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.

There is a drop box outside town hall, ballot has been delivered!

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.

Ballot arrived! I have voted, but now I need to wait until Monday to drop it off.

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.

If it’s Friday it must be PIZZA! 🍕

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

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.

Chicken meatballs, roasted green peppers and red onions 🍕

Yes it’s definitely fall

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.

More fall colors

Pizzas again 🍕

Fall is here

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.

Life goes on, most pretty pizza so far. 🍕

RBG oh no

Lamb sausage, kale, feta, and fresh orange tomatoes. 🍕

It’s hard to discuss this book without spoilers, but I will do my best. The story revolves around the title character, who is a warrior of mysterious origin in a far future, ancient society where power and influence are based on necromantic abilities, and as events unfold it’s not hard to see why, as the greatest adepts of the Nine Houses are gathered together in a locked and decaying palace and challenged to unravel the secrets of death in order to achieve immortality, performing feats of magic and sorcery. As the cast assembled I found it hard to keep track of who was who, and Gideon is a perhaps reliable but certainly sarcastic narrator, but as time went on there was a positively Darwinian reduction in the ensemble. Towards the end shocking revelation is heaped on deus ex machina (no spoilers!) to reach…the perfect point for the sequel to begin.

The novel is a strange combination of space opera, sword and sorcery, action and adventure, sound and fury, but in the end I felt as if I was left hanging, with a large number of the characters I had trouble keeping straight now extinct, with all the red herrings thrown against the wall left unsettled, and no recourse but to wait until the library can send me the next volume in the series. It was certainly a page-turner in the best sense, with plenty of twists and turns (perhaps too many, as I often felt a bit lost), but I was unhappy in the end (no spoilers!)

Recommendation pending until I read the next volume.