Birthday Reflections 2025: Death, Love, and Birthdays

 

In my birthday blog posts, I always mention that birthdays are both a good reason to celebrate life as well as a reminder of our mortality. Birthdays eventually lead to a deathday for us all. None of us are here forever. 

Since my previous birthday, this fact has become even more exigent for me. Last October I lost two friends within two days of one another. One acquaintance died a few months ago. We lost my wife's aunt as well. I lost another friend just last week. 

I miss them all deeply. I’m no stranger to grief. I’ve written a lot about losing my mom 25 years ago. That grief is with me every day and always will be. 

Still, this year I can’t help but think that the friends I lost in the last year were close to my age. And my mom was only two years older than I am now when she died. Every year, my age provides less and less insulation from the realization that none of us are here forever, and I am no exception. 

To Absent Friends: Jerry and Anand

 

To absent friends...

I lost two friends last week. It has been difficult. If you might be so kind, dear reader, let me say a bit to honor these two absent friends, Jerry and Anand. 

Birthday Reflections 2024: Eldritch Eons and Birthday Drinks on a Wednesday

 

Credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/580823683164479108/ 

As has become tradition on this blog, I’m making a post for my birthday! 

Birthdays, of course, remind us that we’re closer to death, but they are also a good excuse to celebrate life—while we have it. I can no longer pretend I’m a young person. As of today, I can’t even pretend that I’m in my mid-40’s anymore.

To loosely paraphrase Gandalf, I’m at an age where it’s becoming increasingly obvious that I can’t choose how much time I have left, but I can choose what to do with the time that is given to me. 

Serious Cozybusiness: Legends & Lattés by Travis Baldree

 

I definitely recommend Legends & Lattés to anyone who has ever played Dungeons & Dragons, or really anyone who enjoys this quote from Tolkien: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

I'm nearing the end of my Hugo reading (for novels, anyway). I admit when I first saw this was nominated, I ... didn't know what to think. It kind of looked like a wacky self-published thing (and it was originally published directly on Amazon before Tor picked it up). It didn't really seem, well, like a Serious Hugo Nominee.

Dear reader, I was wrong. This may be my favorite Hugo novel nominee yet. It's not that the novel is "serious" in the sense of not having any humor. I chuckled out loud several times reading it. But there is, I think, a serious deeper point.

Movie and TV Mini-Reviews: The Boogeyman, Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Picard, Beavis & Butt-Head, and More

As the prophecy of a recent post foretold, I'm back with some short reviews of movies and TV I've been watching lately. I'm including The Boogeyman, Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Picard, Beavis & Butt-Head, John Wick 4, Sinister, Insidious, and X. These reviews get weirdly impressionistic, so if you're looking for elaborate plot summaries and the like, you may be disappointed. Just the mood I'm in these days, I guess. Enjoy!

Chattacon 2023 Is This Weekend!

 

It's the middle of January here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which means it's time for Chattacon! This long-running con (it's a few months older than I am!) celebrates science fiction, fantasy, horror, comics, games, cosplay, and all things nerdy every January. It's a small, friendly con (usually a few hundred participants) that I've been attending regularly since 2015. This year it runs THIS WEEKEND, Jan. 13-15, 2023.

And as I have been for the past few years, I will be an official Chattacon panelist! Here are the panels I will be on with links to the panel descriptions:

• Predicting 2022: How Did Science Fiction Movies Do? (Fri. 6pm)
• SF vs. Fantasy vs. Horror: Philosophy of the Multiverse (Fri. 8pm; this was my idea and is probably the panel where I'll most earn my keep as the resident philosophy professor)
• What is Science Fiction? (Fri. 9pm)
• Scientology and Science Fiction: What's It All About? (Sat. 1pm)
• Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy (Sun. 10am; not on the schedule yet due to Vogon bureucracy, no doubt, but I will need a Pangalactic Gargle Blaster for a Sunday morning panel)

I will also attend a bunch of other stuff. You can see the full programming schedule on the Chattacon website.  Maybe I will see you there!

