It's quiet, so I'm still playing 2.0 catch up. LibraryThing is pretty nifty. (My library is linked in the handy widget to the left.) I will say, though, that I find the entering of my books to be somewhat tedious. Still, once I get some entered, it's neat to see all the covers all in a row. 8)
It's amazingly easy to get lost in LibraryThing - like wikipedia, you can spend hours simply following a chain of link after link after link, noting down titles or interesting bits of information to follow up later. For instance - while entering books into my library, I discovered that there's a new Captain Raptor book* out! How awesome is that? While following tags on things I had already entered, I found a list of books on runes that I've never read. And new books on horror films that I'll have to track down. It's all very exciting.
Unlike flickr, I can see myself continuing to play with this one. And I haven't even touched the more social aspects of the site yet.
*Captain Raptor is about dinosaurs in space ships. Also, there are robots. And jetpacks. If there is anything in the world that is better than that, someone needs to tell me about immediately.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Photohosting
So...I've been totally slacking on my 2.0 stuff - time to play catch up. Today, I am browsing through flickr.*
Personally, I don't take a lot of pictures. My family tells me that this is a failing. I do have various pretty pictures that I've found on the internet stored on my computer, but none of these are things I've taken myself. I save them because they're shiny and then I reupload as needed, because hotlinking is rude. I tend to use photobucket.com for that because, well, when I was a wee interweb n00b, it was what was free and available. And it's pretty easy to use, for my purposes.
Flickr is very pretty. And I like being able to search other people's pictures - with just a cursory search, I've found some amazing raven and crow pictures that I'll have to add to my collection when I get home. (Seriously - is this not gorgeous?) I'm pretty sure my mom uses flickr to upload pictures of her artist trading cards - she goes through a lot of pictures space. (Or does she use picassa? I'm honestly not sure.)
As for me, despite flickr's prettiness, I really don't have so many pictures to share with the internet that I would need a huge picture community to do it. Photobucket works for the few pictures I have so, at the moment, that's probably where I'm going to stay.
But I'll head to flickr the next time I'm looking for pretty corvids.
*I cannot type that word properly to save my life. My fingers really want it to be "flirk" and that's completely incorrect.
Personally, I don't take a lot of pictures. My family tells me that this is a failing. I do have various pretty pictures that I've found on the internet stored on my computer, but none of these are things I've taken myself. I save them because they're shiny and then I reupload as needed, because hotlinking is rude. I tend to use photobucket.com for that because, well, when I was a wee interweb n00b, it was what was free and available. And it's pretty easy to use, for my purposes.
Flickr is very pretty. And I like being able to search other people's pictures - with just a cursory search, I've found some amazing raven and crow pictures that I'll have to add to my collection when I get home. (Seriously - is this not gorgeous?) I'm pretty sure my mom uses flickr to upload pictures of her artist trading cards - she goes through a lot of pictures space. (Or does she use picassa? I'm honestly not sure.)
As for me, despite flickr's prettiness, I really don't have so many pictures to share with the internet that I would need a huge picture community to do it. Photobucket works for the few pictures I have so, at the moment, that's probably where I'm going to stay.
But I'll head to flickr the next time I'm looking for pretty corvids.
*I cannot type that word properly to save my life. My fingers really want it to be "flirk" and that's completely incorrect.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Audiobook reviews
Y'know what there should be? There should be a website or something that reviews audiobooks as audiobooks. Not the book itself but the reader's performance - their vocal quality, the animation of the narration, the various voices the reader may put on. A critique of the performance as a performance.
See, I don't get audio versions of books I haven't already read. I already know whether or not I like the book. But readers are tricky things and a bad one is just impossible to listen to. Book reviews sites - at least, the ones I've played around on - don't give you the kind of information I'm looking for. And the few audiobooks sites that I've found have very very few reviews available.
Anybody have any suggestions?
On a related note, the audiobook of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is really very good. The reader's voice suits the dry whimsy of the prose and his voice for Mr Norrell is perfect. (I am not quite convinced by his Drawlight but I'm willing to work with him there, as I don't care terribly much about Drawlight. His Childermass, though, makes me very happy indeed.) I'm only on disc three, so I haven't gotten to Jonathan Strange as yet and thus can't comment on the voice given him. But the bit I was really worried about are the footnotes, as that's difficult to do in an audio format and they're so very important to the book as a whole. I needn't have worried - the footnotes are handled beautifully, in a way that flows into but doesn't disrupt the larger text.
As I say, I'm only on disc three and it's likely to be slow going as I can't listen to this one at bedtime (I'll never be able to sleep for trying to follow the story). But I'm very much enjoying it. I may have to copy it to the computer for future re-listening.
See, I don't get audio versions of books I haven't already read. I already know whether or not I like the book. But readers are tricky things and a bad one is just impossible to listen to. Book reviews sites - at least, the ones I've played around on - don't give you the kind of information I'm looking for. And the few audiobooks sites that I've found have very very few reviews available.
Anybody have any suggestions?
