tracker7 | Entries tagged with reading

It's the Winter Solstice, the first day of winter, Longest Night, what-have-you. I've been very lazy, just reading and doing laundry after driving home from Lexington. It's been nice.

Last night was the annual LeNoue extended-family Christmas party. I wasn't sure if I was going until Thursday afternoon, glad I went, though. Most times, I drive back to Louisville after things wrap up; this time I decided to get a hotel room for the night and that was a good choice. It actually led me to leave the party earlier than I had planned because the thought of that quiet room and big comfortable bed kept running through my head and I surrendered to it. Felt great, a worthwhile little treat to myself.

I'm probably going to pass on the Fallout game. The setting is interesting enough, but I'm at least a generation older than the other players and a couple of them are just a little too twee for my tastes. The Numenera game looks better, and it's a Discord/Roll20 game which has the huge selling point of, when the game is over I just put the iMac to sleep and walk three feet to my bed.

I'm about halfway through The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII. That is a title-and-a-half, dear reader, and it's a heck of a book. Deep dives into individual players' stories, the value of pro baseball as a morale booster for servicemen and civilians alike, FDR's love of the sport, and all of the politicking involved in keeping the game going. Good stuff.

Also reading the second marvel G.I. Joe compendium. This one includes a dozen or so Special Missions issues and I'm very much looking forward to revisiting those.

Early escape on Friday was good. I did get in some time with a couple of my favorite clients before going home and reading a nice chunk of Moscow X.

Went to the No Kings rally on Saturday. 4500-5000 people there, passionate but peaceful. No signs of trouble all afternoon.

Nerd Louisville board meeting after that. Nothing exciting. I'm not running for re-election at the end of the year. I haven't engaged with the position very much, and, honestly, I'm happier running games than being in this leadership and organizational role.

Drove to Liberty to see Dad after the meeting. Early Father's Day dinner and good talk. Spent the night, played with the dog, did some other stuff. Good times.

This will be a short week. June 19 is a holiday for us, and I took a vacation day on the 20th for a nice four-day weekend. Got some things on the schedule, and some time blocked out to just allow myself to recharge.

This weekend was the twice-or-so-yearly Hex family retreat. This time around we assembled at Lake Cumberland - and it may say something about our luck that we were at a lake on a weekend when the regional forecast called for six to twelve inches of rain along with the chance of tornadoes. We sure got the rain, and it was plenty stormy sometimes, but we had a good time playing games and eating and telling stories.

Saturday night had one of those great moments. After the second game of the day and before dinner, Josh and Leighton and I were standing on a covered deck looking over the lake. The most recent storm front had blown through, there was some light rain and wind, and just this energy. We were having a great talk, watching clouds and rain. It was unquantifiable, but it just was the best feeling.

I gave Shadowdark another shot, mostly because Josh is a heck of a GM. I'm still not sold on the game. I don't dislike it, but it's just adequate for me. DCC and OSE are better for what I want, except for OSE's Vancian spellcasting. Shadowdark's simple character classes are a selling point, but on the whole, I don't really get what the fuss is about.

I read Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye instead of playing Runequest, and damned if that wasn't a heck of a good novel. Scalzi presents an utterly ridiculous event - the Moon turning into cheese - and plays the results completely straight. I loved it.

Valentine's Day ate the CP Red game, and that was okay. Saturday saw heavy rain and thunderstorms and that was good for lying in bed and reading. Sunday's board meeting was blessedly moved online, and weather in Florida did a number on the Daytona 500, so, hey, more reading!

Packed my duffel and took off Monday morning. Drove down to the Corvette Museum, a long-overdue visit. The very fast machines are the focus of the museum, of course, and there is plenty of space given over to the people who designed and engineered and promoted them. I found myself taken with the story of Zora and Elfi Arkus-Duntov - they were a heck of a couple, Elfi was the first Corvette Girl, and she would spell out Zora's name on her body with adhesive medical tape and go sunbathing so his name would be on her. It was a good visit.

