Posts Tagged: reading

Tidbits for Palm Sunday

Posted by & filed under photos + text from the road.

The Snow, it is falling and falling this weekend in Mammoth
Sun. 04.09.17 – The Snow, it is falling and falling this weekend in Mammoth – photo by Ms. Jen with her Lumia 950

Tidbits for a Sunday afternoon’s reading:

The Art and Design of End Papers

The beautiful choral music of Suor Leonora d’Este

Thinker, tailor, soldier, spy: The extraordinary women of Ghiyas-ud-din Khalji’s harem

Erica Wilson, The Julia Child of Needlework

Which led to the Queen’s Coronation Gown and her Maids of Honor, then and now:
1. http://orderofsplendor.blogspot.com/2012/02/flashback-friday-queens-coronation-gown.html
2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2089887/The-Pippas-day-aristocratic-beauties-stole-the-Coronation-60-years-ago-Now-share-scenes-stories.html
3. http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-04-21/the-queens-coronation-day-maids-of-honour-where-are-they-now

A book review that is a good read in and of itself:The Souls of China by Ian Johnson – the resurgence of religion after Mao

“Johnson spends weeks with Taoist musicians, whose ritual performances bring the deceased “over to the other side”. He attends an unregistered Christian church in western China that challenges the party’s claim to be moral arbiter of society. He dines with celebrity Zen Buddhists, who dispense wisdom to real estate developers, the offspring of party aristocracy, executives and bank managers. He practises qigong – religious breathing exercises and meditation – with a master in an apartment block reserved for once-persecuted party elders rehabilitated after Mao’s death. With nicely understated irony, Johnson weaves the political rituals of the self-proclaimed atheistic CCP through this calendar: its conferences held in the Great Hall of the People, a communist temple saturated with legitimising ritual symbols; the intensely ritualistic departures and ascensions of communist leaders. “Like a Taoist priest,” he observes of Hu Jintao anointing a successor at the 18th party congress in November 2012, “Hu emulated an immortal … dyeing his hair jet-black to make himself look ageless, and surrounding himself with propaganda banners conferring immortality on the Communist party.””

Note to Self: Go on one of these UK walks
It’s blooming spring! 22 great UK walks

After spending so much time in Arizona the past two years, this article on living in Arizona is spot on.
Mike Powell : Why I live Where I liveZonies: Part 7
with a link to Walter Percy’s Why I Live Where I Live

Unusually strong April storm headed for Northern California this week : This storm was fun. I spent it up at Mammoth. My Instagram documents: 1, 2, 3, 4

Good Morning: Stross has a Good Poke at Steampunk

Posted by & filed under writing + blogs.

If you like to read and have been more than bewildered by the sub-genres that have spawned off of sub-genres, go read Charlie Stross’ rant on Steampunk* – The hard edge of empire.
It is a good and glorious essay/rant:

We’ve been at this point before with other sub-genres, with cyberpunk and, more recently, paranormal romance fang fuckers bodice rippers with vamp- Sparkly Vampyres in Lurve: it’s poised on the edge of over-exposure. Maybe it’s on its way to becoming a new sub-genre, or even a new shelf category in the bookstores. But in the meantime, it’s over-blown. The category is filling up with trashy, derivative junk and also with good authors who damn well ought to know better than to jump on a bandwagon. (Take it from one whose first novel got the ‘S’-word pinned on it — singularity — back when that was hot: if you’re lucky, your career will last long enough that you live to regret it.) Harumph, young folks today, get off my lawn ….

I am not a big fan of Steampunk the sub-culture, as I have only seen it in the late stages of its decline – the point where it is a fashion/identity sub-culture**. As for Steampunk the literary sub-genre, I have only read one novel that even has a bit of steampunk in it, of which the book was a tongue-in-cheek bit of romance-vampyre-regency-werewolf-steampunk-victorian-humor fluff of the best read it in three hours sort.
But then again, that is how I find myself reading many genres of fiction, I start off reading the humorous parody novels, get curious, and then start reading the ‘real’ books in the genre, which is not a bad way to find books to read.
All that to say, go read Charlie’s The hard edge of empire.
* Steampunk is a sub-genre mashup of SF/Fantasy, time anachronisms, Industrial Revolution dystopia/utopia, and sometimes with the addition of either the historical Romance and/or Vampyres & Zombies genres.
** Now as a person who has participated, with joyful abandon, in several fashion/identity/music sub-cultures, I will not condemn the folks who are having fun living the steampunk life, I am merely stating that it is not my thing (too much brown, sepia, and finicky metal bits).

