Author: Andrew Huey

The Great American Read results

The Great American Read PBS series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, with To Kill A Mockingbird as the number one book on the list. Here’s a link to the results page for the full list. When the series started, with a special back in June, I joined a Goodreads group related to it, and set myself a challenge to read 13 books from the list, before the show ended. I didn’t quite meet that challenge, but I managed to read 12 books from the list.

Here’s a list of the books I read during the challenge:

  1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  2. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  3. The Martian by Andy Weir
  4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  5. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  6. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  7. Ghost,
  8. Patina,
  9. and Sunny, all by Jason Reynolds
  10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
  11. 1984 by George Orwell
  12. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

So that’s not bad, for my summer reading this year. Several of those books are pretty short, but there are a few longer ones in there too. And a few of them were re-reads. (And I’m not sure if the whole Track series by Jason Reynolds counts as “on the list”, or just the first one, Ghost, but I’m counting them all.) I would have hit my 13-book goal if I hadn’t decided to read Lonesome Dove with the Goodreads group. That’s 900 pages long. (I’m about two-thirds of the way through that.) And I’ve been slowly working my way through Catch-22 at the same time. (I’m about a quarter of the way through that one.)

The Goodreads groups is continuing, and will be reading The Lovely Bones this month and To Kill A Mockingbird next month. I’ve purchased copies of both of those, and plan to read them with the group, though I really want to finish either Lonesome Dove or Catch-22 before starting a new book.

And since I’m posting lists, here’s a list of books from the main 100-book list that I’d like to read, but still haven’t read yet:

  1. Great Expectations
  2. Frankenstein
  3. Game of Thrones (series)
  4. The Picture of Dorian Gray
  5. Invisible Man
  6. Gulliver’s Travels
  7. Ready Player One
  8. The Intuitionist

There are others that I’d probably find interesting, but this is the short list I came up with, after watching the series and reviewing the list again.

Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between reading physical books and ebooks, and between buying books and getting them from the library. All other things being equal, I’d almost always prefer to read the Kindle version for most novels, but I balk at paying the prices that they charge for some Kindle books, especially for older book that (in my mind at least) shouldn’t be priced as high as new books. In cases where I can get the ebook from the library, that’s always the best option. I get the benefits of reading on my Kindle, for free. When I can’t, I’ll often buy a used copy from eBay or Amazon for $4.

Instapaper Premium

Speaking of changes in paid internet services, Instapaper’s new owner has started charging for premium subscriptions again. When they were acquired by Pinterest, they discontinued premium subscriptions and made all features available for free. But the new owner needs to make some money off the service, so they’ve re-instituted Instapaper Premium. I went ahead and signed up for it, at $30/year. As with Flickr Pro, I don’t mind paying for a service, if it means I don’t have to put up with ads or spam or having my data sold off, and if it means that the service has a sustainable business model that will keep it from going under.

more Flickr changes

I’ve been a Flickr user for quite some time. They’ve had some ups and downs over the years, but I have a whole lot of photos there, so I’ve stuck with them. I was happy when they were bought by SmugMug earlier this year. Not much has happened with that, but it looks like some stuff will be changing soon.

First, they’re finally ditching their tie to Yahoo’s login system. That’s long overdue. I’d really like to nuke my Yahoo account, but I’ve had to keep it a lot longer than I’ve wanted to, since my Flickr account is tied to it. They’re also making some other changes, which all sound good, but honestly, just getting off Yahoo’s login system is my main concern.

I’m pretty hopeful about Flickr’s future. The SmugMug CEO is saying a lot of the right things:

Unlike most photo sharing services, SmugMug is photographer-focused and has been for more than 16 years. We are privately owned and operated. We never raised venture capital to grow our business and we don’t make money selling our customers or their data to advertisers.

And:

At SmugMug, we also charged a fair price when others were pretending “free” was actually free. We work for you, not investors or advertisers. We don’t mine you or your photos for data to re-sell or advertise to you. Your data, and your photos, are yours. You’ve entrusted them to us to keep safe. We take that responsibility very seriously and so does Flickr.

