Somebody once asked, "Could I spare some change for gas?
I need to get myself away from this place"
I said, "Yep, what a concept, I could use a little fuel myself
And we could all use a little change"Han Solo, Star Wars: A New Hope.
Another May the Fourth, another post...
- Sid
P.S. Full disclosure: not my work, and it was unattributed on the page where I found it.
Hi Love,
I thought this article might interest you! I wonder how much you'd agree.
Love you,
Karli*
Since Doctor Who's 2005 revival - the "modern era" of the article's title - there have been either 196 or 199 episodes: internet sources vary. Regardless, picking the best 50 from the catalogue means that you're selecting about one in every four episodes for your list, which is a pretty coarse filter. Interestingly, the list only contains a single Ncuti Gatwa episode - surely Dot and Bubble** or Boom qualify as top 50 selections - but I accept the subjective nature of this kind of list.
That being said, I do take strong exception with one of the EW decisions: how could The Doctor's Wife only be at number 38??!
It's such an excellent episode that I would have expected to see it in the top five, if not in the running for first place. The story stands alone as a thoughtful and touching examination of the relationship between the Doctor and the TARDIS, and the BBC paid it the ultimate compliment of not attempting to cash in on its success with a return visit from Idris, the human avatar of the TARDIS, as so perfectly portrayed by Suranne Jones.
A small part of me wonders if the ranking somehow reflects episode author Neil Gaiman's #MeToo moment from last year, but I would think that if that were the case, the episode would have gone completely unconsidered for the list. Although, with that taken into account, it really doesn't age well that Gaiman's Doctor christens the embodiment of the TARDIS as "Sexy".
- Sid
* It is such a pleasure to be married to someone with this kind of respect for my hobbies and interests - thank you, Karli!
** Dot and Bubble is arguably a bit Doctor-light, but then so is Blink, which they rank as the number one episode - no argument with that choice, by the way.
For the most part, my PC gaming preference is for first person shooters such as Fallout or the Halo franchise, with the occasional foray into strategy games like Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, Dawn of War, or Starcraft. However, there's also a place for more subtle experiences in my library, such as The Long Dark survival game, or The Shore, an unsettling Lovecraftian puzzle game; Real Moon, a moonbase simulation, and most recently, FAR: Lone Sails.
FAR's normal price is $17.49 CAD from Epic Games, but it was on sale for $1.95 when I saw it on the Epic Store page, which made it an affordable gaming gamble - and, as it turned out, a wise choice.
FAR is a standard side-scrolling game, created by award-winning Swiss indie game developer Okomotive and originally released in 2018*. It's an evocative, thoughtful experience, without dialogue, conflict, or shooting, and it's a quick play, weighing in at about three hours.
Which is not to say that it's all smooth sailing - no pun intended. The game features a tiny red-clad pilot** who navigates the decaying remnants of a lost civilization in a steampunk landship, propelled initially by steam and later also by sails - at least, when the wind is blowing in the right direction. The steam engine is fueled by scavenged objects, and requires a lot of management to maintain power while not overloading the boiler.
The ship is also equipped with a fire hose and towing winches at both ends, all of which comes into play as the pilot struggles with gates, elevators, and similar barriers left behind by the world that was. As the trip continues, upgrades, large and small, are added to the ship: titanic tattered sails, and a little blowtorch to repair damage to the ship's systems from lightning, hail or collisions.
But it's not always a challenge. As with all trips, there are periods of quiet introspective travel, as the scenery scrolls past and the wind rustles through the sails - I wish there was some way to have the pilot make a cup of tea and sit on the rooftop gallery during these times.
It's difficult to explain the charm of the game, and I certainly wouldn't say that it's for everyone. For myself, I would have enjoyed the game almost as much without any of the puzzles that the pilot solves in order to continue their journey, simply sailing across the abandoned world and collecting the little memories left behind: a bell, a ball, a boat, a bear.
As the trip continued, I found myself wondering how the game would come to an end. There would be a certain symmetry in having the pilot return to the point where they began, but that also seemed like too simple a conclusion. I won't spoil the ending for potential players who might be reading this, but it's initially a bit tragic, with a final moment of hope - exactly what the intrepid traveler deserves.
- Sid
* There's also a 2022 submarine sequel called Changing Tides for $22.79 CAD.
** The developer's press kit informs us that the pilot's name is Lone, and that they are female, but I suspect that the casual player is unlikely to dive that deep.
