A post by @JamesBazan reminded me of one of my absolute favorite and the most profound quotations from a book. In fact, this book has many others. I'll let you discover others on your own. Here are a few.
“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. … Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.”
Reading For Fun Is Plummeting In the US, and Experts Are Concerned - alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you sett... - news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/… #books
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S.
i wrote a 120,000 word book on my experience growing up in the BBS and dial-up internet era, from ~1985-1997
it's chock full of stories about ibm pc and macintosh hardware and gaming
it's going to be published this autumn as an ebook and might get a print edition
but i have a far more stupid idea for it: how about a floppy disk edition with a custom dos/windows 3.1 & macintosh system 6 ebook version
has anyone written a Voyager Expanded Book using the VEB Toolkit in 30 years?
(if you haven't heard of Expanded Books, michael crichton and voyager's team wrote an *excellent* version of Jurassic Park)
is there an ms-dos or windows 3.1 equivalent to VEBs? I swear that back in the 90s someone made ebooks using "Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook", but i can't seem to find any examples of it
🆕 blog! “How long does it take to upgrade an eBook?”
The older I get, the more comfortable I become with complaining. Not merely moaning on social media, but writing a direct email to the perpetrator of some annoyance.
I'd purchased an eBook and was appalled by how crappy the accessibility was. If you don't know, modern ePub books are just HTML…
My book Drystone – A Life Rebuilt is out in just three weeks.
I really believe in this book. It’s honest about important things, quietly subversive, funny, easy to read, and I’ve poured everything into writing it and getting it into the world as far as I can.
If you can, I’d love your help. A share, a preorder, a message to someone who might love it, it all makes a difference.
I'm dying over this reddit comment. Not saying that it is wrong but the framing of books as "old timey entertainment" is funny to me. Like my grandpa talking about farming using mules.
Hurray! Another San Francisco bookstore is following Booksmith's example and pulling Harry Potter books.
From the SF Chronicle:
Fabulosa Books followed suit on Wednesday, June 25.
The queer Castro bookstore shared a picture of a whiteboard to its Instagram account with the message, “We are no longer buying + selling books by J.K. Rowling as she is devoting her life to nastiness.”
The caption thanks Booksmith for “setting a good example.”
Two popular independent bookstores in San Francisco have stopped selling the “Harry Potter” series after J.K. Rowling’s fund opposing transgender rights.
Lesya Ukrainka: Ukraine’s Beloved Writer and Activist
“Lesya Ukrainka” was a carefully considered pseudonym for a writer who left behind a legacy of poems, plays, essays and activism for the Ukrainian language.
“I recall Midwestern summer nights, standing on my grandparents’ hushed lawn,” Ray Bradbury told me in 2010, “and looking up at the sky at the confetti field of stars. There were millions of suns o…
I want to talk about money.
(Ugh, I know. How crass.)
Specifically, how much money authors make, or more accurately, don’t.
I signed my publishing deal in 2023. My advance was £2,500. That’s it.
Starting my GDC week off with a bang! I have just been notified that my contract at Rookery Interactive will not be renewed in 2 weeks, so I am suddenly #OpenToWork! Please keep me in mind for any writing or consulting roles. If you're at GDC & would like to meet, lmk!
🌎 I’m open to remote roles, or positions in Bangkok!
⭐ I've worked on a ton of games, comics and books, and am available for writing, consulting & editing outside of games. #gamedev #comics #books #gdc
Thanks to the magic of the Streisand effect, I just heard about #CarelessPeople - a book by former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams.
Apparently the company is FREAKING OUT and seeking legal ways to stop its promotion. I can see why. This article about it in the Times made my jaw drop: web.archive.org/web/2025031022…
IN OTHER NEWS just as i thought i knew everything i needed to know about the development of fascism ―a very EuroAmerican flavah of authoritarianism― i find myself being schooled by… well… scholars.
am reading "Breve historia de la moda: desde la Edad Media hasta la actualidad" by Giorgio Riello. the book is a product of one of his history courses.
today i columbused a few things about the links between the development of authoritarianism and fashion in Europe…
As you will know I'm no stranger to typos, so this cartoon goes out to anyone who sent me a massage about a typo in a post (as always thanks for your help, much appreciated) bit also to my Mastodon friend @h4890 who will appreciate this on a Saturday morning.
