e-bollocks
I love my Kindle, but dang Amazon is making it hard to buy exactly the sort of book I like.
F’rexample, I love me some non-fiction crime and police books. I hate fictional murder mysteries and police procedurals.
You know how you tell the difference between true and fictional crime online? In fiction, the synopsis has adjectives. You know, “irascible police Inspector Slab Hardcheese” or “spunky detective Dick Trouble.” That’s it. That’s the only way. You’d think there’d be a fiction tag or or a subcategory something, but no.
To be fair, that’s been a gripe of mine for years — I belonged to a crime-themed book club for a while that made not the slightest distinction between true and fiction — but Kindle is worse, since only a tiny percent published books are available as e-books.
There seem to be three classes of book available for Kindle: really old (and often pretty lame, outside the classics) for free. Current titles, for the same money as a real book (yeah. Not going there). And a handful of desirable titles for small money that I really have to work to find.
Dear publishers: I can buy a used copy of your out-of-print book from Amazon UK for a penny (the seller makes his money on the shipping and handling and you make nuffink at all), or you can re-publish your back catalogue for $.99 a title and squeeze a little more juice out of that useless pulp. Choose wisely.
In that middle, desirable category — our own Ric Locke has Amazon-published a sci fi title. I read it (I’m mama’s little shit-hot proofreader, me). I promised him a real-live book review with, like, descriptions and shit…but for now, the short version is: I liked it.
And the picture? Why, it’s my new Eco-Nique Natural Hemp Kindle snuggy. I know, I know, but it’s so gosh-darned…snuggy.
June 1, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 53
Words, meet numbers
Have you seen this thing? So cool.
Google has now digitized 15 million books and this dingus allows you to graph word and phrase frequency over time. Up to five comparisons at once.
So, for example, you can see the handover point when “World War I” replaced “Great War” in literature. Or the exact point “Tiananmen Square” drops out of Chinese books.
It isn’t by a pure word count. It couldn’t be. There were only half a million books published in English before 1900 and a squintillion since then, so any pure word count would make a screaming spike roar up the Twentieth Century. They explain a bit more about how they normalize the data here.
This would have been a great tool to have during the Michael Bellesiles controversy. (Though I still think the simplest way to debunk him would’ve been counting how many cookbooks had recipes for game. Game means guns).
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Y’all are going to go look up wirty dords, aren’t you?
Yeah, I know you people like the back of my hand.
December 16, 2010 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 26
We knew him when…
Goodness me, what a handsome lad! But who’s that banana holding him?
Why, it’s Christopher Taylor. Who has, apparently, published hisself a book.
So I guess when he’s not putting together thumping great blog essays, he amuses himself by writing novels.
Huh. I’m sensing a pattern here.
November 28, 2009 — 5:36 pm
Comments: 21
Christmas weaselpr0n!
Stoatpr0n, actually. Badger gave me this present early, presumably to keep me quiet while he did his end-of-year accounts.
It’s the September, 2008 issue of the BBC’s nature magazine, Wildlife, which features the best goshdarned weasel photography I’ve ever seen.
The photographer is Spaniard Oriol Alamany who chased a family of stoats in the Pyranees to get these shots (the little one looking into the camera is Mama Stoat, with her three fine sons. They grow to weaselhood so quickly!).
The whole magazine is slick and impressive. I’d ask Uncle B for a subscription, but magazines always pile up on me and become a throbbing locus of angst and guilt.
Not really something you want for Christmas.
December 23, 2008 — 8:57 pm
Comments: 19
Na. Na. Nananana. No. No. Nana nono nana nono. Pinned for November.
NaNoWriMo thread, if you want it. NaNoWriMo thread, if you don’t. The likely lad who’s buying Stoat Acres got his mortgage confirmation, so I shall be rawther busy for a while (just kidding! I’ll probably post more than usual. I babble when I’m nervous).
November 7, 2008 — 8:40 am
Comments: 42
Today’s Fun British Fact
It is illegal to mail horror comics to the UK.
For reals. I tried to find an online citation for that, but I couldn’t. It’s true, though. The lady at the Post Office showed me the regulation sheet.
I wasn’t trying to do that. I was trying to mail Uncle B an air pistol. A BB gun. PO Lady wouldn’t let me, on account of it’s “a weapon.” And I say, “a reproduction weapon.” And she says, “well you could hurt somebody with it.” And I say, “I could hurt you with this Customs Declaration form if I tried hard enough.”
I lost. Of course I did. Nobody ever argues the regulations and wins.
My real guns are going in the shop (most of them, anyway). But I have a couple of CO2 pistols I’d like to keep. They’re perfectly legal in the UK, but one looks exactly like a Glock and the other looks like a Walther PPK. I figured I didn’t want to pack them in with my household stuff, on the off-chance they turn up on an x-ray or something and get everything confiscated. So I decided to mail them on ahead.
I’m sure the comic regulation is some fusty old thing left over from the pre-Code comics era. Like the comic I stole this header graphic from. Which is in my horror comic collection.
