The winners of the 2026 Locus Awards have been announced. The awards are voted on by subscribers and readers of Locus, the long-running newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in May. Now that we're watching the Blue Jays, there won't be as much here.
Movies
I took this photo earlier this week when Nancy and I travelled in to Toronto for a fancy supper to celebrate our anniversary. This is Yonge Street, about a block north of Dundas, showing what's left of what was once known as the Yonge Street strip, partly because of its many strip clubs. The large building on the right is part of Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), formerly Ryerson Polytechnic. It stands on the former site of SAM The Record Man and A and A's, two great record stores that are long gone. The Zanzibar Tavern, one of Toronto's few remaining strip club, still stands.
Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and cropped and straightened in Google Photos.
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| What's left of the Yonge Street strip |
I first discovered the New Riders of The Purple Sage through their association with the Grateful Dead, who they opened for when I saw the Dead in 1970 and 1971. I enjoyed their music; I guess you could say they were my gateway to country and western.
From a post by Peter Christiansen in the Grateful Dead group on Facebook
"Powerglide". Second album by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Wonderful followup to that most excellent first album. Buddy Cage replaces Jerry Garcia on pedal steel. A number of guest appearances including Jerry Garcia (banjo) and Bill Kreutzmann (percussion) from the Grateful Dead, and noted session player Nicky Hopkins (piano). Another fun, sing along, toe tapping collection of songs. Covers "Hello Mary Lou", "Willie and the Hand Jive", "I Don't Need No Doctor" "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)" take on the energy of the band while original writing on the others contributes significantly. Another important part of my high school days.
Of their albums, Powerglide was my favourite. It still holds up well after more than fifty years.
We'll start with the newest feature for account recovery, which is Recovery Contacts. This is a list of up to 10 people you specify, and when you're trying to get back into your Google account, they can be asked to confirm access in the same way that you might normally approve a prompt on your own phone (which is helpful if your phone is lost, for example).
I have a friend whose phone was stolen while travelling. He was not able to recover his account and lost access to many valuable photos and a YouTube account he used to promote his business. If he'd followed some of the steps in this article, that wouldn't have happened.
It may take some time and be a bit of a hassle to get your account set up so you can recover it, but it's worth it.
Nancy and I went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu last night at the IMAX theatre in Whitby. I didn't enjoy it. There was enough plot to fill out an average episode of the TV show, padded into a 2-hour-plus movie with a lot of pointless action scenes. No character development at all. The Mandalorian might as well have been a 2nd-tier Marvel superhero. Even in the IMAX format, much of the movie was dark and hard to follow.
Wait for it to show up on Disney+ if you want to see it. (That may be a general reaction; the theatre was maybe 10 percent full).
I've been having a lot of trouble watching movies, and some TV shows, these days. Part of that is due to my eyes lacking enough rods to give me proper vision in dim light, but that's only part. I've talked about this with my family and friends and they agree that a lot of what their watching is darker than it used to be.
The New York Times has a feature article (gift link) about this. It starts with a reference to the recent movie, The Devil Wears Prada 2.
“The heartbreaking story of a woman who can no longer afford lamps in her office,” read one viral post, showing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly of yore alongside a screenshot from the new dimly-lit trailer. “So did we just forget how to light movies?” asked another, above bright images from the 2006 film beside shadowy, shrouded shots from the sequel. Noting that the sequel employs the same director and cinematographer as the original, one poster lamented “that isn’t a skill issue it’s a choice. So why DO new movies insist on looking like that. Absolutely lifeless.”
That's someting I noticed when I saw Project Hail Mary recently; it was dim, even in the IMAX format. But there are other things going on.
The article goes on to reference a YouTube video titled 'Why Movies Just Don't Feel 'Real' Any More" by Tom van der Linden. It's a bit on the nerdy side but I highly recommended. He talks about the various factors influencing the look of modern movies and makes some very incisive points, including the lack of depth-of-field in many shots.
