Movie Night.

We have a unique opportunity lined up for next month: the Hollywood Theatre, one of the local entertainment venues, is showing 2001: A Space Odyssey on February 1st. In spite of her long term interest in film, my charming wife Karli has never seen Stanley Kubrick's enigmatic masterpiece, and what better way to do a first viewing than on a big screen?  

Similarly, I've seen 2001 several times, but never in a theatre environment, and whereas I'm looking forward to seeing it in a larger format, the real attraction for me is in the theatre's sound system. As I've commented before, the great shortcoming of watching movies at home is keeping the sound low in consideration of the neighbours, and as such I'm eager to see - and hear - the opening sequence accompanied by Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra at full volume.  

Tickets were a reasonable $16 and change each, and I was amused to see that someone took their best shot at the movie title when creating the ticket page - and missed.  

- Sid

 

 

"Science fiction’s most prestigious award."

I assumed that the Hugos were like the Oscars: Voted on by some sort of body to which one must be invited. I figured that this was an echelon of SFF to which I would never ascend, and was content to follow along with the winners, losers, scandals, controversies, and delights, like any other award situation.

But I was wrong. 

Molly Templeton, Anyone Can Vote in the Hugo Awards — And Here’s How 

This month's copy of the Macmillan Publishing Reactor* newsletter showed up in my In box this morning, and the first link was to an article on Hugo voting by Molly Templeton.  It's a well-written and comprehensive guide to not only the process for registering as a Hugo voter, but also the value that a larger pool of voters brings to the awards.

I gave it a bit of thought, and decided that after attending the Seattle Worldcon last year, I wanted to continue to be a part of the process, and signed up for a non-attending LAcon membership at $50 USD.

It wasn't entirely a casual decision: in the wake of retirement, I've done my best to control spending (with a few exceptions for travel and entertainment), but so far my modest investments have performed quite well**, and as such I'm willing to spend a bit of discretionary budget on this.  And, as pointed out in the Reactor article, the Hugos voter packet probably includes equivalent or greater value. (Last year's was an impressive 43GB download of long and short fiction, series episodes, review links, graphic novels and related content.)

I should also point out that it's not just a voting membership, non-attending members also have the ability to nominate entries for the various categories - Molly Templeton's article includes some useful guidelines for the nomination process. 

Depending on your degree of fandom, interest or financial security, you can register at:

https://www.lacon.org/register/

The deadline is January 31st - why not make your voice be heard?

- Sid

* If you're not already a Reactor subscriber, here's the subscription link:

https://reactormag.com/newsletter/ 

 It's a great source of news, reviews, and every issue includes a free piece of short fiction.

** A little bit of finger crossing accompanies this statement.   

Upgrade Part 3: Trials and Tribulations

Perhaps due to my request for a refund due to delayed delivery, over the weekend the delivery date for my Alienware computer purchase magically changed from Thursday to Monday - apparently the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

The delivery arrives bright and early at 8:38AM on Monday morning.  It's quite a large box - for no good reason I somehow envisioned the R12 as a smaller footprint - regardless, I cheerfully scribble my name on the signature screen and off goes the postman.

I drag the package down the hall and manage to get the Alienware box out of the cardboard shipping box - not as easy as it sounds, it's very much a friction fit situation.  I open it, and the first thing I notice is that the cardboard accessories tray contains only a power cord: no mouse and keyboard as per the product listing on Amazon.  I lift the tray out, and the computer, which is supposed to be white, is black.  This is a bit concerning - is this is fact the right computer?  It’s got the right product code on the back, but is the configuration correct?

I quickly borrow a monitor, mouse and keyboard from another system, make the necessary connections, hit the alien head power button, and the system starts up.

Almost.

Instead of the standard boot screen, I see the following:

I'm not a seasoned PC technician, but this seems like a bad thing.  With a mental shrug, I click on Continue, and the computer shuts down, which also seems like a bad thing.  

Sigh. 

I have a moment of regret for not using the QR code when I had my chance, and turn the computer on again.  Astonishingly, it instantly boots up and loads the login screen.  I click on the Sign In button and the Windows 11 desktop opens up in front of me - success, at least for the moment.

I decide not to worry about the drive error message in the short term in favour of confirming the computer's configuration.  To my relief, after checking all the system specifications against the original product description on Amazon, it looks like the only difference is the chassis colour.  I connect to our wifi, install Firefox (sorry, Edge, but that's the way it is) download Steam, and decide to install Fallout 4 as a test because I have some confidence that it will run, unlike the game that Karli bought me, which is still a mystery.

