Time to finish off the Skywalker saga! 🎬
personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
In Portland (well, just outside of Portland, in Happy Valley) for a holiday visit with Mom. Tomorrow I get to see the newest Star Wars film and finally get to stop trying to avoid spoilers (which I think I’ve done fairly well at, only heard two minor ones so far).
📚 sixty-one of 2019: Dead Endless, by Dave Galanter. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Focuses on the Stamets/Culber relationship, in a creative manner that’s a little confusing for the first few chapters until it suddenly snaps into focus. Some great Tilly and Airiam moments as well.
My Christmas book stack. On the left, Star Trek. On the right, not Star Trek. 🖖📚
Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and general good wishes to you all, however you celebrate the day and season!
📚 sixty of 2019: The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber. ⭐️⭐️ 1965 Hugo Best Novel
Veers wildly between interesting concepts (a planet the size of Earth appears in Earth’s orbit, affecting tectonics, tides, etc.), and incredibly dated plots that do not age well.
Out for the Seattle Symphony’s performance of Handel’s Messiah. The last time I was at a performance of the Messiah, it was as part of the choir, along with both parents (also in the choir) and my brother (in the orchestra). It’ll be nice to be in the audience with Prairie for this performance!
Obviously, I’m not a best-selling SF author, but if you adjust for that, John Scalzi’s approach to recognizing his own likelihood of making problematic mistakes in his past, present, and future and accounting for such very much matches my own.
An Old Music Meme Revisited
For no particular reason (and certainly no good reason), resurrecting a silly little meme from a few years ago…
Some silly pointless statistics on my iTunes music library:
- How many total tracks?
33,978: 109 days, 2 hours, 38 minutes, and eight seconds in total, taking up 228.35 GB of storage.
-
Sort by song title — first and last?
- First: A Drowning (Bonus Track), by How to Destroy Angels, from Welcome Oblivion
- Last: } . } @ } . @ . } @ } . @ . } @ } . @ . } @ } ., by The User, from Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers, if you sort special characters and numbers after letters, as iTunes does, or Zyklon B Zombie, by MSBR, from In Formation–A Tribute to Throbbing Gristle if you just want the last one alphabetically
- Sort by time — shortest and longest?
- Shortest: 0:01 — g-and that’s all she talks about, a sample of a girl’s voice I pulled from somewhere for use in DJing
- Longest: 4:23:21 – Thor’s Day Night, a nearly four-and-a-half hour mix of me DJing at Norwescon 36
- Sort by Album — first and last?
- First: Abandon, by The User
- Last: Either 55578 by Wolfsheim, if you sort special characters and numbers after letters, as iTunes does, or Zoot Suit Riot by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies if you just want the last one alphabetically.
- Sort by Artist — first and last?
- Top five played songs?
- Wasted, by And One, from Virgin Superstar
- One World One Sky, by Covenant, from United States of Mind
- Kathy’s Song (Come Lie Next to Me), by Apoptygma Berzerk, from Welcome to Earth
- Afterhours, by Covenant, from United States of Mind
- Doubleplusgood, by Eurythmics, off of 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother)
- Find the following words. How many songs show up?
- Sex: 279
- Death: 215
- Love: 1,853
- You: 3,014
- Home: 344
- Boy: 901
- Girl: 793