Today I received my ballot for the DragonCon Awards

Huh. I'm not quite sure why. I don't recall signing up for such a thing, and I certainly don't have a membership.

There's one big difference between the DCA and the Hugos: the latter provides you with a copy of all of the material nominated because you have to pay for at least a sustaining membership to WorldCon. Reading through the ballot, I recognize maybe 4-5 novels, no comics except for the character titles: a lot of the stuff is flat-out foreign to me. I recognize the novels only because they were also nominated for Hugos or their by John Scalzi or Cory Doctorow. And I don't understand their process as the Doctorow book was definitely released in '17.

I don't think I'm going to bother voting. There's only three or four categories that I could vote in, in that I actually recognize titles, but I haven't read all of the submitted books and therefore I don't think I could offer a reasoned opinion. It would just be "I read this one book or I like this one author, and even though I haven't read any of the others, they're all rubbish!" Movies are about the only category that I could vote and would feel that I could argue my vote in.

"A bear in his natural habitat: a Studebaker"

Or in this case, my dad in his shop.



He just installed new lighting and wanted a photo to send to the manufacturer who had requested it, so I dug out my 6D with a 17-40 zoom and did a panorama of three photos and stitched/cropped them in Photoshop.

Unfortunately he had turned off the light behind the drill press, so I had to re-shoot it for the third time and he wasn't sitting there. Still, my wife thought it would make for an excellent jigsaw puzzle, so we may get one custom made.

Not visible: table saw behind the table and under the drawers of the back wall, a router under the cabinets of the left workspace, a band saw, and an innumerable amount of hand tools. The air compressor is outside of the shop but piped in. The shop has evolved over a period of more than 50 years of customization.

Speaking of photographs....

Tonight we took my parents out to dinner: we're in Phoenix for a game convention Saturday/Sunday. Parked on my right was an SUV with this on its back window:



Parked on my left was a car with this on their back window:



You just can't make this stuff up.