Views from Medina Road

I am not headed to the Locus Awards in Seattle, where all the cool people will be this weekend; various circumstances alluded to in previous posts will be making this an extremely frugal year for travel and convention attendance, for me. Instead I will stay home and stoke the fires of keeping the website running, with an imminent update to the awards index and a few outstanding finishing touches to the 2009 site redesign. (Fortunately, at least for the Locus audience out there, my presence at cons is no longer necessary for the quick posting of breaking awards news. At least in theory; we'll see.)

If I'd been posting more regularly, I might have commented about, say, the Star Trek movie. I thought it was OK; I have a long, long history with Star Trek (it was perhaps the formative experience of my golden-age-12-year-old-childhood) and at this late stage can only sigh at the recycling of trek tropes--time travel, Romulans (or was it Klingons?), and so on--and hope that someday they might remember to "explore strange new worlds and..." so on -- to confront genuinely new premises that were the reason the series excited me in the first place. (Not the political and space operas the subsequent series became.)

I might have commented about, say, Up, the latest delightful Pixar film, which nevertheless left a slightly sour taste in my mouth at the identification of the scientist as the villain. It would be nice if pop culture had a different attitude about scientists.

And I might have commented about the admittedly few books I've read lately (I'm reading/rereading H.G. Wells, among others), though I am resolutely not commenting about ongoing progress on the background expansion projects for the website... those are better off revealed only when complete.

I did receive a review-copy CD which I hope to review soon, though whether as a blog post or as a full-fledged review on the site, remains to be seen.

Hope everyone has fun in Seattle.