To start off this week, I want to give a little shoutout to some of my fellow Neocitizens who are working on some cool projects!
- Scott over at Scott's Site has been working on a little project called Daily Cats. Almost daily pictures of cute cats with a little story. I'm always down for cat pictures!
- You all know I have a thing for old graphic websets. Pixel Moondust also has a thing for old graphics! She's created an incredible archive of both old graphics sites and backgrounds, which she's separated by color. Amazingly, there is very little overlap between our site collections. She's also put a lot of work into the background tiles pages. They all look so beautiful!
- Much like I'm going on my journey through the Godzilla movies, ChaosGoat is chronicling his journey through the books set in Larry Niven's Known Space. Really cool to read about how he got started with his love for science fiction and his description of characters in the Known Space as well as what he thinks Niven did really well at. He intends this to be a multi-part series and I am looking forward to future entries!
My past couple of entries, I've been meaning to share some links but after I wrote everything else I ran out of steam and thought, well, I'll post them next week. I'd better get them posted now otherwise "next week" will never come!
- I follow a site called MessyNessyChic and every week she posts a list of the "13 Things I Found on the Internet." A few weeks ago, the second item on her weekly list was a couple pictures of a woman's reading journal - that she kept for 80 years. I have a hard time keeping up with doing things - I can't even imagine doing it for 8 decades!
- Another site I follow is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. One of theie featurs is a Wednesday links section. At the beginning of the month, their entry had 2 links I found interesting: a deep dive into Amish romances and a really cool article on rewilding the Internet using lessons learned from ecology.
- The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas - Did you know there was a yearly competition for Excel users - in Vegas? I find this absolutely fascinating. I can use Excel, sort of. I can make the simplest of spreadsheets. Competitive Excel-ing, to me, is just bananas. Super interesting read, even if you aren't into spreadsheets.
- Lost in the Backrooms: Exploring the Internet's Creepiest Liminal Space - This is a YouTube video about liminal spaces and the digital folklore surrounding them. I was not familiar with the Backrooms until I saw this video.
All righty then, what else is going on in my life? Well, as usual, not too much!
Last week I got to meet up with some friends who are also former coworkers. We're all MRI techs and we all used to work at the same hospital and now we've all ended up someplace else! One of our group is retired and I tell you, I think she's busier being retired than she ever was working! The rest of us are still working. It was good to get together with everyone and chat.
This week is a big holiday for the US - 4th of July. It doesn't hold the same appeal for me as it did when I was a kid. Now it's mainly kind of annoying because people insist on setting off fireworks days before and after the actual 4th. Some of them, I would swear, are actually mortars. I feel so sorry for all the animals who get terrified because of the noise and the people with PTSD who find this a very trying time to get through. I do surprisingly get the day off (I work in a small, very staff-lite facility and I end up working a lot of holidays) so I am very much looking forward to my 3 day work week!
Reading
I'm in the midst of a Regency mystery/romance series (Silver Linings) by Mary Kingswood. It's got an interesting premise - a ship went down and a mysterious Benefactor has engaged a lawyer to find the family members of the men who drowned and offer them £1,000. No one knows who the Benefactor is. The sinking of the ship is the one thing that ties the books together and, of course, the lawyers have been showing up in all the books but each main character is different, although side characters will show up in different books. Right now I'm ready to start the 4th one but I thought I'd take a little break and read something different.
I borrowed Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy from the library app. I read about it on NPR's site and thought it looked interesting. Sister Holiday is a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed queer nun with a past who lives in a New Orleans convent. In this book she investigates an arson that happened at the convent school. I thought it would be so cool, both because the character sounds awesome and New Orleans is always such a lush, rich tapestry for an author to set their story in. But ... I'm just not feeling it. I don't know if I'm too much in a Regency frame of mind or what but I think, for now, this is going to go in the DNF pile. I will revisit it later - sometimes I'm not feeling a book in the moment but when I go back to it later I can't believe I didn't like it in the first place!
Watching
I claim not to watch a lot of TV but, boy, I've been watching a lot of TV lately!
Grantchester on PBS and My Life is Murder with Lucy Lawless on Acorn have both started their new seasons. I've been watching Beacon 23, a series based off books by Hugh Howey. I'm on the 6th episode and they've been going back and forth in time a little bit to set up what's been going on. It's been interesting that it hasn't been just a straight shot temporally. And I just found Slow Horses, an Apple series that has, I think, 4 seasons now? It's about spies who have messed up and are relegated to Slough House, where they can do no damage. And then they get in the middle of all the shit. Gary Oldman is their boss, a jaded old spy who hates everyone. It was so good that I watched the entire first season in one night.
Til next week!