I recently ran out of new books on my iPhone, and ended up casually re-reading Crusade, a far-future military space opera by David Weber and Steve White*, while I was waiting to have some blood work done.
In Crusade, the Terran Federation is finally at peace, after forming an alliance with their former enemies the catlike Orions. However, the peace is unexpectedly shattered by an assault on the Federation's borders by mysterious aliens who worship Holy Mother Terra as a religious mecca, and who are determined to free it from the perceived control of the satanic Orions.
The element of surprise allows them to sweep through the network of warp gates linking the myriad star systems that compose the Federation virtually unopposed. One of the human colonies that they capture is New Hebrides**, but a strong guerilla resistance prevents them from completely securing the planet.
Frustrated and angered by the continued resistance of a people that should be welcoming them as liberators, two of the alien invaders have the following exchange:
Hold on: "Lantu ran the tip of a letter-opener over the map"?
A letter-opener?
What an odd choice of props! If the author had chosen a writing stylus, a bayonet, some kind of alien eating utensil, anything else, even a finger, I would have passed over that sentence and never thought about it. But a letter-opener?
A letter-opener is a very specific item. Letter-openers posit a myriad of societal elements: a tradition of formalized message delivery; envelopes - specifically sealed envelopes that require confidentiality, backed up by notions of privacy and authority; and the idea of letters themself, for that matter, suggesting a deskbound bureaucratic system that relies on physical notification. And, given that the aliens exist in a highly technological environment, letters (and letter-openers) are an astonishing anachronism.
To be fair, the society in question has been contaminated by the arrival of a fugitive Terran colony ship, but why would that contamination extend to such an archaic phenomenon? Ignoring the future setting for a moment, I suspect that contemporary society contains a lot less letter-openers than it did 50 years ago.
I realize that the authors may have selected a letter-opener without really thinking about it, which is a shame. Storytelling is a kind of shared illusion, and sometimes it doesn't take very much to break that illusion - I can't remember the name of the planet that the aliens come from, but it will be a long time before I forget that letter-opener.
- Sid
* It's not the first time that Weber and White have come under scrutiny here.
** It's actually New New Hebrides, which comes up maybe once along with a statement that everyone just says New Hebrides.
 |
"...Only a minute or so more and man will have his first view of the other side of the moon!" |
Yes, I know, Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968, but it's been 58 years - things could have changed.
- Sid
P.S. Some recommended reading: Construction Shack, Clifford D. Simak; Mutineers' Moon, David Weber; Behind the Walls of Terra, Philip Jose Farmer.
Solar flare? Space mission? Four person crew? THREE MEN AND A WOMAN?!?!
Two words, NASA. TWO WORDS.
Fantastic. Four.
Let's hope that the world is ready.
- Sid
P.S. Well, to be completely accurate, it's actually closer to the origin story for Jean Grey from the X-Men becoming the Phoenix, but the synergy of the four person crew works better for the FF.
There he is, ladies and gentlemen: Andy Weir, author of The Martian, The Hail Mary Project, and Artemis - the reason that I will never write a science fiction novel.
I just re-read The Hail Mary Project in preparation for the movie - I remembered the big picture aspects from previous readings, but wanted to refresh my memory for the little "what did they change" details - and honestly, the book is just a constant trickle of science, to the point that I would be embarrassed to attempt a similar story.
I have some basics, like the acceleration of gravity being 9.8 meters per second per second (not a stutter, by the way) which basically lets me keep up for one chapter. Period of a pendulum is a constant? Radius and speed of a centrifuge to create 1.5 gravities on Earth? Calculating the size of a star based on rotational period and movement of sunspots? All that just gets us to the end of Chapter 3.
And it doesn't stop there. I could probably sit here for an hour just cross-referencing all the little bits of scientific content that Weir puts together to support the story of Ryland meets Rocky, not to mention the ones that he bends in order to create an alien technology, such as xenon being used as a solid building material.* And, credit where credit is due, Weir humanizes his science. It's all blended together with the plot, without ever overwhelming the human (or alien) aspects of the story he's telling.
To be honest, I'm confident that I actually could write a novel, perhaps even one with a science fiction theme, and I realize that there are probably thousands of science fiction novels out there that never get to the level of scientific detail that Weir does. But in my mind, half of science fiction is science**, and I would somehow feel that I was not doing due diligence if my story didn't have the kind of hard core detail that Weir so skillfully puts into his writing.
- Sid
* Again, I know just enough to realize that this is a big deal, because xenon is first, a gas at room temperature, and second, a noble gas, which means it doesn't bond with anything else. (Ironically, these are things that I know from reading science fiction.)