I'm always excited for Chattacon, but after an online con in 2021 and the anxiety of the Omicron surge last year, I'm hoping maybe I can relax a bit this year, especially in the best con suite I've ever experienced at any con (they probably can't mention it for legal reasons, but there may be beer and rumors of beer...). The con is asking people to wear masks, but I don't think there's a vaccination requirement this year. Obviously COVID is still an issue (rumors of the pandemic's death have been greatly exaggerated), but our local numbers (even the wastewater testing) aren't anywhere near as bad as they were at this time last year and I'm fully up-to-date on all my vaccines and boosters, so I'm hoping I won't have as much anxiety about attending as I did last year. I'll still test before and after just to be safe and responsible.

Well, I'd better make sure I have some notes for what I'm going to say on the panels, but if you are interested in more information or would like to buy a badge, check out the Chattacon website. 

Onward to Chattacon!

42nd Post of 2022 New Year's Eve Spectacular!

 

I was going to make one more post before the new year, and I noticed that my next post would be my 42nd of the year--an auspicious number for a science fiction and philosophy blog!

This is fewer posts than any other full year since I started this blog in December 2014. But that's okay. In fact, this has been one of my lessons of pandemic life: it's okay to do less. Sure, life is short and all of our days are numbered even if we don't know what that number is, but on the other hand sometimes you have to take the advice of that great sage of the 1980's, Ferris Bueller, and take a minute to look around at life once in awhile or you might miss it.

I've learned how to rest. How to take naps and walks more regularly.

Besides, I've been busy enough. I did a bit more travel in 2022 than in 2020 or 2021, but not too much. I wrote a bit more fiction after attending a workshop on fiction writing for philosophers. After that, I started my new part-time gig as a first reader ("slush reader") for Escape Pod, which has been an interesting experience so far and no doubt helped my own writing as well.

I published some non-fiction, including a chapter in Dune and Philosophy: Minds, Monads, and Muad'Dib (available now across the Imperium!). I read some books, meeting, but not exceeding, my Goodreads goal for the year. "Meeting but not exceeding" seems like a good motto for 2023.

I did keep up my pandemic journal that I started in 2020, but I've written in it less and haven't felt the need to post it here lately, which is fine. Maybe I'll do another public journal post when/if the pandemic actually ends. Actually, this post somehow became more of a journal entry than I intended when I started it. But that's okay! Another lesson of recent years: it's okay if things go otherwise than you intended.

And I spent a lot of time with my loved ones, including my cats, who enjoy that I've become a lot more of a homebody the last couple years. And we bought a house (thanks to the pandemic freeze on student loan payments), which makes being at home a lot cozier for everyone.

Looking forward to 2023, I will watch a bit of the Twilight Zone marathon on New Year's Day, and then I have a sabbatical in the spring term. I won't be teaching for the regular semester for the first time since the fall of 2011 when I had a dissertation fellowship. 

I'll probably read and write some stuff about classical Indian Buddhist philosophy (especially Vasubandhu and Ratnakīrti: the project I originally intended to start in 2020, which won't go the way I intended it then, but that's okay). I might start writing something about Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler and their Daoist and Buddhist influences. I'll probably write some more fiction, and who knows, maybe publish something. And take lots of naps and walks.

And I have some travel plans for conferences in Denver and San Francisco, maybe a road trip or two, at least one to a beach somewhere and another to visit my Midwestern folks, and maybe yet another to some US states I have yet to visit. Who knows where the road will take me?

And there will be some conventions, starting with Chattacon in a few weeks. And Hugo reading this summer.

So I think I'll be busy, but hopefully not too busy in 2023. I'll do enough, but not too much. And it will be okay if not everything goes according to my plans, because, after all, most of life, the universe, and everything happens outside of my intentions, and maybe sometimes those are the best parts of this wild, mixed up experience of being a bit of the universe that has temporarily coalesced into a human life.

Wherever you have coalesced, dear reader, I wish you and your beloved life forms a happy new year of doing enough, but not too much!

Two Short Kings: The Colorado Kid and Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King

 

In my perhaps ill-advised and loosely-resolved quest to read all of Stephen King's books, I have come to two shorter ones published over 20 years apart (2005 and 1983). I figured I would review them together on the blog. So here are The Colorado Kid and Cycle of the Werewolf!

The Colorado Kid

I don't know how Stephen King does it, but he took a story of two folksy small town newspaper reporters telling a 25-year-old story to a 22-year-old reporter and turned it into a probing thought experiment on two kinds of stories: those that recount events loose threads and all and stories that wrap things up with a nice beginning, middle, and end. If you think about it, the first kind of story is what really happens in life. And if you think about it some more, you'll see that the "complete" stories where everything is wrapped up are entirely artificial: they always leave some things out or take liberties for the sake of narrative unity. 

