Jules Jones's Blog, page 25
December 21, 2014
Happy Gauda Prime Day!
It is the winter solstice today, and more importantly for one small church, the Church of Boucher, it is one of our main feast days. Ladies and gentleman, raise a glass of good cheer angst to the man who killed Christmas. Happy Gauda Prime Day!
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December 5, 2014
Turing bio, and other ebook deals
Another month, another batch of deep discount book offers from Amazon
. Of particular interest (at least to me) is Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma (Kindle Single)
. This is short at 63 pages, but I'm about half way through it since buying it this morning, and enjoying it a great deal - definitely worth the current 99p offer price if, like me, you're interested in Turing's life and work.
Also of likely interest to some of you : Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It
is at £1.49 this month, and about to be on my phone.
I've heard good things about Lev Grossman's The Magicians: (Book 1)
, but at £1.99 for Book 1 of however many, it's slightly too expensive for my "but what if I run out of books on my phone!!!"[*] impulse buying. I shall think about it a while longer.
Ditto The Time Traveller's Almanac: The Ultimate Treasury of Time Travel Fiction - Brought to You from the Future
from the VanderMeers, at £2.39.
[*] Last weekend I'd got to the bus station after work on Friday before realising that my smartphone was not in my handbag but still on my desk, and I Had Nothing To Read on the bus, having deliberately left the treeware and the Kobo at home that morning to cut down weight. Panic ensued... This was as nothing to the tantrum on the bus this morning on realising that the Turing bio I'd taken the time to order before rather than after work had not actually synched onto the phone before I left home. Fortunately I found some free bus wifi to hook onto.
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. Of particular interest (at least to me) is Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma (Kindle Single). This is short at 63 pages, but I'm about half way through it since buying it this morning, and enjoying it a great deal - definitely worth the current 99p offer price if, like me, you're interested in Turing's life and work.Also of likely interest to some of you : Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It
is at £1.49 this month, and about to be on my phone.I've heard good things about Lev Grossman's The Magicians: (Book 1)
, but at £1.99 for Book 1 of however many, it's slightly too expensive for my "but what if I run out of books on my phone!!!"[*] impulse buying. I shall think about it a while longer.Ditto The Time Traveller's Almanac: The Ultimate Treasury of Time Travel Fiction - Brought to You from the Future
from the VanderMeers, at £2.39.[*] Last weekend I'd got to the bus station after work on Friday before realising that my smartphone was not in my handbag but still on my desk, and I Had Nothing To Read on the bus, having deliberately left the treeware and the Kobo at home that morning to cut down weight. Panic ensued... This was as nothing to the tantrum on the bus this morning on realising that the Turing bio I'd taken the time to order before rather than after work had not actually synched onto the phone before I left home. Fortunately I found some free bus wifi to hook onto.
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December 3, 2014
winter
It's been such a mild autumn that some of the young spring blossom trees got confused and flowered again. There have been one or two very light frosts, and that's all.
No more. This morning I opened to the curtains to find condensation on the inside of the double-glazed windows even in the cooler rooms, and the frost lies thick enough to make the playing fields in the park stark white. It's *cold* out there...
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No more. This morning I opened to the curtains to find condensation on the inside of the double-glazed windows even in the cooler rooms, and the frost lies thick enough to make the playing fields in the park stark white. It's *cold* out there...
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November 29, 2014
I'm on Amazon Japan
This morning's cat-vacuuming -- setting up my Author Central account and author page on Amazon Japan. Here it is: http://www.amazon.co.jp/-/e/B002BMHH60
Top tip - use Chrome for this. The in-browser translation makes life ever so much easier. As far as I can tell you'll need an ordinary account on Amazon.co.jp first, which you then use to sign into Author Central at https://authorcentral.amazon.co.jp/
No idea why only some of my books are on .jp - I may have to pick up the Amazon IDs of the missing ones from .co.uk and try searching directly.
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Top tip - use Chrome for this. The in-browser translation makes life ever so much easier. As far as I can tell you'll need an ordinary account on Amazon.co.jp first, which you then use to sign into Author Central at https://authorcentral.amazon.co.jp/
No idea why only some of my books are on .jp - I may have to pick up the Amazon IDs of the missing ones from .co.uk and try searching directly.
