Month: October 2017

Last week two bits of entertainment I’d been looking forward to finally unlocked for my enjoyment: the video game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Stranger Things 2, the second season of the well-regarded Netflix series. What did I think of both? Well, let me tell you.

Wolfenstein II: I enjoyed the heck out of this. The game takes place in an alternate reality where the Nazis won WWII (they nuked New York!) and have occupied the US. Your job is to take back the country, mostly by shooting the ever-living crap out of every Nazi you meet. Obviously, this is a game that has some resonance in today’s political era, in which homegrown WannaNazis are stomping around in their polo shirts and khakis (some of these tender racist flowers complained about the content of the game recently, to which the gamemakers said, essentially, “Ha ha ha fuck you, you little shitheads,” which is a sentiment I can get behind).

Although the game takes place in the US, you don’t actually kill American Nazis, merely Nazis in America; they all spit German at you as you shoot them. Which is fine! Nazis of any sort make for good killing, if you ask me. There’s a special joy in mowing them down by the dozen, untroubled by pesky ethical issues. They’re Nazis, they deserve to meet large-caliber ordnance. And they do — this is not a game that’s stingy about throwing Nazis at you to be dispatched. I played the game on medium difficulty and found it was nicely playable at that level; challenging to get through but with enough ammo, armor and health that I could survive without having to save every ten seconds.

The game comes with a storyline involving hero BJ Blaskowitz and his band of freedom fighters joining up with the American resistance and visiting places like (nuked) NYC, Roswell, New Mexico and a New Orleans that’s been turned into a ghetto for America’s undesirables (Jews, blacks, gay folks etc). The storyline is pretty good, and has interesting moments, but can be bleak and has a couple of missteps, including a memorably gratuitous topless scene with one of the women characters, also involving very large guns. That said, I generally enjoyed the storyline, which featured more humor in it than I remember earlier installments having.

But really you’re here to kill Nazis. And you will! In the US and on Venus! (Why Venus? I think the answer is, why not on Venus, and also, there’s something sublime about battling Space Nazis on Venus. That’s a B-movie title right there.) If you’re hankerin’ to slaughter goddamned fascists, this is the game for you.

A final note of gratitude for this game: It’s all about the single-player experience, which is something I really appreciate these days. I don’t really care to do multiplayer games that often, and I prefer generally to pay for my game once rather than through in-game transactions. I don’t want to be on a team and I don’t give a crap about jaunty hats or alternate armor. I just wanna shoot things in peace and at my own pace. Kudos to the Wolfenstein II team for giving me exactly what I’m happy to pay money for in a video game experience.

Stranger Things 2: It’s a pretty good ride, and with that said, I’m reminded of a line in Die Hard 2, when, after a whole movie of plane crashes and guns blazing and terrorists grimly being evil, Holly McClane looks over to John McClane and asks “Why does this keep happening to us?!?” The answer is, of course: Because that’s what the audience wants. The audience wants the thing they got before, only more of it this time.

And there’s definitely more to ST2: Stakes are higher, the danger more dangerous, and poor Will Byers (who if this series had actually been filmed in the 80s would have almost certainly have been played by Wil Wheaton) gets slapped around by the Upside Down even more than he was in the first season. There are more subplots (justice for Barb! Eleven looks for home! New kids with their own drama! Steve and Nancy and Jonathan!) which take more time to deal with and don’t necessarily resolve in any particularly satisfying way, instead leaving loose ends to be picked up in Stranger Things 3, which will almost certainly happen.

Also, more than once, someone has to act stupidly in order to advance the story, which the shows tries to wink at by having the characters note that, gosh, they sure did something stupid there, didn’t they? Which doesn’t really solve the problem, but at least lets you know the show acknowledges your awareness that someone’s being dumb for plot purposes.

(Oh, and, hey, Duffer brothers: Naming one of your characters “Bob Newby” is a little on the nose, guys.)

None of this really bothered me that much, however, because the story does keep clicking on and ramping up, and the characters, so engaging in season one, continue to be so here and are often even more so. The kids still feel like real kids, the adults are occasionally clueless in particularly adult ways, and the bad guys are slightly more dimensional than they were before. I was sucked in and watched one episode after another just like I was intended to, and with the exception of an interlude episode which felt more like a soft-launch pilot episode of another series entirely, they all connected seamlessly.