Which is packed with my stuff.
Oh, piffle.
October 30, 2008 — 2:41 pm
Comments: 39
Dude!
Albert Hoffman died yesterday at the age — holy shit! — of 102.
Hoffman is called the Father of LSD on account of he was the father of LSD. He was a chemist working at Sandoz Labs in Switzerland in the thirties when he discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25, a compound derived from wheat rust. He was looking for a PMS cure (I forget where I read that; maybe the pixies told me). The stuff is so powerful, he got a ginormous dose just from handling it that day. His description of riding his bicycle home afterward is guaranteed flashback fodder.
He remained a proponent of the stuff all his life and dropped acid himself for decades. A hunnert and two. As a friend of mine once remarked, “this stuff doesn’t kill you. It only makes you wish it would.” She was looking rather paisley at the time.
Plant rusts — ergots — are fungi that occasionally affect crops and, when eaten, cause a range of effects from hallucination to extreme blood constriction (Ew. Wikipedia calls it ‘dry gangrene’). Some historians have blamed the nuttiness of Medieval Europe on ergotism, AKA St. Anthony’s Fire.
Dry gangrene. There was one medieval lady who was riding a mule to pilgrimage, rubbed against a tree and her leg fell off. She picked it up, tucked it under her arm, got back on the mule and went on her way. That really doesn’t advance this post, but I read it a long time ago and wanted to share. Like, how the hell did she hop back on the mule with one leg? And why take it with her? (Don’t be a litterbug — take your spontaneously amputated limbs when you go!) Boo. The pixies never answer the important questions.
Oh! You want a good, creepy read? I highly recommend The Day of St Anthony’s Fire. True story. A sack of wheat contaminated with rust was delivered to the little village of Pont St Esprit, France in 1951. The frogs love them some bread. By nightfall, half the village was yapping mad.
Actually, I recommend the first half of the book. The second half of the book is a boring drone about the decades the survivors spent trying to wring some reparations out of the government. The frogs love them some bureaucracy.
Wait, what was I talking about? Stupid pixies.
April 30, 2008 — 5:38 am
Comments: 54
Smut week continues on sweasel.com
It snew! Yes, the big storm racing across America reached a Weasel this noon. I flew home at a cumulative speed of 6.25 miles an hour (wot a beaut of a traffic jam!) and…continued putting things into boxes.
So here’s a link to somebody else’s shit! Tokyo Damage Report has been on my reading list since before I read blogs, even. The proprietor is a messed-up American dude in Tokyo who comments on…bands and porno, mostly. This is where I first heard about tentacle porn and used panty vending machines — without the knowledge of which, my life would be immeasurably poorer. Yet, despite the subject matter, his posts are somehow never in the slightest prurient or even smutty.
But the site can be hard to follow. Whenever he gets jammed up in the structure of his own site, he shifts everything around and opens entirely new pages in different places. No blogging software, either; it’s all free-form and bewildering. Sometimes interesting links go here to die.
The photograph above comes from what purports to be a Japanese sex manual from the 1960s. I think. The description got severed from the page scans and I can’t seem to find it again. Anyhow, here’s the book. Sure, it starts off innocently enough, making hand-holding as complex as docking the shuttle to the international space station, but it gets pretty hot after that.
Click at least as far as the nice lady in the leotard making vague gestures at an artist’s mannequin from across the room. That’s oral sex! It looks so wholesome.
December 13, 2007 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 32
Meet my new neighbor(s)
Born Tuesday morning at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence: conjoined twins Faith and Hope Echevarria. Video here. These little girls are zipped together from the bellybutton to the breastbone. They share a single heart and liver, so there will be no separate existence for these two.
A pretty example of synchroniwhotsit: my airport book coming out of Heathrow this time this time was Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. I’ve always had a warm spot for teratology.
I (mostly) recommend it. The good bits are very good. He spends a fair bit of time on genetics and the chemical engines that drive differentiation in the developing fetus. These parts are interesting, but heavy going when you have the attention span of a stoat on an airplane.
It’s an extremely handy book for discouraging your seatmate from striking up a conversation, anyhow. It’s illustrated.
November 2, 2007 — 5:13 pm
Comments: 9
We the Weasels…
Yeah, the Fourth of July is not usually one of my big holidays. Too damn hot for me. But this year, it’s downright chilly around here. This has been the coldest Summer ever, so far. If it keeps up like this, they’ll have to talk about it — whether they have their hearts set on a warming trend or not.
Anyhoo, I’ve just finished a steak and a baked potato and slaw and a beer. The beer was British, which didn’t seem quite right, but it’s my favorite. Bite me, King George! Lush that I am, I never drink in the daytime, so I feel quite naughty. Lookit me! Drinking a beer! Before five!
Now for a nap. God bless America! (I said that just to confuse Dawn. And I didn’t get hit by lightning or any
July 4, 2007 — 2:07 pm
Comments: 9