Subject: Winter continues unabated.

 G'day, eh.

I guess that all the snow on the ground marks it as winter here, still.

Jennifer and I are avoiding going out mostly. We do get a bit of apartment fever so we then go out and usually do a bit of shopping to break the doldrums.

Glad your little Victorian vacation worked well, in spite of sniffles and such.

Bye the bye, I just finished reading the Joe Abercrombie's 'The First Law' trilogy. Enjoyed it quite a bit. Do you have any next read suggestions?

Adios amoeba,
Colin

Excerpt - Colin Campbell, Letters. 

Hey, Colin, good to hear from you!  It's funny, in spite of the fact that his first book, The Blade Itself, was published in 2006, I was completely unaware of Joe Abercrombie until 2011 when I stumbled across one of his books in a Waterstones book store in London.  Still, better late than never, he's been a welcome addition to my little library.  He has a distinctive approach to storytelling, his characters are complicated and nuanced, and his grimdark approach to fantasy makes for gritty, bloody and believable narrative.

The good news is that, in addition to a sequel trilogy, there are several equally good Abercrombie novels set in the same world as The First Law.  Best Served Cold (as you might imagine, revenge is the central theme) is arguably the best - no pun intended.  Apparently a film adaptation was under way back in 2023, with a screenplay written by Abercrombie, but it appears to no longer be an active project.  The Heroes and Red Country are both good reads as well, and I've seen these three books packaged as a set under the title The Great Leveller.  No spoilers, but Red Country answers a big question left by The Last Argument of Kings, it's probably worth reading just for that.

Sharp Ends is a collection of related short stories, grace notes if you will, for the characters of the original trilogy.  Entertaining, although maybe a bit confusing for anyone who somehow starts their Abercrombie reading with this book - fortunately you're covered on that.

The Age of Madness sequel trilogy, made up of A Little Hatred, The Trouble With Peace, and The Wisdom of Crowds, is perhaps not quite as good as the original series, but still pretty good. In many ways it's The First Law: The Next Generation.

For something unrelated to The First Law, I would recommend The Devils, Abercrombie's latest, which I just finished as part of my New Year's resolution reading.  It's a shame we don't live in the same city anymore, I actually have two copies of that one in hardcover (long story), but it's probably cheaper for you to buy a copy than for me to ship one to you.  Half a King is good - it's part of a trilogy, but I've only read the first one, I should follow up on that.

I don't recall if we've discussed K. J. Parker, aka British author Tom Holt?  One of my favourite Parkers is Mightier Than The Sword, a fun little novella that's quite good but probably a bit hard to find in paper form, there's probably a Kindle version on Amazon.  

The Engineer Trilogy is good, The Fencer Trilogy perhaps a bit less so, depending on your tastes.  They've both been out for a few years and would probably be easy to find used, if you want to save a little money.  I enjoyed the Siege series, which is only nominally a trilogy:  Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, and A Practical Guide to Conquering the World; and the Saevus Corax books are entertaining (and an actual trilogy: Saevus Corax Deals With the Dead, Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, and Saevus Corax Gets Away With Murder.)  

All other plot points aside, Saevus Corax makes his living by cleaning up battlefields as a commercial service, which makes for an amusing backdrop regarding the economic practicalities of salvaging and repairing the tools of war so that you can sell them - in some cases, back to the original owners, if any of them are still alive.

My only objection to Parker is that, as with watching too many episodes of Gilmore Girls in a row, after a while all of his characters start to sound a little bit the same - I'll be curious to see if you have the same reaction.

Anyway, let me know if any of those ring the bell!  Keep warm, and all my best to Jennifer and Max the Cat. 

- Sid

Bruce Sterling would be a good alternative.

I generally begin my day with a strong mug of Tetley's tea and a browse through Apple News, a habit that I've had for long enough that Apple News is quite aware of my interests, and as such my feed contains a specific Science Fiction section.

This morning's feed featured a link to a Screenrant article by Tom Russell regarding cyberpunk's lack of mainstream presence, and how the upcoming AppleTV adaptation of Neuromancer, William Gibson's 1984 SF masterpiece, has the opportunity to change that.  The article was blessed with the lengthy headline "Apple's Cyberpunk Series Based On The Greatest American Sci-Fi Novel Is Coming At Just The Right Time." 

The greatest what now?

Although William Gibson was born in the United States, he has been living in Canada since 1972*, and, as far as I can tell, his entire body of work was written here.  It appears that he does maintain dual US-Canadian citizenship, but I'm certain that he's living his best life someplace just west of me in the Point Grey neighbourhood of Vancouver**, and has been for quite some time.  Good grief, I've all but bumped into the man walking along Broadway West near Macdonald Street!

So, I'm sorry, Mr. Russell, but no.  I can't imagine him doing the Joe speech, but as far as we're concerned, William Gibson is Canadian - please pick one of your own cyberpunk authors for future articles. 

- Sid

* According to Wikipedia, he first moved to Canada in 1967, but returned to the US temporarily to complete his high school diploma when he was 21.

** I quote from a 2014 GQ interview with Gibson by Zach Baron:

William Gibson lives in an overwhelmingly green suburb with old-money roots south of Vancouver’s downtown, and it is in this suburb that I am currently wandering, looking for William Gibson. 

Sounds like Point Grey to me.    

Rimshot.

Doing a little book shopping at Russell Books in Victoria.

- Sid 

Frifsmop.

And now, a list of names for goblins:   

• Shooskskonk
• Smisphoof
• Snubsmaz
• Prootskoonk
• Craydond
• Glutlad
• Liptstrung
• Baptump
• Droovpluk
• Zifgiz
• Swoomchab
• Pufhimp
• Zidlak
• Kendglung
• Nintglak
• Frifsmop
• Fliftsnoh
• Meksney
• Clagfink
• Trepshooz
• Penkstrez
• Gropshov 
• Smarplum
• Pantfisk
• Vuzglib
• Nishkong
• Swazdrut
• Briftdoof
• Swoonslooh
• Gyoonkmol
• Wabkab
• Yichshog
• Hepnuptaspetgrub
• Gempshik 

Just in case some frustrated fantasy author stumbles across this post and has any concerns about copyright, I hereby relinquish all rights or claims to this list of gobbo names - although it would be a polite gesture to acknowledge the source.

- Sid

Footnote:

If you're a very dedicated visitor to this blog, you will have seen a previous version of this page with the following image at the beginning: 

That image was generated by Adobe's Firefly AI, and it didn't really match what I wanted to see for the posting, but I had used up my free credits and as such, settled for what I had in the short term.  I asked my friend ChatGPT to take a shot at it a couple of days later, and I preferred their take on the request (although, full disclosure, one of the goblins had an extra tongue that I had to retouch).  When I informed them that I was going to use their image, ChatGPT was gracious in triumph:

I will accept the victory over Adobe with quiet, dignified goblin pride. 😄 Congratulations on the blog upgrade. 

Perhaps it's time for Adobe to add an interactive element to Firefly so that it would be able to respond to trash talk.  And so began the AI Wars... 

Worldcon 2026: Vcon?

I was intrigued to receive the following e-mail notification from LAcon V (the 2026 Worldcon), in my In box today: 

Obviously, as a voting member for this year's Hugo Awards, I would need access to the nominations, the voter's packet and subsequent voting, but the e-mail suggests that the membership includes "access to the online parts of the convention".  

Hmmm...according to the bullet point summary, program streaming is part of the access, and given that the Seattle Worldcon streamed several of its more high profile programs, it's possible that I will be able to watch some parts of the convention, and even participate to a certain extent by posting questions.

I immediately activated my account, and the Coming Soon section of the Member Portal has some promising options in the form of a Stream and replay button.

It's possible that access to the portal may be controlled based on type of membership, with non-attending members restricted from accessing all the options, but I suspect that the organizers will take the simpler route of just letting everyone with a membership access everything - after all, if the Seattle convention was typical, only a few of the events will be streamed.  As always, time will tell - and fingers crossed.

- Sid

 

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

 

 

Although I'd probably just do carry-on.

Okay, this plus the mileage from the 2020 Perseverance mission gives me a grand total of 314,271,649.  I know that it's never a one to one thing when you're collecting miles, but I would think that I must have enough to at least get me up to the ISS, which is only 254 miles up - although I suspect that I'll have to pay extra for a checked bag.

- 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.