That’s what I’m looking for. I don’t mind paying for Flickr Pro. I just want someplace safe and stable to put my photos.

Batman: TAS on Blu-Ray

I’m tempted to pick up the new Batman: TAS Blu-Ray set, but it’s a bit expensive, and I probably won’t get around to watching it anyway. I have the first season on DVD, which I bought many years ago, and probably haven’t watched that yet. (Of course, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of the series, more than once, back when it was on TV.)

broken links

I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin on my site today, and spent probably too much time fixing broken links. Doing blog maintenance like this feels like productive work, but really isn’t. But it’s kind of fun, and lets me stroll down memory lane a bit, rediscovering stuff like Get Your War On, which I’d forgotten about.

A lot of dead links can be easily replaced with ones from the Wayback Machine, and the plugin helps with that. But some of the links on this blog seem to have completely disappeared from the internet, which makes me a little sad. Nothing lasts forever, I guess, even an interesting review of The Two Towers from a newspaper in Las Vegas that apparently only existed from 2003 to 2005. Oh well.

I’ve been linking to Wikipedia, the NY Times, and Amazon a lot lately. I think (and hope) that those sources will be around for a while, and that they won’t mess with their URL schemes in a way that breaks old links. (For the most part, they haven’t, at least recently.)

The plugin has found more than 600 broken links so far, and I’m not even sure if it’s done crawling the site yet. I need to be careful about getting too wrapped up in this, or I’ll be doing it all day. (Or maybe all week.) I’ve actually talked myself into deleting some old posts, where the links are dead, and I didn’t really say anything interesting about them. That’s always been hard for me to do, but I’ve got more than 2000 posts on this blog, so it makes sense to cull some useless ones out occasionally.

Meditation progress update

I’ve been doing pretty good with meditation since my last update. I’ve been meditating for about 10 minutes, 3 or 4 times a week, usually with just the plain timer from Insight Timer. I’ve tried a few guided meditations, but haven’t found any new good ones, really. I was feeling pretty good about this, but then I saw the Kickstarter for The Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz. In the intro video, she mentions that she meditated every day for a year, except for the day she went in for brain surgery. So, heck, if she can meditate every day while dealing with a brain tumor, I should probably be able to meditate every day while dealing with my significantly less serious life problems.

Her Every Day Calendar is pretty cool, but I don’t think I want to spend $300 on it. I’ll stick with tracking stuff on my iPhone. But I have a lot of respect for her, both for making cool things and for handling her brain tumor so well. I’d be a mess if I had to deal with that. (Heck, I’ve been dealing with a relatively minor car problem for the last three weeks, and that’s almost broken me.)

Uber and Lyft

This is probably going to be a rambling, incoherent, post. I woke up at 4am this morning, and couldn’t really get back to sleep. Now it’s almost 7am, and I’m trying to have a normal breakfast and proceed with a normal weekday. It’s a little abnormal already, since my car is acting up and the dealer can’t look at until Monday, so I’m probably working from home today. I used Lyft to get to and from work yesterday, and I could do that today too, but I don’t know if I really want to spend $40 just to sit in a cubicle all day and not talk to anyone, which is pretty much what I did yesterday. (It was a productive day. I got a lot of programming done. But zero interaction with coworkers.) On the other hand, if I spend all day alone in my apartment, I might go stir-crazy.

I’ve used Uber several times recently, in New York, during NYCC, and back at home, due to my ongoing car problems. It’s convenient, but a bit expensive. Uber has a pretty bad reputation, of course. I was just looking for a link to include here, but there’s so much bad PR for Uber, you can just search the NY Times and find a bunch of examples. (Here’s one at random.)

I installed the Lyft app on my iPhone a few months ago, but never got around to trying it. So I gave it a shot yesterday. There aren’t as many drivers working in my area as there are for Uber, but there were enough to get me rides back and forth to work yesterday without any hassle. And if you search the NY Times for Lyft, you get mostly financial articles, and none of the bad PR stuff that you see about Uber. So maybe Lyft is a better option, at least from a moral standpoint.

