silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (_support), made by <user name=pne>
I did promise something on Indigo Springs.

Book cover is generic fantasy, by which I mean it's a dun-coloured construction, with a woman (half her face showing) cupping a dish of something.
Here's the cover )
Here's the blurb:

When small-time criminal Albert Lethewood is murdered, he leaves his daughter Astrid a house in the town of Indigo Springs. Suspecting a scam, she nevertheless moves into the house with two friends. There they discover several mystical objects, including a penknife capable of terrible–perhaps limitless–destruction.

Soon it is obvious the old house is a cover for a wellspring of magical energy, and that Albert Lethewood had a secret life as the wellspring’s keeper. It falls to Astrid and her friends: dependable, heroic Jacks Glade and volatile Sahara Knax, to puzzle out the nature and purpose of the magical well.

But Albert’s killer is still out there. Worse, the mystical power is deeply seductive. . . and Sahara might be willing to risk everything, even Astrid herself, for control of the well.


Astrid inherit her deadbeat father's house when he dies. She discovers, however, that he's left behind a sac of belongings, ragtag and old, but seem to be magical. The kalediscope can see through walls. A pencil sharpener makes gold flakes. A rough penknife crumbles anything into dust.

It's all tangled up in the past and present; in the present, the thread follows a man named Will, living in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to reason with Astrid. The world is seized up with the overflow of magic: the U.S. is frantically trying to control contamination of it. Astrid's former best friend, Sahara, is leading a cult called the Alchemists, who are apparently controlling the supernatural acts - huge forests sprouting out of control, people turning into half-human, half-animals. Sahara herself seems to be able to do miraculous things like curing the sick.

Back to the past, Astrid is discovering that her father, whom the entire town had thought a wastrel, was actually creating magical artifacts - called chantments - and sending them away. Astrid discovers this knowledge in fits and starts. When they pull up the fireplace to find a dripping leak, they're hit by a blast of blue fluid - vitagua, from which magic issues. Slowly, she's discovering memories of her and her father: that he's a guardian of the blue spring. The book flips between past and present - Astrid herself is often confused about what time it is and what's happened (she refers to the day Will arrives as "Will day"; the significance of this isn't revealed til the end) - and also between the world of the ordinary, and the unreal which contains magic.

the informal babbling )

EUPHORIA

Feb. 18th, 2012 01:24 am
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (_support), made by <user name=pne>
Current definition of euphoria: After an 8-day struggle with Overdrive and Adobe Digital Editions' "Error getting license Server communication problem: E_ADEPT_IO" and the library site (you lie, command prompt, there is no way the ping is 14ms it takes a whole minute to load a stupid page) seeing the words "Downloading document" AND THE STORIES OPEN!

I am starving for books, and I just finished one the day before. I NEED BOOKS. I am going to go devour the three I checked out. o/

(On a side note, the book lately finished is Indigo Springs and is, surprisingly, fantastic! Will get round to a post of capslock tomorrow.)
silverflight8: http://www.google.com green-white text on black: "Go ahead! Panic! Do it now and avoid the June rush!" (Panic!), made by <user name=dawnduskdancer site=livejournal.com>
Having heard the excellent advice about overcoming writer's block, paraphrased:

Write your words in a different, unreadable font like Webdings, so you can't see what you've written. Then go back the next day and untranslate it to see where to start for the next day, and continue writing in the unreadable font to prevent your internal editor from critiquing.

...I decided to follow it.

The writing went well enough as I dashed off the next piece of my GLORIOUS TALE (subtitled: Pixie Lights). And then I, being your usual impatient fellow, decided to untranslate it without waiting the aforementioned night.

When I switched the font to Times New Roman, though, I ran into a small problem.

Namely, this one. (Illustration, in technicolor). )

Word's inability to translate certain words seems to be random. There are parts of one word translated properly, and parts that aren't. Typoed words are translated properly in some cases and in other cases. So I switched the boxes (which is Word's way of freaking out and saying it can't render the text) back into Webdings and translated them manually.

I am getting good at reading Webdings, but next time, I think I'll just turn the colour of the font white.
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (Barcode), made by <user name=pne>
It's odd how I don't have a book-reading icon. :( THESE MATTERS MUST BE RECTIFIED, and SOON.

