In the coming weeks, I want to blog about a typical day on board; tell little stories of routines and big stories of adventures, in pictures; introduce you to some of the characters from my journey; familiarize you with the beautiful Antigua; and talk a little about my writing work on board.

I want to start, though, with a simple series of landscape photos, just to give a sense of atmosphere. For two weeks, with the exception of one day when we docked at the research station in Ny-Ålesund, we were alone on both land and sea. At the beginning of our trip, on October 1, we had about 10 and a half hours of daylight. As the trip progressed, we began to lose daylight steeply, as much as 40 minutes per day, such that when we returned to Longyearbyen on October 15, we had about 6 and a half hours of daylight. Can you imagine such a change, over the course of two weeks?

It made for some dramatic and moody skies.

Notice, in these pictures, how often my camera would reach for the Antigua in the distance :o). While I took these pictures, I was cold, in a remote and vast place where wind and ice were the only sounds. Often I was on land, a Zodiac-ride away from the ship, for hours. The Antigua in the distance meant warmth and home.

I'll start with the map of our route around the western and northwestern coast of Spitsbergen. I won't be identifying locations in this post -- forgive me, but it would add a couple of hours to this posting, and I don't have that tonight -- but I do want you to have a general idea of where we were. Please do click on the pictures to embiggen and also see them in higher resolution/better quality. These pictures are insufficient to express the range of what we saw -- but I will fill that out more in coming posts!

John Barrowman returns as Captain Jack!

После нескольких лет разработки состоялся релиз свободного векторного графического редактора Inkscape 1.0. Редактор предоставляет гибкие инструменты для рисования и обеспечивает поддержку чтения и сохранения изображений в форматах SVG, OpenDocument Drawing, DXF, WMF, EMF, sk1, PDF, EPS, PostScript и PNG. Готовые сборки Inkscape подготовлены для Linux (AppImage, Snap, Flatpak), macOS и Windows.

I had the honor of being the Guest of Honor at the science fiction convention Capricon in Chicago just a little over a week ago...

The spread of COVID-19 threatens the lives of more than 2.3 million people locked up in prisons and jails throughout the United States. We look at how the call to release prisoners during the coronavirus pandemic makes the case for prison abolition, with scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance and the author of "Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California." Her forthcoming book is "Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition."

We look at an incredible story unfolding in Venezuela of a failed coup attempt. Did a former Green Beret mastermind it? Two Americans have been arrested in Venezuela. President Nicolás Maduro claims the U.S. was behind the plot. "It looks like a bad Rambo movie, or a really bad telenovela," says Miguel Tinker Salas, author of "The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela." He notes that "the U.S. is seeking regime change ... and the consequences for Venezuela could be very dire going forward.”

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Venezuela will try two Americans allegedly captured during a failed raid by mercenaries, President Nicolas Maduro said on Wednesday as the US vowed to "use every tool available" to bring them home.

I am old. I’m so old that, when I entered the industry, we didn’t have specializations like “frontend” and “backend” developers. You just had developers, and everybody just sort muddled about. As web...