(I'd looked at several of Tim Power's books before - incuding the earlier Vickery and Castine story, Alternate Routes [https://thelastredoubt.com/on-higher-powers-pt-2/]). Since we last saw Vickery and Castine, things had not quite returned to normal. Sure, Ingrid Castine went back to work for the hush-hush transportation agency who's rogue manager had tried to kill her, and Vickery, a former secret service agent, was living a quiet life in a small home near the highway. But both were a bit un…
The site will be getting a couple backend updates at some point today, and be unavailable for a few hours. Update: The majority of the work is done - the site has been migrated to a new server instance. The site is back up. Still getting a few things with older images straightened out. Final Update: the tricky (and fast), as well as tedious (waiting on uploads) parts of the backend updates and migrations are done. I still have to clean up some old entries that didn't get all the formatting ri…
While I've written on how to make better popcorn [https://thelastredoubt.com/popcorn/]at home, Brian Neimeier has gone into it in somewhat more [https://www.brianniemeier.com/2021/03/how-to-popcorn.html]detail [https://www.brianniemeier.com/2021/03/how-to-popcorn.html]. I'll have to try the presalting, as well as the timing of turning off the heat.…
It's always year zero for the social justice (and believing) set - so the events of but a few short years back, namely the nomination of Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N [https://arkhavencomics.com/product/appendixn/] to the Hugo slate, and being dismissed among other works and editors for being liked by the wrong people are already ancient history lost in the antiquity of time. And one surely cannot expect a writer for a prestigious outlet like Boingboing to do better than indian tech support, an…
Over at MoTW, The Didact posts some good and solid information on getting yourself protected and unplugged from as much constant monitoring by Big Tech as possible [https://www.menofthewest.net/cancelling-cancel-culture/]. It's a good start. A few notes to add once you've processed all of that. One, VPNs. I won't knock Surfshark - I haven't used it, and it seems to hold up OK review-wise. I've leaned more on NordVPN, and am seriously eyeing ProtonVPN [https://protonvpn.com] by the same guys…