From the Times:
For van der Linden, the blurry-background conundrum is exacerbated by “fake-looking C.G.I. elements.” He pointed to 2025’s “Jurassic World Rebirth”: Compared to the technically-jankier but actually-superior “Jurassic Park” (1993), the latest installment’s backgrounds are constantly out of focus. The environments — even in scenes shot on location — are rendered “faker” through digital visual effects that undermine the world-building. “Subconsciously, I’m not registering that landscape as a real place, and that detracts from the reality of the movie as a whole,” he said.
I've watched the video and found it quite illuminating (pun intended). It's definitely worth half and hour of your time, though it may make you a lot more ciritical about what you're seeing on screen.
It was late April, the fourth night of a nine-show run at Sphere in Las Vegas, and the band had just begun its second set. As they slid from a thin boogie into an atonal blur, the screen that swallowed them took the sold-audience of about 17,000 on a grisly animated tour of a damaged body—teeth pocked with fillings, a tummy laden with plastic toys, lungs puffing hard. As the camera wormed its way up and out of the body and back to the mouth, a wrecking ball swung toward the teeth, smashing them with three terrifying hits. The image faded. The room went dark. The band kept playing. The crowd erupted.
The screen needed to go black because a fleet of video teams with a squadron of computers and servers at their command needed time to load a system that has forever reinvented the way Sphere can work: a physics-defying virtual model of Phish’s famous light rig, programmed and run by a pair of technicians so legendary in lighting and jam circles that they have been profiled by The New York Times. The system, the most expensive visual element of Phish’s two Sphere residences, allows Chris Kuroda and Andrew Giffin to control 7,080 individual sources of light, all designed to look like they’re part of physical light fixtures flying above the band. Because it is not mechanical, it can move in directions and with a nimbleness that traditional lighting rigs could never match. It can charge the audience like a bull or pull back into a bright vanishing point.WATCH
I've included some videos of their performance that show off the new capabilities. The first includes the songs mentioned in the above quote.
And here's one more that gives a sense of the scale of the venue.
Finally, here's a review of one of the concerts from the April residency. The author isn't a Phish fan but he was impressed by the visuals and has some advice about the best seating locations if you are planning to attend a concert at The Sphere.
This week's photo is from one of the few warm days we've had in the last couple of weeks. It was warm enough to go for an evening walk down to the lakefront; an activity that we gladly shared with many other people who crowded the waterfront area. This picture is from my Pixel 8 Pro and was slightly cropped and touched up in Google Photos.
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| Sunset at the marina |
More and more, I'm finding that jazz is the music that gives me the most comfort and enjoyment right now. This week's musical treat is a from an artist that I've not listened to much, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. I've known about him since I started listening to jazz and I knew he was a multi-instrumentalist (sax and flute, mostly) but for some reason never paid much attentin to his music.
One night recently, I was listening to the jazz channel on Sirius XM, as I often do at bedtime, and was blown away by what I was hearing. It was "You'll Never Get to Heaven" from Kirk's live album, Bright Moments. From Wikipedia:
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (born Ronald Theodore Kirk; August 7, 1935[1] – December 5, 1977),[2] known earlier in his career simply as Roland Kirk, was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality; in his shows, virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter, political ranting, and the simultaneous playing of several instruments.
Bright Moments seems to be a good representation of Kirk's music. It was recorded in 1973, just a couple of years before a stroke restricted his playing and four years before his untimely death. I regret not paying more attention to his music before this, an oversight that I will be trying to rectify.
Here's something I didn't expect to find; a performance from the Montreux Jazz Festival, filmed in 1972. As you might expect given the period, the video quality isn't great but the audio is fine. It's an energetic performance and fascinating to see his multi-instrument technique in action.
Finally, here's a short (27 minute) documentary about his life.
