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Another Parallel Prairies review

Posted on by Patrick
The cover of Parallel Prairies

Update: I’m feel­ing a lit­tle slow, eh, because I only just now noticed that it’s Amaz­ing Sto­ries that reviewed Par­al­lel Prairies. Amaz­ing Sto­ries just reviewed my writing.

Dar­ren Rid­g­ley, one of the edi­tor of Par­al­lel Prairies, just tweet­ed a link to a new review of the anthol­o­gy. It appears the review­er enjoyed my lit­tle tale of demen­tia and alien visitation:

What makes this sto­ry fun to read is Vincent’s deter­mi­na­tion to pro­tect Char­lie from the agents. […] Amus­ing. With a tinge of sadness.

R. Graeme Cameron

He also liked the anthol­o­gy as a whole:

This anthol­o­gy fea­tures a col­lec­tion of sto­ries rang­ing far wider than I antic­i­pat­ed. There is, per­haps, a Cana­da-wide ten­den­cy to under­es­ti­mate Man­i­to­ba. […] Amaz­ing what sto­ries the con­trib­u­tors wrest­ed from its soil. I con­fess this book exceed­ed my expec­ta­tions. Well worth reading.

R. Graeme Cameron

If you’d like a copy of Par­al­lel Prairies, you can get it from McNal­ly Robin­son.

The Milky Way

Posted on by Patrick
Night shot of the Milky Way

I’m still learn­ing how to process RAW images using Dark­table on Lin­ux. I think I’ve found a few good tuto­ri­als, but I need more prac­tice. I’d like to learn how to remove noise with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the sharp­ness, for exam­ple. (Maybe I need to shoot at low­er ISO and then stack and align the photos?)

Any­way, I shot this south of Bran­don on the evening of May 31st (or maybe real­ly ear­ly on the morn­ing of June 1st). Enjoy!

Ride for the Breath of Life

Posted on by Patrick
Bikers on the road between Sandy Lake and Rapid City

This week­end I joined the Bran­don Kins­men club in putting on the 2019 Ride for the Breath of Life, sup­port­ing the research done by Cys­tic Fibro­sis Cana­da.

It’s a pok­er-der­by ride, about 200km in length, with stops in Bran­don, just out­side Minnedosa, Sandy Lake, Rapid City, and then back to Brandon.

I was the offi­cial pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and so I drove the whole route, stop­ping every so often for some photos.

  • Dozens of bikes at the rest stop out­side Minnedosa
  • Approach­ing Sandy Lake
  • The route, more or less

More pho­tos

More star trails

Posted on by Patrick
Star Trails
Star Trails

You’re not get­ting tired of these, are you? I hope not, because I’m not plan­ning to stop.

This one was shot in the wee hours of Fri­day, from about 12:10 – 1:10 AM, behind cab­in 650 at Elkhorn Resort. You can see the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion streak­ing by (I saw it go over­head, too, and I waved to the crew). Also, there’s a short mete­or streak in the low­er third, on the far right.

Time­lapse of the trails. Approx. 75× actu­al speed.

Nerdy details: 219 images @ 15s, f/2.8, 16mm, ISO 800. No dark frames. Stacked using a Star­trails plu­g­in for GIMP.

Catch-22

Posted on by Patrick

I’m watch­ing the first episode of George Clooney’s adap­ta­tion of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and I’m real­iz­ing I need to reread the book.

Bike Ride

Posted on by Patrick

It’s a long week­end Mon­day here in Cana­da, so I went for a nice long bike ride today. 23km and change, in a bit under two hours. There was quite a wind out of the east, so I’m hap­py with that time.

I had my cam­era with me, and so I snapped a cou­ple pho­tos: a goose land­ing in the riv­er, above, and a train under the 1st Street bridge, below.

Train under the 1st Street Bridge

I did­n’t get a pho­to of the fam­i­ly in the not-yet-open splash park on 1st Street south of Rich­mond (Kins­men Park, I think), mak­ing do with a water-gun fight.

The Twilight Zone

Posted on by Patrick

I real­ly want to like the new The Twi­light Zone. But I think the prob­lem with an anthol­o­gy series is that you’re always start­ing from square one. Every episode requires an all-new round of expo­si­tion, and expo­si­tion is hard to do well.

I real­ly don’t like the “as you know, Sal­ly” style of expos­i­to­ry dia­logue, where char­ac­ters say things to each oth­er that they both already know, for the ben­e­fit of the audi­ence. It sticks out like the cliché sore thumb for me.

And there’s a lot of it in this first sea­son of The Twi­light Zone.

Maybe it’ll get bet­ter, but so far I’m on the sixth episode, and it’s not been liv­ing up to my hopes.

(On the plus side, the act­ing has been top-notch, across all the episodes. Even the child actors have most­ly impressed me.)

Update

Well, episode 6 — “Six Degrees of Free­dom” — was def­i­nite­ly a brighter spot, at least for me. It had some issues, sure — tech­ni­cal quib­bles on the lev­el of CBC’s SF attempt Ascen­sion, q.v., but at least they tried hard­er. (For instance, they gave a rea­son, how­ev­er ludi­crous, that the Mars ship would have arti­fi­cial grav­i­ty.) The sto­ry, though, man­age to cap­ture me and hold me till its end, even with a bit of clunky “as you know, Kather­ine” bits of infodump.

Seems I can for­give a bit of clunky writ­ing if the over­all sto­ry is good enough.