Year 50 Day 304

Me wearing a light blue t-shirt with a Star Tek delta shield with an asterisk. I'm making the Vulcan salute, only with my hand held sideways and with the back of my hand to the camera, and I'm kind of smirking.

Day 304: Somehow, Mariner’s sarcastic back-handed Vulcan salute just seems appropriate when wearing my Swear Trek t-shirt.

Side note: I actually had to think about the least-icky way to link to Swear Trek, since my choices seem to be either the X/Twitter account (which, well, obvious) or the Tumblr account (who just announced they’re selling all their user data for AI training, on an opt-out basis, of course). I went with Tumblr, but I wish there was a non-ethically-horrifying place to link to.

Year 50 Day 302

Me standing next to a bookcase. One shelf has books, the other has a Lego Jurassic Park T-rex skeleton and other small toys.

Day 302: Proof that I was back in my office today! Every office should have a T-rex somewhere in it. Size, construction, and level of risk up to the owner of the office.

My New Osborne 1

Thanks to the 3D printing wizardry of @trevorflowers@machines.social, I now have an adorably tiny replica of an Osborne 1 on my desktop!

A small 3D printed Osborne 1 and two tiny floppy disks sitting on my desk in front of a modern Apple keyboard.

The Osborne 1 was my first computer (well, my family’s)…and second, and third, as we picked up a couple more from friends as they moved on, allowing me to swap parts around to keep one running.

The top of the computer, showing the Osborne logo embossed into the case.

Two 5.25″ floppy drives, a 5″ 52×20-character green screen, ran CP/M. A “portable” computer, it was the size of a suitcase, weighed 25 pounds, and didn’t have a battery, but because you could flip the keyboard up and latch it onto the front to lug it around, it counted as portable!

The front of the Osborne, showing the floppy drives, disk storage slots, screen, and keyboard connected to the case with a curly cable.

I typed early school papers with Wordstar (which coincidentally doubled as early training for HTML, as it used printer control codes to tell our dot-matrix printer to print \bbold\b or \uunderlined\u text; when I discovered HTML, it was an instant “oh, yeah, this makes sense” moment), played Snake before it showed up on Nokia mobile phones, and taught myself the basics of BASIC by translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into a simple text-based adventure game.

Another view of the front of the Osborne.

Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I’m ridiculously pleased to have this lil’ guy on my desk now.

The mini Osborne sitting on top of my Mac mini, next to a teddy bear skeleton, Lego figure pendant, two tiny 3D printed skulls, and a 45 single adapter pin with the Norwescon 45 logo.

📚 Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

18/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Excellent account of the settling and first steps of terraforming Mars, taking place over a few decades. Good hard sci-fi, with fascinating ideas on how it could be done and the effects, both micro (on the people involved and their immediate society) and macro (on the larger sociopolitical societies of Earth and Mars as it grows, and the physical effects on Mars). Fascinating from start to end; very much looking forward to continuing through the trilogy.

Also interesting reading this at a time when Mars is often in the news as an eventual destination once again, both realistic (NASA) and unrealistic (Musk), not long after reading and seeing Andy Weir’s The Martian and its film adaptation, just after finishing season four of For All Mankind, which is set on Mars, and while seeing Zach Weinersmith frequently post about his recent book looking at how Mars colonization is more difficult and dangerous than most people think. I wonder how much of what we know has changed since this part of the trilogy was written and how it might affect the underlying story if it were written today (I’m assuming that the Green Mars and Blue Mars sequels, being necessarily further extrapolated and less dependent on current real world science, would be less affected).

Me holding Red Mars

Year 50 Day 301

Me driving our car home, taken from the passenger seat.

Day 301: I actually went to work today! And then was busy enough that I totally forgot to take a picture to prove that I was feeling well enough to leave the house, so my wife snapped this shot on our way home.

These Are Facts

From Solarbird’s latest Fascism Watch (see the original post for more details and links to sources):

I want to present a list of items which are very well documented facts, but would’ve been absolutely, patently insane 10 years ago. I mean, the kind of rantings that got you thrown out of every conversation and mocked for years afterwards – and which are all now verified as true.

[…]

  • The Republican House is a tool of Russian intelligence, routinely using disinformation from Russian intelligence services, and either not caring whether the disinformation was true or not or knowing it was using disinformation and using it anyway, in conjunction with the Russians.

    […]

    The ‘Russia hoax’ was never, ever a hoax.

  • Trumpist allies within in the FBI and US intelligence services have similarly shown willingness to either take money from Russian agents or suppress information about Russian intelligence disinformation, particularly when doing so benefits the Republican party.

  • CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Conference, where insurrectionist leader and former President Trump spoke on Satuday – is a Nazi forum that welcomes Nazis. This isn’t an allegation anymore, there were literal Nazis openly welcomed on the floor and throughout the event.

    Some of these fascists overtly called for the end of democracy at this event and its replacement by a theocratic government. […]

  • Said former president and insurrectionist is running for president and thus far easily winning the Republican nomination. Amongst other actions, he’s promising to be a dictator on day one, and he and his allies are planning to use Red-state militaries against Blue states and to build a mass system of concentration camps. […]

  • Where Republicans have power now, they are trying to overturn marriage equality as a stepping stone to making LGBT people illegal again, arresting women for miscarriages, banning trans people and health care for trans people, banning books at scale and criminalising librarians who try to run underground book sharing programmes with laws which carry felony sentences, appointing terrorists to library oversight committees, introducing bills to criminalise sexting between adults, pledging ‘holy war’ against women pop stars.

    Oh yes, and doing everything they can to stop people from voting.

    And they will do all of this – every single bit of it – nationally, if they can.

Year 50 Day 299

Me sitting on our couch, with my MacBook running OBS, an iPad acting a second screen showing the final video output, and a DJ controller half-shoved behind pillows to one side.

Day 299: More work on prepping for DJing at Norwescon. Today I was working on making sure I had a good video output setup with OBS to send to the projection screen that will be behind me on stage during the dance. It’s a variation on what I use when streaming, and I really like the way it comes out.

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🎥 Meg 2: The Trench

Meg 2: The Trench (2023): ⭐️⭐️

This was dumb. The first Meg was entertaining; still a big dumb monster movie, but at least with it you could (just) hit the point of suspension of disbelief and go along for the ride. This one took far too long with the setup for very little payoff, and just prompts eye rolls when it tries to be entertaining. Another one we’re glad we didn’t chance in the theater.