Project Update: Stained Glass Poppies

 Foil nearly done - will finish foil and solder next week:

Proposal: Adapting Gamestorming 2.0 for Zoom-based Graduate Level Cybersecurity Courses

What would Gamestorming 2.0 look like if you stripped away the “game” language and applied the underlying facilitation principles to a Zoom‑based graduate‑level Cybersecurity & Audit course?

Starting from three realities:

1. Students need entry points, not “fun.”
2. Zoom requires simpler, more intentional structures.
3. The TA should not have to juggle 3 rounds of breakout rooms.

... I identified several frameworks that would work in this type of educational setting:

RECIPE: Morel Supper with Farro and Roasted Vegetables

Anna came over for a slice of my chocolate–quince bundt cake and casually handed me a paper bag full of late‑spring Sierra morels that she and Rene had foraged. I haven’t met Rene yet, but he clearly did heroic work out there because the bag was packed. With that many morels, the direction of dinner was obvious: they were going to be the foundation of a farro‑based roast vegetable dish with plant‑based chicken folded in at the end.

This was also my first time cooking with “Just Meat” chicken, and it was a surprise in the best way. I browned it in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium‑high heat until the edges charred and crisped. The pieces stayed tender inside and the irregular shapes worked perfectly with the roasted vegetables and farro. The whole dish came together exactly the way I wanted: earthy, bright, textural, and built around the generosity of friends who show up with morels.

INGREDIENTS

Farro base (Instapot):

• 1 cup farro
• 2 cups water
• 1 quart dry-ish morels, cleaned and coarsely chopped
• 1–2 tablespoons black truffle olive oil (if you have it)

Roasted Veggies:

• 1 large head of cauliflower, broken into small florets (grocery‑store large; it barely fit my 14" Wagner skillet)
• 4–5 large carrots, peeled and cut into thick coins
• 1 large red onion, halved, cut into 3/4" wedges, then halved again
• 1 serrano chile, seeded & chopped
• 1 head garlic, peeled & coarsely chopped
• 3–5 tablespoons capers, depending on the size of the cauliflower
• Olive oil (regular or flavoried if you prefer)
• A note about EVOO: I love infused olive oils! I used garlic infused EVOO on the cauliflower and onions, a black truffle infused EVOO to dress the farro and morels, and a smoked olive wood EVOO in the dressing. Experiment with flavors that you like to bring out the different flavors.

• 1 package “Just Meat” chicken (or your preferred plant‑based chicken)

• Lemon herb salt or a mix of lemon thyme, basil, and dill
• Bragg's aminos or coco aminos, to taste (for salt)
• Pistachios, whole raw shelled, toasted and coarsely chopped

INSTRUCTIONS

Pre-heat the oven to 450°F for 10-15 minutes, then drop the oven to 400°F.

Cook the farro in the Instant Pot with 2 cups of water on the "rice" setting. When it finishes, leave it on “keep warm.” Stir in the chopped morels and 1–2 tablespoons of black truffle olive oil. Put the lid back on. The morels will soften and absorb the extra moisture from the farro, and the herbs will bloom gently in the warmth.

Roast the veggies: I used three cast iron skillets in parallel because that’s what I had in the oven already from baking bread, and cast iron gives you the kind of direct heat that really caramelizes vegetables. If you don’t have that many skillets, you can roast things serially, or use a regular sheet pan set on top of a preheated pizza stone to mimic the extra heat.

NOTE: Roast the carrots, cauliflower, and onions/garlic/chile separately. They all have different water contents and different shapes, and if you pile them together you’ll end up steaming instead of roasting.

• Skillet 1: Spread the carrots in another pan with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast at 400°F until caramelized and tender.
• Skillet 2: Red onion, chopped serrano, and a few smashed garlic cloves with olive oil and spread them in a skillet. Roast until the onions are softened and juicy with some char on the edges.
• Skillet 3: In a separate skillet, toss the cauliflower with olive oil (about 1 tablespoon is enough if you toss well).
• Halfway through roasting, add the capers to the cauliflower pan so they can toast and crisp slightly.

Toast the pistachios in the toaster oven 1–2 minutes at a time, checking frequently. You can always toast more but not less, and burned pistachios will make you very sad. Coarsely chop once cooled.