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November 27, 2014
Phillip Hughes
Like a good many other people, I was shocked by the accident on Monday that left young Australian cricketer Philip Hughes in a coma, and horrified by the news this morning that he had died. Not just for him, and for his family, but also for Sean Abbott, who bowled what should have been a perfectly routine bouncer, only to see his friend fall and never get up again.
Kalypso_v has written a moving post. As she says at the end, "If you pray, pray for Phillip Hughes's family, and for Sean Abbott."
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Kalypso_v has written a moving post. As she says at the end, "If you pray, pray for Phillip Hughes's family, and for Sean Abbott."
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November 22, 2014
free book offer - Courtney Milan's "The Duchess War"
Remember that I mentioned I was reading a feminist historical romance series that a lot of you would enjoy? Well, I finished it earlier this week. And this is me, Kermit-flailing about The Brothers Sinister series by Courtney Milan. I did very nearly Kermit-flail IRL on the bus when I opened up one of the later books in the series to find it dedicated to, amongst others, Rosalind Franklin.
Even better, I went to Courtney Milan's website to pick up links for the books, and found a blogpost saying that the first full length novel in the series, The Duchess War, is free over the holiday season. (Except on Amazon at the moment, because Amazon will not let publishers set the price to free unless publishers remove the book from all other outlets.) Go and get it - there are links in that post to the various retailers where you can pick it up for free. There is a prequel novella, "The Governess Affair", which I read first, but I don't think you don't need to have read that for this one to make sense.
I will write reviews of the individual books, I promise, but for now I wanted to get the link to offer on The Duchess War out there.
ETA: And since I started writing the post, Amazon UK have price-matched, and it's free there as well: The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister Book Book 1)
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Even better, I went to Courtney Milan's website to pick up links for the books, and found a blogpost saying that the first full length novel in the series, The Duchess War, is free over the holiday season. (Except on Amazon at the moment, because Amazon will not let publishers set the price to free unless publishers remove the book from all other outlets.) Go and get it - there are links in that post to the various retailers where you can pick it up for free. There is a prequel novella, "The Governess Affair", which I read first, but I don't think you don't need to have read that for this one to make sense.
I will write reviews of the individual books, I promise, but for now I wanted to get the link to offer on The Duchess War out there.
ETA: And since I started writing the post, Amazon UK have price-matched, and it's free there as well: The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister Book Book 1)
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Amazon sale - Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography
The latest Amazon UK Kindle sale includes Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography
for 99p. You don't need Kindle hardware to read this, just a device that will run the Kindle app.
The other Kindle item of potential interest to this parish is Alex Woolfson's gay sf romance comic "Artifice" which is currently on countdown deal at both Amazon US
and Amazon UK
. Deep discount, rising in price each day until it's back to normal price.
Lots of other stuff in the Kindle sale of potential interest to some of you, including large swathes of Neil Asher and Inspector Morse.
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includes Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography for 99p. You don't need Kindle hardware to read this, just a device that will run the Kindle app.The other Kindle item of potential interest to this parish is Alex Woolfson's gay sf romance comic "Artifice" which is currently on countdown deal at both Amazon US
and Amazon UK. Deep discount, rising in price each day until it's back to normal price.Lots of other stuff in the Kindle sale
of potential interest to some of you, including large swathes of Neil Asher and Inspector Morse.Mirror of http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/282732.html, where it has received
comments.
November 11, 2014
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
We observed the Armistice silence at work today. We heard the crack of the signal mortar from the town hall, and then there was no sound at all inside the building. Just the occasional car outside, and the sound of the town hall clock striking eleven. One hundred years ago the deaths had already started, and would go on for another four years.
I am not a pacifist. I know too many survivors of the Nazi death camps to think that war is always the worst option. But it is never a good option, only sometimes the least bad option, and the Great War was nothing more or less than a butcher's shop for no good purpose. In this year of all years, that the British Legion should choose to create a butchered version of Eric Bogle's haunting song "No Man's Land"/"The Green Fields of France" to promote the Poppy Appeal, that they twisted it by censoring the final two verses to scrub away the song's anti-war message -- they show themselves as being more concerned with a jingoistic message about Our Glorious Dead than with truly remembering what the dead died for, and that sometimes it was for nothing at all.