Drove to Dad's after the museum. Spent the night with him, then lit out for Dayton early Tuesday morning. I hadn't been to the Air Force museum in several years, and while it was nice to see some of the new exhibits (a Titan 4 stack and a Su-27), I found myself kinda bored. Beautiful machines and stories, but I've seen most of them, you know? And the Presidential aircraft gallery just kept reminding me of that orange bastard, and ... ugh. Hotel was nice.

Wednesday morning, up and off to Point Pleasant for the Mothman Museum. US35 is a heck of a fast road, and would have been even faster without the winter storm I drove through. Fun visit to Point Pleasant, then headed back to Louisville. WV2 was an easy drive down to Huntington, and I-64 brought me home one more time.

Ran an errand with a friend this morning. Going to take care of some business this afternoon - taxes and car licenses and REAL ID documents. No plans for tomorrow, maybe back to BG for a train show on Saturday, then the first ALIEN session at Slur on Sunday evening. Back to work on Monday. Can't wait to see what nonsense went down while I've been gone.

That's a lie. I just don't care all that much.

I read Burning Chrome over the last week. The Sprawl stories are the backbone of the collection, and why I bought the book so many years ago. The other stories are good work, too, of course, and a passage from "The Winter Market" stuck in my head this time around. Lise, the brilliant and broken braindance artist, asks the narrator, Casey, if he wants to have sex with her. Lise has some neurological disorder that requires her to use an exoskeleton for mobility, and she can't feel anything. Casey asks her, after her offer, that very question - "Could you feel it, if I did?" Lise responds, "No, but sometimes I like to watch." There is so much bitterness and hatred in that brief exchange. It's so fucked up.

There's some kind of respiratory virus going around, and it got hold of me and I do not recommend it. It's like a mild case of flu that just won't go away. Been doing all the standard remedies - fluids, rest, vitamins, all that. Reminded again that orange juice is just delicious and I should drink more of it.

The funk really hit me on Friday. I went home early, had to skip out on the staff holiday party and cancel the evening's Cyberpunk game. Went to bed early that night, woke up way too early, slept and rested as much as I could, repeated last night/this morning.

Tomorrow's going to be a day. Got one of my unhoused clients into one of our transitional houses and I'm moving him in. The other resident has overstayed his time there, has an apartment lined up and paid for through Section 8, but doesn't want to move. Going to have to lean on him a little bit to get this sorted out.

I'm probably going to spend tomorrow night here to recover. Housemate is leaving for his family stuff before my workday ends and having the place to myself for the night sounds delightful. I'll wake up early, alarm or no, get things together, and light out. Should be a good getaway, with a couple of NFL games on Christmas Day.

Read a couple of stories from Burning Chrome yesterday, finished Mechatron (MYZ) today, and started Those Dark Places this evening. Mechatron's interesting, and I guess I'll get more out of it when I read the other MYZ books from a recent bundle purchase.

I am trying to keep my hopes managed, but yesterday's dual-position interview felt good. I feel like I pitched myself well. I think that the panel liked me - I was told that if I passed the first round of interviewing, they would ask for references on Monday ... and the email asking for them hit my inbox this morning, with a follow-up request late this afternoon.

So, I threw out a request for reference on my socials, to use the parlance of our time, and got so many offers. An embarrassment of riches. Narrowed it down to a grad school friend who's now at the NIH, a good friend from my time at the paper, and my practicum mentor. Sent those in a couple of hours ago. Let's see what happens.

I'm feeling better about tomorrow's interview - also interviewing for two positions at the same time. I sure wouldn't turn down what I sat for yesterday, but if I'm being honest, tomorrow is what I really want. Better money, more inline with my education and interests.

I'm getting hopeful about this, no matter how much I'm trying not to. I'm telling myself that some of this is clearing books at the end of the calendar year. But then I think about the call asking if I was interested in a job that I hadn't actually applied for, and then there was the impromptu phone interview leading to an in-person appointment next week and ... well, here's hoping.