Which is to say the story-telling technician in me could see all the tricks season two of this series was laying out and using, and the “shut up and just give me a fun ride” audience member in me didn’t care, because generally speaking, all the tricks worked like they were supposed to. So well done, everyone: ST2 was really enjoyable and I’m in for season three when it inevitably shows up and tortures Will Byers again.

That poor kid. He should just move out of Hawkins. Really, they all should.

Pretty sexy, I have to say. Definitely right-swipeable on Tinder.

Hope you’re having a very fine Halloween.

Of Paul Manafort and Rich Gates. Those of you who had them first in the indictment pool, come claim your prizes.

I’m not a legal expert and I don’t know anything else about these but what I read in the news, but I do expect two things:

1. These are just the beginning;

2. If you thought Trump was angry and unhinged before, well. Just you wait.

Also “Conspiracy Against the United States” is a hell of an impressive-sounding thing to be charged with, even if it probably mostly just means you’re trying to hide money from the IRS.

Anyway: Happy Monday! I suspect it’s gonna be a hell of a week.

Thread first, followed by the new books/ARCs in the last tweet.

During our recent California sojurn, Krissy and I stopped in Fresno for a day. Why? Because, in fact, that’s where I lived when we met (I worked for the Fresno Bee newspaper), and we still have friends in the area, and we wanted to see them. One of the friends we saw was Donald Munro, who was a fellow journalist at the Bee, and who now runs the Munro Review, a site focused on the Fresno and Central California arts scene.

Most of what Donald and I did was catch up on things — it was the first time I’d been back to Fresno in about a decade — but I also did an interview with him for the Munro Review, talking about Fresno, writing and other stuff (including how I proposed to Krissy). It’s a fun interview, and you can read it here. Also, of course, if you’re interesting in the Central California arts scene, please check out the rest of the Munro Review, and put it into your daily reads. Donald’s great at what he does.

The last time I chatted with my friend Stephen Toulouse, he was cheerfully trolling me on Twitter about the AC/DC song “Thunderstruck,” which he enjoyed rather more than I did, followed by a quick DM to let me know he was just having fun, which of course I knew. I was having fun with him too.

I’m so happy my final words with him were of friendship, and fun, and silliness, and of kindness to each other.

Farewell, Stepto, my dear friend.

As most of you know I’m fond of Chromebooks, but they do have limitations — it helps to have a constant internet connection while using them, and for a long time everything had to be done in the browser. This was okay for email and word processing, but less great for things like photoediting. Recently, however, recent editions of Chromebooks (and ChromeOS, the operating system) have started being able to use Android apps, including various photoediting programs like Photoshop Express and Snapseed.

When I traveled to California recently I took one of my Chromebooks (the Asus 302ca) and then checked to see how well it handled some light photoediting of pictures I took with my Nikon d750. It turns out it did pretty well; both Photoshop Express and Snapseed have the ability to handle RAW photo files, which means you can have substantially better control over images than you just get through .jpg files. It’s not optimal — none of the photoediting suites in Android are as fully featured as you will have get on the desktop — but it’s still easily workable on a picture-by-picture basis and the gap is beginning to close some. If you have an Adobe CC subscription, Adobe just released a version of Lightroom that lets you photoedit equally on your phone or on the desktop, which means late-edition Chromebook users can access that as well.

If you’re doing a lot of photowork, you’ll still need a desktop or PC/Mac laptop. But, if all you need is a bit of light photoediting/curating, Chromebooks are now an option. Which I think is pretty neat.

Lots of very fine books and ARCs came to the Scalzi Compound when I was in California, and here’s the first stack of them. What here looks good to you? Tell us all in the comments!

I had a Google Home Mini sent to the house while I was away and it was here for me when I came home. I was curious to try it out; I have a full-sized Google Home, which I like, but possibly not enough to spend $130 for another. I wanted to see if the $50 Mini would serve my purposes.

It turns out it does. I mostly use Google Home (and the Amazon Echo, which I also have) mostly to play music and to answer questions I’m too lazy to type into a search bar, and the Google Home Mini does that as well as the Google Home. The reviews of the Mini that I saw warned that the speaker in the Mini is not that impressive, and I suppose from a technical perspective that might be the case. But it’s plenty loud when it needs to be and is more than sufficient for listening to music at my desk or responding to my queries. It doesn’t have a lot of bass, but otherwise, it’s perfectly fine.