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I am not a pacifist. I know too many survivors of the Nazi death camps to think that war is always the worst option. But it is never a good option, only sometimes the least bad option, and the Great War was nothing more or less than a butcher's shop for no good purpose. In this year of all years, that the British Legion should choose to create a butchered version of Eric Bogle's haunting song "No Man's Land"/"The Green Fields of France" to promote the Poppy Appeal, that they twisted it by censoring the final two verses to scrub away the song's anti-war message -- they show themselves as being more concerned with a jingoistic message about Our Glorious Dead than with truly remembering what the dead died for, and that sometimes it was for nothing at all.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
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November 9, 2014
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
Remembrance Sunday, one hundred years after the start of the Great War. More wars since, so very many of them. This morning I went to the silence at the village cenotaph, and afterwards laid my little wooden cross with the names of my family's dead from the Second World War.
The crowd grows bigger each year. This year we were spilled out so far across the road that even the lane normally held open during the service for traffic to get through other than during the silence itself was blocked. There were many more of the little wooden crosses than I have seen before, perhaps because people are aware of them now. Some were in general thanks for sacrifices made, but most were like mine, with the names of family members who came home maimed, or in a box, or never at all. The ritual responses to the exhortation to work for peace were ritual, but not rote.
Time marches on, and changes how we remember. As usual, there weren't enough printed hymn sheets to go round. The man in front of me got out his smartphone and looked up the words online. But still we remember, that war has a terribly high price.
Lest we forget. Because the price of forgetting is so terribly high, and we have forgotten so many times in the hundred years since.
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The crowd grows bigger each year. This year we were spilled out so far across the road that even the lane normally held open during the service for traffic to get through other than during the silence itself was blocked. There were many more of the little wooden crosses than I have seen before, perhaps because people are aware of them now. Some were in general thanks for sacrifices made, but most were like mine, with the names of family members who came home maimed, or in a box, or never at all. The ritual responses to the exhortation to work for peace were ritual, but not rote.
Time marches on, and changes how we remember. As usual, there weren't enough printed hymn sheets to go round. The man in front of me got out his smartphone and looked up the words online. But still we remember, that war has a terribly high price.
Lest we forget. Because the price of forgetting is so terribly high, and we have forgotten so many times in the hundred years since.
And I can't help but wonder now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause'?
Did you really believe them that this war would end war?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame -
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
-- The Green Fields of France
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November 1, 2014
NaNoWriMo
As noted in previous years, I do PicoWrimo instead - com is here: http://picowrimo.livejournal.com
I'm going to be restricted in what I can do, because I've just had a bad flareup of the RSI and am completely dependent on Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Fortunately, I'd bought a brand-new laptop in July just as the latest edition of Dragon was released. I haven't had much chance to use it since then, so PicoWriMo is an excellent opportunity to get to grips with the new kit. The downside of this is that Dragon takes a lot of concentration to use, and I'm a bit fuzzy with pain and/or medication, so I may have trouble writing on some projects. I'm just going to target 150 words a day on *something*, and hope I have something usable at the end.
Today's update: Somewhere between 500 and 1000 words on assorted bits for a private commission -- which means no snippets. Mix of keyboard and Dragon, but definitely time to stop for the day.
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I'm going to be restricted in what I can do, because I've just had a bad flareup of the RSI and am completely dependent on Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Fortunately, I'd bought a brand-new laptop in July just as the latest edition of Dragon was released. I haven't had much chance to use it since then, so PicoWriMo is an excellent opportunity to get to grips with the new kit. The downside of this is that Dragon takes a lot of concentration to use, and I'm a bit fuzzy with pain and/or medication, so I may have trouble writing on some projects. I'm just going to target 150 words a day on *something*, and hope I have something usable at the end.
Today's update: Somewhere between 500 and 1000 words on assorted bits for a private commission -- which means no snippets. Mix of keyboard and Dragon, but definitely time to stop for the day.
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