There are a lot of “Uber vs. Lyft” articles on the web. Here’s a pretty reasonable one from How-To Geek. From a user’s standpoint, they’re really similar.

Either way, I feel bad for the drivers. They’re not making a lot of money. Most of the drivers I’ve had recently, when I’ve talked to them, say that they’re working multiple jobs. And, in many cases, I don’t think any of those jobs are providing heath insurance.

UPDATE: I was afraid to hit “publish” on this post this morning, given how loopy I was, but it’s now 7pm, and I’m rereading it, and it’s not that bad. I did decide to go in to work this morning, using Lyft to get there and Uber to get back home. I think I’ve decided that Uber drivers, in this area at least, are a little better than Lyft drivers. Anyway, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t drive today. I was pretty tired in the morning, and again in the evening. I think I was fairly productive at work, at least. But again, I really didn’t have much human interaction and could easily have worked from home.

 

 

Lazy Sunday

I had tentative plans to go in to NYC for the Frankenstein exhibit at the Morgan today, but it turned into one of those mornings where I couldn’t quite talk myself into getting all my stuff together and heading for the train station. Instead, I finished reading a big Avengers hardcover, then spent way too much time writing a review of it on Goodreads. I’m kind of in a mood to read some more Marvel stuff now, so I might spend the afternoon reading Avengers vs. X-Men, which I have in Comixology.

DC was really pushing their new DC Universe service at NYCC last weekend; every DC-related panel started with the DC Universe trailer, and the service got mentioned a lot in some of those panels. I’ve alternately been talking myself into and out of signing up for the service. On the one hand, I’m a long-time DC fanboy, so there’s probably lots of stuff there I’d like. On the other hand, I still have a huge pile of unread comics and graphic novels that I haven’t read yet, and DVDs and Blu-rays that I haven’t watched. And I haven’t watched the most recent season of any of the Marvel shows on Netflix. So I already have a lot of superhero content to consume, that I’ve already paid for. But at $75/year for the service, that comes out to $1.44 per week, which is less than the price of a single comic book. So… maybe.

I’ve been curious about the game Stardew Valley since I heard it discussed on an NPR podcast a couple of months ago. (Here’s the article that they mentioned on the podcast. And here’s another NPR article that makes me wonder what kind of Stardew player I’d be…) I was kind of hoping that the game would have been available for the Apple TV, since I have a game controller for my Apple TV that I never get to use for anything. But no. It’s available for most other platforms, including Mac, PC, PS 4, Switch, and XBox One. The only game console I currently own is a PS 3, so I’m out of luck there. I could buy it for Mac or PC, but I was looking for something I could play on the TV. I saw an article a few days ago announcing that it was coming out for iOS, so I had some hope that would include Apple TV. Still no; just iPhone and iPad. And I saw that Minecraft for Apple TV has been discontinued for lack of players. So if Apple TV can’t support something as popular as Minecraft, it probably can’t support any big, interesting, game. Oh well. Maybe I should buy one of the current-generation video game consoles, but I just don’t think I would use it enough to justify the price. (I was really hoping Apple TV gaming would take off at some point.)

I didn’t make it to the big Doctor Who panel at NYCC last weekend. I’m sure it would have been fun, but it sounded like it was going to be very crowded and I was too tired to deal with that. The full panel is up on YouTube now, on the official Doctor Who channel, so I’ll have to watch that later. I watched the first episode last week, and liked it enough that I’m looking forward to this week’s episode. I don’t get BBC America, so I get the episodes through iTunes, which means I don’t get it until tomorrow. I’m not liking this new Sunday night schedule for the show. When it was on a Saturday night schedule, I could watch the new episodes on Sunday afternoon. Now I have to wait until Monday after work. Well, at least it gives me something to look forward to after work on Monday.

OK, so this turned into a long rambling post, it’s almost noon, and I’ve killed my entire Sunday morning reading comics, listening to music, and writing pointless reviews and blog posts. Eh, there’s worse ways I could have spent the morning. Time for lunch.

