An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
My 17-year-old has been learning French and practices by trying to repeat lines in things we watch, translated into French.
Right now, we’re watching Lord of the Rings… so he keeps repeating the name Frodo when characters say it… but in a French accent. Continue reading “French, Borgen, Severance, The Rain, and AI”
I rarely feel like I’m keeping track of the words as I’m going along, but then I do find that sentences make sense to me that wouldn’t have in the past. And what I know for sure is I’ve learned a lot more Danish in the last month than I managed to learn of Spanish 20 years ago…
Back then, I enrolled in a night course and checked out music from the library and watched Spanish language tracks on DVDs that had them… but it was just really hard to get anywhere when I didn’t have an actual pressing reason to learn… Continue reading “Danish on Duolingo”
We make ourselves out of the things we encounter in this world. We make our bodies out of the food we eat, and we make our minds out of the things we see and hear.
And at this point, I think most of me is made out of DS9. I stored it up and held onto as much of it as I could, and I’ve been using it to patch myself up and build new parts for so long… it’s most of me now. Continue reading “Finishing My 4th Full Viewing of DS9”
I’m close to the end of the first season of Borgen… and it’s gotten really depressing. I don’t know if I should hold on, and it’ll turn around… or if a political show of this sort is just going to be something I find too depressing.
When I started watching Borgen and The Rain to practice listening to Danish, I really didn’t expect Borgen to be the one I’d be finding depressing. Continue reading “Danish Shows, Lil’ Abner, and Severance”
Just hanging out at an art museum, working on learning another language. As one does.
It turns out I can read through a lot of Zooscape slush during a two hour plane flight, as long as I load it up on my phone ahead of time. Continue reading “Returning from Disneyland”
The eleven-year-old, playing Minecraft, with great pathos: “Sheep, you don’t understand my suffering! You’re just eating grass!”
After a beat, I repeated their own sentence back to them and asked them to appreciate the absurdity of their life, which led to much giggling.
I spent my evening trying to work out whether it’s still safe to take my trans kid through airport security now that I live in a country that’s seizing trans people’s passports, and whether I’ll get enough warning when it becomes unsafe to avoid putting him in danger.
Horse in a Hospital 2 was really a sequel we didn’t need.
This is (hopefully!) a complete list of everything I released in 2024. It can be hard to keep track, and last year was an especially busy year. I’ve provided links to pieces that can be read online for free, which is most of it.
Novels
Star Trek: Section 31 uses an excellent cast of fun characters and impeccable visual aesthetics to bravely ask: what if Katniss and Peeta had to compete for replacing President Snow and also had a universe destroying bomb???
Is it good? Weeeeell… Continue reading “Section 31, Vic Fontaine, Twelve Monkeys, and Danish Shows”
I’m not sure there’s a more epic burn in the history of the universe than Brian Wilson centering the second to last song on the final Beach Boys album around the lyric, “I’m better on my own.”