What else is going on. Started reading Lash-Up, a technothriller by Larry Bond. So far, it's heavy on the tech and slowly building up the thrills. Finished watching Hunters on Prime, and started Citadel. I'm dropping Prime after the last Thursday night NFL game of the season - not even watching tonight's Patriots-Steelers game - so, trying to get in as much of that service's viewing as I can before reupping Apple+.

Halloween season has improved my mood a little bit. I've found myself wishing that I'd renewed the ol' WoW subscription because of the holiday-themed stuff that Blizzard does - I've found myself wishing that for a few years now, so clearly it's not that big a deal.

I finally got around to getting a borrower's card at the county library. Checked out William Forstchen's One Second After and its sequels. Given my mental state last week, that may have been a mistake because these are hard reads. Great ideas, very good writing, but fuck me these characters suffer.

Louisville beat Duke this afternoon - a solid 23-0 thrashing. After last week's horrible game against Pitt, this was quite welcome.

Got things prepped for NerdLouvia next weekend. A buddy's putting me up for the weekend, and that's awesome. Going to run a couple of DCC sessions, and after that taking a crash course in Coriolis for January's con.

I'm going to take a break from Goodreads and Booksirens. The last couple of books I've gotten for review haven't been any fun and were not very good. They're better than anything I've written lately just by virtue of actually existing, but ... yeah. What I said. The collection of Lovecraft mythos detective stories I'm slogging through now is just flat out boring.

On the other hand, Alien: Inferno's Fall is moving along quite nicely, and the Xenomorphs haven't even shown up yet. I got to hear the author, Philippa Ballantine, read from some of her other work at Butcher Cabin Books a while back, and was taken with her writing.

Still reading The Dracula Dossier: Director's Handbook for Night's Black Agents, too. Like any of Ken Hite's work, it's rich and detailed and just goshdarn fun to read. There's a ton of material about Romania, and I wish that I could ask the guys from the MCC game about their potential visits to some of the places and the social and political details discussed in the book.

I hate writing resumes, apropos of nothing. I'm not good at selling myself, I don't know the codes and phrases that automated systems use to select whichever candidate gets through the filter.

Today's Dad's birthday. He's on his way back from somewhere in Missouri, which is somehow appropriate. 76 years old, still acing his physicals and able to wrangle 30 tons of truck and trailer and cargo like it's an extension of himself. Amazing.

Got the printer ink, and installed the necessary cartridge. And then got an e-mail notifying me that the cartridges I'd ordered the night before had shipped. Top of my game, y'all, top of my game.

Got the Escape's AC compressor replaced, and that wasn't cheap, but it has sure enough made longer drives more tolerable. Well, more than tolerable.

Like today, for example. It was Dungeon Crawl Classics Day, and that meant a drive to Louisville to run a game for people. And it was a good day. Three Judges (and therefore three games) and twenty players in total. I had a good time, but friends, a two-hour drive, then a five-hour game with seven players, then a two-hour drive home has made for a very tired fella.

So, I'm gonna make sure I can sleep, thanks to my friend diphenhyrdramine, read a little bit of a decent cyberpunk novel, and call it a weekend. Back in a couple of days.

I've had some decent days lately. Rode around with Dad on a clumsy but ultimately successful attempt to find a boat repair place someone had suggested to him. I'm continuing to burn through the Netflix DVD queue before that service sadly comes to an end in a few months - Tubi has helped with that, too.

Got a lead on a Delta Green game, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that shakes out. I thought that last night was going to be the session, but I misread the store's calendar. Saved myself a drive when I checked again before heading out and saw that last night was D&D night, and, no thanks. So, I ordered a pizza and settled in for some reading ... and that became some writing, and hokie-smokes did that feel good.