NYCC 2018 haul


So I did give up on the idea of going back to NYCC today. I checked out of my hotel in the morning and went straight home. Here’s a photo of my modest haul from the con. Mostly trade paperbacks out of discount boxes, plus one Warren Ellis series, also out of a discount box. (Also, a signed Zorro novel by Peter David and a signed Motor Girl omnibus from Terry Moore.)

I think one of my main takeaways from this con is that I’m too old for a full four-day con in NYC. Especially if I’m not staying overnight for Sunday night. The thought of checking out of the hotel this morning, going down to the con, then having to come back to the hotel, pick up my bags, then get back to Penn Station and take the train home in the evening was a bit too much for me.

On the plus side, I get to enjoy a little of the Somerville street fair today, and watch the Giants game!

NYCC day three

Since I wrote up posts for days one and two, I might as well write one for day three also. As planned, I did in fact spend most of the day at the con, arriving a little after 10am and leaving a little after 6pm.

I wandered the floor for a little while in the morning, before it got too crowded. And I went through Artist’s Alley again, and stumbled across Terry Moore. I bought a signed copy of Motor Girl from him. (And that’s really all I bought, unless you count overpriced Javits food and coffee.)

I went to several panels today. The first was a “Coffee and Comics” panel, with a pretty random assemblage of people, including DMC (from Run-DMC), Larry Hama, Amy Chu, Sean Von Gorman and Ming Chen (from Comic Book Men). They did, indeed, talk about coffee a bit. But mostly they talked about comics, so that was fun. (There was a Will Eisner panel at the same time as that one, and I would have gone to that one instead, if I’d been paying more attention to the schedule. But I’m glad I went to the Coffee & Comics panel.)

Next, I went to a DC World’s Finest panel. (It didn’t have anything to do with the old World’s Finest title. It was just a random panel name.) They had a variety of creators at that one, similar to the previous night’s All-Star panel.

After that one, I went to the DC Superman 80th panel. I was expecting that to be more of a historical overview panel, as these anniversary panels often are, but instead it was a conversation between Brian Bendis and Frank Miller about Superman (moderated by Dan DiDio, as many of the DC panels were.) It was actually very interesting to hear the two of them talk about Superman. I’m now a little more interested in Miller’s upcoming Superman project, given some of the stuff he said on the panel.

I stayed in the same room after that one for the Adam Savage panel, which is the only non-comics-related panel I went to. He showed a trailer for Mythbusters Jr. and talked about that a bit. He also talked about cosplay and stuff like that. And he spent about half the time answering questions. I’ve seen him live a couple of times before, and he’s always great. Very energetic, funny, and kind.

Lastly, I went to a Brian Bendis spotlight panel. I had meant to go to a Tom King spotlight, but they switched up the schedule, so the Bendis panel was moved from earlier in the day. (I’m not sure what happened to the Tom King panel.) Anyway, that was also pretty cool, but the end result is that I saw a lot of Bendis over the last couple of days. I haven’t actually read any of his DC work yet, but now I’m looking forward to some of it.

I guess that was only four panels, but it seemed like a lot. I was going to go back to the con for a StarTalk All-Stars panel at 8pm, but I’m too tired for that.

Looking back, I seem to have gone to a lot of DC panels this weekend. I haven’t gone to any Marvel panels, or really any panels from any other publisher. That wasn’t intentional, and some of that is just timing. But a lot of that is that I’m not really that interested in anything coming out of Marvel right now. I’m interested in a few things coming out from Image, Dark Horse, and other smaller publishers, but there weren’t any panels related to them that were convenient for me to attend.

I’m writing this on Saturday night, unsure about whether or not I’m going to actually go back to the con on Sunday. I have my badge, but there’s not much I’m interested in tomorrow. I’ve seen just about everything I want to see on the show floor. And there aren’t any must-see panels tomorrow. There’s the big Doctor Who panel at MSG, but that’s probably going to be crazy. There are probably people lined up for it already.

So I may just check out of my hotel tomorrow morning and go home. Or I might get a second wind, and/or remember something I want to buy, or whatever. (Or I might just want to delay re-entering the real world a bit longer, since I see we apparently now have a horrible new addition to the Supreme Court? Sigh.)