notes

1. I'm embarking on a long-deferred project: examining all my old 3.5" floppy disks (itself already an obsolete term then, inherited from when they were 8 inches across and actually floppy) for files worth saving onto a more useful medium. True that discarding a whole file drawer full of the things will give me needed storage space, but why I'm doing this now is for revelation at a later date. I bought a portable USB-plug drive, and all went well until the metal cover of one of the disks stripped off while I was ejecting it. Now the cover is stuck in there, and the sites I've consulted say it'd be best to give up and get a new drive. They cost $20, which is not horrific, but it's a nuisance, and I'm suffering the feeling of researchus interruptus.

2. Having observed that all 6 Hugo Short Story finalists from this year are available online, I figured I'd read them. They couldn't be easier to get, and they're all short.

After reading them, though, I think I'll pass. Two revenge fantasies in which a subject person massacres her oppressors is two too many for me. Two stories I couldn't follow at all; one of them appears to be a metaphor, but I could not figure out for what. One uses an unusual storytelling conceit I've liked better every other time I've seen it. Which leaves one that I found both comprehensible and tolerable, but I didn't think it was very good. I'm not here to condemn these stories, just to indicate my own lack of affinity. If this is the state of contemporary SF, it's not for me.

3. Oh, look, an article on two fantasy authors so obscure that, as far as I can tell, even Doug Anderson hasn't blogged on them.

4. He seems to have dropped off a few days ago, but for a while John Rateliff was giving a day-by-day blog account of what he'd be doing on the trip to Egypt he'd be taking right now if he were taking it. I think that a marvelous way to pass the time if it doesn't merely fill you with regret.

5. We received our stimulus checks. They were both automatically deposited in B's bank account, because that's what we have on file as the destination for our IRS refunds. I'm almost sorry we didn't get paper checks with DT's signature in the memo field, because then I could have written a choice verb or two before his name before depositing it. (You can write whatever you want in the memo field.)

6. I started to watch the National Theatre's stage production of Treasure Island, but I didn't get very far, not finding it any more captivating than I did the novel in childhood. I got even less far with Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, due to the impression that nothing much was happening. Why does the Phantom keep walking Christine back and forth along the catwalk? The music was not good enough to compensate for this.