Well, not a weekly wrap up but more like a mid-week. Or week and a half. Whatever. I just wasn't feeling it on Sunday but I kind of am now so here we go.
- I’m obsessed with icebreaking: I was trained not to hit anything – now I drive my ship into ice 24/7 - Fun interview with a ship's captain who works for the British Antarctic Survey, piloting an icebreaker. I can only imagine how incredibly satisfying it must be to hear and feel the breaking ice.
- Saving One Screen At A Time - Screensavers! Remember those? Well, maybe not a lot of you and that's a shame. My favorite After Dark version was one where marbles would fall from the top of the screen, hitting pegs on the way down. Sometimes the marble was a smiley face and it would make squeaky noises instead of plinking sounds. The article is pretty cool as it takes you through the history of screen savers.
- Subpixel Text Encoding - Did you know that each pixel on your computer monitor is really 3 sub-pixels? One red, one blue, one green. Someone used this knowledge to encode text within the pixels. Pretty neat!
Listening
- Sidedoor - The Sex Lives of Giant Pandas
- Search Engine - What Happens When a Cemetery Goes out of Business?
- Weight For It - I heard about this podcast on the Search Engine episode about flying while fat. I'm two episodes in and it's really interesting. The host, who is a fat person but wasn't always one, talks about "the nuanced thoughts of fat folks and of all folks who think about their weight all the time." I am fat folk at the moment so this is interesting not so much in that I'm learning something new but more like I'm being seen.
Reading
Last post I had started on Death on the Tiber, a mystery set in ancient Rome. It was excellent, as most of Lindsey Davis's books are.
After finishing that, I was in the mood for something like a medieval mystery (or ancient, if I could find it). I did some searching for medieval/ancient mysteries and, thank-you-SEO-enshittification-of-the-Internet, it seemed the same half dozen options kept coming up. And I had either read them or wasn't interested in them.
But finally I found a post on Librarything mentioning a mystery set in ancient Egypt that I hadn't heard of before. Hello! Since my last blog post I have read Year of the Hyenas and Day of the False King by Brad Geagley. I enjoyed these 2 novels so much! I think the series was meant to go on because the second book left a plotline hanging but these books were written like 10 years ago and there was no follow up so I don't think there ever will be. Who knows why but I wonder if they just didn't make enough money. In my quest for medieval mysteries I found out that 2 series I followed that I quite enjoyed died for that reason, not because the authors were done writing them.
Watching
Been looking for some lighter fare and checked out "English Teacher" on HULU and "Little Mosque on the Prairie" on TUBI. Apparently there's some scandal with the lead actor of "English Teacher" and I wasn't really feeling it anyway. But "Little Mosque" is light and silly but OK so far. It's a good show to cross-stitch to.
I don't watch movies all that often even though I have a long list of ones I want to see. So why don't I watch them more often? Because I tell myself I don't want to sit and watch a movie for 2 1/2 hours so I'll just watch something "quick" on YouTube and, before you know it, I could've watched a movie with the time I spent on YouTube! I know, I'm ridiculous. The ones I recently watched were:
- Thelma- a little bit sad but also sweet and heartwarming. Also, Richard Roundtree's last film.
- A-X-L - this movie got a 5/10 on IMDB but absolutely horrible ratings and reviews everywhere else which I don't really think were fair. I thought it was a seriously OK movie. I would agree with IMBD - solid 5. It kept me entertained.
All right, I think that's it for this mid-week catch up blog post. See you all on Sunday - probably.