Happy holidays (part one)! This past week was, of course, Christmas week. One of the really nice things about working at Highline is that this entire week was designated a work from home week, and Wednesday and Friday (the two days on either side of Christmas) are considered “personal development” days, with a pleasantly broad definition of “personal development”. Email was monitored and work was done, but it definitely makes for a comfortably low-key week. Our Christmas day was quite nice: Slept in as late as we could, had a fun breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes with chocolate-infused butter and chocolate whipped cream (there was a _bit_ of a theme there…), a comfortable walk around the neighborhood, opening presents, and a lot of relaxing and reading. ## 📸 Photos My big present this year was upgrading my camera to a Nikon Z5II mirrorless camera, with the 24–50mm f/4–6.3 kit lens and the FTZ II adapter to allow me to continue to use my existing lineup of F-mount lenses. I did make myself laugh by half-seriously wondering if the Z5II is still a mirrorless camera if I attach a 500mm reflex lens to it (if you’re unaware, this is a catadioptric or mirror lens which, as the name implies, uses a pair of mirrors to pack a long telephoto range into a physically short lens). Taking the new camera out for a first test run around our neighborhood. (Photo by my wife.) On Saturday we went up to the Seattle Art Museum, partly because it had been a few years, and partly as a good opportunity to take the new camera out for a spin. I posted a small set of photos from the museum to my Flickr account. ## 📚 Reading * I’m on a bit of a _Star Trek_ binge to wrap up the year. Last week (though I forgot to include it in my weekly notes) I read Kij Johnson and Greg Cox’s TNG novel _Dragon’s Honor_; this week I’ve been working my way through the TOS “New Earth” series, getting through the first two of the six books, Diane Carey’s _Wagon Train to the Stars_ and Dean Wesley Smith and Diane Carey’s _Belle Terre_. I thought I might get through the third book in the series today, but didn’t end up making it. * I also “finished” one I’ve been working on for a few months now (since this year’s major gift wasn’t a surprise), Thom Hogan’s _Complete Guide to the Nikon Z5II_. “Finished” is in quotes because as it’s something of a reference book, there were sections that I skimmed, and this is one that I’ll be sure to keep on my iPad to refer back to whenever I need. ## 📺 Watching * As befitting the season, we’ve binged our way through two seasons of _The Great American Baking Show: Holiday Edition_, which is just _The Great British Baking Show_ but with American contestants. It’s a little jarring to be in the GBBS tent and hearing American accents, but it’s also really nice to see Americans in a competitive baking show actually being nice to each other (as is the standard for GBBS) rather than being snarky and rude to and about each other (as is the standard for, well, virtually every American reality show out there). We’ve also watched several movies, two from the stable of holiday favorites, one new holiday favorite, and a couple that we’ve been looking forward to seeing. This week’s lineup was: * _The Nightmare Before Christmas_ (1993), which is _always_ good. * _Violent Night_ (2022), which was new to us, but which we enjoyed more than we thought we would. It lives up to its title, but it’s a very fun holiday action/comedy. * _Die Hard_ (1988), our annual Christmas Eve tradition (along with many others). * _Fackham Hall_ (2025) has been on our radar for a while now, and it just became available to rent this week. It’s _Downton Abbey_ meets _The Naked Gun_ , and we laughed a lot — it will definitely eventually be going in our home collection once it’s available on physical media. * _Wake Up Dead Man_ (2025), the latest _Knives Out_ film, is excellent. Continues the twisty mystery fun of the prior two, and incorporates some really neat political and religious commentary as well. Rian Johnson is _so_ good at what he does (I need to go back and watch _Brick_ again at some point, too). ## 🔗 Linking * Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central: Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025): Absolutely devastating zero-star review of James Cameron’s latest “Dances With Ferngully” film. “The indigenous people, the Na’vi, are giant blue cats who literally meld with the natural elements on their planet, Pandora, through their