Monthly Archives: December 2021

How I Totaled My Car (PS: I’m Fine)

On December 12th, I went to my friend’s ugly sweater party at her house in Columbus. After a few hours of socializing and dancing (badly), I ended up starting my trek home at around 2:30am. It’s not the longest drive in the world, but it is long enough to be a pain in the ass, […]

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Looking Back on 2021

2021: Not a great year! Its major claim to fame is that it wasn’t as bad as 2020, which I expect and bluntly fucking hope will go down as a real bottom-scraper in the annals of the 21st century, but let’s all agree that “not quite as bad as 2020” is not a huge recommendation […]

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Prepping for the New Year

Krissy’s family has a tradition of making menudo for the New Year, which aside from Krissy’s family’s Mexican roots, is probably because menudo is also a traditional hangover cure, which some people might need on the morning of January 1. Krissy’s dad (who was actually of German descent – go figure) made the best menudo, […]

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My Top Two 2021 Songs

One was a big hit! The other was from a video game! And, uhhh, don’t really have that much in common sonically. Welcome to me. If you have a song or two from 2021 that spoke to you (and actually from the year, not just something you like generally), put a YouTube or other generally […]

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Whatever Best of 2021 (Athena Version)

Hello, everyone! It is I, the junior Scalzi, returning to bring you a few of my favorite pieces I wrote this year. Since I haven’t been writing for the past couple months, I have a smaller selection of posts to choose from than some people on this blog, but I guess that makes the selection process […]

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Thoughts on Whatever in 2021, and in 2022

This was an interesting year for the Whatever, in my opinion. It was a pretty good year for Athena Scalzi content in the eight months she was blogging regularly, and a very good year for Big Idea features. It was a middlin’ year for me, though. I wrote some very good work here this year, […]

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Brief Review: Don’t Look Up

I liked it a lot, which is not surprising as it combines two of my favorite things — astronomy and satire — into one movie, and then also gives me an excellent cast and a pretty good script. I would have liked it more, I suspect, if we weren’t currently living through a pandemic in […]

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(Probably) My Last Self-Portrait of 2021

And I look skeptical! Of what? Well, what have you got? We’re now in that week between Christmas and New Year, in which days, hours and even minutes mostly lose meaning, so maybe I’m skeptical of the very nature of time itself. Seems a reasonable position to have, at least through January 1st. How are […]

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Review: The Matrix Resurrections

Big question first: Is The Matrix Resurrections the first sequel to The Matrix that is actually essential to the story of this universe? The answer to this is: one, there was already an essential Matrix sequel and it’s called The Animatrix, thank you very much; two, from a cinematic point of view this film was […]

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Whatever Best of 2021

2021 was an interesting year for me in terms of writing here; it was a year with a lot of round number anniversaries, plus the ongoing COVID pandemic, plus, you know, creeping authoritarianism. These themes are reflected in this annual Christmas Eve “best of” list, although there are other topics as well, just to, you […]

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23

Back when Athena was very young, we didn’t tell her when her birthday was; she would know when her mother and I would suddenly burst into her room one morning, bearing a cake and singing “Happy Birthday.” Now, at age 23, Athena is aware of when her birthday is, but Krissy and I still enjoy […]

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New Books and ARCs, 12/22/21

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, partly because I’ve been strangely busy at the end of the year, partly because physical book deliveries have slowed down a bit, and partly because, well (waves at the world). Nevertheless I wanted to give this hefty stack of books a moment in the sun […]

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Name Your Cookie

This afternoon I made a comment on someone else’s tweet about oatmeal raisin, and chocolate chip, cookies: This immediately sparked a (fortunately merry) war about the relative values of these two types of cookies, with so much back and forth that Twitter actually put a debate warning on the conversation. Which wasn’t needed, to be […]

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The Dispatcher Optioned for TV; “Kaiju” Excerpt at Tor/Forge Blog

These are two separate things! But they happened at around the same time (i.e., as I was on a plane home from Worldcon), so they’re being put into the same post. First: Dispatcher optioned for TV, as reported by Deadline. This write-up is accurate (except the part where the story takes place in a distant […]

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Hello From Worldcon

Please enjoy this lovely hotel lobby tree, full of festive yuletide goodness. Things are progressing nerdily here at the convention, and today I had a signing and I moderated a panel on book series, which is somewhat fitting as I am up for the Best Series Hugo this year. The actual panelists said wise and […]

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View From a Hotel Room 12/16/21: Washington DC

We’re in town for the first December Worldcon ever (I almost said first winter Worldcon, but then I remembered the Southern Hemisphere is a whole thing), and the current temperature outside is 63 degrees, which is not particularly December-y for DC, but is certainly pleasant to walk around in. Good to know the days before […]

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Kirkus Review of “The Kaiju Preservation Society”

It has some not-insubstantial spoilers so I’m going to avoid pointing directly to it for now, but it’s pretty darn positive, and this is a key observation: “Despite the absurdity of the premise, the book isn’t entirely escapist fluff. Sure, it bubbles with the banter and snarky humor readers expect from this author. But it’s […]

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