Today started pretty well. Dad needed a few things for some baking wanted to do for the reunion today, so off we went to the grocery. After that, I felt the need for some tea and the Escape needed fuel, so stopped at the large convenience store/small truckstop for such. On the way out of the store, my clumsiness reared its head - I smacked my left wrist against a doorframe and popped the screen right off my smartwatch. Its battery had started to swell up (it's six years old, after all) and had pushed the screen up a little bit, so it was probably just going to happen eventually. Anyway, it wasn't reparable by my hands, so I just replaced it this afternoon. It's currently syncing with the phone, and I have a shipping label ready for sending the old one off for recycling.

The reunion was okay. I had pie. That was about it.

It's Memorial Day weekend. Somewhere along the line, it became a thing here in the South(ish) to add flowers and decorations and whatnot to the graves of any and all relatives. I'm not much for that, but since I failed to do so for Mother's Day, I got a nice simple bouquet for Mom's grave. It's pretty, quite colorful, and she would have loved it.

Goshdarn it, Mom, I miss you today.

The Indy 500's tomorrow, and coverage of the Monaco Grand Prix, too, so there's my afternoon soundtrack sorted out. Dad's already promised to not ask me to go to church with him.

Monday's the holiday itself, and the Honor Guard Dad's part of will have a part in the town's observance. That, I will definitely attend. He's proud of this continued service and universe knows it does my heart good to see him enjoying this.

The phone and new watch are still syncing, so I think I'm going to get some reading in (Magician: Master, by Raymond Feist, for the record).

After yet another six-day 52-hour week, I felt no guilt about ignoring two calls to cover callouts or no-shows this weekend. I had plans, and I needed the rest. I'm gone in twelve days, and I'm not letting HR's inability or refusal to do its job become anything like my problem.

Gave some books to a co-worker - better they go to Russ, who I know will read and enjoy them than they sit on shelves at Half-Price Books for who knows how long. I had that little hoarder/collector voice in the back of my head, but it got shut up in a hurry. A couple of local gamers have asked about some of the RPG stuff I'm offloading, so maybe Noble Knight won't be getting that much of the collection after all. And I've even had a few nibbles on the X-Wing collection.

I've torn through a few novels this week. A Jack Reacher novel. Murder mystery set on Nantucket Island. The third Southern Reach novel. And I'm a few dozen pages into a Conan novel by S. M. Stirling. Varying quality, but all enjoyable enough.

Kansas City won the Super Bowl in a similar fashion to the conference championship win - a last-minute field goal. I’m happy enough with the outcome - my fandom is ultimately pretty casual, but I like the Chiefs well enough and I think Andy Reid’s a good coach on and off the field, and the Eagles fan base is terrible, so yeah, good for the Chiefs. Also, KC barbecue over cheesesteaks any day of the week.

Since the S&W doesn’t get enough use, I bought it a little friend - a compact Taurus, also in .40S&W. It feels a tiny bit rougher than the bigger pistol, and lord knows it feels different in my octave-and-a-half hands, but the first hundred rounds fed and fired just fine.

Patiently waiting for Free League and Goodman to acknowledge a couple of demo game reports. I’m not in any kind of hurry - I still haven’t sent a sell list to Noble Knight or boxed up a couple shelves’ worth of books for Half-Price Books. Going to be a good-sized purge again.

Well, heck, let’s dive into this. There’s a Harry Potter game out, and it’s causing quite the stirs, plural. First, it seems to be not very good, but it’s getting high numerical review scores because reviewers don’t want to get blackballed by studios. Then, there’s JK Rowling’s broad spectrum awfulness, and boy-howdy is there plenty of that to go around.

I’ve never really gotten the Potter fandom. I was in my mid-20s when the first book was published in the US, finishing my undergrad degree, and not much interested in the kid-lit that a lot of my peers were getting into. I tried the first book a few years later, and tossed it aside after a hundred pages. Could not give a damn about any of the characters, and that’s the kiss of death for me as a reader. The near-virulence of the fanbase turned me off, too. Say you haven’t read their tomes, and they look at you like you’ve grown a spare head or something. And FFS, if you’re a grown-ass adult and you still call someone a “muggle” or WTFever, just, ugh.

Good thing there’s no shortage of other things to read, watch, and play.

I finished reading another of John Joseph Adams' big SF/fantasy anthologies a couple of nights ago and promptly dove into Authority, the second Southern Reach novel. Same unsettling dreamlike feel as Annihilation.

Streams cross, and while reading this, some related ideas from the Symbaroum setting started bubbling up. There are hints that the great dark forest in Symbaroum is physically as well as spiritually corrupting. Going to give that some thought.

It's Halloween, my favorite holiday. It's a beautifully gloomy day - rainy and cool and leaves falling and all the good stuff. No parties, of course - I'm not a holiday party kind of guy.

Some reading - after seeing the movie who knows how many times, I finally got around to reading Something Wicked This Way Comes. Heck of a good book, and there's just no way not to see Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark. Bradbury was a simply amazing writer. After an episode of Unspooled on the first Hellraiser, I decided to dive into some Clive Barker. Years ago, I read some comics adaptations of his Books of Blood, and one of the stories stuck with me since - "The Skins of the Fathers." The prose original is maybe creepier than the illustrated version I read so long ago; Barker has a talent for making his monsters more sympathetic than they should be - Cabal/Night Breed, for example. Anyway, I'm reading through the Books of Blood on quiet nights and quite enjoying the trip.

Went to Liberty to see Dad over the weekend. A pretty good visit, even if we didn't do much of anything.

NerdLouvia is this weekend. I feel like I'm prepared enough for my games - just have to keep track of how Panic rolls trigger and what they cause to happen.

For All Mankind's third season was really good. I think that the story has progressed enough that some of the first-season characters will have realistically aged out of further stories, and some of them have already met their ends in one fashion or another.

I'm keeping the AppleTV subscription for a little longer. There are a few originals I want to check out before moving on to other services. Right now, I'm a couple of episodes into Foundation. It's not bad, but at the same time, it's not setting my world on fire. I'm sure that I've read at least part of the novel series, way back when. Thing is, I don't have a great appreciation for Asimov's writing. His ideas, sure, but very much not his prose. A friend was more than a little critical of the TV series, and okay cool; he has a much deeper attachment to classic SF lit than I do.

Far from a classic, but darned enjoyable is my current read - Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. It's not quite as engaging as Gideon or Harrow, but it really seems to be moving towards something big, and it's filling some of the history of the Locked Tomb.

It's already been a long week. Big-time maintenance work on Saturday evening, blocked for 12 hours. It went very smoothly, hooray, and I went home after eight hours. 12 hours last night, though. I'm refusing any non-emergency time this coming weekend - this is two in a row, and I need some time for myself. Plus, there's the DCC game Friday evening (my third as a Road Crew member), and some goings on at TLGS Saturday that I'd like to check out. And maybe I'd just like to lie on the couch and recharge.

This morning is darn near my ideal seasonal weather. A little under 50F, cloudy, gentle breeze. It's very quiet, the drive home didn't make me want to blow the bridges and mine the Ohio. It won't last, but right now, what a lovely time.

The distributor finally got my copy of Tales of the Red (CP Red) to the LGS. There is some absolute gold in this book. The first two missions give two very different takes on cyberpsychosis. One is a straightforward killing spree with a strong horror element; the other is a twisted and a little bit sad story of delusional love. There's a technothriller op, relics of the old Net, old allies from the Forlorn Hope. There are a couple of clunkers, at least to my tastes, but the good far far outweighs the less-than-good.

I've taken a dive into Alien novels this week. Colony War was a good quick read, plenty of action and horror. I'm about halfway through Pat Cadigan's novelization of William Gibson's screenplay for Alien 3 - the unproduced screenplay. It's far from perfect, but it's a better Alien story than what we got all those years ago.