In The Colorado Kid, our folksy reporters call these news stories versus features stories. I'm also thinking about a distinction used by Noam Chomsky between mysteries and problems. A problem has a solution, or at least a resolution. But a mystery may not. It may go far beyond our cognitive capacity as human beings to understand. It may remain open-ended. Like life itself. 

A lot of the so-called "mystery" genre really consists of stories of problems in this sense, or features stories to use the terminology of this book. And if I'm being honest, this is probably why I usually don't care for the mystery genre (and why I have only recently delved into King's forays into more mystery-tinted fiction, but I should have known that King's mysteries would still be, well, Stephen King). 

While I understand the appeal of wrapping up a mystery or solving a problem with a nice little bow (maybe precisely because we are usually denied such things in real life), my experience in my decades of existence has taught me that reality is rarely like that. It's simply not true to my basic sense of this universe. Our universe is full of mysteries that we may never solve. This could in some cases be horrifying or disappointing (and King explores those Lovecraftian depths elsewhere), but I prefer the answer that King hints at in this novel and seems to confirm in his Afterword: it is precisely these unresolved mysteries, these loose threads of reality, that make our lives more interesting, perhaps even more meaningful.

See also my Goodreads review.

Cycle of the Werewolf

This is a fun little story (maybe a novella, maybe really just a long-ish short story) that was originally based on an idea for a calendar (no, really). It's vintage 80's Stephen King: mysterious murders are taking place in the small Maine down of Tarker's Mills (no relation). And of course the murders take place when there is a full moon each month for a year (so this is a kind of calendar, after all!). 

And you get all of this with cool artwork from Berni Wrightson. Honestly the artwork is probably what sells this for me. The werewolf story is solid enough, but nothing all that great within King's larger oeuvre. The movie Silver Bullet is a bonkers expansion of the story in the tradition of the best schlocky 80's Stephen King adaptations.

Like other monsters, werewolves are, from the outside, a reminder of our mortality. Be they werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, mummies, creatures from the Black Lagoon, etc., monsters are there waiting for us all. You don't know when. But they will get you eventually. In particular, werewolves are a reminder of the duality within us all and a reminder that the more brutal, base side of our nature can sometimes come out unexpectedly. 

I hesitate to say "animalistic," because I like animals just fine and think they get a bad wrap. As a werewolf in wolf form, you're just trying to eat, which is little comfort to the victims, I suppose, and a horror all its own. 

Still, the real evil in this story is the conscious decision made by the human side of the werewolf character. I won't spoil it, but that, I think, is a common theme for King: the real evil isn't the monsters, it's the people. And what they do with their inner turmoil. That's a far more terrifying idea, ultimately much harder to escape, which is probably the key to King's enduring popularity. (Along with the schlocky adaptations, of course!)

See also my Goodreads review.

Review of Reviews: TV and Movies, May 2022

 

Apparently I haven't done a "review of reviews" since February 2021 and most of my reviews on the blog lately have been for books, so I figured it was time to do a "Review of Reviews" for some of the TV and movies I've been watching lately.

So check out my review of reviews of Firestarter (2022), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Severance, Outer Range, Inside Job, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch! (Okay, you got me. Gremlins 2 is hardly new, but I did watch it recently, so here you go.)

I've also been watching all the new Star Trek shows as of late: Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It's a fantastic time to be a Star Trek fan! But that's a lot of Star Trek, so I will cover those in a separate post.

Without further ado: my review of reviews!

Still the Novella King: If It Bleeds by Stephen King

 

Good job, Uncle Stevie!

I've loved King's previous novella collections, especially Different Seasons, although Full Dark, No Stars is really good, too (Four Past Midnight, which I somehow missed, is next on my list). If It Bleeds is the only one of these to have a title story, but you have to admit it's a pretty good title for a Stephen King book.

Alien Immortality: Kéthani by Eric Brown

 

I'm a sucker for stories about benevolent aliens (Clarke's Childhood's End is one of my favorites, and I also enjoyed one of Brown's other novels, The Serene Invasion). Kéthani also includes some interesting thoughts on death and the possibility of immortality. There are a few things that didn't work for me, but overall I really enjoyed this one.

