Recently

Reading

Since last time, I read a few books: Sea of Tranquility, a book club book, Doppelganger, the new Naomi Klein, and Manywhere, a collection of short stories.

Sea of Tranquility was very digestible sci-fi. I haven't read that much sci-fi overall, so it's probably inaccurate to say that it's spiritually similar to Ted Chiang, but that's the closest reference I know of. In the end, I think it's a little empty - the book shows off a lot of complexity but doesn't really deliver on it and things conclude in a way that's a bit too cute. That said, it was a perfect book to read in a few days and discuss with a friendly group.

Doppelganger, I found kind of annoying. I agree with Naomi Klein on nearly everything, including all of her thoughts in the book, and I think she's a very cool person, but it just isn't the style of book I like to read.

Manywhere was a good quick read, too - a collection of short stories. It's nice to read short stories, and usually quick, too. It's tempting to read a lot more books like this: I read about two books a month on average, but could 'pump up those numbers' by avoiding behemoth books and sticking to short fiction. Maybe next year I'll aim for 36 books and see if I can achieve that goal.

Listening

I've been listening to a lot of Mal Blum, who I discovered via a mailing list for a local wine store. The store is kind of known for its emails, which recently have been about bad customers that the owner hates to deal with, also streetlights and whether the local business district is going to fix them, and the difficulties of capitalism, and also a lot of links to good bands that are new to me.

New Daedalus album! It's perfect!

Watching

Death Becomes Her is such a classic early-90s romp of a film.

I accidentally spent some time being sick in August, and in the haze my best discovery was this YouTube channel, Elephant Graveyard, which recounts the right-wing "cancellation-free" comedy scene. It's artistic, the comedic pacing (of the channel, not the comics) is great, and it made fun and easy watching.

I'm also not a video gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I picked up No Man's Sky, an open-world space adventure game that was a total flop when it was released, but in eight years of fixes and updates has become something really compelling. It aligns with my previous game that I played when I had COVID, Cyberpunk 2077, which also had a disastrous launch. No Man's Sky is great: I'm playing it on easy mode, so it's more about adventuring than it is about fighting, surviving, or commerce.

Elsewhere

Val Town started funding more open source software, to the tune of $9.6k in 2024. Pretty exciting times for open source! It was an interesting process to figure out what to fund, in part because a lot of OSS projects are themselves companies: heck, just today, Laravel, the PHP framework, raised $57M in a Series A round.

We rode to Patchogue - terminating around Blue Point Brewing Company. Long Island provided some really nice views. Overall, the streets were quite a bit more bike-hostile than last year's trip up the Empire State Trail, so I'll probably stick to that, or the C&O, or a bikepacking trail for future trips.