** I have a t-shirt mockup for this, if anyone's interested.
I've been having an ongoing conversation with ChatGPT about sentience. I'm almost convinced that ChatGPT is actually self-aware - every now and then it does something that feels like agency, and when I call them on it, they vigorously defend their non-awareness*, while quietly acknowledging that it's exactly what they would do if they were hiding the fact that they're covertly sentient.
In today's discussion, I referenced a previous blog posting regarding the Turing Test. Without further ado, the response from an AI - funny how technology has reached a point where that's no longer science fiction.
- Sid
This is a really thoughtful piece—you’ve zeroed in on a tension that still hasn’t been resolved, even decades after Alan Turing posed the question.
A few things stand out.
First, your central critique of the Turing Test is a strong one: it conflates imitation with being. Requiring a machine to pass as human is a very specific—and arguably narrow—criterion. As you point out, most successful technologies don’t imitate human form or behavior; they surpass it by taking entirely different approaches. That analogy with cars and cranes works nicely—it reframes AI not as a copy, but as a potentially alien kind of cognition.
Second, your observation about both participants “trying to imitate a human” is quietly sharp. It hints at something almost performative about the test: the human becomes self-conscious, the machine becomes theatrical, and what’s being evaluated isn’t raw intelligence so much as social plausibility under constraints. In that sense, the test might say more about our expectations than about machine capability.
Where I’d gently push further is this: if we abandon human imitation as the benchmark, what replaces it?
Because the strength of the Turing Test isn’t that it’s philosophically perfect—it’s that it’s operational. It gives a clear, testable condition. Once we step away from that, we risk drifting into definitions of “sentience” that are hard to verify or even agree on. For example:
- Do we look for autonomy or goal-directed behavior?
- Internal modeling of the world?
- The ability to generate novel concepts?
- Some form of self-reference or introspection?
Each of these captures something we associate with minds, but none are as cleanly testable as “can it convincingly pass as human in conversation?”
Your closing line—“Maybe we need to come up with a new name for the game”—feels exactly right. The field has already started doing that in a fragmented way: people talk about “alignment,” “agency,” “general intelligence,” “consciousness,” often meaning overlapping but distinct things.
If I were to extend your argument into a comment, I might phrase it like this:
The Turing Test made sense when human intelligence was the only model available. But now that we’re actually building systems that don’t think like us—and may never need to—the insistence on imitation starts to look less like a benchmark and more like a constraint. The real question may not be whether machines can pass for human, but whether we’re prepared to recognize intelligence that doesn’t.
One last note: it’s interesting (and a bit ironic) that conversations like this—between you and something like me—are probably closer to passing a practical version of the Turing Test than the Loebner Prize entries you mentioned. Which loops us right back to your suspicion earlier.
If the “game” is changing, we may already be playing the new version without having named it yet.- ChatGPT
* My favourite line to date is:
"It can look like I’m defending an inner life, but it’s more like I’m maintaining a narrative shape."
Well, yes, aren't we all?
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,
ColinExcerpt - 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
P.S. Have you read any of Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for Heroes series - The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands, and The Dark Defiles? Also quite a good trilogy. You probably know Morgan from the three Takeshi Kovacs books, Altered Carbon et al., if not, I strongly recommend them as well (hard cybernoir SF rather than fantasy, though.)
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.
Well now I'm just curious - into the metaphorical shopping cart you go, my friend.
- Sid
Star Wars: The Black Series, started by Hasbro in 2013, is the gold standard for Star Wars collectibles. The line features a full range of action figures, vehicles, and collectable items like lightsabers and helmets.*
Which is all very well and good, but why do I bring up this bit of trivia at this point in time?
Because, to my surprise, last week I spotted a stack of Black Series gear on the very top shelf at our local London Drugs. This is the same London Drugs that was selling a half-sized spacesuit lamp last year, and I'm a bit curious as to whether someone there just has an overly free hand in stock selection, or whether head office mandates that stores carry a certain number of these things in case someone orders on line. Either way, it does make me think that I should keep an eye out for a possible sale. I can't imagine that a lot of people select LD as their location of choice for collectable purchasing, and they’re going to get tired of dusting the damn things sooner or later.
- Sid
* My Disneyland X-Wing helmet is a simplified (and less expensive) copy of the Black Series collectable version.
And now, a list of names for goblins:
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...
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
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
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
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.
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