Every once in awhile I see how many I've got of these books...bold for read-through, italics for started )

It snowed approximately five centimeters on the evening of the 30th, I arrived home looking like the abominable snowman and cursing people for salting their sidewalks (instead of shovelling, since then it just freezes), and woke up today to find it was GONE. This is such a weird winter.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Bee), made by me
It is an awful godforsaken time of the night, but I finished Pride and Prejudice last night and just asdjfkl;jkl;

I will actually review the book at some point, but for now [really really spoilery!] [the book is, however, 200+ years old...] my thoughts )

tl;dr *Pride and Prejudice flail*, and why didn't I read this earlier
silverflight8: Canadian flag waved by stuffed dog (Poog), made by me
Happy, happy New Year! May this year be better than the last.
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Bee), made by me
Advice: never wire money unless you have to. 1

Interesting detail: gummy bear torture occurred in the hallway outside my room (!!!). Someone brutally tacked an orange gummy to the wall, and idk how it even stays (the pin shouldn't be long enough).

Other interesting detail: while I was in the bank, it was really foggy. The bank has enormous west-facing windows, so you could see one building on the next street which appeared to be slowly disintegrating into the sky. It's a standard high-rise, but the white exterior alternates with black windows, so it looked like a zebra-striped thing vanishing into air....it was incredibly bizarre. I thought at first that dark smoke was flagrantly disobeying physics and rising to the heavens in a zig-zag path. I wish I had a picture.

Being a student: is boring. Thought process during class: hm, okay, that makes sense, wait, what? no, what are doing? what? oh. ohhhh. I see. ok. hm. And so it goes. This is why I don't update much. Plus, I'm playing Runescape.

Dear Liberal government: )

Today while in the drugstore I complimented a lady on her hat. She smiled and said: "Yes! It keeps me warm." The hat in question was the size of a car-tire and extremely white and furry. It was a bold fashion statement, to say the least. (She did look warm. Maybe I should invest in one too.)

Last thing: LiveJournal, too, has an announcement regarding SOPA and PIPA, although less in-your-face than Dreamwidth. I'm glad that both LJ and DW decided not to shut down as Wikipedia did; for a protest that specifically targets censorship, I think louder voices - especially on sites specifically designed for sharing one's life - is better. Wikiepdia's shut down is ramatic - yes. But I prefer having my voice.



1 So due to an unfortunate confluence of moving and credit ratings, I, the sole member of family in Canada, was tasked with wiring money. This was a three-trip affair, and the last trip took over an hour. (Admittedly, mostly it was because I kept getting wrong info, but I digress). In doing the wiring, I talked to all of the tellers of my neighbourhood branch, had the manager called over multiple times (?), and listened to a lot of pop music. On the upside, I now know this branch really well! Good Lord.

2 http://cfsontario.ca/downloads/CFS-Tuition%20Grant%20Briefing%20Note.pdf Retrieved January 18, 2012
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (Barcode), made by <user name=pne>
Messiah!

I went to see hear the Messiah yesterday a few weeks ago!
complaints about own sillypantsness )

I am still in love with the choir, because it was fantastic. It is the choir that makes my heart leap - like a sudden rush of sound, all together. They had fantastic control over volume, so it could sink low and - this being in a concert hall - in dead silence, then boom out. And of course Handel gives them the opportunity: Messiah is chock full of glorious outpourings of happiness and - grandeur. (All we like sheep unexpectedly joyous, and he shall purify resonant, and of course Hallelujah magnificent. "Wonderful counsellor" stuck through my head on the half-hour of wet evening, walking home). I liked the bass and the soprano - the tenor was okay - but I am a firm believer that Handel, though he was also awesome, should never burden anyone (virtuoso or no) with passages that Messiah contains. As in fifty-note strings of trills, basically - in the bass (pardon me, baritone), they sounded like nothing more than rocks being shaken about. (This might have been "For behold darkness" or "The people that walked" but I don't quite remember.) Having analyzed the bit in the second part for music history, beginning with "There were shepherds", it was fantastic to hear another rendition - and the soprano didn't overload too much; her voice simply rang.

All in all, amazing. But I'd still rather have gone to the sing-along - alas!

omg

Dec. 26th, 2011 07:54 pm
silverflight8: http://www.google.com green-white text on black: "Go ahead! Panic! Do it now and avoid the June rush!" (Panic!), made by <user name=dawnduskdancer site=livejournal.com>
YOU GUYS YOU GUYS

I HAVE A FANTASTIC YULETIDE STORY

I am so happy. OH MY GOD I WANT FIC FOR THIS FANDOM and there was none and NOW THERE IS

EEEEEE

A Liar's Honor (1028 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Novels of the Collegia Magica - Carol Berg
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ilario de Sylvae, Portier de Savin-Duplais, King Philippe de Savin-Journia
Summary:

On why Philippe de Savin-Journia, King of Sabria, was so ready to trust his never-before-seen cousin Portier with such delicate matters.



MY SHIPPER HEART
IT IS IN LOVE
silverflight8: Canadian flag waved by stuffed dog (Poog), made by me
this is another test entry in public form lalallala

here have a video )
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Bee), made by me
Bug 3917: Crisped: new themes
Category: Style System
Patch by: [personal profile] laitaine
Description: More themes, for all your journal decorating needs! This is a mega-packet of themes, with 9 from [personal profile] timeasmymeasure, 9 from [personal profile] nornoriel, and 23 from [personal profile] rising for the Crisped layout.

