Leonard Richardson's Blog, page 3

The Crummy.com Review of Things 2022

Here we go, another year gone and I'm no wiser than before. But I do have some quality recommendations for you!

Books

2022 was a year where I read a few really long books rather than a lot of shorter ones. Here are my top three of 2022:

The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

Live Events

The big live event for me in 2022 was seeing Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in the Music Man revival. It's my favorite musical, as I've surely mentioned here before, and seeing a live professional production live of it a real bucket-list event. We're not going to end up like that sap in The Apartment!

I also did more museum outings and whatnot than I did in 2021, and even took a trip to California to see my family, for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

Film

As usual, Film Roundup Roundup is up to date with 21 new recommended motion pictures among the ones I saw in 2022. My top ten for the year:

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Local Hero (1983)
L.A. Story (1991)
Glass Onion (2022)
Roxanne (1987)
The Lost City (2022)
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
The Afterlight (2021)
Stalag 17 (1953)
WarGames (1983)

Games

The Crummy.com Game Of the Year is I Was A Teenage Exocolonist. Other games I enjoyed in 2022 include ZERO Sievert, The Barnacle Goose Experiment, and Vampire Survivors. Of our daily games, the ones I most look forward to playing every day are Framed and Artle.

My accomplishments

Ugh, don't ask me about The Constellation Speedrun right now. It will be done eventually. I am working on it today, and this blog post is but a procrastination measure. 2022 saw publication of four of my short stories (see previous post) and I finished three more: "Or Current Resident", "A Place for Monsters", and "Expert Witness". I also wrote two Yuletide fics. Not what I'd hoped, but not too bad.

The Procedure Sign

My bad-dystopia-SF parody "The Procedure Sign" is out in Issue #16 of Etherea Magazine, a steal at USD $2.

Tommy stared at a blank concrete wall painted hospital green.
He heard the hot-air hum of a projector starting up behind him. He
squished his eyes closed, but the headband gave him an electric
shock that jolted them open.

I did not expect to ever sell this story, because its satire skates so close to the edge of being simply bad. "The Procedure Sign" was directly inspired by an item in the ancient Strange Horizons "Stories We've Seen Too Often" list:

A mysteriously-named Event is about to happen ("Today was the day Jimmy would have to report for The Procedure"), but the nature of the Event isn't revealed until the end of the story, when it turns out to involve death or other unpleasantness. [Several classic sf stories use this approach, which is one reason we're tired of seeing it. Another reason is that we can usually guess the twist well ahead of time, which makes the mysteriousness annoying.]

More seriously, the story was also inspired by the experience of my own mysterious Event: being baptized into the LDS church when I was eight. Assuming the story has any real emotional edge, that's where it comes from.

Our Morning Games

In the year or so since Wordle became very popular, bringing along with it the more general online game model of "everyone gets the same quick game every day". Since then, Sumana and I have curated a set of games that we play together most mornings over breakfast. Many games have gone in and out of our list, and I figured the start of a new year was a good time to make some recommendations. I hope you find some fun with any or all of these:


Framed: guess a movie from increasingly obvious stills.
Artle: guess an artist through their artwork. I find this one very educational.
Globle: guess a country via distance from other countries. This also has a new "capitals" variant.
Flagle: guess a national flag as the arithmetic sum of other flags.
Subwaydle: guess the trains taken on a trip through the NYC subway system (also available for a few other cities). This is mainly a Sumana game because I don't like the weird, convoluted routes it comes up with, as if for a spy trying to shake a trail.
OEC Tradle: This was originally "guess the country from its exports" but it's currently going through US states.
There are a lot of variants of Heardle (now owned by Spotify), which is basically "Name That Tune", but we enjoy Heardle Decades and TMBG Heardle (originally a Casey Kolderup project).

There are also two slower-paced games that we don't necessarily play every day:

Redactle: guess the Wikipedia article by filling in blacked-out words.

After spending a while playing Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, etc. we spent quite a while with no Wordlelike in our rotation. (I actually have a separate post in draft form for those who are into the N-ordle series of games.) Recently we picked up Squareword, which can be played just like Wordle but which adds a surprising depth of strategy to the formula if you want to take it slower.

