On my way, I happened upon a lovely field of sunflowers, so I stopped for a few photos. None of them turned out, because I neglected to turn on the autofocus on my lens. But that’s OK, because I went back today (Friday) to scout the spot for a possible round of star trails later tonight, and I got this photo:
One sunflower, looking back
And then, after visiting with some friends in Winnipeg (thanks for the iced tea, Mike & Michelle!), I stopped in at the abandoned house near Erickson, and got about a half-hour’s worth of star trails.
Star trails above the abandoned house
It was about 2:30 AM when I got back to the cabin (hmm, I seem to have an affinity for that time…), so I started the star-trail GIMP plugin whose eventual output you see above, then went to bed.
Monday morning I got my 1,250 words done quickly, then rewarded myself with a couple more episodes of Carnivàle. (Aside: I don’t know what’s up with the à in Carnivàle, any more than I know what’s up with my friend that insisted on pronouncing it Carnivalé.)
In the afternoon I headed into town on a couple missions: I wanted to get some supplies for the cabin (milk for my morning coffee, for instance, and peanut butter for my toast), and I wanted to upload Sunday’s photos, if possible. I took my laptop to the coffee shop for the second mission, and got permission to plug it in. (The battery no longer charges, and it’s time for a new laptop, or at least a new battery.) I sat down at a table near the outlet, pulled out my laptop, and discovered that I’d left the cord back at the cabin.
At least I managed to get milk and peanut butter.
Later in the day I went for a bike ride, and snapped photos of a bush full of red berries (I think they’re probably chokecherries, but I’m not sure enough that I’m going to taste them) and some of the bison in the bison enclosure (see up top).
I think these might be chokecherries, but I’m not sure enough to try and eat them.
In the evening, after supper, I did my 1,250 words, then went to bed fairly early. I had a plan, you see: I set my alarm for 2:30 AM, with the intent of getting to the abandoned house (see Sunday’s post) to get a longer set of star trails. I wanted to get there before moonset, so that the moon would partly light the house, and then stay till after the moon had gone down.
Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. Clouds started rolling in to the north (to shoot the house, I’m shooting to the northeast), meaning that my star trail plan would be nixed. Also, I miscalculated how much moon I’d have; it had nearly set by the time I got halfway to the house.
Sighing, longing for bed, I turned around and started home. Something made me stop, though, about halfway back, at the top of a valley on the road between Minnedosa and Erickson.
The aurora were putting on a bit of a light show. I’d checked Space Weather earlier in the day, and found that there was a chance of a mild geomagnetic storm, so I kind of halfway expected it.
I stopped, and got some photos. I’m happy with what I got. At least I didn’t get up at 2:30 AM and drive 45 minutes round-trip for nothing.
A bit of a light show, between Minnedosa and Erickson
This week is my writing retreat at Minnedosa. I’ve set myself a goal of 2,500 words a day, split between a morning and an evening writing sprint. I’m also taking advantage of the clear(ish) skies to do some astrophotography.
On Sunday, I arrived in the early afternoon. I went for a visit with my landlords (whose cabin I’m borrowing for the week), then settled in at the cabin. In the evening I did my 1,250 words, then hit the road. There’s an old, abandoned house that I got a geotagged photo of last year, and I wanted to see if I could find it. I thought it’d be a great location for some night photos: the Milky Way, perhaps, or some star trails.
(The moon is closing in on full right now, and it tends to wash out the fainter stars, so if I want Milky Way, I have to wait till after moonset. That’s… difficult, since it sets somewhere around 3 or 4 AM these days. (More on that in Monday’s post.))
I wanted to find the old house while it was still light, so I left the cabin around 9 PM and drove the half-hour north, up a highway that went from pavement to gravel about ⅓ of my way to my destination. (There was another route, possibly a little longer, but I knew it’d be paved the whole way. I decided I’d take it when I returned, after dark.)
I found the house, and then, since the sun was just barely setting, went for a tour. I drove down to Neepawa, stopping at the side of the road when I saw a particularly spectacular cloud lit by the sunset (above). From there I drove back to the cabin, where I watched a couple episodes of Carnivàle, waiting for full dark.