I really don't like Alien 3. It's a well-made movie, but I don't think it's a good Alien movie/story at all. For a long time, my dislike of it led to a dislike of the director, and I wasn't fond of Fancher's other movies, either - I think Seven is just misery porn with good performances and great cinematography. But then, I saw Zodiac, and thought it was just brilliant coming and going.

There was monkey business, of course. Had to work a 12-hour shift last night, and it felt longer. I'm justifying things here - Dad had some festival commitments, so we wouldn't have had much time together. I probably won't to see him for another couple of weeks now. The weekend after Archon, at the earliest.

I finished reading Heat 2 Friday night. Really liked it - it continues the film's mix of deep character study, criminal and police procedural, and roaring action. I wasn't fully sold on the leader of a Chicago home-invasion crew escaping the wrath of both Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley for several years, but he was a smart villain, so it worked.

Now I'm reading The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal. Interesting alt-history. Under President Dewey, the NACA puts an American satellite in orbit in the early 1950s. Soon after, a meteorite hits Chesapeake Bay, wrecking the East Coast. It's soon determined that climate changes will make Earth uninhabitable within a few generations, so a massive planetary colonization effort begins. Solid writing so far, and Kowal doesn't flinch away from the racism and sexism of the era.

Gods, I'm tired. I think I'm going to finish putting away laundry, watch a little football, and go to bed.

The second season of Star Trek: Picard was pretty good Trek. Better than the first, I think. Time-travel stories are risky by nature, and this one has some hefty changes in the future history. Being Trek, of course, canon is flexible, and there's always the out of creating an alternate timeline.

Strange New Worlds got off to a good start. The first two episodes were rock-solid Trek. I love the cast, especially Jess Bush's Christine Chapel. Anson Mount is a really good Christopher Pike.

The drawback to watching these shows on my TV is the Paramount+ app. On the PS4, at least, the app is hot garbage. It doesn't save logins, so I launch the app, sign into my account on the laptop, enter a code, and then I can watch something. But, the HUD stays on-screen at all times, and the audio and video lose sync far too often. So, I just watch on my iPad instead, and that'll do until I drop the subscription in a few weeks in favor of AppleTV, probably.

I'm thinking about selling off my X-Wing collection. I don't think I'll play the game again, not with any regularity, at least. I may go that route with Armada, too - I think I have two expansions sealed in box that have been sitting next to my desk for over a year.

Continuing my read of The Expanse - about 3/4 of the way through the seventh book. It continues to be darned enjoyable.

Weather in the Ohio Valley can be interesting. About four hours ago, I went out to run some errands, and it was ungodly hot - 98F, indexed at 110F. Walking a single block in that heat was painful. Then the thunderstorm rolled in, and a little while ago, the air temp had dropped to 77F. Power outages around town, including on the street behind mine. I stepped outside during the end of the rain, and it felt good out there.

Finally paid a visit to the city's newest game store. Nice place, decent selection of minis games, but it is clearly a collectibles shop before anything else. A couple of the anniversary edition G.I Joe figures tempted me - maybe another time. They have a regular minis painting night on Wednesdays - won't go tonight, but I'll keep in mind for later.

Since renewing my Paramount+ sub (with a free month!), I've torn though half of the fourth season of ST: Discovery. Enjoyable enough Trek, and I'm coming around to the further-future setting. After this, Picard and Strange New Worlds, the latter being the main reason I renewed my account to begin with.

Still really enjoying The Expanse, too.

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Roadside Picnic

Bright Ideas, Dark Futures

Go Go Gadget ClanTech

Nine Pound Hammer

The Family Business

Mood Ring

Soothing

Please Come Home

Come on Heartache

Give me Back my Wig

Cool About It

Mother Road

Love Lies Bleeding

Sky Blue Sky

Don’t Dream It’s Over

Big Time

Witchcraft

Dream Girl Evil

Into My Arms

Let my Love Open the Door

Did You Hear What They Said

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December 2025

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