Yuletide Reveal!

Now it can be told! I wrote two stories for Yuletide 2022. The one for which I anticipate more interest is The Practical Boyfriend: A Post-Scarcity Rom-Com . This is a brand new Constellation Games bonus story, the first one in ten years, depicting the meet-cute between Tetsuo Milk and Ashley Somn at the beginning of the contact mission. Guest starring Curic and You'll Only See Kis Echo!, a character you've forgotten about. It's got laughs, romance, and Tetsuo designs a game!

As a fan of high-quality 2012 releases, I'm sure you also enjoy Subset Games' FTL, a death-in-space simulator that inspired certain bits of Situation Normal. Now I'm closing the circle with an fanfic called Try, Try Again, where I used the gallows-humor style of Situation Normal to tell a story in the FTL universe.

Wherever you find yourself today, I wish you a happy new year, and happy reading and writing!

For Your Consideration

If you're looking to catch up on stories published in 2022 so you can fill out your Nebula or Hugo nominating ballots, you've come to the right blog post. Here's are the stories I had published this year, conveniently sorted in descending order of "plausibly might win an award":



"When There is Sugar" (Diabolical Plots) - Sweet science fantasy story about resilience in the aftermath of war.

"Two Spacesuits" (Clarkesworld) - SF mystery where Internet rabbit holes go weird.

"The Scene of the Crime" (Clarkesworld) - Space opera time travel story about labor relations.

"Stress Response" (Analog November/December) - Space opera silliness where exactly the wrong person goes into space and it works out fine.

There's a chance a fifth story will be published this year, and I'll mention it in an update here, but it's going at the very bottom of this list, since I wrote it as a parody of bad SF. Makes me laugh every time, though.

When There is Sugar

Diabolical Plots has my latest story, "When There is Sugar". A touching fantasy story about baking and teaching with a decommissioned military robot.

The oven hissed as it turned rain to steam, moving less than a living thing would, but more than an oven ought to move.

���I suppose you should come in,��� said Berl. It was a royal gift, and well-meaning, if a little patronizing.

This is my pandemic baking story, written in the depths of despair, a time now known only as October 2020. It came from Sumana's request to write a sweet story about a robot oven, as opposed to the grimdark-lite atmosphere of Situation Normal, which was about to be published. I think I did a good job, but Sumana still holds out hope for a gentler, more Bob Ross type of robot-oven story.

My RSS!

Since listening to KUSC in college I've been a fan of the old BBC radio program(me) My Word!, an ur-quiz show with a focus on chin-stroking erudition, shameless bluffing when erudition fails, and cornball shaggy dog stories. About ten years ago my fandom took a big hit when the BBC stopped pouring decades-old My Word! reruns down whatever transcontinental pipe eventually got it broadcast on American radio stations' streaming websites. But recently I discovered a large cache of episodes uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2020, including a bunch of episodes I'd never heard. Jackpot!

I really wanted to get this cache turned into an RSS feed so I can listen to episodes alongside my podcasts. Kevan's Fourble service can do this pretty easily, and in fact it already has, but what I'd really really like is an RSS feed that incorporates the information about broadcast dates and shaggy dog stories found in this particular item's carefully written description. That will dramatically improve the usability of the "podcast" and allow me to listen to the episodes in rough chronological order, rather than alphabetically according to the first vocabulary word lobbed at the panelists.

This is, in fact, a job for The Syndication Automat, a project I created in 2004, the semi-early days of RSS. Back then it was sometimes necessary to employ vigilante justice to make RSS feeds for websites that didn't have them. This was actually the original use case for Beautiful Soup!

Of course, hard times soon struck the Automat as every website got its own RSS feed, RSS feeds themselves were ditched in favor of Twitter and Facebook, and then Twitter and Facebook melted down, leaving us with nothing. (I'm extrapolating a little here.) 2009 was the last time any of the Automat's old feeds were updated. But podcasts still stand, the cockroaches of syndication, so it makes perfect sense to bring back the Automat one more time to host The Doubly-Unofficial, Partially Chronological "My Word!" Podcast Feed. Painstakingly hand-crafted by a script I painstakingly hand-crafted to deal with tons of edge cases like "two shows that use the same vocabulary word" and "shows where the filename doesn't precisely match the vocabulary word" and "shows where the general era of the show is known but not the exact broadcast date". I took care of all that stuff; all you have to do is listen.

