The Default State Is Broken

It entirely escaped my memory that, while on my cruise, I finished Elizabeth Bear's new novel, Ancestral Night , and hadn't managed to review it yet, because I spent so much time gushing about it while on the boat. Like, honestly, for a couple of days it was my opening conversational gambit: "Hi! Have you read Ancestral Night ? Yes? Let's talk about it! No? You should read it right now!" So yes, this is going to be a positive review, in case you hadn't guessed. As a fan of Star Trek and Ian Banks' Culture novels, I can absolutely see the underpinnings of the Synarche (and the dark mirror of the Freeporters) present in this novel, which I desperately hope is about to become a series. The main characters in the story are two humans, two cats, a giant preying mantis, and an AI and all of them have hidden fracture-points and surprising secrets that are hidden, sometimes even from the person who's hiding them. And like the best parts of ST and Culture s...

  We drove up to Seattle, because there are no direct flights from Portland to Fort Lauderdale, but there are from Seattle to FLL. Here's the tricky bit: the nonstop Alaska flight from SEA to FLL is a redeye. It arrives at 6AM local time in Florida. Programming note: this was not a great idea. I'm just too old to do redeyes; I can't sleep and I can't go without sleep and this makes me very, very cranky. Our next trip out to Fort Lauderdale will have to be done differently, for sure. The flight had several mechanical difficulties which resulted in us not taking off for more than two hours, including 90 minutes sitting on the tarmac at the gate while they double-checked everything to make sure things weren't going to break. That was actually fine with me; the longer we waited to take off, the later we landed. (I have a whole bit in my talk about Support about five nines and moving parts and the 737 so I'll spare you the repeat and let you watch it yourself he...

I don't know if you've noticed me mentioning it on Twitter, but I'm about to go on vacation. (Yes, that was sarcasm.) On Thursday afternoon, my partner and I are driving up to Seattle to catch a non-stop redeye flight from SeaTac to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We'll land Friday morning, stumble blearily into a taxi, ride to the hotel, and camp in the lobby until they let us check in. Then Saturday morning we'll get up, relax, and around noon we'll head over to the Port of Ft. Lauderdale (which is just fun to say) where we'll board the MS Oosterdam for a 7-day cruise through the Caribbean with 1,934 other nerds for JoCoCruise 2019. My partner and I did this in 2017, and we had a goddamn blast, and this time there's at least two other couples going that we'll know well enough to hang out with, which means we won't spend all of our time holed up with each other. Which is fun, but sometimes it's better to hang out with other people? Anyway, w...