When I was going to university, I thought I was going to be a writer. I was then rejected from the creative writing program and went into the straight literature program. The process of trying to get published over the next 10 or 15 years, I think killed any idea that I was going to be able to be a writer as a profession. But that didn't affect my desire to continue to write and publish. So I just got up in the morning and then wrote, then went to to whatever job I had and I never stopped thinking of myself as a writer, but I did stop thinking of it as a career.I also saw what writers did in general, that a great number of them taught at universities. I have no interest in doing that. That a lot of people have MFAs, which I had no interest in getting. That they treated writing as a group activity, which I had no interest in. You know, there were there was really very little attraction to the other things around writing that typically constitute what being a professional writer is.And so once I became a Foreign Service officer, I had a fascinating job that was really interesting to me, where I got to learn new things every couple of years. And, I was constantly moving from one place to another and learning a lot, and I felt that it was really also feeding my writing very well with new information and new ideas and, and so I thought "well, this is, good. I can continue to just be a Foreign Service officer and write on the side and publish in Asimovs and Clarkesworld and get some nice feedback from my work and talk about the things I'm interested in, but I don't have to worry about making money on it." And so that's been good.
Here's a tip for fans of dark mode: how to get white text on a black background in Acrobat Reader.
These instructions are for the latest (and highly enshittified) release of Acrobat Reader.
1. Click the hamburger menu icon in the upper left.
2. From the menu,, click Preferences.
3. In the Categories list, click Accessibility.
4. Select Replace Document Colors.
5. Then select Use High-Contrast colors and choose White text on black from the High-contrast color combination list.
6. Click OK.
In step 5, you could select Custom Color and then pick your text and background colours.
I'm posting this because I cannot easily read PDFs with black text on a white background. The current release of Acrobat Reader changed whatever settings I had in the past to give me dark mode in PDFs, and it's been driving me crazy for a while now.
Some PDFs may not work well with these settings;. for example, tables with shading will be a problem. I will have to experiment more to see if other settings in the Accessibility dialog will help.
If you know of a (preferably free) PDF reader that works well in dark mode, please leave me a comment.
Thanks are due to Elizabeth Bear for reminding me to check out the 2026 Hugo Voter Packet. I wasn't planning on buying a voting membership for the 2026 WorldCon, but including 16 GB of ebooks in the voter packet made me reconsider.
Included are:
It's a huge amount of fiction and non-fiction. Most books are in EPUB format, some are PDFs, and some also include audiobooks in MP3 format.
It is not cheap ($50 US), but given that it includes several books that I likely would have bought, it's worth it. (Just INVENTING THE RENAISSANCE by Ada Palmer would justify the cost). And there's so much more. It'll keep me reading all summer.
And of course, you get to vote for the Hugo Awards. I have a lot of reading to do before the voting deadline of Ausust 8.
I've been thinking about what I want to do with this blog and I'm going to change my posting routine a bit.
Going forward, I'm going to stop doing most of the regular link posts like Featured Links and We're Toast. I'll continue the Saturday Sounds posts and probably occasional posts about Canada - US relations.
I'll continue posting about things that interest me or that I want to record here for future reference, like the next couple of posts that will be up tomorrow and Wednesday.
Given that it's summer and I want to spend more time outside, I probably won't be posting as much.
Yes, I know May 24th isn't until next weekend, but up here in the Great White North, 24 means something other than the date. Look up what 24 means in Canadian slang. I won't be consuming one (just a few tall boys), but I will be cleaning the BBQ, mowing the lawn, raking over the garden, and staying away from my computer and the news as much as possible.
I'll be back here sometime next week. In the meantime, here's a tulip from our front yard that somehow survived having two metres of snow dumped on it over the winter.
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| A hardy tulip |
It's time for another post about disinformation and misinformation. I could probably do a post a day like this if I had the time and the stomach for it.
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| Overlooking the marsh |
Over the past couple of months it's become clear that the usual discontent Albertans have with the federal government has morphed into something far more concerning. I lived in Northern Alberta for five years until 1984 and there was no love lost for Ottawa and especially Pierre Trudeau and his National Energy Program. But what is happening now is very different.
In this post, I'm going to highlight several recent articles that cover different aspects of the current political scene in Alberta.
For a starter there's this lengthy piece (gift link) from the Toronto Star: "I went home to the heartland of Alberta independence. Even after covering Donald Trump for 10 years, I was still terrified by what I found." by James Maclennan. I included this as it was written by someone who grew up in Alberta and provides a good overview of the current separation campaign. The scary quote:
We like to imagine we are immune somehow from whatever it is that has torn the American polity apart so violently over the past 10 years, that what is happening there could never happen here. I promise you it can. In Alberta, it already is.