It is at this junction in events that our internet decides to become sporadic. It downloads a bit, then stops.  Recovers, then stops.  The download process takes about twice as long as expected, but finally finishes.  I sigh a sigh of long-suffering patience, and click on the Fallout PLAY button in Steam.

And, of course, Fallout won’t start.  It says it’s running for about two seconds, then the RUNNING button reverts to PLAY.  I repeat this process a couple of times, nothing.
 
Hmmm…
 
When in doubt, reboot. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”)  No difference.
 
Hmmm…
 
Okay, let’s try a couple of things. First, let’s install a relatively simple game, I have a couple of recent acquisitions that I’ve never tried. Second, let’s go back to the iMac and log out of Steam in case it's some kind of an account conflict.  

Our internet connection is a bit more cooperative for the second install, and the untried game runs.  And, to my surprise, so does Fallout when I try it, so it may have been an account conflict after all.  I still have to add in some mods to get full functionality, but the game does run.
 
The next step is to finally download Starfield, the new game from Karli, and see if it works.  The internet has decided to be uncooperative once again, and it's a substantial 124GB download, so now we wait.  Somewhere out there is the unanswered question of the startup drive error message, but in the short term I'm willing to leave that bridge uncrossed.
 
And, finally, I e-mail the seller regarding the missing mouse and keyboard.  For whatever reason, they ship those parts separately, they should arrive tomorrow. 

- Sid

This always ends badly.

Well, that's the first ten minutes of a Doctor Who episode if I've ever seen one - or a Quatermass movie if you're into the classics.  Seriously, has no one at NASA ever read a book, watched TV or gone to a movie?  Let's hope that there will at least be a substantial quarantine involved.*

- Sid

* Especially when you factor this into the equation. 

Upgrade Part 2: "What's a delivery standard?"

When you've actually paid extra for expedited shipping of your new gaming computer, it's a bit disconcerting to see that your parcel is still showing as In Transit the day after it was supposed to arrive.  It's even more disconcerting to see that the Expected delivery date is a full week after the original high end estimate.

Needless to say, I requested  - and, happily, received - a refund for the shipping fee.

- Sid

Upgrade Part 1: Camels and Straws.

Silicon doesn’t wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes, and in fact he was usually more worried about his gear falling behind the state of the art than he was about death (he was twenty-two) or taxes (he didn’t file, although he paid a Singapore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to pay if he’d declared his gross).

William Gibson, Count Zero

As usual, Bill Gibson nailed it.  

Here we all are, living in the future, swimming in a sea of technology that, to quote Daft Punk, gets harder, better, faster, stronger.  But, what it doesn't get is cheaper, which means that most of us are riding along someplace not quite on the top of the breaking wave, living just a bit behind the leading edge - 4G instead of 5G, HD but not 4K, 15 instead of 17 Pro.

For me, that's meant living on borrowed time in terms of computing power, or, more accurately, gaming power.  I'm a long time Apple user, which, like any long term habit, is hard to beat - no 12 Step Program for iMac addicts.  Unfortunately, I also love computer games, and although a few of my favourites such as The Long Dark will run on the MacOS, the great majority of games require Windows.

Fortunately, or perhaps surprisingly, I've been able to get by for quite a while using Apple's Bootcamp software to run Windows from a partition on my 27 inch iMac, in spite of its modest 2 GB AMD Radeon graphics card.*  However, my iMac is ten years old, and although it's had a good run, its shortcomings as a gaming platform have become more and more evident as time goes on: distant images appearing one piece at a time as I approach them, weapons visibly rendering as they're equipped, or just unacceptably slow performance.

The inevitable end of the iMac as a gaming platform came in the form of a Christmas gift.  My wish list this year included gift cards for the Steam gaming platform, and my lovely wife Karli obliged with $50 worth.  One of my long term Steam wish list items has been Starfield from Bethesda, the developers of  Fallout and Skyrim.  Starfield was released in 2023 to surprisingly average reviews, in spite of which it's maintained its original price point of $89.99 CAD.  As such, I've been reluctant to purchase Starfield: if your game isn't doing well, why not bring the price down a bit to attract more users?

However, in this case, the stars aligned, and I discovered that Starfield was on sale for $53 CAD, which seemed a sign from the gaming gods that the time to buy had come.  Fifty dollars worth of gift cards and three dollars worth of Visa later, I was the happy owner of Starfield.