Sautée the “Just Meat” chicken in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium‑high heat. Let it brown and char on the edges, then flip and cook until heated through and still tender.

When everything is done, fold the roasted vegetables and the cooked chicken into the farro and morels in the Instapot or large mixing bowl. Add the Bragg's aminos and dried herbs. Add the pistachios and drizzle with the Meyer lemon–mustard–maple vinaigrette.

Serve warm or at room temperature. It keeps beautifully and is even better the next day with the vinaigrette:

MEYER LEMON–MUSTARD–MAPLE VINAIGRETTE

• Zest of 1 Meyer lemon (removed with a peeler)
• Juice of 2 Meyer lemons
• About 3 tablespoons maple syrup
• Olive oil (regular or flavored)
• (optional) vinegar, cook's choice if a sharper dressing is preferred

Combine everything in a wide‑mouth quart mason jar and blend with an immersion blender until fully emulsified (not to a mayo, just smooth).

REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson (3 stars)

 I just finished the 2025 Wonder Woman Hugo nominee and, by Hecate, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. The artwork is fantastic and the portrait-style alternate covers scattered through the book are gorgeous. Visually it’s everything you’d expect from a Hugo finalist.

The story is basically Greek mythology with Diana pasted in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely not a traditional Wonder Woman narrative. Persephone shows up. Diana eats a single pomegranate seed “out of love,” which binds her to spend one month a year in the Underworld. I couldn’t quite tell if that was meant to be for her mother’s sake or just part of the general mythic logic the book is following.

They also changed her backstory so that she sacrificed her right arm to cast a spell. The reveal comes late, but it’s actually one of the more interesting choices. She’s an amputee, a witch, and still a powerful warrior. The book doesn’t treat the missing limb as a tragedy. It treats it as a mythic cost, which is a very different framing than superhero stories usually take.

Prometheus even shows up, which is when I finally gave up pretending this was a Wonder Woman story at all. He gives Diana some of his blood to forge the Nemesis lasso, and he also creates a zombie Pegasus. Yes, really. It still has feathery wings, but the body is a black skeletal shape, and Diana “feeds” it with magic like it’s some kind of Underworld rescue horse. At that point the book wasn’t even pretending to be DC canon. It was just doing its own mythic thing and letting Diana tag along.

Steve, the love interest barely registers as a character. He’s rescued (alive) in the Underworld for reasons that never quite gel. After defeating the enemy to live on Earth as we know it as an incarnation of Medusa - she appears "stuck" and Steve, the Wonder Woman Whisperer, steps up to remind her she’s actually Diana and she transforms back. They otherwise have zero chemistry.

The part that actually worked for me was the relationship between Diana and Circe. In this version Circe is her adoptive mother, not a villain, and the story keeps circling back to that bond. There’s a line about how you learn to love a child by raising it, and that feels like the real heart of the book. Everything else — the battles, the romance, the transformations — is secondary to that relationship.

I kept waiting for Athena to show up, since she’s the one who sprang from Zeus’s head, not Artemis or Diana. But the book isn’t interested in Athena at all. It’s interested in Circe, in chosen family, in the idea that Diana is who she is because someone loved her into being.

The ending is pure Greek myth. Diana shows mercy, tries to avoid killing, does what she has to do, rescues her mother, and leaves the Underworld. Then the story just stops. No epilogue, no wrap-up, no superhero-style resolution. The quest is over, so the tale ends.

I liked parts of it. The art is stunning and they have alternate covers sprinkled throughout that are stylistically different portraits of Wonder Woman. The adoptive-mother theme is lovely. The disability reveal is handled with more grace than I expected. But the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash. Some readers will love this version of Diana as a mythic heroine. Others will miss the clarity and grounding of a more traditional Wonder Woman story. It’s ambitious, uneven, and definitely memorable.

REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson

RATING: 3 stars

QUILTS: red & pink

 I really liked this cute fabric and didn't want to cut it up too small so did an ad hoc pattern instead of a traditional pattern to showcase the cartoon beaver-in-love fabric along with various pink and red-and-white fabrics:

Tony loves helping!

Eclipse and Tony helping

Twin quilt over the door:

Hugo Nominees: Mickey-17 vs Superman

I watched both Mickey‑17 and Superman (2025) because they’re Hugo nominees. I never would have watched Superman otherwise, and after this I’ll probably keep avoiding the franchise. Mickey‑17 at least felt like it had something interesting going on.

One of the things I appreciated about Mickey‑17 is how it handles identity in a way that lines up with what I’ve been thinking about since reading Old Man’s War and writing that earlier post about cyborgs and memory uploads. Old Man’s War raises the question of whether someone is still the same person after their body dies and their memories get transferred into a new one. The characters themselves start to wonder about it — and the story never really resolves it. Their world treats memory like a file you can copy into a new body and call it continuity, even though the cracks are obvious.

Mickey‑17 doesn’t gloss over those cracks. It leans into them. Mickey‑18 isn’t Mickey‑17. He’s similar, but he’s also more aggressive, more cynical, more fed up with the colony. He reacts differently because he is different. That’s the whole point: copying memories and experiences doesn’t preserve the person. It just preserves the data. The continuity of consciousness is gone.

What makes this even sharper is how the colony treats the Expendables. They’re commodities. They’re infrastructure. They’re bodies the system can use up because it has decided those bodies don’t count the same way other bodies do. It’s the same pattern I’ve noticed in other stories — Murderbot, Old Man’s War, The Handmaid’s Tale — where some people are treated as infinitely renewable resources and others are treated as irreplaceable. In Mickey‑17, the colony needs the fiction that each new Mickey is “the same person” to justify killing him over and over. But the moment Mickey‑17 and Mickey‑18 exist at the same time, the whole system collapses. You can’t pretend they’re interchangeable when they’re standing next to each other arguing.

Nasha is the only one who seems to understand that. She treats Mickey like a person, not a curiosity. Everyone else just wants to ask him what it feels like to die, as if his subjective experience is some kind of novelty item they get to poke at. Nasha is the one who recognizes his personhood, and that’s why she defends him the way she does. She sees the human being the colony refuses to acknowledge.

Even Mickey‑18, with all his sharper edges, still has a moral code. He’s not just “the angry version.” He’s a person with his own perspective, shaped by the gaps in his memories and the circumstances of his awakening. And he makes a choice that protects Mickey‑17 and Nasha, not because he’s programmed to do so, not because he’s a copy acting out a script, but because he recognizes their humanity. He’s not a defective version. He’s not a spare part. He’s a person making a decision.

That’s what made Mickey‑17 work for me. It actually takes its own premise seriously. It doesn’t pretend that memory equals identity. It doesn’t pretend that you can kill someone and reboot them and call it the same life. It doesn’t treat the philosophical questions like window dressing. It builds the story around them.

Then there’s Superman (2025), which I had to force myself to finish. I paused it, went to bed, and came back the next day because I felt obligated to get through it for the Hugos. I spent half the movie wondering how Lex Luthor convinced so many people to go along with his ridiculous plans — pocket universes, portals, “cities I care about,” whatever that was supposed to mean. And then I saw the endless credits list and thought: all these people worked on this, and this is the result.

There was one moment in Superman (2025) that actually worked for me, and it was Lois interviewing Clark as Superman. She’s the only person in the entire film who seems to understand that “I prevented a war” is not automatically a heroic statement. Her immediate pushback — basically, “Did you? Or did you just decide your assessment was the only one that mattered?” — was the only time the movie acknowledged that Superman acting unilaterally is not automatically noble.

It’s not like he was stopping a giant meteor from taking a chunk out of the Earth and throwing it off orbit. He was intervening in a geopolitical situation with actual governments, actual people, and actual consequences. Lois is the only one who raises the obvious question: who gave him the authority to decide what counts as “preventing” something? That scene had more moral clarity in thirty seconds than the rest of the movie had in two hours.

And honestly, that one exchange just made the rest of the film’s worldbuilding problems stand out even more. If the movie had followed that thread — the one where Superman’s unilateral actions have political, ethical, and human consequences — it might have had something to say. Instead, it went right back to portals, pocket universes, collapsing skyscrapers, and people cheering while their city falls apart.

The worldbuilding is a mess. If you’re going to make up fake countries and fake cities, why keep “United States” at all? And obviously Mexico exists because someone mentions a burrito. It’s inconsistent in a way that makes the whole setting feel flimsy. Metropolis is supposed to be a major American city, but Mr. Terrific and the newspaper editor are basically the only Black characters. It just adds to the sense that the world is a cardboard backdrop.

The destruction scenes are even worse. Entire skyscrapers collapse and people are somehow cheerful. A building ripped in half is a demolition site, not something you push back together like a broken toy. Mr. Terrific “closing the rift imperfectly” and Superman staring at mismatched cracks like it’s a minor cosmetic issue is absurd. That building is condemned. The whole city should be traumatized. Instead, the movie treats it like a quirky workplace disagreement.

The xenophobia subplot, trying to make Superman look bad for being an "alien," has no emotional weight. The movie doesn’t build a world where that fear makes sense. It doesn’t build a world at all. It just gestures at themes without doing any of the work.

By the end, Superman is apologizing to Mr. Terrific for pointing out that a cracked building isn't lined up, and I’m sitting there thinking: you should all be apologizing for the entire movie.

Mickey‑17 gave me characters who felt like people, not props. It took its own ideas seriously. It understood the same thing Old Man’s War hints at but never commits to: that identity isn’t something you can copy‑paste. Superman (2025) couldn’t even keep its own world consistent. One respected my time. The other made me hit pause and go to bed.

Baking - Sourdough Bread - Overnight Cold Bulk Method

 

Starter:

• 600 g active 100% hydration starter. That means that the starter is equal parts of water and flour by weight.

If it loses a little weight during rising, that’s normal. Dough Mix:

• 700 g flour.
• 430 g water.
• 20 g salt.

Mix until combined. I do use a dough hook on my KitchenAid mixer. Add extra water until the dough is sticky enough that you need wet hands to handle it and it mostly comes clean off the dough hook. Dough should feel loose, sticky, and hydrated. Bulk Fermentation: Let the dough rest at room temperature for about 3 hours. Look for a 30 to 50 percent rise, visible bubbles, and a jiggly surface. Do not break the big bubbles. Cold Bulk:

• Cover and refrigerate overnight. It’s OK to just cover this with wax paper.
• If you want to preserve hydration, then put a tight lid on it
  

Next Day – Divide and Shape:

• Turn the cold dough out onto a floured board.
• Use two bench scrapers to turn and tighten the dough with minimal extra flour.

Total dough weight today was 1766 g after cold bulk. Split into one large loaf (about 1000 g) and one smaller loaf (about 766 g). Shape each into a tight ball (as best as you can because it’s very hydrated and sticky). Let rest on the counter for about 20 minutes. Place into floured bowls and refrigerate again to firm up. Preheat oven to 500 F with Dutch ovens inside for 45 to 60 minutes. Bake:

• Dust the bottom of each dough ball with semolina (not the Dutch oven).
• Do a quick hand‑shape to tighten the surface.
• Drop dough into the hot Dutch oven.
• Score immediately with a shallow angled cut.
• Bake covered at 500 F for 15 minutes.
• Lower to 450 F and bake covered 5 more minutes.
• Uncover and bake 15 to 25 minutes depending on loaf size until deep golden brown.

Cool completely before slicing. JUST KIDDING - nobody does that.

REVIEW: An Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo & John Picacio (3-stars)

 I finished An Invisible Parade as part of my Hugo reading, and it’s one of the most striking books in the packet this year. The writing is incredibly strong, and the emotional clarity of the story is what carries it. It treats death, hunger, anger, and fear with a kind of honesty that respects a child’s interior life instead of simplifying it. Nothing is softened or turned into a lesson. These emotions are presented as companions a child learns to walk alongside, not problems to be solved.

The artwork is even more impressive. Every page is dense with sensory detail. You can hear the sounds of the people in the street, smell the food, feel the excitement and tension in the air. The world feels lived‑in and immediate, and the emotional atmosphere is almost tactile. The small touches matter, right down to the cat tucked into one tableau. It’s the kind of book that invites you to slow down and take in each page.

There is one moment that didn’t work for me. The embodiment of “hunger” is shown as a homeless person holding a sign, framed as a reminder to be grateful. That choice felt off‑putting and the wrong kind of message. It reduces a real person’s suffering to a symbolic prompt for someone else’s emotional growth. In a book that is otherwise so careful in how it personifies difficult emotions, this stood out as a misstep.

I also noticed the phrasing in the author’s note: “Día de Muertos is part of my culture.” I rarely see that form; in my experience it’s almost always “Día de los Muertos.” But “Día de Muertos” is a legitimate variant used in Mexico, especially in cultural and institutional contexts. It isn’t a mistake or a dropped article. It’s simply not the form I’m used to seeing, and it caught my attention because the rest of the book is so precise about cultural grounding.

As a piece of illustrated storytelling, this book is exceptional. As a Hugo nominee, it sits in an odd place. It isn’t science fiction, and it’s only lightly fantastical. The figures that appear aren’t speculative beings in the genre sense; they’re allegorical presences meant to make internal experiences visible. That’s powerful, but it doesn’t make the book a genre work. Its strengths come from emotional truth and artistic craft, not from speculative worldbuilding.

It’s a beautiful and moving book, and I’m glad it’s in the packet. But it doesn’t feel like science fiction or fantasy, and that makes its placement on the ballot feel slightly out of alignment with the award’s usual scope.

REVIEW: A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham (3.5 stars)

 As part of my Hugo reading this year, I read the 2025 graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea. It’s a beautiful book. The landscapes, the magic, and the sense of scale are all handled with care, and the art invites you to slow down and take in each page.

The storytelling doesn’t land with the same force as the novel or the audiobook. The adaptation compresses the narrative in ways that flatten the emotional arc and weaken the transitions. Some scenes feel abrupt, and the internal stakes that drive Ged’s growth don’t come through as clearly.

A few artistic choices also introduce new confusion. The dragon sequence is the most notable. The panels make it appear as though Ged is becoming a dragon, rather than asserting control through the dragon’s true name. In Le Guin’s world, that distinction matters. Transformation magic has strict limits, and dragons are not beings a wizard can imitate. The visual metaphor muddies that boundary.

There’s also a noticeable inconsistency in Ged’s skin tone. He is described in the text as having dark brown skin, and the graphic novel reflects this, but not consistently. He appears darker as a child than as a young man. Given how intentional Le Guin was about the racial makeup of Earthsea, this stands out.

Overall, it’s a visually rich adaptation and a welcome inclusion in the Hugo packet, but it doesn’t match the clarity or emotional depth of the original story.

REVIEW: A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel by Fred Fordham

RATING: 3.5 stars

REVIEW: The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford (4.5 stars)

 This is my first year as a Hugo voter and my first time attending Worldcon. I genuinely had no idea I was even eligible to vote until this year, so diving into the voter packet has been a mix of surprise, delight, and a little bit of “why didn’t I do this sooner.” One of the best parts of the whole experience has been discovering works I might never have picked up on my own, and The Space Cat is exactly that kind of discovery. I’m so grateful the creators made it available in the packet.

The book is a fantastic set of stories about a wild lynx‑point Siamese who travels with his family to Nigeria for the year and ends up saving the world from alien invaders. He’s also secretly an alien himself, and his orange space‑cat friend—who he adores—turns out to be his sister. It’s whimsical, heartfelt, and visually rich in a way that a lot of reviewers seem to have missed. People who complained that the story “wasn’t complex enough” were clearly reading only the text and not the art, because the art is doing so much of the emotional and narrative work.

The depiction of kitten zoomies alone deserves an award. Periwinkle’s first day in the house, running nonstop in frantic loops, mapping every corner and surface, is exactly what my mom’s cat Paddy did when we brought him home. It’s so accurate it’s almost documentary. And the hot sauce incident is hilarious in the most cat‑true way possible: the bold investigation, the instant regret, and then the offended look that somehow blames the universe for allowing hot sauce to exist.

The alien plot is playful and unsettling at the same time. The glowing blue plant‑creatures that mimic plants during the day and take over human minds is a clear nod to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The final battle where geckos, dogs, owls, and cats all band together is chaotic and charming. It’s a story about cooperation, identity, and belonging, told through expressive art and tight, efficient writing.

For me, this is easily a four‑ or five‑star work. It succeeds on its own terms: visually sophisticated, emotionally resonant, culturally grounded, and genuinely funny. As a first‑time Hugo voter, finding something this joyful and well‑crafted in the packet feels like exactly what the Hugo process is meant to do—surface stories that deserve more attention than they get.