In this article Dean Blundell provides (in his words). "The Alberta File: How a Foreign-Backed Separatist Cabal Doxxed Three Million Albertans, Lawyered Up Against Treaty Rights, After Being Promised "500 Billion" From The Trump Regime: A definitive, on-the-record accounting of what the hell is happening in Alberta — and why every Canadian, every Treaty signatory, and every NATO ally should be paying attention."
Yes, he can be a bit long winded, but the article provides more history and context than most of the pieces I've seen in the major media and ties it to influence from the US and wider international disinformation campaigns.
What is happening in Alberta in the spring of 2026 is a stress test of Canadian sovereignty conducted, in part, by a foreign power in friendly contact with a domestic separatist movement, lubricated by an algorithmically amplified information environment that pays Dutch YouTubers to tell Albertans separation is inevitable, organized through evangelical and convoy networks with documented histories of contempt for the state, and enabled by a provincial government that rewrote its own constitutional safeguards to accommodate the operation."
In The Leningrad Hot Dog Maker and the Destruction of Canada Charlie Angus takes a deep dive into the Russian disinformation machine and how it might affect Canada, even if there is no referrundum.
It won’t matter that the separatists don’t have the votes to succeed. They will drive false claims that the referendum was stolen or encourage a convoy of extremists to set up camp on the Coutts border to call for American help.
Imagine the hate that will be generated against First Nation people by online bots if the courts shut down the referendum.
The Donbas playbook is about weakening our nation and creating internal chaos. A full on hate storm is brewing. The Prime Minister needs to take this threat very seriously indeed.
Finally, Patrick Lennox of The Walrus asks How Did an Alberta Separatist Group Get Its Hands on the Voter List? There will no doubt be court cases arising from this and it will be interesting to see just how high up in the Alberta government they reach.
That 2.9 million voting-age Albertans have had their personal information circulating in the Maple MAGAsphere poses a massive public safety risk and exposes the October 19 referendum process even further to foreign influence from the global far right. We can safely assume that Alberta’s list of electors has been captured by agents of authoritarian regimes who wish Canada, as the last standing democracy in North America, all sorts of harm, unrest, and collapse.
The implications of this breach, which is likely the largest in Canadian history, will come into further relief in the coming days and weeks leading up to the referendum the UCP seems hell-bent to bring on.
That will do for now. I could have easily included sevral more articles, but the ones above paint a pretty detailed, and not pretty, picture of what's going on.
This week's photo is of some daffodils in our backyard. It's been a late, cool, and wet spring; not the best for flowers, so I'm glad to see these coming up. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
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| Spring daffodils |
This week's musical treat is Remember the Humans, the latest album from Toronto's Broken Social Scene. I've seen them live four times and posted about them several times, so a new album is an event.
The new album is quite long, almost 50 minutes, and contains 12 tracks. The production hearkens back to their classic You Forgot It In People, with multiple overdubbed vocals and wall-of-sound instruments. It'll probably sound best on headphones.
They'll be out touring this summer and if they're anywhere near you, go; they're one of the best live bands I've seen.
This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed.
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| Springtime in Paris after the AMOC collapses |
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Springtime swans |
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This week's photo is taken along the marsh land near the lake. Most of this vegation will come back in the summer but right now it looks pretty bleak. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and touched up a bit in Google Photos.
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| Marsh land plants after the winter |
This week's musical treat is the new album from The Sheepdogs, one of Canada's better bands. Keep Out of the Storm is a solid rock album that sounds a bit like some classic Southern rock bands, which is a bit odd considering that The Sheepdogs are from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. No mater; it's a good album. Enjoy.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in April. Now that we're watching the Blue Jays, there won't be as much here.
It's time for another article abut the ongoing cultural and economic conflct between Canada and the United States.