By and large, I don’t check game specs before I buy. I'm very aware that no game is ever going to say “Playable on a ten year old iMac running Bootcamp with a weird nonstandard video card”, so I cross my fingers and hope for the best, a philosophy which has been surprisingly successful. 

That being said, I assumed that there would be some combination of settings that would allow me to play Starfield on my system.  After all, Fallout 4 runs fine on the iMac, why would there not be a similar configuration option from the same developer?  So, I patiently downloaded the 124GB setup package, ran the installer, and launched the game.

Or tried to.  In their infinite wisdom, the good people at Bethesda created a preplay scan for video cards that they thought would be suitable for the game, which, apparently, does not include my card.  As such, the game would not even start without one of those cards, let alone offer me options that would accommodate my idiosyncratic setup. 

This is more than a little irritating.

As far as I know, Steam offers the option returning a purchase within 24 hours, but damn it, that’s not the solution I want.  All other considerations aside, I’m a bit embarrassed by the failure to launch -  having explained to my spouse just how pleased I was to finally be able to play the game and thanking her for making it possible, I'm reluctant to tell her that it's not going to work.  
 
While all of this is taking place, life goes on in the real world. Karli decides to order some stick-on lights to put in her closet and makes a selection on Amazon.  As the owner of our Prime account, I’m in charge of Amazon orders, so she sends me the link and I add the item to my cart.

I sit for a minute in thought before going to checkout, and then do a search on Amazon for Alienware, which I think of as the premier brand for PC gaming computers.  To my mild surprise, there are slightly older reconditioned Aurora R12** systems available for about $1200.***  A prudent check with Steam confirms that the system in question comes with a video card that will run Starfield, and I have about $600 worth of Amazon gift cards stacked up in my account to put toward a purchase.
 
So I buy one. 

The sellers offer a modest $12 Expedited Shipping option through which I can have the box in about three days rather than just over a week, and you know, in for a penny, so I select that.  The order goes through, and now we wait.
 
I’m fully aware of the irony of spending $600 (or $1200, depending on how you look at it) to play a game that I wouldn’t buy until it was on sale for $53, but but it's really more of a camel's back situation, and this was the proverbial straw. As it is, I don't regret my decision, and I'm looking forward to trying out some game purchases that I've been reluctant to install in case of similar performance problems.  

Bootcamp iMac, thank you for your service. 

- Sid

* The joke is that I upgraded to a new Mac Mini when I retired, leaving my iMac to run solely as my primary Windows platform - which it ran faster than the MacOS. Draw what conclusions you will.

** The R12 had an oddly brief lifespan.  It was originally released in March of 2021, but was almost immediately replaced by the R13, apparently due to changes in US energy efficiency regulations.  

*** To provide some perspective, a current entry level Alienware gaming system new from Dell would start at about $2500 CAD.

"And so it begins..."

Happy New Year, Revolutionaries!  January 1st is traditionally a day in which people take a moment to evaluate their lives and consider areas of improvement as they recover from New Year's Eve, and I thought I'd take a moment and look at the last year.

Considering that I'm retired, I have to confess that I had a slow year in terms of fandom.  If anything, it was sub-par in terms of things like catching up on reading, making inroads into my TV viewing backlog, or continuing with book cataloguing.  Instead, my first year of retirement was pleasantly restful: naps, daily walks, leisurely cups of tea, and a lot of time watching YouTube™ - as well as a brief flirtation with Duolingo, which ended after three months when I finally accepted that the free version wasn't teaching me anything I hadn't learned from Mrs. Wood in high school French class. 

That being said, I also attended Worldcon in 2025, which stands out as the peak of my life as a science fiction fan.  I had a great Space Marine VR experience, we paid an enjoyable pre-boycott visit to Disneyland (and by extension Galaxy's Edge, which I love), I saw some good SF movies, like Thunderbolts, Mickey 17, Fantastic Four, Superman*, and Tron: Ares*, and made a casual start on Season Two of Andor and Season One of Pluribus, both of which are excellent.

And now it's 2026, and I feel that it's time to get back in the groove.  As such, my New Year's resolution is to read a book a week, watch an hour of TV a day, and do one blog posting a week, as well as finally finishing up my long-running book catalogue project, which is currently dead in the water at "Rowley".  As with any resolution, I can't promise that I'll stay the course for the entire year, but at least it gives me a place to start.

A happy New Year to anyone reading this, and I wish you good luck with whatever resolutions you may choose to undertake for 2026! 

- Sid

* To be honest, I went against the current on these two.  I didn't really love Superman, and I quite enjoyed Tron: Ares.