entries; the advantage of viewing the screen shots is you get to go make a nice hot cup of tea while waiting for them all to finish loading. Let’s review a few notes about this year’s list!
Continue reading “That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2023 Edition”‘Tis The Christmas Spammer Season
Fa la la la la, la la la la!
Doctor, Where Are Your Pants?
So recently I was watching the third Doctor Who special of 2023, AKA The One Where the 15th Doctor Shows Up. Although my wife is not, as a general rule, interested in Doctor Who, I knew that she was curious about the new Doctor, although she did have some questions.
Wife: “What number Doctor is this? Fourteen?”
Me: “No, this is Fifteen. Thirteen was Jodie Whittaker, and then they brought back David Tennant as Fourteen, so the new one is Fifteen.”
Wife: “But didn’t David Tennant already play the Doctor?”
Me: “Yes, he was Ten. But he’s also Fourteen.”
Wife: “I don’t think they should give him a new number when he was already the Doctor before. He should be like 10A or something.”
But we’re not in charge of the numbering, so Ncuti Gatwa will be Fifteen. Besides, they probably used an integer for this variable, so can’t just go slapping a string on the end of it. Oh and, by the way, in case you need it …
Not A Review Of “The Haunting of Bly Manor”
So for a while, we had canceled our Netflix subscription, because we were watching a lot of stuff on other services and Netflix didn’t have anything going that I really wanted to watch. (I know, I know, everyone loves Squid Game, but that doesn’t interest me, and the reality show version of it interests me even less.) I finally decided to resubscribe because I wanted to watch Mike Flanagan’s new horror series The Fall of the House of Usher, which is, essentially, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, novels, and poems. I almost convinced my wife to watch this one, on the basis of the fact that the Mike Flanagan shows I’ve seen on Netflix have been spooky but not gory, and my wife is known to enjoy the spooky creepy stuff on occasion (in fact, she is currently reading The Little Stranger); but then I heard from several friends that House of Usher was, in fact, quite gory, and, yeah, you can kind of see that in the trailer:
Continue reading “Not A Review Of “The Haunting of Bly Manor””Busy Busy Bots
So I know I said I took back all the bad things I said about ChatGPT, but I also said that was only going to last until I had accumulated a good number of obviously-AI comments and needed to do a post, and, well, that didn’t take long, did it? Shocker! As usual, these are mostly from the animals’ blog, and the saga of Bean accidentally becoming the owner of Twitter* by peeing on it continues to be the most popular target of AI comments. Gosh, I wonder why that might be … 🤔
Continue reading “Busy Busy Bots”
Viscosity 