My newsgroup on SFF Net is gone. Rather than leave everything to the last minute, I asked the folks in charge there to shut it down on March 15th, which they did.

So this is my new home, I suppose. Or one of them, anyway.

I saved a bunch of messages and threads there, some recent, some not. I’m planning to copy some of them here.

For example, here’s an item from May 11, 2004 — the oldest I have saved, and the last in a thread entitled “Fragments”:

It is late spring, but still the Druvars remain camped upon m front lawn. I have spoken with their chieftain, but he will tell me nothing save that they will leave when the time has come that they must leave. My neighbors seem to be quite amused by my predicament, and I am no longer able to share in their amusement.
At first I was not particularly disturbed by this uninvited visitation, but it has been fully five months now since the first cookfire scorched the grass, and the novelty has worn off, replaced by annoyance.

See, sometimes I write down story openings that occur to me — usually openings, but once in awhile a scene from the middle of a story. Sometimes I know what the story is, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I actually write those stories; sometimes I don’t.

I collect these fragments, and look them over every so often to see if one is ready to turn into something more.

This particular fragment never went anywhere, but I still kind of like it.

It seems as if I’m reading more books lately — more of other people’s books, that is. I was asked to blurb An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, for example, and was happy to do so because I really enjoyed it.

A couple of posts back I plugged Disreputable Persons; that was another one I liked.

Well, tonight I finished The Glittering Court, by Richelle Mead.

It’s not bad. I’m not really sure how to categorize it; it’s a romance, but it’s set in an imaginary world that very roughly parallels Europe and North America of the 17th or 18th century. It’s not a fantasy in the usual sense because there’s no magic, but other than that it feels like a fantasy romance. It’s not really my usual line of country, and I didn’t like it as much as the other two I mentioned, but I can see why Mead’s popular.

One of the interesting aspects, though, is that it’s first in a series I assume will be at least three volumes (though only two are out so far). I assume there will be three because it’s not going to be a first and then sequels, but three parallel stories. This first one follows the adventures of a young countess dodging an arranged marriage, and being a romance it ends with her and her beloved happily married and going off to start a new life together.

But she befriends two other young women who drop in and out of the story along the way, and whose adventures we do not learn about in detail. Obviously, they’ll be the stars of the next two volumes — and in fact, one of them is the protagonist of Midnight Jewel, the second in the series. I assume we’ll get the third girl in the third book. Funny thing, I’d guessed wrong about which girl would be #2 and which would be #3.

Anyway, one reason I find this of particular interest is that I’m currently writing Stone Unturned, a fantasy novel told from three interlocking points of view. I had seriously considered splitting it into three separate stories, divided among those three protagonists. So it’s a little surprising to see Mead doing essentially that same trick. Maybe it’s just something in the zeitgeist.

Since many people are discussing their early memories of “Star Trek” on the 50th anniversary of its premiere, here are some of mine:

I was twelve. The old saying “The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve” does have some truth to it. My parents both loved SF, so we were all gathered in front of the TV to see this new show. I had loved “Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits,” but this was different — it wasn’t an anthology, but an ongoing series.

I remember thinking the design of the Enterprise was weird and didn’t make sense. But other than that, I loved the show. The costumes were not the usual “futuristic” stuff I’d seen elsewhere, but did look futuristic in their own way. Spock was seriously cool, even though I thought humanoid aliens were ridiculously unlikely. (His half-human parentage wasn’t mentioned in the premiere episode, so far as I remember; I would have balked even more at that.) The transporter was nifty. Phasers were beyond nifty. Kirk was charming and smart and generally a solid hero.

I knew that a lot of the science and technology was nonsense, but I didn’t care — the show’s creators had at least tried, rather than going for pure fantasy like so much alleged SF. I was old enough to understand that they were limited in what they could do. And we had heroes, and action, and monsters, and pretty women in short skirts (I had already hit puberty), and most importantly, it wasn’t condescending. It didn’t go in with the presumption that science fiction adventure was all junk aimed at kids, or that the audience didn’t know any science whatsoever.

I knew it wasn’t up to the standards of the best written SF, but it was still better than anything else I’d seen on TV or in the movies. (I hadn’t seen “Forbidden Planet” or a few other classics yet.)

I loved it. My mother did, too, and most of my siblings. Dad appreciated the effort, but thought it fell short in too many ways.

As the series continued, there were good episodes and bad — I found “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” horrendously preachy, and “The Way to Eden” patronizing and stupid, and the less said about “Spock’s Brain” the better — but watching it was still usually a highlight of my week. I was disappointed when it was cancelled; I had hoped that it might recover from the weak third season and get better. I wasn’t heartbroken, though, because the novelty had worn off and the average quality really had slumped in the third season.

The real disappointment was the long wait before we got any more SF on TV that was even remotely as good.

I needed some documents I’d created in Publisher 2.0. After much googling, I concluded that the only way to get at them was to reinstall Publisher (which I had last used two computers back). After messing around with downloads and a burned CD, I concluded that the only computer I had (out of five) that would run Publisher properly was Sid, an old Acer notebook that’s still running Windows 7 instead of 10 because it can’t run 10 — every attempt to upgrade has ended in an error message telling me that 10 can’t install because it isn’t compatible with Sid’s display drivers, which Acer won’t update for this model because it’s too obsolete.

(It really is obsolete, by the way; I got it out of mothballs a couple of months ago to run some other ancient software. Windows 10 is only about ten years backward-compatible, and I still use software dating back to, no shit, 1986. Mind you, Windows 10 is still better at that than whatever it is my iMac is running now.)

Thing is, Sid doesn’t have an optical drive. But I have a cheap external floppy drive I’d picked up a year or so back with the idea I would someday go through my stacks of old floppies to see if there was anything I wanted to save.

So I hooked the floppy drive up to Sid, dug the original Microsoft diskettes out of deep storage, and installed Publisher.

Three of the five floppies had problems, so I’m missing some fonts and graphics. One of them, #4 (of five), had a crucial file that was unreadable, so I downloaded a disk image of that one from an abandonware site and copied it to a blank diskette — finding the blank took awhile, as I’d thrown out all the ones I knew were blank years ago, but one turned up in a pile I hadn’t sorted yet.

So — it worked, and I can provide my daughter-in-law with some family history she wanted.

So today I read a piece about DC Comics revamping their line.

It’s a mixed bag, but over all I don’t think it looks good. Prez, fergodssake! And it’s pretty much all rehashes and revivals of old superhero stuff; why is there nothing new, nothing where I say, “Hey, that sounds cool!” or “That looks like fun!”?

(Okay, I don’t know what Dark Universe or Mystic U or Doomed is, but I’ll bet they’re derived from some existing properties, and they all sound pretty grim.)

Wait, I looked it up — Dark Universe is just a revamp of Justice League Dark. Bleah.

Is there anything here that will draw in new readers? Anything that will appeal to kids? Not that I see.

At least there’s some humor, in Section Eight — at least, I hope that’s intended to be funny, since the characters originally appeared as comic relief in Hitman many years ago, a series that, despite the title, had many funny moments and was generally enjoyable. I confess I’m looking forward to seeing Dogwelder again. (And yes, his name is an accurate description.)

But mostly it’s spin-offs, yet more riffs on characters and concepts originating with Batman and Justice League, more grimdark. Why do they think we need more of that stuff?

I dunno, maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m missing something, but this all just looks like More of the Same. Pfui.

P.S. I see DC’s announcement says Bizarro, Bat-Mite, and Prez are intended to be humorous. They don’t mention Section Eight on that list. This does not encourage me.