Part-time prevaricator
Today I finished reading How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse, by K. Eason, and I have to say, it was one of the best SF fairy tales I’ve read in a long time.
Continue reading “Review: How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse”
I biked about 12km this afternoon, and I took my camera along with me. I saw some geese (so many geese) and what I think was a red-winged blackbird.
I went for a short bike ride today, after I finished work: over the bridge and down to the riverbank. I managed to get a couple photos of a kayaker enjoying the weather, and I’m trying to decide which one I like better. I think I like the closer-in one, though I wish I’d focused it better. (Looking at it again, maybe I could lie and tell people I meant it to be an impressionistic image.)
(Actually, they’re both crops of the same photo.)
I also got a photo of one of the trees that died in the 2011 flood, with the new crop of willows visible behind it. That one’s at the top of this post.
The Space Weather forecast called for a slight chance of aurora and the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower, so I packed up my camera gear and went out west of town. I let the camera snap away for about half an hour before I decided I was tired and came home. I mean, it was a school night, after all.
I got one very faint meteor and no aurora to speak of, but that’s OK, I got some star trails out of it, too. And a truck passed by me on the gravel road, illuminating the field for me, so there’s that too.
Nerdy details: 113 images, 15 seconds each, 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 1600, stacked in GIMP (no dark frames).
I had an epiphany, at lunch time, about my current short story project. I have an ending, now, a nasty bull’s-eye to aim my narrative at.
What’s more, a lot of things I’d already sprinkled into the story have come into focus, especially the doctrine of true names. The protagonist has a solution to his problem, but he’s so desperate to avoid it that he’s unwilling to admit it to anyone, even himself.
I wonder if I knew the ending all along, too, and didn’t want to admit it to myself.
Photo by Simon Hattinga Verschure on Unsplash.
Listening to Metric’s “Breathing Underwater”, I suddenly realized that one of the lines — “I can see the end / But it hasn’t happened yet” — resonates pretty hard with my current work-in-progress. Like that’s a pretty pithy encapsulation of the entire theme of the story.
Also, if you haven’t encountered Metric before, you should really check them out. I haven’t heard a song from them I haven’t loved.
My sister in Winnipeg texted me yesterday, on Easter Sunday, to show me what I’ve wrought in her household. My nephew C. took inspiration from my habit of messing with their text sign, and wants to wish one and all a HAPPER YEAST.
Below are some examples of my work over the last couple years. So… am I a bad influence, or the best influence?
Forty-some minutes worth of Earth’s rotation. In the lower-left corner, you can watch the crescent moon and Venus setting; the moon is reflected, a bit, in the water that was on the field.
Nerd stuff: 153 light frames, 5 dark frames; each frame is 15 seconds, f/2.8, 11mm, ISO 800.
I’m not sure who put up a billboard with an oil painting of a moose in the woods, or why, but I know I appreciated seeing it on my bike ride yesterday.
I rode my bike about 4.29 km today. It was lovely. The weather was nice, the roads and trails were (mostly) dry-ish, and the people that I saw seemed happy to be outside.
Header photo: screenshot from MapMyRide.