On a related note, the audiobook of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is really very good. The reader's voice suits the dry whimsy of the prose and his voice for Mr Norrell is perfect. (I am not quite convinced by his Drawlight but I'm willing to work with him there, as I don't care terribly much about Drawlight. His Childermass, though, makes me very happy indeed.) I'm only on disc three, so I haven't gotten to Jonathan Strange as yet and thus can't comment on the voice given him. But the bit I was really worried about are the footnotes, as that's difficult to do in an audio format and they're so very important to the book as a whole. I needn't have worried - the footnotes are handled beautifully, in a way that flows into but doesn't disrupt the larger text.
As I say, I'm only on disc three and it's likely to be slow going as I can't listen to this one at bedtime (I'll never be able to sleep for trying to follow the story). But I'm very much enjoying it. I may have to copy it to the computer for future re-listening.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Action Figures
Yesterday (my day off), I went and poked around at the Toys R Us. This is a thing that I do occasionally. See, I like action figures. I'm not a hardcore collector or anything but hey, I like small shiny toys that I can put on my desk and play imaginative games with. Action figures are pretty good for this. Wonder Woman, Darth Vader, Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Pearl all occasionally have epic adventures on my desk. It fills the time while I wait for things to load on the computer. 8)
The problem is, though, that I always end up wanting action figures for things that toy companies would never in a million years make action figures for. They're almost always books - literary characters don't get made into action figures until they're first made into a movie. For instance - to my knowledge, there are no action figures for characters in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, even though that would rock. Surely that series is ripe for action figures. There's dragons and knights and assassins and shadow-witches and ice zombies and semi-vikings and semi-Mongol hordes, etc, etc. (And just think - the toy company would have fewer and fewer of them to produce as the series went on. By the time you get to book four, practically everyone you met in book one is dead.) It would be brilliant.
The last time I started thinking about this, I was reading Crime and Punishment. I still vaguely want an action figure of Raskolnikov. He would come with an axe for killing elderly pawn brokers, a couch for having a nervous breakdown on and possibly a dead horse. (Of course, you'd end up having to get Sonya and Razumikhin to go with him. And maybe Porfiry Petrovich.) I could pretend my desk was St Petersburg and have him walk around on it, talking to himself and gesticulating wildly. (Our Rodya canonically walks around talking to himself - the gesticulating is probably just me.)
I asked my sister what literary character she'd want an action figure of and I think her answer was cooler than mine: she wants Gregor Samsa from Kafka's Metamorphosis. This is awesome because her action figure would be a transformer. That is magnificently cool.
Anyway. The action figure thing is a good game. Want to play? What literary characters would you want as action figures, greater blogosphere? What kind of accessories would they come with? Would any of them have kung-fu grip?
The problem is, though, that I always end up wanting action figures for things that toy companies would never in a million years make action figures for. They're almost always books - literary characters don't get made into action figures until they're first made into a movie. For instance - to my knowledge, there are no action figures for characters in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, even though that would rock. Surely that series is ripe for action figures. There's dragons and knights and assassins and shadow-witches and ice zombies and semi-vikings and semi-Mongol hordes, etc, etc. (And just think - the toy company would have fewer and fewer of them to produce as the series went on. By the time you get to book four, practically everyone you met in book one is dead.) It would be brilliant.
The last time I started thinking about this, I was reading Crime and Punishment. I still vaguely want an action figure of Raskolnikov. He would come with an axe for killing elderly pawn brokers, a couch for having a nervous breakdown on and possibly a dead horse. (Of course, you'd end up having to get Sonya and Razumikhin to go with him. And maybe Porfiry Petrovich.) I could pretend my desk was St Petersburg and have him walk around on it, talking to himself and gesticulating wildly. (Our Rodya canonically walks around talking to himself - the gesticulating is probably just me.)
I asked my sister what literary character she'd want an action figure of and I think her answer was cooler than mine: she wants Gregor Samsa from Kafka's Metamorphosis. This is awesome because her action figure would be a transformer. That is magnificently cool.
Anyway. The action figure thing is a good game. Want to play? What literary characters would you want as action figures, greater blogosphere? What kind of accessories would they come with? Would any of them have kung-fu grip?
Thursday, November 1, 2007
RSS
Today is RSS day! Yet another thing that I've heard of in my internet travels but have never really played with. Now that I've got an account on bloglines, following other people's blogs is certainly easier.
In my previous blogging experience, I've tended to use services like journalfen or insanejournal, which have a sort of built-in RSS feature. Once you sign up for a blog at a service like that, you get what's called a "friend's page" - a way to subscribe to the journals of people or groups that you want to continue reading. I'd missed that on blogger, so I'm glad to find a comparable way of doing things.
(I still think the other way's easier, since it's built in and you only have to have one account. Having seperate accounts to read and post from seems silly to me. Ah, well.)
In my previous blogging experience, I've tended to use services like journalfen or insanejournal, which have a sort of built-in RSS feature. Once you sign up for a blog at a service like that, you get what's called a "friend's page" - a way to subscribe to the journals of people or groups that you want to continue reading. I'd missed that on blogger, so I'm glad to find a comparable way of doing things.
(I still think the other way's easier, since it's built in and you only have to have one account. Having seperate accounts to read and post from seems silly to me. Ah, well.)
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