Functionally you can raise and lower music volume by touching either side of it, and you can keep the thing from listening to you by switching the microphone off in the back, and that’s it for functionality — there was the ability activate it or pause music by touching the top, but apparently in some Minis a bug caused it to endlessly listen (and send that data to Google), so Google disabled that function permanently. Since you can get it to pause music and/or respond to queries by saying “Hey, Google,” and that’s kind of why you get one of these things in the first place, I don’t think this is a huge loss.

Size-wise, the thing is the size of a hamburger bun or a donut and relatively unobtrusive. Mine is “Charcoal Gray” (effectively black) but there are other colors as well. I have mine placed next to my first-gen Amazon Echo on my desk, which makes for an amusing visual contrast: A squat, fabric-covered puck next to a tall metallic cylinder. I’ve found having both on the desk is actually kind of useful, since I can have one play music while I use the other one to answer questions. They both have different hailing phrases so they don’t get confused about to whom I am speaking (don’t, however, place your Mini on top of your Echo; doing so confuses the Echo’s microphones).

Now that I have Amazon and Google smart speakers, you might ask if I have thoughts to which company does a better job at the virtual assistant thing and which I would recommend over the other. My answer is that at this point it’s kind of a wash generally and a lot of it will depend on what you use the thing for, which electronic ecosystem you’re invested in and, bluntly, who you want to have all of your electronic information. I would give the edge to Amazon if you’ve got Kindles and Fires and a Prime subscription and want to buy things frictionlessly, and the edge to Google if you’re already neck deep into Gmail and Android and Chrome dongles and computers. I do find Google Assistant slightly smarter than Alexa, but both are plenty smart enough for most things and the distance between the two only shows on very picky queries. Google’s aesthetic is friendlier, but Amazon’s is hipper. Honestly, flip a coin. You’ll probably be fine either way.

That said, if you are well into the Google system and like these smart speakers and aren’t excessively paranoid about giving a massive multinational corporation a listening post in your home 24/7 (they say they’re not listening unless you tell them to listen, and I believe them, but they surely could listen all they wanted, that’s just a software update), the Mini does the trick and is pretty cheap at $50. I’m enjoying mine so far.

I posted this picture and the following bit on Facebook because that’s where most of my high school friends are online, but I’m posting it here as well. It’s true in both places.

—

One final picture from the Webb Schools Alumni Weekend, if I may: A picture of me with Krissy, standing in the same spot, 22 years and some-odd months apart. Krissy and I got married at the Vivian Webb Chapel and she wanted to recreate a particular photo from our wedding album. I think we did a pretty good job of it, considering we were doing it from memory.

22 years have passed and there’s not a moment of it I would change. Being married to Krissy has been the great joy and privilege of my life, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about how much better my life is because she is in it. Those of you who spent time with her at Alumni weekend, some of you for the first time, understand what I mean. I was amused and delighted how quickly she became Your Favorite Scalzi — a thing which I approve of, because I feel that way too. She just makes everything better.

I am blessed with my marriage, blessed with my friends and blessed with a wonderful life made better because of both. We recreated the photo but every day we create and commit to our love, just as each of us, in small and sometimes large ways, create and commit to friendships, building them to last the long years. This reunion reminded me how much I am bettered by these constant acts of creation I get to have with each of you. Thank you, all of you, for that.

And especially thank you, Krissy. I love you more, 22 years and some-odd months on, than I loved you that day we stood in front of friends and family and vowed to be married. And on that day, I loved you more than I had loved anything in the whole of my life.

Last weekend I was on the campus of my high school for my 30th reunion with other members of the class of 1987 (as well as all the other classes ending in a “7” or “2” and indeed any other alumni that choose to show up). It was a delightful time — I went to a small private boarding school (this one), so I knew everyone in my class and everyone knew me and we mostly liked each other and our affection has maintained and in some cases increased over the years.

Me being me, I also took hundreds of pictures and selected about 100 of them for four albums documenting the day. Would you like to see them, even though you (probably) didn’t go to my high school? Sure you would! Here they are on Flickr:

’87 Portraits: Saturday Afternoon — Classmates touring the campus and at the alumni lunch.

’87 Portraits: Awards and Evening — Classmates showing up for two of our own winning school alumni awards, and then pictures from the alumni dinner.

Webb Portraits: Spouses, staff and other classes — folks who did not graduate in ’87 but are pretty cool anyway.

Webb Scenery — Pictures from around campus.

Enjoy!

And for those of you too lazy to click, a quick selection of photos:

As you know if you follow me here or on other social media, I’ve lately been in the great state of California. What was I doing there? Well, in no particular order, going to and being a photographer for my niece’s wedding, seeing family and friends, having business meetings and going to my 30th(!) high school reunion. Not all at once, mind you. Mostly one after the other.

It was both an enjoyable and productive trip, but now I’m home and glad to be here and seeing my pets and sleeping in my own bed. I’ve also got about two weeks of mail to sift through. One thing I did open up immediately, however: The box from Tor that contained my author copies of the Old Man’s War mini-hardcover. Folks, it looks great, inside and out. I’m super pleased with this edition and would recommend it highly even if I wasn’t the author. If you’ve been looking for a print edition, this is the one to get.

In any event: I’m back in Ohio! And it’s nice to be home.

The headline says it all: The Dispatcher is an Amazon Deal of the Day, so you can get it for under a buck on the Kindle. What a deal! But it’s only for the day (October 19, 2017), and it’s for the US and Canada. I’m not sure if the price applies on other retailers today, so you’d have to check it out for yourself. Regardless, if you’ve not picked up this novella yet, today is a good day to do so. Enjoy!

Hello fellow humans! I am not dead. I am slowly making my way down the length of California toward my high school reunion.

Life is good. I hope also that your life is good.

Tell the class about your day in the comments.

Yours,

JS

Today Tor Books is releasing Old Man’s War in a spiffy new “mini”-format hardcover edition: All the benefits of a hardcover book, miniaturized for your convenience! It’s available at your favorite bookstores in the US and Canada, and it’s no coincidence that it’s being released just prior to the holiday season. Stocking stuffer, my friends, and/or a nice little gift for, like, day four of Hanukkah. But you don’t need to wait for the holidays to get it. You can get it today. For yourself! And pick up several copies for friends! Distribute them like Pez! It’s the Covandu version of OMW, if you will, and if you get that joke, thank you for being a fan.

I’m delighted at this new mini hardcover of OMW because, among other things, the original hardcover run of the book, almost thirteen(!) years ago now, is actually pretty small: about 3,700 for the first printing, and about 7,700 overall. OMW really took off in the trade paperback edition a year after the initial release. As a result, the hardcovers have always been hard to find — great news for collectors, to be sure. Not so great for anyone else.

So, dear everyone else: This edition is for you. Enjoy!

I’m in Sacramento, California. Here are some pictures from where I am.

Hope your day is fabulous, wherever you are.

A couple weeks on, a brief follow-up to this piece, in which I noted how much 2017 was messing with my word count.

It turns out it was really useful for me to write that piece. Not necessarily because I’ve increased my writing speed since then — I’m still slogging away at a slower pace than I’ve done in previous years — but because, basically, in naming my problem I’ve lifted a fair amount of the psychic weight of it from my shoulders. I’m not kicking myself for writing slower right now, and as a result, the writing is easier. Which ironically means the writing is more regular, and because of that, there’s at least slightly more of it. Who knew.

I’d also like to acknowledge the folks who wrote me or linked in to the piece, saying, more or less “Yes I have been feeling the same thing I’m glad somebody finally said it.” One, you’re welcome and I’m glad the piece accomplished at least part of its intended effect of letting folks know they weren’t alone in their creative miasma at the moment. Two, your chiming in also helped me, because as much as I strongly suspected I wasn’t the only one in the spot I was in, getting actual confirmation of it was heartening. I was right! Alas! But the knowledge meant a bit of fellowship, and that made the burden a little easier to bear. Which made the little readjustments I’m making now easier to do. Thanks, folks.

(Mind you, I had some of my usual suspects out there pointing at me at going ha ha Scalzi has writer’s block, because they’re sad little dudes like that. While I could push my glasses up on my nose and say well, actually I was never blocked I was just writing slower, which you would know if you could read, in point of fact they read perfectly well, they just have a pathological need to see me as a failure. And to be honest, that cheers me up a little too. I like enraging these sad little dudes so much just by existing that they have to create voodoo doll versions of me to stab stab stab stab. They want to be enraged, and it literally requires no effort from me to oblige them. Keep at it, sad little dudes! It’s good for you to stay busy.)

And now, back to it.