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My thoughts, too. I met him once on a secret mission to Seattle. He seemed like such a thoughtful guy who was much better than he gave himself credit for. And he loved his cat. RIP dude...

Given that we just sat in with a host of WGB Elders on zoom, ( thank you!) I can concur that our communities bring us joy.

Just hearing about Xeno, and Gil. I'd hired Xeno a couple of times for small jobs. He was smart, and very funny, although he would disagree with both statements. I know his father had been ill as well, I'm not sure if he passed or not but I'm thinking about his mother and family. Thank you for letting us know.

Why you gotta badmouth Benny, man?

Well, since I can't post on Twitter right now and I think *very* few people will see my Mastodon post, here's my Wasson Peak New Year's Day scramble. 9.5 mile out and back, foolishly started at 4pm. Beautiful sunset at the top but did the last 45 minutes in full dark by flashlight and was every so glad when the car finally came into sight!

At least you have an incoming administration who aren't bumbling psycopaths who think that all they need to do to gloss over failings that are costing a thousand lives a *day* here at the moment is to muss up their hair and do their best Benny Hill impersonation. And at least you haven't just ignominiously crashed out of the largest free trade conglomeration in the Western Hemisphere. Here in the UK, things are looking bleak. The power's been flickering here tonight, which is unusual. I hope it's not a sign of things to come...

That's a brilliant idea! Btw, I am applying for a job at the local library network @Fashionpolice... They're looking for a "digital coach" who would organize coaching for digital skills, manage and promote their own applications and also manage all the hard and software used in the library system. It would be a bit of a departure from what I'm doing now, but could be interesting!

It's the privacy aspect that seems attractive about the slack, but I hope there will be a renaissance of this as well! Hi @Fashionpolice

I reconnected with some awesome people on zoom. Moving forward, should we want to do zoom meats, I'm up for it.

Minx and Heavyboots are to thank, maybe others. I tried to keep up from time to time but didn't do a great job at it. I miss you all, even though I follow many of you on twitter.

Just saw that this board existed and happy to be back amongst friends after 10 years or so in the wilderness (although I'm connected to many of you via twitter). Can't believe I joined the OG board almost 20 years ago!!! Anyway, glad this exists and thanks to those who made it happen.

7:00. Alarm sounds. Get up half sleep and set up breakfast. 7:15 Shower. Get a new bandage for the left arm (blood donation yesterday). 7:30 End grooming. Check the weather forecast and pick clothes and shoes. 7:40 Check the mobile work backpack that I take daily (MS Surface, masks, powerbank, notebooks, alcohol gel...) 7:45 Breakfast while checking news and first wave of work e-mail (America and Asia). 8:00 Make sure my wife is awake and conscious. Wish good morning. Go to work. 8:15 Arrival at work. Temperature and mask check. Get into my office. 8:30 Sta

My direct boss, she was at HUD before but this is a big step up and it sucks and I hate it.

Hmmm seems like my settings are right. Nada in the spam folder either... Well, back to work for a short, intense week. DC is basically an armed camp as we proceed with the coronation. Which is kind of weird right? Its like the founders wanted some of the pomp of the monarchy without the monarchy. Do other democracies make a new executive taking office into such a big deal? OTOH, the transition is a freight train steamrolling right over hapless Trump appointees that are scrambling to either get embedded in the career federal workforce or looking for work.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it, David! I almost put the new novel on my Christmas wish list, but it didn't get the greatest reviews, so I think I'll reserve it at the library. One of the things that makes my Christmas shopping easier is that I buy a lot of copies of the same book and then send it to people around the world, so I get the gift of seeing how they react differently to the same book. I especially like to send Scandinavian books that have been translated. So this year my book gift was "The Employees/Les Employés/De Ansatte" by Olga Ravn. It seems it might be difficult to pick up i

Although I have voted " Working outside the home like normal", because I do go out daily for work, it has nothing to do with normal, as I used to travel 2 weeks per month, and I have not traveled for work since the 25th of February of 2020 (Hannover, Germany). Right now, no plans to travel till the autumn, at least. Using almost exclusively MS Teams with customers. I have spent several days working from home, while we waited for my wife's COVID PCR test results (she has been tested 4 times). The only time I have been tested it was on a Friday afternoon and I got the results on Satu

I used to do all my reading while commuting, which is not a thing anymore... One of the last books I read was recommended to me by @Fashionpolice when we last met about a year ago in London: Convenience Store Women by Sayaka Murata, which I quite enjoyed. It took a while for the library to get it in stock. I still have Gibson's latest sitting on the shelf waiting to be read.

So sorry to hear about Xeno and (belatedly) Gil. RIP, gents.

After we maxed out Twitter this afternoon so that I couildn't add more people to the conversation, I have set up a channel on Slack where we can hang out and share stuff like Zoom conversations privately. I've sent out emails to as many people as I have emails for, but if I've missed you and you want in, give me a holler.

Or we could hang out here :-) on thewgb.com 🤪

Get in touch if you want an invite.