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| How the US will get it's booze back into Canadian liquor stores |
Expect Donald Trump to try to punish Canada for not bending the knee (gift link). "It’s now clear the Americans aren’t even willing to sit down until Canada coughs up what’s being described as an “entry fee” — unilateral concessions on a range of issues in return for the privilege of getting to the table and facing, no doubt, demands for even more concessions."
How much does Trump hate Canada? (gift link) "Five charts help illustrate the U.S. President’s obsession with his northern neighbour."
Why Did So Many Canadians Keep Doing Business with Epstein? "The predator’s network reached into this country’s financial, science, and cultural elite."
A network of YouTube accounts is promoting U.S. annexation to Albertans, researchers say. It has 40 million views (gift link). "Flagged as a “potential covert influence operation” in a new report, those behind the network are tough to trace."
Mark Carney Officially Put A Bullet In Canada's Relationship With Trump's America. "Mark Carney simply never misses. This morning, he kindly put our relationship with Trump's America in a body bag while reminding us who we are."
Can Alberta Protect Its Secession Vote from Trump? "If we’re being honest, probably not."
Washington demanding 'entry fee' from Ottawa before trade talks: sources. "Trump administration demanding concessions before formally launching CUSMA talks, sources tell Radio-Canada."
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| A calm day on the lake |
I took this week's photo while walking along the new walkway along the lake on the east side of Frenchman's Bay. I just happened to notice the boats out on the lake and waited until one was passing behind the tree. Lucky timing. This was taken with my Pixel 10 Pro and adjusted slightly in Google Photos to bring out some detail in the trees.
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| Boats on the lake |
This week's musical treat is Future Soul, the latest album from the Tedeschi Trucks Band. I've featured them several times here and will probably continue to do so if they keep putting out albums of this quality. It's a tighter, more focused production than 2022's I Am the Moon with velvety smooth sound that begs to be cranked loud. I have been trying to think of a favourite track or two, but I can't. I like them all. Enjoy.
The finalists for the 2026 Aurora Awards have been announced by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFSSA). The awards are nominated and voted on by members of CFSSA. Winners will be announced during a ceremony to be streamed on YouTube on August 9.
These are the finalists for Best Novel.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Boats at the marina waiting for summer |
Okay. Let me interrupt here to insert a “Holy EFF” explicative. What Mythos autonomously did, without any explicit guidance beyond just being asked to, was to discover and invent an exploit which deeply manipulated FreeBSD’s Network File System server by using Return Oriented Programming. Since FreeBSD’s NSF server is already so secure, the AI pseudo-attacker was not able to insert its own code. So it caused the server to selectively re-execute its own code, code it already contained at the tail ends of a series of 20 different existing subroutines. This enabled it to manipulate the internal state of the NFS file server to grant root access to an unauthenticated remote attacker who was unknown to, and had no account on, the machine.
Let me be very clear: This capability is truly nothing short of terrifying. If Project Glasswing has the side-effect of launching Anthropic’s forthcoming IPO into the stratosphere then as far as I’m concerned they’ve earned and deserve it.
And this:
And this admits to the MUCH bigger problem. I suppose we should have seen this coming. But it’s here: We all know that only a small fraction of the world’s already deployed code can and will ever be made “Mythos safe”. It’s great that AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks will all get to have access. And apparently some 40 others who are equally deserving, or who are presumably the owners of many of those thousands of other bugs that Mythos found. But what of everyone else?
We could truly be poised upon the precipice of some seriously rough times. As I said, I suppose we should have seen this coming. The biggest surprise is that everything about this brave new AI world is coming at us much faster than we expected, or even still now expect.
I've only touched on some of what he discussed in the podcast. For me, the biggest worry is all of the IOT and embedded devices that either can't or won't be upgraded and which may now be at risk because they contain embedded code libraries that are now insecure.
Interesting times indeed.
This week's photo is of a stand of e-scooters ready for someone to hop on. I think this is a project of the City, and no, it doesn't compenste for the lack of public transit. I have no urge to try one; my eyes and my balance preclude that.
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| An addition to public transit |
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| Our toasting Earth |
Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Docks waiting for summer |