Amazon will remove the ability to download the ebooks for Kindle at the end of the month. So if you ever close your amazon account, you'll no longer be able to access the books you had bought.
Designed for downloading your Kindle eBooks in a more automated fashion than is typically permitted, this tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you've already purchased. - treetr...
More "enshittification". This time from Amazon. Amazon is pulling a Google, killing off popular services. Evidently, I have until 25th February to download my 708 books that I have purchased from them. After the 25th you can no longer download YOUR books for backup or transfer via USB
Good job I did this 2 years ago eh? Buy the books from elsewhere.
This is fine for those of us who don't buy from Amazon anymore, but if you have a standing library with them, make sure you get it all downloaded so you can break it. It's frustrating because you can't bulk download - I keep finding titles I own but missed grabbing somehow - but you have until Feb 26th to get them all.
Amazon is removing the ability to download purchased Kindle content, which is the only way to read it on my Kobo or elsewhere. What this means is I will no longer be purchasing (“a license to”–ick) any books by the mostly independent authors who exclusively publish there; just cancelled preorders.
My favourite part of this interview? Hmmm...maybe this?
Vikander: What did you learn about craft while writing this, your first book?
De Garis: Craft is a conversation with your materials. It can’t be hurried. It requires attention, patience, and humility. Writing also taught me that craft resists capitalism—not just in theory but in practice. Eighteen months of work for £1250 made that point clearer than any philosophical argument.
I wanted to share with you a conversation that I had with journalist, therapist, broadcaster and editor extraordinaire Svea Vikander. I know Svea well and, like all of us, I am most compelling on any subject when I am comfortable.
Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations
"...court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models."
Hello, I'm new to Mastadon and looking to meet people interested in medieval Silk Road history, especially of women and non-western historical fiction.
To sort of give you an idea of the weird stuff I'm into, here's a post I did about stories written in the Medieval Silk Road that feature women and are available in English:
The Silk Road had men and women of all walks of life. It also was one of history’s most literate eras and places, prior to the modern age. One of the reasons that we know that is from the sto…
‘Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.’
Lord Byron's semi-autobiographical tale in verse The Corsair is published by John Murray in London and sells 10,000 copies on this day and over 25,000 in the first month, going through seven editions. Walter Scott is to say of Byron's poetry: "He beat me out of the field in description of the stronger passions and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart."
Many of the locations of Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' can still be seen today. Scrooge's counting house is thought to be in Newman's Court, in the City of London. "The ancient tower of a church" is described, whose "gruff old bell was always slyly peeping down at Scrooge out of a #gothic window." That church has been identified as St Michael's Cornhill, which looms over Newman's Court. In addition, Bob Cratchit heads home via nearby Cornhill, where he "went down a slide" on the ice "at the end of a line of boys, twenty times, in honour of it being Christmas Eve." Scrooge's "usual melancholy tavern" where he takes his "melancholy dinner" is thought to be Simpson's Tavern in nearby Ball Court, which has been trading since 1757. The door knocker which turns into the ghostly head of Jacob Marley was apparently inspired by one in Craven Street, near Charing Cross, where Dickens worked as a boy in a shoe-blacking factory. #Christmas #literature #history #folklore #Yule #books #London
In the wake of SPD shutting down, I started doing roundups on Metafilter of #SmallPress books to support a less corporate reading ecosystem. Time to start posting those here too, dailyish! 💙📚 Or you can go to my Bookshop list (affiliate link): bookshop.org/lists/small-press… #bookstodon #books
I remember reaching out to a bunch of friends to put together this six year-old article about books for getting started with occult/magical practices. Lots of good stuff on this list, too. #books #occult #magic #morebooksarnemancy.com/articles/getting…
Review: The Odyssey is a story about a homicidal maniac (Odysseus) who refuses to ask for directions. This tragic flaw, shared by many men, leads his crew to disaster. Some are eaten by monsters, some are eaten by their crew-mates, and some finally get fed up with this cruise from hell (literally at one point), and take a flight home.
When Odysseus returns home, he is shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that after a 20-year absence, his wife is entertaining the possibility of remarrying.
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!?
"What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow. What are brief? today and tomorrow. What are frail? spring blossoms and youth. What are deep? the ocean and truth."
Christina Rossetti, who died #OTD in 1894, was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
"Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC."
"Those publishers ... will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book." #canada #cdnpoli #books
J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