naked mole-rat tails, and boast of a harmonious existence that nonetheless requires a warrior class because those are the two things indigenous people in white fantasies are allowed to be: ferocious warriors and children of the Earth.” * Randall Munroe’s xkcd: Funny Numbers: “The teens picked a new funny number.” * Ben Keough at The New York Times‘ Wirecutter: The First Nikon Z-Mount Mirrorless Lenses You Should Buy (archive.is link): Now that I have a new camera, though I can use (and absolutely will be using) my existing F-mount lenses, eventually I’ll be adding newer Z-mount lenses to my collection. Time to start dreaming! * Barry Petchesky at Defector: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?: The annual report! “This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.” * Lorraine Boissoneault at Smithsonian Magazine: A Civil War Cartoonist Created the Modern Image of Santa Claus as Union Propaganda: I had no idea about any of this. * Infinite Ball Drop: “On New Year’s Eve, the Times Square Ball drops for only 60 seconds over a measly 139 feet. What if we extrapolated from that and covered the entire year?” * Robin Buller at The Guardian: How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very: “From emancipation to women’s suffrage, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, mass movement has shaped the arc of American history. Protest has led to the passage of legislation that gave women the right to vote, banned segregation and legalized same-sex marriage. It has also sparked cultural shifts in how Americans perceive things like bodily autonomy, economic inequality and racial bias.” * Doug Henwood at Jacobin interviews Émile Torres: Tech Capitalists Don’t Care About Humans. Literally.: “…there’s also a kind of capitalist influence, the idea that human beings do not matter in and of ourselves. In this worldview, we matter for the sake of value, rather than value mattering for the sake of us. ¶ …we are just means to an end. The only end is value, this abstract yet quantifiable concept that should be maximized to the physical cosmic limits. We matter only as the conduits through which this value can come into existence.

Book 65 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Really, this kind of needs two ratings: Five stars for the content, and two stars for the editing. Thom is _incredibly_ knowledgeable about photography and Nikon cameras, and this book is an incredible deep dive into the Z5II, how it works, why it works the way it does, what all those settings mean, and suggestions on how to get the best results out of the camera. However, as he has obviously (and quite transparently; he mentions some of this on his website) adapted large swaths of this book from very similar books on other cameras in Nikon’s Z series, there are a _lot_ of instances where the shift from one camera to another wasn’t caught, leading to everything from the wrong camera model being mentioned to slight errors (I’ve not come across anything major or that would cause a problem, though). Still very worthwhile, and I’ll be sure to keep this easily available on my iPad so I can reference it whenever I need.

Book 63 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ An interesting start to this six-part series. Shortly post-V’ger, Kirk and the Enterprise guide a 70-ship convoy of 60,000 settlers to a new home six months away. Of course, things do not go well. Most interesting so far for its treatment of Kirk, somewhere on his road from the (perhaps overly) brash self-assurance of TMP to the depression of the start of TWoK, questioning his place and the effects of his career. The new alien races are interesting, as well. However, the primary antagonist is a little too one-note, and while “the Orions” are involved, I’m very confused by them, as they’re described in ways that don’t match the green-skinned humanoids we know as Orions (descriptive bits include: “…slimy muscular arm…”, “…arrowlike orange eyes…”, “…his many-fingered limb…”, “…his claw still tightened around [their] jaw…”, “…purple skin…”, “…turned burgundy with both fury and fear…”, “[his] excuse for eyes…those milky orbs…”). At some point in the editing process, those descriptions should have been corrected or they should have been given some other name than “Orions”.

Book 62 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️ Overly convoluted and far too reliant on what felt to me like exaggerated Asian stereotypes. Not one of the better TNG entries.

ZERO STARS/**** starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver directed by James Cameron by Walter Chaw I think, for white Americans, the indigenous peoples they displaced to colonize what would become the United States aren’t real people. Instead, they are supplemental creatures in a myth of American exceptionalism: the wolf that eats grandma; the wind at the door. They are props for enlightenment, triggers of guilt. Once conquered through disease, genocide, broken treaties, and other nasty tricks born of avarice and cupidity, indigenous peoples became objects of pity and romanticization, transitioning from boogeyman to avatar of a gentle, mystical, maternal, natural world without once passing through “human being.” From marauding savage to mourner of litter and butter saleswoman in less than a generation. What would happen, do you suppose, if white men finally thought of indigenous peoples as men and women with the same complexity, desires, and fears as them? What if they suspected indigenous peoples loved their children and didn’t want them taken from them to be buried beneath strange “schools” in unmarked graves? How would it affect their sense of self, to suddenly understand the unimaginable suffering they have justified and continued to celebrate under the aegis of their undead cannibal god and this beautiful stolen country they’re destroying in His name? Would they have to experience shame? Would that shame force them to grow? Unacceptable. How dare the dead hope their passing had meaning for their murderers. _Avatar_ is about Jake (Sam Worthington), a white soldier in a wheelchair who is ported into the body of an indigenous person so that he can help indigenous people fight against the _other_ white interlopers interested in colonizing their natural resources. The indigenous people, the Na’vi, are giant blue cats who literally meld with the natural elements on their planet, Pandora, through their naked mole-rat tails, and boast of a harmonious existence that nonetheless requires a warrior class because those are the two things indigenous people in white fantasies are allowed to be: ferocious warriors and children of the Earth. Director James Cameron, who writes like an eighth-grader but is a kinetic cinematic savant, has really cracked the code here. What the American people want is to relitigate the systemic literal, social, and cultural displacement of indigenous peoples from the United States by recasting the obvious villains of history as Sgt. Rock and his victims in various shades of “me checkum for bees” ‘blueface.’ Imagine how many billions more Cameron could have made doing _Roots_ with giant Black cats and a white hero who masquerades as one of them by putting on a Black body as a costume and helping them fight back at colonial powers seeking to enslave them. But he wouldn’t do that, because, for the most part, the white folks who defend this shit know enough to pretend to see Black people as people, though not without severe and immediate pushback. All Lives Matter, right? In 2010, Cameron told THE GUARDIAN why he wanted to make these movies: > _I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation. This was a driving force for me in the writing of_ Avatar _–I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society–which is what is happening now–they would have fought a lot harder._ In short, Cameron was frustrated by how the Lakota Sioux successfully survived a genocidal campaign against them that included the ravaging of their land and the engineered near-extinction of buffalo, a primary source of food and other necessities for them. He’s convinced they weren’t tough enough, and that what they needed was a Jake Sully: a white guy to help a brother out, since they were incapable of helping themselves. This outrage over what he sees as the Sioux’s cowardice has been his obsession for almost two decades now–a time during which his billions and visual skill could have been directed at the best action movies anyone has ever seen as opposed to these cartoons about a white saviour who first overcame disability, then overcame racism. Cameron is, in a sense, no different from J.K. Rowling. He found a weird fucking drum, and although he has the resources to do anything else, he’s going to beat it until he’s dead. He’s going to reclaim the “honour” of the Lakota Sioux, goddamnit, because if they won’t grow a spine… Anyway, we like to say it’s inexplicable that these movies are the highest-grossing of all time in the United States. Whenever we Americans recognize a horrible truth about ourselves, we say it’s not like us, and I have to say: I agree, it’s not _like_ us. It _is_ us. Not the fact of _Avatar_ , but that _Avatar_ rakes in a billion dollars every time a new one comes out. Imagine an unbelievably paternalistic rollercoaster that makes you feel less racist for a few hours. If you build it, they will come. Get your 4DX tickets for _Avatar: Fire and Ash_ and buckle up, bra’! Gnarly! Um, hang ten! If you haven’t revisited the first two _Avatar_ films lately, you may not recall that Jake has mated with a Na’vi warrior lady, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). They had a litter, and their firstborn was killed last time around. They’ve also adopted Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the mysterious offspring of another human in a Na’vi body, who has a special connection with the sentient mycelium network that animates the planet. There’s a heroic, “rogue” talking whale–who, in this film, nobly exiles himself for the good of the many in the funniest moment of 2025–as well as a white kid with dreadlocks, Spider (Jack Champion), the unwanted but inescapable Brian Bonsall/Cousin Oliver/Scrappy-Doo of Jake’s family. Spider is also, and take a minute to marinate in this, the narrative and emotional hub of _Avatar: Fire and Ash_ (hereafter _Avatar 3_). That’s right. Because Jake being white and in Na’vi-face isn’t on the nose enough, _Avatar 3_ is centred around the life and times of Poochie. I did enjoy Neytiri threatening to murder Spider, advancing on him menacingly, knife drawn, at least three times in the early going, whether or not there’s a solid narrative reason for it. Her problem is twofold: she’s grieving her child and needs to hate this surrogate son so there can be a tearful “I’m your mommy!” moment at the end; and she hates the “pinkskins”–even her husband, who says, “ _I’m_ a pinkskin…on the _inside_.” When he says this, she winces. The audience winces. This is the natural response to both a James Cameron screenplay and Cameron’s attempt to teach white people that terms like “redskin” are, by their nature, dehumanizing. It doesn’t work, alas, because only white people believe in reverse racism. “Okay, okay, but _technically_ it’s dazzling.” Like the world’s most advanced plantation. I never thought of it like that: _Pocahontas_ with a $300 million budget. A shit sandwich where the bread is a Tiffany mosaic. Thanks for getting my mind right. The mycelium network, you see, has elected to transform Spider into a “half-breed,” a human who maintains his pink skin but can breathe the air of Pandora. Spider, the biological son of Quaritch, chose mercy in a confrontation with the sumbitch and is now the Kwisatz Haderach with whom Jake plays out the Abraham/Isaac story in a _Ferngully_ screensaver. Should the roundeye–er, pinkskin–ever figure out the riddle of Spider’s biology, they could more easily colonize Pandora–except it’s not his biology–he’s infested with mushroom, but… Okay, listen, I’m not going to pretend to give a shit. You can if you want to. Mainly, I want to talk about how it’s not really progress to introduce a savage woman archetype whom everyone calls a witch to battle the feral warrior woman archetype. I want to talk about the scene where Ronal (Kate Winslet)–who is of course the _tsahik_ of the Metkayina clan and wife of Tonowari (Cliff Curtis, the rare Pacific Islander among the cast)–screams, “I’m gonna die! But not before I push out this baby!” to Neytiri before she does indeed push out her baby and die, which gave me a tantalizing peek into how good this movie could’ve been with a John Waters at the helm. I want to talk about the high-framerate enhancement of the fight sequences, a technique that still only succeeds at making a film look instantly like the porn knockoff of itself. I want to talk about how the dialogue is mostly composed of “hurry!” and “is that all you got?!” and other such exclamations and interjections as a bunch of expensive toons Shrek scenes from _Free Willy_ , _Revenge of the Sith_ , and Cameron’s own _The Abyss_. The baddies this time around are the…twice? Thrice?…reanimated Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and the “Sahib” of the airborne ash people, Varang (Oona Chaplin), who favours queening around like Epiphany in _Angel Heart_ while speaking in the fashion of the Na’vi, i.e., slowly and without contractions. She blows hallucinogens into her loyal subjects’ faces during ritual dances–and into Quaritch’s, too, to which he responds, “That’s some _strong_ shit!” because underneath all this hoohah lies a Seth Rogan burner hangout flick–and demands someone show her how to work an assault rifle by shaking it and barking, “Make thunder!” That’s right, the Na’vi refer to firearms as thunder sticks, do fire dances, and collect scalps. Varang cuts Quaritch, and Quaritch says, “Ouch! That wasn’t cool!” You know what would be really interesting is if Cameron and George Lucas wrote a script together. We could take bets on how many pages it took before it was just a string of Republic serial Mad Libs spoken by characters named Admiral Badguy and Poopy Dookus. Quaritch and Varang form one of four romantic pairings in _Avatar 3_ , each of whom is given extended “campfire conversations” full of great emotion and lines like, “Yearling calves and reef babies, together, having their first bond with Ewa!” The contortions people go through, the knots they tie themselves in, to rationalize patronizing, unforgivable bullshit like this should be a red flag. Please check in on your minority buddies and ask them what it feels like to hear sentiments from friends and allies such as, “Well, sure it’s problematic, hurts vulnerable populations like yours at a moment where they’re being targeted by perpetuating obvious and archaic stereotypes, and is written by the guy in screenwriting class who doesn’t like movies, but BRIGHT COLOURS GO BOOM BOOM GOO GOO WOW WOW!” When I first got all up in my feelings reviewing _Avatar_ sixteen years ago, much of the hate mail accused me of imagining that Cameron was retelling the Native American genocide with Lakota Sioux who “fought harder.” Then he confirmed it. Upon revisiting the original in preparation for this review, I found it to be at least true to a science-fiction premise slightly more than a _Dances with Wolves_ one, with a concluding battle that does, indeed, kick some ass. This third time out, Cameron only clarifies his intention to make America great again with terms like “pinkskin” and by having a rigid human, General Ardmore (Edie Falco), derisively refer to Quaritch as “Cochise.” She’s calling Quaritch Cochise in the same way certain tiny-dicked assholes refer to sitting American Senators as “Pocahontas.” I think Cameron means all this self-awareness as evidence of growth and sensitivity, but, as there is no other evidence of maturity, it kind of implies the opposite. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t have to. There are no consequences. Ignore the offensive parts and what remains of _Avatar 3_ is a cacophonous mess of sentimental mumbo-jumbo with a worthy hero–Jake and Neytiri’s grieving teenage son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), who spent the last film hoping to be loved and accepted in the shadow of an impressive older brother–shuttled to the sidelines in favour of a trustafarian scumbag broligarch whose biological and adopted dads fight over for the right to give _him_ their paternal approval. Not all lives matter in the _Avatar_ movies, it seems. Even the planet-conscious Elwa spends a lot of time resurrecting the pinkskins while Her native sons and daughters drop like flies. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, time to suck it up, everybody. Here’s your meat, so eat it. ## Related Posts: * Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - 4K Ultra HD +… * Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray… * Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) * Paradise Found: FFC Interviews Steve James * Avatar (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD * Wolf Man (2025) [Collector's Edition] - 4K Ultra HD… * Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) - 4K Ultra HD * Telluride '18: White Boy Rick + Shoplifters

Work was rather uneventful this week, being the week between the end of the quarter and the week of the holiday break. Quiet, with time to putter around on the list of things that have been in the “lower priority” pile for a bit. Not bad at all. Outside of work, much of the week was just watching the world around us slowly start to emerge from the flood waters. There’s still a _lot_ of water around, and the rivers are still running high, but things are improving and most roads have reopened. Soggy progress is still progress. Today we went down to see the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s _The Nutcracker_ down in Federal Way. We enjoy the Grand Kyiv Ballet’s performances — they’re a Ukrainian troupe that’s now based out of Bellevue, with a blend of Ukrainian professionals and local students, so the individual dancers range from very good to very enthusiastic — and it’s always good to support local artists. ## 📚 Reading Finished Catherynne Valente’s Space Oddity, the just-as-fun sequel to Space Opera. My only disappointment (and it’s not with the book) is that I was busy enough at last spring’s Norwescon where she was a guest of honor that I barely crossed paths with her and didn’t get to say how much I enjoy her work. ## 📺 Watching Rewatched Better Off Dead for the first time in a few years, thanks to Royce pointing out that it’s a Christmas movie. Still one of my all-time favorites. ## 🎧 Listening Bootie Mashup’s annual Best of Bootie Mashup album is out; so far I’ve downloaded it and added it to my library, but haven’t started listening through it yet. Looking forward to seeing if there are any gems to be inflicted on my unsuspecting audience at the Norwescon Thursday night dance this spring…. ## 🔗 Linking * Jim Milliot with Sophia Stewart at Publishers Weekly: Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks: “The format credited with making books more accessible via low prices and widespread availability will all but vanish from the publishing scene in a few weeks.” This is disappointing; I generally prefer the mass-market paperback size to the trade paperback size (same content, less money, and smaller, so more fit on my shelves). * Chris Parthemos and Martina Svyantek at Inside Higher Ed: No, Colleges Do Not “Over-Accommodate” (archive.is link): “…a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces…speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education. ¶ As members of the executive board of the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) in Virginia—a professional organization for staff of disability service offices—It is our intention to define and defuse the recurring arguments of this specific ‘type’ of opinion article, which for convenience we will call the ‘Do Colleges Over-Accommodate?’ piece.” * Lane Brown at Vulture: The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy Did Stanley Kubrick warn us about Jeffrey Epstein?: I put no stock in the conspiracy theory (this one in specific, and conspiracy theories in general), but this is a fascinating story. I had no idea this was even a thing. * Emma Stoye & Fred Schwaller at Nature: The best science images of 2025 — Nature’s picks: “The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more.” Some gorgeous photos. * Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal: We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars. (archive.is link): “Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for ‘marketing purposes.’ It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear. ¶ Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.” * Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn at The Guardian: It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced: “In Trump’s second term, the Republican-appointed majority on the supreme court has brought their institution to the brink of illegitimacy. Far from pulling it back from the edge, our goal has to be to push it off.”

Book 61 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ So much of this made me laugh, and it all wrapped up in an extremely satisfying way. Valente is a hilarious writer (the “Douglas Adams on a sugar high” quote on the book cover is spot on); my only disappointment (and it’s not with the book) is that I was busy enough at last spring’s Norwescon where she was a guest of honor that I barely crossed paths with her and didn’t get to say how much I enjoy her work.