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Moonbound And Simulated Mars

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"I will show you a technique for exploring your nerves – the underside of them." There, in the calm shadowed chamber, she taught him how to meditate. Moonbound by Robin Sloan What do you do with a midweek holiday? I don't know what I would have done previously. Nothing, maybe. Stayed home and lollygagged if I were at the camp, or back in the Wausau days I may have made grand plans and not followed through. (That was certainly my pattern.) Now -- I escape. Staying home and lazing requires me to navigate downtown parking and that holds no appeal; that simple fact makes it much easier to find and pursue plans. So this last week, with my midweek holiday and my birthday gift to myself, I aimed for one of my favorite spots in my geographic neighborhood. The Badlands. For all my exploring there by car and on foot, I'd never really considered riding a bike on those roads. By and large this is because I've struggled to be comfortable on a bike with cars zooming by or confi
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Acting My Age

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[Come, join me for a meandering monologue already in progress.] I have not yet figured out what exactly it means to "age gracefully." Seriously. What does that mean? Is it about acceptance? Is it about "living your best life," whatever that actually means? Is it continuing to think about the future even though said future is by necessity getting shorter as you work your way into it? Hm, that last one is jarring. Let's not go there right now. Still, I find myself wondering -- and it has a lot to do with my inner monologue. I don't think I'm alone in this: my inner monologue sounds perpetually 24. Her voice hasn't changed. Her opinions certainly have and she knows a lot more than she did sixteen [eek] years ago, but there haven't been major shifts in her vocabulary or basic approach to many things. And if that's true for me, how many of us are carrying around the same thing? Maybe we don't necessarily act our ages because, deep down, we al
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Penumbra Revisited

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A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time. - Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Let's talk about the Penumbraverse for a moment. Back in 2016, while wandering the stacks of (the now beleaguered) Tattered Cover in Denver, I came across a book I'd somehow not heard of, even though it had been around for four years by then. White background, bright yellow books (which I later found glowed in the dark – jarring) and an intriguing title. I finished reading it before my trip had ended . Since then Robin Sloan has built a world. Not Middle Earth style – it's not total invention from the ground up – but a world built on our existing one, a world that is just a touch more ideal than the one we inhabit. Every time I re-read one of the books (or re-listen – they're fantastic fun in audio form) I find myself happier. They're fun, they're interesting, and they feel so ... possible. In-world, here they are chron
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Guys Guys Guys!

 Go play with this. Just ... follow the instructions and click around. (Hit the little button in the corner that says "view machine" if you want to see how it all works together.) ANOTHER XKCD GEM
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WTF

Well, hello there. Who else realized we're already 25% of the way through 2024 and thought, "Huh, I wasn't actually ready for that. How do I go back a couple months?" Yeah, I didn't think it was just me. So in the last couple of years, I've cut waaaaaay back on my internet presence. There was the general toxicity of The Face, the distraction of The Gram, the inanity of ... everything. I couldn't do it. And as such, this little project of mine also fell by the wayside. The thing of it is ... I've wanted to get back into it. I've missed throwing my little tidbits onto the internet here. This is more of a shout into the void than other platforms and an outlet for a quiet engineer that doesn't get a lot of chances to write anymore. Not to say there's anything of real substance. But the possibility is there. So let's see if I can give this a proper shot again, shall we? I'm in need of a hobby again, and on a day like today -- cold and ra
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Let's Talk.

 No, no. I mean, "I'll talk." It's been awhile, and for that I'm sorry. Not, like, REALLY sorry -- I doubt very much I've been missed -- but a little. But let me tell you a little about my 2022 regardless. The fun actually began in 2021, as calendar days mean nothing to the universe at large. December 18th, to be exact. That day -- just a bit after noon -- I received a text message from the Tall One. Had an accident heading to the hospital may need you to find out where ********s dad lives and get my truck Yeah, not exactly the kind of thing you want to receive. Ever. Ever ever. And particularly not in text form. Over the next few minutes it became slightly more clear. Bad burns on his legs. Talk of heading to Denver. By the time I'd retrieved said truck and gotten to the hospital, they were packing him up for the flight down. It had been a bit of a freak accident -- a boiler, a can of primer, a spill, and thirty seconds that changed things drastically. St
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Fred

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I read A Christmas Carol every year. "Marley's Ghost", original illustration by John Leech from the 1843 edition Found on Wikipedia That's not entirely accurate. The last few years I've listened to it; Audible has a lovely version read by Tim Curry. This means that my brain does it's association thing and I get to picture the story as read by Long John Silver, because why not? The bottom line is that this year I listened to it over the course of a few commutes (by the by, I have a job in Spearfish these days, and what do you mean I don't write often enough here to keep you up to date? I know, I know...) and this year, for no clear reason, I found myself wondering so much more about Fred. For those who don't remember the story, Fred is Scrooge's nephew. We only learn a few things about Fred -- he is the son of Scrooge's only sister and his only living kin, he's not particularly rich or well off, and he is unendingly kind. We don't know h
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