Ballistic Kiss by Richard Kadrey. Sandman Slim #11 and quite frankly if Mr K wants to keep writing these for the rest of his life I will keep buying them (sadly, he won't - this is the penultimate novel in the series). This time out, James Stark, the last of the Nephilim and LA resident has PTSD and depression (given what he's been through in the last ten books, that's not exactly a surprise to me) and is unexpectedly vulnerable. As a result he's a much more interesting character, and his "what's it all about then, eh?" ruminations are casting interesting light on where the series is going. Bu

Interesting little piece on aging goths. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/do-elder-goths-hold-the-secret-to-aging-successfully/2021/01/11/a565b2de-3b04-11eb-9276-ae0ca72729be_story.html I feel a bit seen. We were actually at two of the events mentioned here, but compared to Florida they were pretty small scale.

He was posting cat pics on Instagram till recently... RIP https://www.instagram.com/p/CJXRAVbsOORdkBVbRyCA_nzjuR0caOBbnSrY9c0/?igshid=knf21iyghldm

Yeah, circling back around to origins. Glad to see this place still exists... again

I never do get to the more picturesque parts of Tucson. I'm almost always there for my hobby, or to pick something up. And now with the plague times... so yeah. Some day I'll get to see that view for myself!

Whew, I thought I was going to be the only one who didn't like Agency as much as they'd hoped. I do intend to read it again, because it feels like the main action, the stuff Eunice is up to, is magic that makes things happen, but I have no idea how or why she made the choices she did. And while I understand the whole Naturalist philosophy in Gibson's work, I felt cheated. I realize, too, that whatever AI comes to life now is going to be, at minimum, that fast in getting itself together, however I just felt like it all happened weirdly. Maybe a second reading will make

Like I said on the FB post, fuck. I just was thinking of him recently since he mentioned being in the hospital and I was hoping he'd gotten better. Also very sad to hear about Gil. Though I never got to meet him he seemed like a genuinely kind and person and would have been great to chat with in person.

Didn't see this part at first. I don't know if he was even feeling that sick before a heart attack on New Years day. From that point he was pretty out of it, so... no? Hopefully not. Patrick.

Heard about his condition from a mutual friend named Chris, but I don't think you know him. Later heard he'd died, from his cousin. Patrick.

If anyone is feeling so philosophically down from all the current headline video, we all know the fight must start again, even if it's tomorrow morning. Not that I don't go off all stream of consciousness crazy, but I recommend reading or re-reading the Conan the Barbarian Belit short story for magic, and if I may quote: "And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death. Her white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her. Then, as the whit

Clicked onto the wrong end of this thread and noticed this... It hasn't aged well. :-\ Not your fault though. Cheers, Patrick.

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, I agree there's probably more systemic failures ahead of us, but OTOH, if last year was the year of the pandemic, hopefully this is the year of the vaccine…

they did the same to me before, they go through phases of hitting a load of folk. do you have email in your profile? i guess you can't login to check? what i ended up doing was giving number to get back in, then going into profile to delete number. i had also previously deleted email address from profile - because every time i logged in i got a warning of suspicious behaviour, because i don't tolerate cookies. yay security theatre covering up tracking bullshit.

The hell year continues and my levels of reading continue to escalate as my only consistent and reliable escape route from events, so as ever this is a long post, which I apologise for. I should get into habit of posting smaller more often rather than a month at once. Winged History - Sofia Samatar – A prequel to a Stranger in Olondria, with first impressions that we are reading a collection of random histories, like the later Tolkien books that were odds and ends. But, as one progresses it becomes clear that the stories each fit into the period of events circling around an uprisin

After a quite dark denouement to the story of the doll (that had me executing several unconscious gangers) we get a glorious view of a veve, some Haitian creole and the need to find a netrunning gang called the Voodoo Boyz. It will have to wait as the ninja wants me to hack a parade float. And more dark, angry, long haired Keanu. He made a couple of interesting suggestions, however. Still very absorbing, but some mechanics clash, such as building bullets out of ashtrays and playing cards. Unless I have a hidden nanoforge... But then why single out ashtrays?

He’s just chilling in his cat tree by me while I watch old movies lol. This week we’ve been working on not shredding or biting my hands and arms to the point of bleeding like I just walked through a cactus lol. He’s actually doing really well at it—he picked up that it wasn’t cool anymore after I started saying “ow” and gently pushing him away within a couple hours. A few minor relapses because he desperately wants to chew on something since he’s such a kitten still.

from: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/sir-leopold/

My local fish guy has a weird sense of humor.

Well, shit...

WHAT?? How did you hear, GR? (And thanks for letting us know. I hope he didn't suffer much )

Oh man… he was so freaking young! This is very sad news indeed. Deepest condolences to his family. 😿

@xen0phile, this morning. Please don't refer to him by [real] name or mention this on social media, until his whole family's been notified. This wouldn't be a good way to find out. He had diabetes and high blood pressure, then pancreatitis, then organ failure, including eventual heart failure. But no CV-19 , which is almost strange these days. He was kind to cats and [mostly] nice to people. You all know he lived under a heavy load of depression and disappointment. I hope he's free now. Sing with me. Cheers, Patr

Looking back to history, intimidation of politicians by small group of armed supporters is classic fascism. This will generate martyrs, as quite a few people will be going to jail for this (all those cameras and selfies will bite them back), and create a hardcore group of violent excons for 2024. The erosion of credibility of the democratic process is what makes dicatorships possible. It is one more step in the wrong direction. The fact that DC and Capitol police, with apparently one single exception, are unwilling to shoot white people will also make things worse. We