Bug 4063: OpenID users among the list of users in "Gives access to" unclear
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: If you have lots of OpenID people in your 'gives access to' list, it tends to make the list enormous, because the name of the user is a URL; smaller Dreamwidth usernames tend to get lost in the crowd. This patch sifts them out and pushes them onto the next line.

Bug 3993: December paid time promotion
Category: Payments
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: December promotions are coming, so here's the patch to make them happen!

Bug 4068: Code to add a user to default filters automatically is duplicated
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: FILL IN

Bug 4022: New community left out of default reading filter of creator
Category: Communities
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: Before, if you created a community, you wouldn't automatically have the community added to your reading filters. [staff profile] fu expanded on that and so, if you create a community/have your join-community request approved, the community will be added to your default reading filter.

Bug 1865: Jump back to where you were after editing a filter
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Suggested by: [personal profile] cesy
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: When editing subscription filters [http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/subscriptions/filters], when you switch someone from one box to the next, the list will jump up to the very top - rather annoying if you want to continue working through the list systematically! This patch makes sure the list stays put.

Bug 2934: cannot re-save password for external site if unchecked
Category: Crossposter
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: When crossposting, if you set up the other account and didn't include a password when doing so, it wasn't possible to add a password later (to be saved and used automatically when crossposting); you'd have to delete the account and re-add it with the password. This bug fixes this so that you can now add a password to a previously password-deficient crossposting account.

Bug 4012: PM privacy option is misplaced
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Patch by: [personal profile] ninetydegrees
Description: Options for who can send you PMs are located in the Manage Profile area, which is a little unintuitive. (Just a little.) It's now been moved to a more sensible spot, the Privacy tab on the Account Settings.

Bug 4067: import queue viewer admin tool
Category: Site Administration
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: Sometimes imports break for whatever reason on an external site, and so this tool will allow administrators to see relevant information about the breakage and who's in the queue and other relevant things. This is great for the support team, too - now we can tell people where their import went to - whether it went searching for mushrooms in cyberspace or is just queuing up.

Bug 3675: jQuerify icon browser
Category: Modernization
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: Updating code!

Bug 26: Display how a person answered all questions of a poll
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: [personal profile] yvi
Description: This is probably one of the oldest bugs in the drive here - it was started in 2008. It shows how one person (Alice), answered all the questions of the poll. Right now, you can expand the answers to a question, but it shows everyone's response, jumbled together.

Bug 2445: Crosspost set-up error unhelpful
Category: Crossposter
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: Getting the error "Sorry, something went wrong" isn't very helpful: now, if you enter a wrong URL into the crossposting extensions management place thingy, it will try to divine the site instead. In [staff profile] fu's words: "silently fix the URL if we have other lj-type site + only provided the domain".

Bug 4083: Update YAML version: we need at least YAML-0.67
Category: General/Unknown
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: Updating things in the swampy murky backend.

Bug 4088: ATOM API /interface/atom/entries contains comment count images.
Category: APIs: RPC/XML/Flat
Patch by: [staff profile] fu
Description: More updating.
HELP WHAT DO I PUT HERE?

Bug 1726: move cgi-bin/lj*.pl files into proper modules (in cgi-bin/LJ)
Category: Modernization
Patch by: [personal profile] kareila
Description: This is a huge bug. (Go look! Don't forget the scrollbar: or better yet, the spacebar!) It's part of a project to make the backend more modern, and has basically been ongoing since 2009. (This bug, anyway!) And...if you want trivia, 1726 is the year that Mary Toft claimed she'd given birth to 16 rabbits.

That wraps the code tour! Stay tuned for the fourth installment, coming to you soon!

cards!

Dec. 5th, 2011 09:55 pm
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (Barcode), made by <user name=pne>
If you would like me to send you a card for December holidays, please leave a comment or PM me with your address. I alas cannot make cards this year (my supplies are a few thousand kilometers away atm) but I will write notes in Hallmark cards and try my italics pen. Again. (You don't wanna see the copperplate :p) Let me know if you celebrate Christmas/New Year and such!

Comments are screened.
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (_support), made by <user name=pne>
Essay-related (it's in, thank goodness), now I want to read the books I was writing about. What should I read first, flist/circle? Thoughts on any of them?

(alas no paid account here so no poll. POLL IN THE COMMENTS!)