If you just want to make a podcast out of the MP3 files in an Internet Archive item, and not do any other processing, you can use my very tidy, edge-case-free Python script, which depends on the modules internetarchive, feedgen, and pytz

from datetime import datetime
from feedgen.feed import FeedGenerator
from internetarchive import get_item
import pytz
import sys
import time

def utc(dt):
return dt.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)

class IACollectionFeed(object):
def __init__(self, ia_item, destination_url):
self.item = self.fetch_item(ia_item)
self.feed = FeedGenerator()
self.feed.link(href=destination_url)
self.feed.description(self.item.metadata['description'])
self.feed.title(self.item.metadata['title'])
for file in self.item.get_files():
if file.format != 'VBR MP3':
continue
self.add_entry(file)

def fetch_item(self, ia_item):
return get_item(ia_item)

def add_entry(self, file):
entry = self.feed.add_entry(order='append')
entry.id(file.url)
entry.title(file.metadata['name'])
mtime = utc(datetime.fromtimestamp(int(file.metadata['mtime'])))
entry.updated(mtime)
entry.enclosure(file.url, str(file.size), "audio/mpeg")
return entry

def __str__(self):
return self.feed.rss_str(pretty=True).decode("utf8")


if __name__ == '__main__':
print(IACollectionFeed(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]))



To generate a fast and cheap version of my DUPCMW!PF, I'd invoke the script with this command line:

$ python roughdraft.py bbcmyword https://www.crummy.com/automat/feeds/...

While producing this post I discovered that not only is there another, smaller, differently organized collection on the Internet Archive, but there's a significantly larger (but less well described) archive on RadioEchoes, which also has an even bigger archive of My Word!'s inevitable but lesser companion, My Music!.

������������

Like today's algorithmic creativity tools, many NaNoGenMo projects take as their grist the results of other peoples' creativity and hard work: years, even centuries of work. My own In Dialogue and Amazon Prime are manipulations of public domain texts, and for Alphabetical Order and Brutus and Cassius, at the close of the scene I took the entire English literary canon as my input. For 2022, I've created a NaNoGenMo work that reuses no one's text but my own.

������������ is a blackout piece made from the text of my unpublished novel, Mine. I've redacted every word that shows up in one of my two published novels, Constellation Games and Situation Normal. You'll see lots of names, places, technical terms, odd digressions on Cleopatra and zucchini, punctuation, and (I assume) typoes. That's it.

This is an appropriate source text since Mine is a story about people preserved as the things around them are erased, and then juxtaposed without context. But really, I could tell you it was about anything and you'd have to believe me... for now.

Stress Response

As promised, the November/December issue of Analog includes "Stress Response", a Ravy Uvana story in which Judicant Uvana helps a young human who went into space believing it would be a big, fun adventure... and who still believes that at the end of the story! Have fun!

The big change I made after my writing group critiqued "Stress Response" was explicitly explaining why the stress response happened; no one got it and without that crucial piece of information the story feels like watching someone else's vacation slides. Many, many times my writing group has told me "Leonard, you need to explicitly explain the thing instead of expecting us to figure it out."

Two more stories of mine are coming up in Analog: "Meat", the first Ravy Uvana story I ever wrote; and "Race to the Bottom", a flash piece that explains why everything is so terrible. Both coming out next year, I guess? I've deposited the checks!

The Scene of the Crime

My new story "The Scene of the Crime" is published in the August 2022 issue of Clarkesworld! This is my second published Ravy Uvana story, after "Mandatory Arbitration", and I just did copyedits for "Stress Response", which will become the third one near the end of the year.

The first draft of this story was much more complicated, with a time loop and a parallel universe, plus with Dr. Miew denying to the end that there was any time loop at all. Way too complicated! A lot of writing the first draft is throwing ideas at the wall, and a lot of the second draft is seeing which ideas stuck to the wall and picking up the others.