Just around midnight I set out again. I found the house in the dark, and snapped a few photos. I’m planning to head back for more another night.
And then I went back to my home for the week, and crawled into bed around 2 AM.
Gutenberg is the new big thing coming from and for WordPress. It’s a brand-new, radically-different editor for posts.
It’s slated to be included in WordPress version 5.0.0. Currently, as I write this, WordPress is at 4.9.7. So it’s coming very very soon—possibly as soon as August of this year (ie, 2018).
It’s available as a plugin in advance, so you can try it and see what you think. So far… so far I’m liking it.
I stopped in at Co-op to get some groceries, and got in the shortest line I could find. The guy in front of me, man, he was a story.
He had a thin beard, grey eyes, and wore a basketball tank-top and a ball cap. His arms were tattooed with numbers and designs: a 12 on his left forearm, an ankh on one wrist, the word SATAN’S crawling down the inside of his right forearm.
He had a 2‑litre bottle of store-brand cream soda, violently pink, and four packages of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He paid his bill—$7.86—with a double fistful of dimes, and got 15¢ change back.
He’s got a story to tell. Probably quite a few of them, really. I just have no idea if I’m tough enough to hear them.
As a young girl, Rose Franklin falls into a hole and discovers a giant mechanical hand. As an adult, she goes to work on what has now been named Themis: a giant robot of alien origin, which, for unknown reasons, traveled to Earth sometime in the distant past, only to be disassembled and scattered around the globe.
Along the way she teams up with a couple of military pilots, a man who claims he’s descended more or less directly from aliens, a rogue geneticist, and a mysterious stranger who wields more power than literally anyone else on Earth.
But no one’s ready for what happens when the robot builders show up. Or what happens when a handful of people are transported to the builders’ homeworld.
Turns out an invulnerable giant robot can have a profound effect on the geopolitical landscape.
The novels are epistolary, told in the form of transcripted interviews, news broadcasts, personal journals, letters, and the like. Sylvain Neuvel is a master of propulsive storytelling—I read books 2 and 3 in a couple of days apiece (normally it takes me between a week and a month to read a book), and the story itself had me laughing more than once. I especially enjoyed the tone of the Mysterious Stranger’s dialogue, even though he was sometimes not a very nice person. (There are no shortage of not very nice people here, and everyone’s flawed, just like the real world.)
The story examines the consequences of discovering that, not only are we not alone in the universe, but there exist aliens quite capable of wiping out the entire human race without breaking a sweat. How do you fight against a threat like that? And what happens when flawed human beings get access to that technology?
Well, you’ll have to read the trilogy to find out. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Highly recommended, especially if you’re into first-contact yarns, sardonic humour, giant robots, or geopolitics. Oh, and linguistics.
On the weekend I finally watched Disney’s Tomorrowland. I sort-of remembered its theatre run, which was underwhelming (apparently it lost over $100 million dollars, based on its production and marketing costs vs. its box-office take).
The story in a nutshell: As a boy, Frank Walker goes to live in a retro-future paradise, till he’s booted out for some crime that remains unspecified until nearly the end of the movie. He grows up into a bitter, bitter man (played by George Clooney). Meanwhile, Casey (Britt Robertson) might be the key to Frank’s return to Tomorrowland, and also the key to, you know, staving off the seemingly inevitable end of the world. Facing off against them is Nix (Hugh Laurie) and his army of skinjobs Audio-Animatronic robots.
I thought it was a decent movie, worth a watch, even if it was unsubtle. The scene in the Texas collectibles store (Blast From the Past), where Casey squares off against evil AA ’bots Hugo* and Ursula, was chockablock with reminders that Disney bought Star Wars. Some of the AAs were pretty creepy, especially the manically-grinning leader of the Men-in-Black–styled “Secret Service” squad.
In a world that seems to prefer its entertainment on the grim & gritty side, optimistic SF is a hard sell. It has a tendency to come off preachy or heavy-handed, and this movie didn’t manage to evade those pitfalls. I’m still glad I watched it, though.
It’s an interesting companion to Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays, which I read a few months ago, in that both explore the idea of alternate futures, especially the sorts of futures we seemed to expect in the 1950s (flying cars! shining towers! personal jetpacks!).
