Crossing Raukawa Moana next week to visit Te Wai Pounamu. Lots of reading time, so loading up on a theme. Cats are evil mass murderers, so @scalzi s Starter Villain & Tom Mead's Murder Wheel are both apt, and the unique ancient fauna of #Aotearoa needs to be saved from them, so KPS also fits.
There's a problem with "Starter Villain" though. How could anyone claim that the idea of cats as macchiavellian murderous managers is FICTION? 🤔 #ebooks#sf#mystery#AmReading@bookstodon
I open the guest room door
as violent winds pummel the inn.
Lightning illuminates the blood
dripping onto the floor.
I shiver in fear.
Who else is here?
Are the Penobscot Indians friends or foes?
If enemies, Elizabeth doesn't want it to be so.
But would she rather have enemies within her friends?
I don't believe so.
The Whole Earth Catalog collection (and much more) changed my life for the better. It's all now online. This is seminal media and cultural history: https://wholeearth.info/
For years a hobby of mine was to take stuff like this, run it through OCR to get editable text, and end up with a proper flowing text ebook. Unfortunately, my old eyes don't let me do much of this any more.
I took a sample page from the first catalog, and experimented with it. The image quality is excellent for OCR, my setup gives very few scannos.
But because of the layout, this would have to be done almost paragraph by paragraph, and then formatted into something ereaders/tablets/phones could handle. And all the images! It would be a real labour of love to do just one of these volumes.
There is no automated way to take pages like these and just stuff them through OCR. The result would be horrible. Maybe that is something AI could learn to do!
If anyone would like to give it a try but doesn't know how, I'd be happy to share my experience. Tools I use, all on Linux: OCRFeeder with Tesseract, LibreOffice Writer, and for images, Gimp and ImageMagick, then Calibre Editor for epub making and html editing.
You would probably be looking at several hundred hours or more for one of these volumes.
ɪ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴏғғɪᴄɪᴀʟʟʏ ᴅᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴏᴠᴇʀ 122 ʙᴏᴏᴋs
I have only finished 3 of them :blobfoxcofeglare: :blobfoxcofeglare: :blobfoxcofeglare: I plan to finish at least 10 books this month, 8 of those will be coming from the series I'm trying to finish T̶h̶r̶o̶n̶e̶ o̶f̶ G̶l̶a̶s̶s̶ i̶s̶ m̶y̶ u̶l̶t̶i̶m̶a̶t̶e̶ t̶e̶s̶t̶ o̶f̶ p̶a̶t̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ :akko_thumbup: :akko_thumbup: :akko_thumbup: The only physical books I have is the Harry Potter series (r͟e͟s͟t͟ i͟n͟ p͟e͟a͟c͟e͟), Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor and they aren't even mine (ɪ'ᴍ sᴏʀʀʏ ᴀʟᴇx, ɪ ᴘʀᴏᴍɪsᴇ ᴛᴏ ʙʀɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ʙᴀᴄᴋ sᴏᴍᴇᴅᴀʏ :akko_sad2: ) and Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton.
Angeblich sieht man bei Amazon keine Flut an KI-generierten #EBooks. Trotzdem führt der #Onlinehändler ein tägliches Publikationslimit beim Self-Publishing ein."
The storm ravages the inn,
As my heart drums a frantic beat.
In this place as dark as sin,
I hear the sound of pounding feet.
A shriek.
A thud.
The lights flicker to darkness.
Added Jillian Dodd's site to my list of DRM-free bookshops.
Jillian Dodd is a USA Today best-selling romance author.
She writes fun binge-able romance series with characters her readers fall in love with—from the boy next door, to the daughter of a famous actress, to a spy who might save the world.
Reading Marsh as a teen, NZ's low profile in her novels irked me, as it left me feeling she was not fond of her birthplace. Reading her shorts atm, NZ is EVERYWHERE, even reminding me of details I'd forgotten - such as calling Palmerston "Palmerston South". This one was named after a bird I tooted about last week. The lady w/ the mispronounced Māori name includes ITS Māori name. Tino pai! #AmReading@bookstodon#books#ebooks#GoldenAgeMysteries#Aotearoa
"He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions."