James Hardin

Confluence 2023

August 7, 2023 – I went to the Friday evening session of Confluence, the convention by Parsec (https://parsec-sff.org/), Pittsburgh’s science fiction club, on July 21. A good time as always, highly recommended for all science fiction and fantasy readers and writers. I particularly enjoyed the session on hopepunk and solarpunk. They’re sort of the opposite …

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COVID

April 14, 2023 – I was just about to start cardiac rehab from the heart surgery, when COVID suddenly came roaring through the household and hit us all. It wasn’t too bad for three of us–all that vaxing and boosting apparently paid off–but my oldest son got slammed–he always gets everything worse than anyone else, …

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Heart valve

February 1, 2023 – I just had surgery to replace my heart’s aortic valve. I’d known for a couple of years it had aortic stenosis (inability to pass enough flow) caused by a combination of a birth defect and aging, but only recently did the condition suddenly jump into the “severe” category and require surgery …

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Robot experiment

September 3, 2022 – A perfect nerd’s holiday! I went to Carnegie-Mellon University’s Robotics Makerspace AI lab and participated in an experiment learning to drive a robot by a combination of voice commands and tilting my head while wearing a hat with sensors in it! And they said they’d pay me for doing it! I’d …

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Confluence Convention 2022

August 2, 2022 – I had a good weekend at the Confluence convention hosted by Parsec, the Pittsburgh science fiction organization (http://confluence-sff.org/). The annual conference was finally back, and in-person! I especially enjoyed reading part of my story “Power to Power” at the Triangulation launch party; I like reading out loud to people. Only bad …

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