Oops… I Skipped a Day

Posted by & filed under fun stuff, writing + blogs.

I took yesterday off from blogging, working, and all the like.
Instead I read a novel that Erika loaned me, Soulless (The Parasol Protectorate) by Gail Carriger.
Soulless was an amusing mashup of regency romance genre tropes with Steampunk Victoriana plus vampires & werewolves set in an 1870s alterna-London. A very good romp. The kind of book that once one starts reading it, one keeps reading it, even when one has other things to do.
Reading an actual book broke my 2 years + daily blogging streak.
And I don’t regret it.
;oD

Kindle Publishing

Posted by & filed under moleskine to mobile, tech + web dev, writing + blogs.

The nice folks at Amazon.com have opened up the ability for bloggers to add their blog to the Kindle-world. If you are a regular blogger and would like to have the various Kindle reader folk out there to able to download and read your blog on their Kindle’s, then go register at Kindle Publishing.
The nice folk at Six Apart alerted their Twitter followers about the new Kindle Publishing option for bloggers this afternoon:

Our friends at Amazon just launched Kindle Publishing for Blogs — list your blog in the Kindle store: http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com

Why is this exciting to me? Given that I am a big fan of reading, mobile devices and blogs, this is a perfectly easy way to make sure that one’s blog reaches what possibly may be a new audience or at the very least it makes current readers of one’s blog be able to read the blog anywhere on a mobile device at their convenience.
I signed up for Kindle Publishing this afternoon and within 20 minutes I had this blog, Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen, and The Happy Tastebud signed up as Kindle subscriptions. And in another 20 minutes after that, I had the links to the Kindle subscriptions added to both blog’s sidebar Subscribe area right next to the links to Atom and RSS feeds.
It was easy. Amazon did not require anything of me that I had not already had accomplished (description, keywords, screen shot, masthead, etc). I did not have to recode my blog nor did I have to make a device specific app, like many have done for the iPhone, but all I had to do after filling in basic information was to give an RSS or Atom feed to Amazon.
Amazon allows you to see a preview of your content as the Kindle will display it to the reader and it is not optimized for a photoblog or for the design control addicts amongst us, as the photos are very low resolution and in black & white and the typography is serif and fairly large. Also, there is no control over layout. But all of this adds up to an impetuous for me to make sure that my content is compelling regardless of the device or machine that it is viewed on.
Whether anyone actually subscribes to my blog via the Kindle or not really doesn’t matter, what does matter is that Amazon is making a wide variety of publications available to their Kindle readership and Amazon is making it easy for bloggers and other content publishers to distribute their work, which is very exciting for the mobile and handheld device ecosystem.

Feed Readers, Please Read!

Posted by & filed under writing + blogs.

I know that at least 1/2 if not 2/3rds of my regular readers here use a feed reader to view this blog. Or so says my log files.
Hello folks who read this blog via an RSS, RDF, or Atom feed! Please read the following, click through to the actual post and comment. I have enabled anonymous comments so that I can have your input.
I love you. Thanks for being faithful. I have been trying through the upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 to make sure that y’all have everything you need to read the posts on this blog. Now I would like a vote…
I appreciate how a feed reader makes life easier, but I would like to change my feeds to excerpts only with a link to the full post. Why?
1) Gesault: I love the merging of image / design / text / code of the internet. Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen is conceived as a loving attempt to combine text, my mobile photography, with my web design. When viewed through a feed reader, unless the css is fully rendered, you are only getting a small portion of the whole.
I look forward to see how folks have combined imagery and design with there content. I generally use a feed reader to let me know when an update has happened then I connect to the actual post so I can see it in its native environment rather than the white and grey of my feed reader.
Do you really like your blog reading in the sterile environment of a feed reader or do you like to see what the blogger has for the whole visual / textual package? Or are many of the blogs on your reading list so poorly designed that the feed reader is a sight for traumatized eyes?
2) Parasites: I have been having a problem lately with unscrupulous humans or bots scraping my full feeds and using my content in their blogs without any proper credit or citation.
I would like to nip this in the bud by only providing an excerpt rather than a full feed. But first I would like to elicit the opinion of my regular readers…
3) Due to image stealing I have put further restrictions on how my images can be used in my feeds via anti-hotlinking .htaccess scripts. I am sorry to my readers who view this in Google Reader, as the images are not coming through at all. On those posts, please click through to see the image.
Vote with your comments and let me know… Do you want a full feed or an excerpt that you click through to is ok?
I would like to weigh your votes with my own desire to have this blog viewed in its native format as well as discourage lazy shits who steal. Let me know… ;o)
Thanks!