Category — Uncategorized

Back in the olden days of the Internet, the first full week of January was declared International Delurking Week, and I still celebrate this ancient holiday. It runs this year from the 1st until the 8th, so you have about six days to slither out of the reading closet and check in with an “I’m here” comment.

It is fairly easy. Leave a comment in the comment section below admitting that you’re here. You can simply raise your hand and meekly admit that you’re here with a simple, one-word “here” comment; or you can proudly raise your hand and tell us all a bit about yourself (my preferred method); or… you can tell me your favourite book (see, I’m trying to make it easy for you by even providing a comment prompt).

The point is that I want to know about the people who read me, since there is a huge discrepancy between the number of readers in actuality and the number of readers I actually know are reading. Or a tongue-twister like that.

And that’s all you have to do to celebrate.

So (clears throat to nudge you along), who is here?

And just to answer my own question, I think everyone knows about my obsessive tendencies with anything Harry Potter, Tolkien, Narnia, or books by Douglas Adams.  But I also love Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy.

* I make a badge every year to mark the occasion, and I give you full permission to right click and grab it for your very own.

It’s the first of the year, and it feels like everyone is writing the obligatory resolution post about how this year will be different from the last; how we’ll finally become our best self.

But I’m not feeling it.

I am facing 2017 with a lot of trepidation.  Did you ever go to River Country as a kid?  There was a platform in the man-made lake with a wooden post and a swinging arm.  The person hung from the arm and swung out over the water before they dropped down.  When it was my turn, I was hanging from the arm, and I looked down into the water.  I saw a flash of an orange fish beneath the surface, and I couldn’t make my body drop.  I was suddenly aware that there were fish in the water; and if there were fish, then there were probably snakes and turtles and all sort of other things below the murky surface.  The other kids were screaming at me to drop off the arm because they wanted their turn, and I finally released myself so I could quickly swim out of the water.  I remember spending the rest of the day going down a water slide with a tube so I could be in the water without really being “in” the water.

The point: 2017 makes me feel like I’m staring down into murky water, and I’m wondering what is below the surface.  This is not where I thought we’d be when we started 2016.

This is a downer of a New Years post.

These are my goals for the year: Before December 2017, I want to be the world’s best backgammon player (why aim small?), return to fiction and complete a new novel, and get into grant writing (by which I mean proposal writing, since… you know… you write proposals for grants).  All do-able with the possible exception of world’s best backgammon player.  I may need to settle for “able to always beat the computer on the expert setting.”  What are your goals?

Updated at the Bottom

Like everyone else, I felt sad when I heard on Christmas that George Michael died.  As a Gen-Xer, it is my duty to make the next generation care about our 80s idols.  While I have done an excellent job on the video game/book/movie front, I have not really driven home the greatness of 80s music, though the twins know George Michael from being subjected to “I Love the 80s” weekends on 97.1 FM.

The part I always try to drive home to the kids is how risqué Faith was back in 1987.  The video for “I Want Your Sex” is fairly tame by today’s standards, but I remember a huge divide between kids whose parents allowed them to listen to it and those who had to listen to the radio edit version.  One day an older girl walked down the aisle of the bus, asking every kid if their parents allowed them to play the song at home.  Not only did I have the song, but my parents owned the VHS tape of all the videos from Faith.  Did that make me cool?  I believe the answer is yes.

There were a lot of “I hate you, 2016” posts on Facebook this weekend, but it’s not as if there has ever been a year without a slew of artists dying.  This is not a uniquely terrible year; it is just a year.  I mean, in terms of celebrity death.  For many other reasons, it’s okay to say I hate you to 2016.

Right now, I’m just trying to have faith.  We all have got to have faith-a-faith-a-faith.  Thank you, George, for the good music.

Updated:

And now Carrie Fisher has died.  This really has been a horrible end of year.

Pssst… are you up?  Are you awake?  What are you doing?  Are you eating something special for Christmas?  Are you wearing Christmas pyjamas?  You are, aren’t you?

Have you opened gifts yet?  Did anything surprise you, or did you sort of know what was underneath the tree?

What are you doing now?  How about now?  And now?

I am actually not as bored as I sound.  I really like Christmas because it is the one day a year that you know nothing will be open, no one will be working, and you can pretty much play video games for 12 hours straight with zero consequences.

Actually, that is what I did last year.  This year, I will still play video games for a little bit, but I’m mostly working through 501 essentially backgammon problems.  Every year I like to set a goal for myself, and this year’s goal is to become a good enough backgammon player to consistently beat the computer on the hardest setting.  A secondary goal is to start competing.  A tertiary goal is to become the best backgammon player in the world before 2018.  I like to aim high.

I hope you are having a relaxing day if you’re celebrating Christmas or not.  That you’re keeping warm (or cool if you live in the Southern Hemisphere) and eating good food and reading books and being with friends or family.

So what are you doing now?

This post contains a spoiler for the movie Passengers.  You likely have already heard about it because it happens in the first few minutes of the movie, and every review has mentioned it, but in case you haven’t, stop reading now.

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I’m not going to see the movie Passengers because the mishaps-in-space trope fills me with dread*, but I realized that I got the story wrong after reading Nerdist’s take on the plotline.  My assumption was that both people woke up at the same time on the ship, and the movie is trying to figure out why these two passengers and none of the others are destined to die in space.

But noooooo, Chris Pratt wakes up 90 years too early and then decides to wake up one of the other passengers so he won’t be alone.

Nerdist asks an interesting questions (which sounds like it comes from the movie): “If you were stranded alone on a desert island, as star Chris Pratt pontificates early on in the movie, and you had the power to strand someone else there with you, would you?”

Like, if you were going to be locked in a spaceship, doomed to die, would you grab someone else to join you on-board so you wouldn’t have to be alone, knowing that you’re dooming that other person to the same fate?

I know the “correct” answer is “of course not!”  The kind person says they would stoically endure their indefinite solitary confinement and talk to themselves until the end of their days.

But… really… I mean, if you had the ability to have someone with you, wouldn’t you take someone with you?  There is a reason why solitary confinement is considered a cruel punishment.  People literally go insane only speaking with themselves.  But once you decide to do it, the question gets trickier: Do you pick someone you know or someone you don’t know?  And if it’s someone you know, do you go with an acquaintance, a friend, a family member, or your favourite person in the world?

Listen, I know this makes me a terrible person, but I think I’d grab someone.  I mean, first and foremost, I would hope that they would naturally be in the same mess with me so I’m not to blame for their situation, but if that’s not possible, I think I’d grab an acquaintance.  I think.  Best not to know me, right?  Oh my G-d, but then the guilt factor kicks in and I think, “No way could I deal with the guilt.  Better to die alone.”

What about you?

*It doesn’t matter whether it’s real, like Apollo 13, or fake, like Gravity.  I can read book versions, but I can’t see movies.  I panic just thinking about them.  I’m still freaked out about the “Resurrection Ship” episode of Battlestar Galactica where Apollo is floating through space.