Black Helicopters by Caitlín R. Kiernan 📚

At long last I have read this companion piece to Agents of Dreamland from so long ago, although the gap in time is appropriate given the manner in which this book hops between years, characters, and locales. From the author’s notes I learn that this is an expanded edition of an earlier work, and I find it is not so much a sequel to Agents as part of the same shared narrative, set in the dark fantastic universe of the Mythos. The structure of the two books are the same, with story fragments jumbled together, references and plot lines weaving between the chapters. It is not really possible to construct a linear narrative from the fragments, as causal links seem to go both directions in time.

This approach has advantages and disadvantages; as I noted for Agents it enhances the sense of otherworldliness, but at the expense of a continuous plot which draws the reader on to the next chapter; we lose the sense of “what happens next” when that “what” won’t be revealed until much later in the sequence, or in some cases not continued at all. There are so many loose ends that I suspect it is not possible to unravel them all.

I would still recommend this book, and now have learned that there is a third volume in the series, if I dare to risk it.

Cover for Black Helicopters by Caitlín R. Kiernan, a dark sky above, a mist covered river below, and a dark bridge in between.

Finally got all the backups working. I ended up reinstalling the OS on the media server, after which the mysterious copy error went away.

Twelfth Night is past, the tree is undecorated and out on the curb, waiting for the first serious snowfall of the winter.

The entropy of your Git repository is S = k ln W where W is the number of branches. And as everybody knows the entropy of any system tends towards the maximum…

I did fix the drawer but ran into backup issues. Will make another attempt later this week, as I need to get back to “work” today.

Starting the new year by going through all of my external storage drives and figuring out what’s on them. I need to erase and recycle the old obsolete drives, I’m not even using them any more.

For a social introvert with severe pandemic anxiety perhaps a visit to the belly of the beast was not the best idea.

We didn’t quite get all the cleaning done, but close enough. We did go out for a lovely dinner, eating outside on the patio…the temp outside was only slightly below freezing, which kept the wine nicely chilled in the glass.

Exposure

Late last evening I got my first Coronavirus exposure notification on my iPhone. This is the opt-in system built into the OS and enabled on a per-state basis; it uses anonymous Bluetooth codes which are traded between nearby enabled phones, and now the owner of a phone which was near mine has reported a positive test. The good news is the system tells me that the date of the possible exposure was 11 days ago, which puts it on the Sunday we flew home from Chicago; this indicates to me that it most likely occurred on the flight, or perhaps at the airport before or after. We were all vaccinated, boosted, and fully masked during this trip, and I have had several negative rapid tests since then, so I don’t think I was infected by this particular incident. The bad news is that the support web site which tells you what to do when you receive these notifications just tells you to get tested, and at the moment finding a test is very difficult. We were lucky to have several rapid tests stockpiled from before the trip, but due to the Omicron surge it is almost impossible to obtain more rapid tests, and clinics which do PCR tests are currently overwhelmed. It is also impossible to know if the unknown person reporting the positive test was contagious at the time of the exposure, and given that the incident took place almost two weeks ago it is near the end of the conventional 14 day limit for symptoms to manifest. Even if I was actually exposed it was probably not the Omicron variant, given its very fast growth rate.