Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 83

Nazis for New Year

If you use social media, you’ve met neo-Nazis and their allies.  They’re everywhere, and they’re about as charming as you’d expect.  And if you haven’t met them personally, you’ve probably met one of their avatars. The con goes like this: The impersonator lifts an online photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority — typically one with clear identifying markers, like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab. Using that picture as a Twitter avatar, the bigot then adds ethnic and...

Big Moon

Another holiday, another trip to the Bernardo bird refuge.  Which this time included another big ol’ full moon rising just after sunset. Gotta say, I remain impressed by that 50-to-1 zoom and what it can do.

Straight Up

I amazed myself by taking this photo on Christmas afternoon, while the moon was more or less directly overhead.  I hadn’t imagined the 50-to-1 optical zoom on my Canon was going to be this good, or that the software would be able to stop the image jittering.    I hadn’t even brought a tripod with me.

Cranes

People have asked me my plans for the holiday, and I’m pleased to report that I don’t have any. Honestly, after all the travel and work and running around I’ve done all 2017, the idea of spending a couple days at home, staying warm, eating prime rib, and opening presents, was very, very attractive. But we did take a jaunt Xmas afternoon to the Bernardo bird refuge, just fifteen minutes south of here, to watch the sandhill cranes fly in at sunset.  There were thousands of them, and there were...

Tamale Time

Among the holiday traditions in New Mexico are the consumption of tamales, the setting of fires, and late-night visits to the graves of the ancestors (where, usually, fires get set). We haven’t set any fires ourselves, but we did pay an after-dinner visit to a local graveyard to enjoy the peaceful night and the luminaria displays.   The dead seemed not to mind our presence, even though our ancestors are cached elsewhere. We hope you practice your solstice traditions in joy and peace, and that...

Yuletide Breakage

Normally we take a certain amount of damage around the holidays.  The tradition of a plumbing emergency on Christmas Eve is well established here, and when it happens we have the joy of trying to get emergency plumbing service here some time before Santa’s scheduled arrival.  Fortunately PHC of Peralta, NM, has always been right here when we needed them. This year the plumbing problems started a couple weeks early.  I noticed that the water pressure kept fluctuating between high and low, cycl...

This Is Quite a Sale

As a holiday gift to you all, I’ve reduced the price of the first of the Dagmar series, This Is Not a Game, to 99 cents till at least Boxing Day. You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, iBooks, and Smashwords. So buy yourself a little prezzie!  What are the holidays for?

Crown

So here’s a crown rack of lamb I produced the other day.  I cooked it sous vide, then browned it in olive oil on the stovetop. The lamb came pre-sealed in a vacuum pouch, so all I had to do was toss it in the pot for two hours at 130 degrees for perfect medium rare. The result was moist and tender and perfectly cooked, but lacked a bit of flavor.  Next time I’ll take the lamb out of the vacuum package, throw in some herbs and garlic, then put it in a baggie and cook it the same way. Also I mi...

Dagmar

Let’s go behind the fourth wall, via some thoughts about the Dagmar books, timely now that the series has been re-released as ebooks. Back in 2005, my friends Sean Stewart and Maureen McHugh, along with Elan Lee and Jordan Weisman,  invited me and Jim Cambias to join them in creating an online game called Last Call Poker.  The same team had created the Alternate Reality Games The Beast and ilovebees, and I’d been hanging with Maureen at Rio Hondo when part of that was going on, and what she t...

“AtreiDEEZ Nuts, Son!”

Doc Sweets directs his attention to Dune.  Will Dune survive? As might an academic, Sweets deploys a vast array of jargon and specialized terminology.  So why can I understand him, and not them?