Waiting impatiently for the first public release of photos from OSIRIS-REx touch-and-go asteroid “landing.”

My ballot has been “accepted” which means that it’s in the system and will be counted…but not until election day. That day can’t come soon enough.

Rainbow adirondack chairs in Belmont, MA, 5:30 PM EDT (UTC-4) for A Day in the Life. Sharing snapshots from neighborhood walks and viewing similar photos from around the world helps keep me connected in these crazy times.

Alas I can’t deliver my ballot today (Monday) as town hall is closed for “Columbus Day” (more recently known as Indigenous People’s Day), so I will need to wait until tomorrow. The land near town hall was used for fishing by Massachusett indigenous tribes prior to colonization.

According to the state’s election site my ballot is on its way. As soon as I fill it out I’m going to take it down to town hall and drop it in the box.

Anxiously waiting for my ballot to arrive in the mail. The sad part is that it hasn’t even been mailed yet.

Season 1 Finales 📺

I didn’t expect the first season of Raised by Wolves to end well for the characters, but I was not happy with the jarring plot twists of the finale; the series’ careful pace was discarded for a bewildering sequence of unexplained changes and events. Few of the mysteries were resolved and several new ones were added in a seemingly random fashion. I’m not sure I want to continue down this road again after what happened to Lost.

Contrast this with Ted Lasso, where the character arcs were properly curved, the final episode was built on what had come before rather than abandoning logic and reason, and I felt a sense of closure rather than confusion. It achieved both a satisfying end point for the first season and a clear setup for next year.

I also just finished re-watching season 1 of The Mandalorian, and it has the best concluding episode of the lot by far, with all the spectacle and surprises of Wolves combined with the meaningful character arcs of Lasso. I am definitely watching season 2 when it is released in a few short weeks.

I’ve been watching Raised by Wolves (HBO Max) and Ted Lasso (Apple TV+); both are dropping their season 1 finales next week. It would be hard to find two shows which are more different, yet both are fundamentally about found families and the ties which bind them together.

Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin R. Kiernan 📚

I feel as though I had already read this slim novella, and I can’t be certain that I haven’t, even though it is only a few years old; the Lovecraft Mythos basis, the dream-like interweaving of points of view (some more dream-like than others), the minimal and largely unresolved plot elements, all combine to give a familiar feel even if this is the first time I’m seeing this particular incarnation. I’ve read enough of the original Mythos, as well as more recent reconsiderations (such as the previously mentioned Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff, and also Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide), that it isn’t surprising to find so many familiar elements.

But that uncertainty fits in all too well with the story, which imagines shadowy government agencies contending with each other as well as the otherworldly threats to humanity, a battle of secrets in which uncertainty and doubt are among the primary weapons. In a way the Mythos has become the ur-conspiracy-theory of SF, a touchstone which only needs to be referenced in the most oblique way to bring the entire weight of cosmic otherness into a work. This can be a force for good or ill, much like those shadowy agencies, and in this case the author has exploited that weight to make her brief tale darker and heavier than one would expect for so short a book.

And there is more to come; I am now waiting for the sequal to arrive from the library. Recommended.

Agents of Dreamland