Little Kings Undiminished: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

 

I've been enjoying Stephen King's short fiction lately, and I continued to do so with 2015's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.

While there were a couple stories ("little Kings" as I recently called them) I didn't care for as much, I enjoyed the vast majority of this 2015 collection, which shows that King's more recent short stories are up there with his early collections like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. 

Holmes Vs. Cthulhu: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

 

It has been a few weeks since I posted on the blog. I'm fine (or as close as anyone can be right now). I just really got caught up in other things. I have a few posts in my ongoing pandemic journal and random thoughts series coming soon. In the meantime, here's a book review!

I suspected this mash up of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft would be a lighthearted fun read, but I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows at a deeper level than expected.

I find Sherlock Holmes stories lightly amusing and clever, but not terribly deep. I'm a much bigger fan of H. P. Lovecraft than Arthur Conan Doyle. But the way that Lovegrove brings their mythoi together shows that Holmes has a deeper side than I previously thought.

Birthdays and Deathdays: 2020 Edition

 

From the show Metalocalypse

It has become my tradition on this blog to write a post on my birthday. This tradition began in 2015, when I wrote a post called "Birthdays and Deathdays." I wrote something of a sequel in 2019 with "Birthdays, Deathdays, Climate Change, and Humanity."

I'm still thinking of a lot of those same issues here in 2020. But the pandemic also makes everything weird-but-not-in-a-good-way, not to mention continuing racial injustice and an impending, increasingly terrifying election here in the US.

Pandemic Journal, Part 12: Back-to-School Doom-Anxiety Edition

 

My pandemic journal continues with Part 12, Back-to-School Doom-Anxiety Edition.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the 2020-21 school year for me, so this juncture in my life and the lives of many others seems like a good time to post a journal update. You can see my latest thoughts at the end.

In recent week's I've come to feel what I've been calling doom-anxiety about the impending school year.

And as always, there are plenty of doom-memes to make the doom-anxiety go down a little easier. 

Whether you're here for the memes, my random thoughts, or you just realized you clicked on the wrong thing: good luck to us all!

Hugo Reading 2020: Novellas

Three of this year's Hugo nominees for Best Novella

Every year since I started voting for the Hugos in 2016, I've told myself that next year I'm going to start reading earlier. And every year, like clockwork, I fail to do so. I've got until July 15 to finish this year, so I'm procrastinating according to plan.

I've grown fond of novellas lately: long enough to get into a story, but not so long as to grow tiresome. You've got to start someplace, so this seemed like as good a reason as any to start with the novellas this year.

Chattanooga Film Festival 2020: Online, but Undiminished

Last weekend I "attended" the online Chattanooga Film Festival, which was rescheduled from its original incarnation as an in-person event in April. I've been attending this festival for the last few years, so I was interested to see how they'd pull it off online.

Love, Philosophy, and Cosmic Melancholy: The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

The Songs of Distant Earth is not my favorite Arthur C. Clarke book, but it has its moments. Since he's my favorite of the Big Three 20th century SF writers (Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein), I've been meaning to check it out. What spurred me to do so now is that I just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Arthur C. Clarke-Award-Winning Children of Time, which is a much newer and different book, but one with some Clarke-style Big Ideas (multiple waves of far future space exploration, hibernation, animal intelligence, etc.). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Tchaikovsky was influenced by this book.

The Dogged Persistence of Fate: Cujo by Stephen King

Cujo is not my favorite Stephen King novel, but not my least favorite, either. This is vintage 70's/80's King. The characters are a bit less vivid for me than his characters usually are, but there's a heavy meditation on fate and chance, cause and effect. And that ending... it's a gut punch, and Uncle Stevie does not pull his punches here.

COVID-19 Journal, Part One

Yesterday I started keeping a journal for the first time in about 20 years. And now that I have a blog, I figured I might post some of it here. The first entry is a bit long and a bit rambling, but it's my attempt to capture some of what I've been doing and thinking in the unprecedented times of the previous week.

Wednesday 18 March 2020

Morning

I woke up with an idea today to write down a little bit about what’s going on during this global pandemic. As a way to document it, process it for myself, work through ideas… I’m not sure.

Anyway, here it goes.