*Tristram Shandy
*Pamela/Clarissa
*Northanger Abbey
*Robinson Crusoe (oh god I think I typoed that on my essay)
*Sense and Sensibility/Pride and Prejudice
*Great Expectations/Oliver Twist
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (Barcode), made by <user name=pne>
Surprisingly I'm enjoying writing this essay. Even if I'm still about 700 words behind (oh, the historiography'll have lots of words and I still haven't got an intro/conclusion and I'll manage fine, wordcount is usually not a problem.) For once I understand why the essay as a form is used. It is like waging a war: not guerrilla war of now, but the two lines of armies marching upon each other, like Spartan armies of old. One may delineate one's arguments with absolute precision and backup with sources and throw them THWAP THWAP THWAP at the reader. (Or gently persuade, but I like the in-your-face better.) Fiction is a lot less explicit and it's sometimes only after the 1000+ pages that you see the themes arcing delicately over. I suppose this would be biowarfare: creeps on you without realizing. Or maybe that's just very good undercover ops.

The elevator broke so I climbed up to my 23rd floor room after dinner. And then the fire alarm went off and I, being just then at the study room, climbed down 28 floors. As devil-possessed awful as the elevators are, I am really glad they exist <3

(one poor fellow I spoke to said he'd been doing his laundry. On the basement floor. He got off the twenty-first floor.)
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (Barcode), made by <user name=pne>
Hi, yuletide writer! I'm sorry for the delay in getting this letter to you, but here it is now.

1. I will be so happy to just get a story this Christmas. These fandoms are so small that almost nothing has been done, so you can take it anywhere! I don't mind sex scenes and violence, but please do your best to apply warnings as accurately as you can - with a heads-up I can pretty much read anything :)

The fandoms:

Collegia Magica: Carol Berg
*ahhhhh I'm in love with not just the characters (oh Ilario <3), but also the setting. I've always seen it as an AU of pre-Renaissance France, what with the advent of reason over magic and so on. Like it said on the prompt, I'd love to see how the characters interact outside of the plot. (If not for Eugenie/Philippe, then all those games of stratagems must mean Ilario/Philippe :D). What was it like to be at the collegia? Was Eltevierre ever inhabited by ordinary people, and what did the Mondragoni do to them? What's the Cazar's place like? (I get the feeling they're quite...remote.)

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: Susanna Clarke
I put down Arabella Strange here, but I would love to have the Raven King or someone else (putting more than one person down would mean you'd have to write them all...which would possibly be awkward). I love the history aspect, that magic has existed for so long in England and is just embedded into the folk tales and so on. Imagine what it would be like to live in northern England when the Raven King was alive! What happens after Jonathan gets rid of that weird cloud thing?

Georgina Kincaid series: Richelle Mead
I find it amusing that no one nominated Seth. >.>. He's lovely but I'd prefer Georgina/Roman, or Georgina/Carter (as messed up as both would end up being...the angel angle is interesting. And Roman's Georgina's roommate.) I'm not really looking forward to the last book which will probably pair Seth and Georgina up, so I'd love to see other options! Gen is good, too: what does a demon do in his daily life, anyway? (Other than drink, apparently, with angels. Or maybe Hugh handles the work?) What's heaven like? (Carter does have to visit it once in awhile, right?) Interaction between Jerome and Roman (oh god.)

Have at it, yuletide writer! Thanks for signing up for these fandoms!
silver
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Bee), made by me
Being the history geek I am, I read Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards, a rather light-hearted history book that enumerated all the regents from Egbert.

And then I found this video. I can't stop laughing at the chorus. )

(Starts from 1066 and William, but it's amazing. Just amazing.)

Alas!

Nov. 13th, 2011 08:33 pm
silverflight8: 2010 Nanowrimo theme colours (pastel, cheerful) with text "sentences do not require verbs" (Nanowrimo 2010), by <user name=arobynsung>
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and numbers underneath (_support), made by <user name=pne>
Take from the flowery speeches and long-drawn pauses, the sound of the trumpet stepping in for the bugle, the sea of red flowers: simply never again. They called it the war to end all wars: let it be true, and never have it again.
silverflight8: 2010 Nanowrimo theme colours (pastel, cheerful) with text "sentences do not require verbs" (Nanowrimo 2010), by <user name=arobynsung>
Nanowrimo stuff, you're all likely inundated with it already )

But, lest you think my life is a horrid frenzy of speedwalking - which sometimes it is, I have improved both my speedwalking and jaywalking skills - I actually live a lovely life. (This is not reflected on my journal.) And I have pictures which I took on Saturday. I found the most delightful, quaint garden on this ramble.

Click for images! Click on images for enlarged images! )

and now I'm for sleep o/

Profile

silverflight8: Canadian flag waved by stuffed dog (Poog), made by me
silver

February 2012

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
121314151617 18
1920 2122232425
26272829   

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Feb. 23rd, 2012 02:42 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios