Category: *heh*

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Why I Like eBooks

. . .let me count the ways. 😉

Of course, one very big reason I appreciate eBooks is storage. With thousands of volumes of hardcopy books clogging our home, storing electronic copies of text is a BIG advantage for us. Sure, I miss the tactile sensations of reading hardcopy when reading eBooks, but the text’s the thing, you know.

Then there’s the thing with aging eyes. With eBooks, I can select from a wide range of text sizes and even, in some formats, toggle between serif and non-serif fonts to ease my eyes. Very nice.

Portability is a big plus, too. When I go out with my Kindle Fire, I carry several hundred eBooks with me, some of them as yet unread and others re-readable. Very nice!

Oh, there are other reasons I like eBooks (less expensive, overall, than hardcopy, easier to shop for, immediate lookup of etymologies, historical references, artwork, etc.) but The Big Reason I really appreciate eBooks hails back to a habit I’ve had for years, one that has grown ever more “necessary” for me to engage in as time has gone on, and a habit that is a real no-no to give expression when reading library books: I edit my books to be more as they would have been had the writers had literate editors in the publication loop. *heh* Marking up books–lining through a “dele” (from “deleatur”–editorial deletions), correcting a spelling, grammar or word usage error, cleaning up an awkward descriptive narrative here, an amphibolous phrase there and the odd “WTF?!?” in between are all serious “Bad Dog”s *heh* when applied to library books. My own copies? Full of such things.

And then there are the other notes, usually underlined or starred and noted by page number on the end pages of books, adding background or commentary correcting language or historical problems or simply reminders to look further into something mentioned in th text. And example from a recent read is where a character–a Roman Catholic priest, no less!–translated “Sic transit gloria mundi” as “the glory of man is fleeting”. *feh* Any even semi-literate person knows better. “Sic transit gloria mundi” is more properly, “Thus passes the glory of the world,” or more casually, “the world’s glory is fleeting, transient, impermanent.” No reference to man in the phrase at all, except that man is a part of temporal existence.

Things like that irritate me, so correcting them scratches an itch.

[The observant reader of this blog might at this point–or perhaps at an even earlier point *heh*–say, “Yeh, if you’re so smart, why is your blog filled with all kinds of convoluted constructions, obscurantist phraseology, and even the occasional misspelled word and lousy grammatical construction?” Fair question. This blog is written as dialog, spoken word, and I cut myself slack here as much as I do authors when they are writing dialog. *shrugs* And who says I have to be consistent anyway? *heh*Nevertheless, I cut myself no slack and am abashed when I re-read an old post and find a misused word or obvious grammar error that cannot be legitimately placed at the feet of casual speech.]

I like the annotation features offered in my Kindle Fire for making snarky corrections to text. In fact, since the silly onscreen keyboard is a bit irksome to use, the very fact that it slows down my reading is often a plus (I do tend to read things too quickly.). But for annotations, nothing beats reading an eBook in html format in a browser on a plain ole everyday computer. Open the html-formatted book in the browser, open each chapter in a text editor and switch back and forth between them for inserting comments, corrections and amendments in the text: fun for me.

Note: my notations do include interesting tidbits to explore further, as I said above, and also amusing lil things, like a character with only one eye appearing described as looking on a dangerous ally, “The big one. . . seemed ambivalent but kept a real close eye on her.” *heh* “Eye”. Funny.

More. . .

One small distraction when inserting notes into eBooks formatted as html files is the really, really sloppy html I see a lot of. *sigh* It’s almost as though many of them were formatted in a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage that inserts all sorts of extraneous, useless, completely unnecessary crap. Oh, I don’t mind deprecated html tags that’ve been replaced with more “acceptable” markup lingo so much, but so much of the garbage markup is simply unnecessary.

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I Want Hercule Poirot’s Suit

And shirt and tie and cuff links and. . .

And a house with the Art Deco themes so prevalent in the early episodes of the ITV series.

Eh, but of course I don’t want such things enough to expend the effort and $$ to actually make such happen, well, except for maybe the clothes. I could really go there. In my sizes, of course. 🙂

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Once Is Happenstance; Twice Is Coincidence; Three Times?

(Enemy action. But of course, efforts to destroy useful distinctions in English are myriad. . . )

Just curious. Anyone know why some folks apparently want to destroy a perfectly good adjective AND a perfectly useful and clear adverb/noun combo by using the adjectives, “backseat” and “backyard” in place of the clearer and more useful “back seat” and “back yard”? (Note: anyone literate and fluent in English both knows the difference and pronounces the adjectives and adjective/noun phrases differently.)

Of course, these are but two of many examples of the attempted extirpation of useful distinctions by subliterate morons (all too often) writing for the Hivemind, their supposedly literate editors and publishers, and those weak minds under the Hivemind’s influence.

Is this sort of thing yet another example of “enemy action” against literacy and simple good sense?

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So, Who Really Cares That There’s Nothing Worth Watching on Any Channel?

Checked the listings for Thursday. Yep. The best the lineup has to offer is “Battle: Los Angeles”–aliens invade LA. It seems the only likely responses from the rest of the country should that actually recur (OK, the first alien invasion was obviously just from south of the border, I guess this one’s talking about “aliens from another planet) would be,

“How can one tell it’s been invaded by aliens from another planet?” or

“DGARA.”

Fortunately, even if I didn’t have some good books to read, there’s always Amazon Prime. 😉

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PC Sales: Doom and Gloom from Hivemind Tech Writers

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! It’s the end of the world!

Bloomberg noting a “causation” that. . . may be just in the “mind” of Bloomberg’s editorial staff:

Microsoft Windows Weak Demand Spurs Worst PC Slump on Record

Correlation does not equal causation, Bloomies. Try to keep that in mind.

How about some breathless hyperbole?

Microsoft has no fast Windows fixes as PC sales crater

Oh, *yawn* IMO, just as a casual observer with access to the same sets of facts as the authors of the two articles linked, this is just a blip. I fully expect PC sales to stabilize after a while at a very naturally lower level than in recent years as more and more causal “content consumer” users find that tablets and dumb phones work just fine for their casual web browsing, listening to mind-numbing mp3 crap, watching cute cat videos and sending/receiving one-line emails that might as well just be text messages, complete with iPho-nono typos.

Folks who need to do more will still buy and use PCs, and more and more users who were once destined for Assisted Computing Facilities (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click for you. . . “) discover that their meager “computing” needs can be met with meager computing devices.

Of course, that could put a dent in the livelihoods of folks who assisted those “meager needs” users in fixing problems they’d caused themselves, but in days of yore buggy whip makers had to find other ways to make a living, too.

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That Certain Glow. . .

This AM while I was trying to get a wee bit more sleep, I heard a shout of dismay from the next room. My Wonder Woman was prepping for her day with about an hour to go before she left for work and. . . the power had gone out (LOTSA storming last night and through the day).

Doing makeup by in the dark just doesn’t cut it, apparently.

I thought she looked lovely by “Kindle Light”. 😉

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Well, I Had Been Enjoying the Book

Not sayin’ the title, but really?

. . . there’s enough (plural noun)s on the. . .

Linguistically innumerate. *gagamaggot* And,

“Ah.” He smiled, and even drunk as he was it was the kind of knowing, sarcastic smile that set my teeth on edge. “Jealousy.”

OK, I’ve not necessarily given enough context for the second, but people who use “jealousy” when they mean “envy” really set my teeth on edge. There’s a clear and useful distinction between the two that poorly-read folks seem all to have missed, and now subliterates are forcing their destruction of a useful distinction out of English. I just hate that.

So, as much as I’ve enjoyed the rest of the book to this point, if this sort of thing continues, I may end up putting this one down just because of the annoyance factor.

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Now, see, if he could count on a literate audience. . .

. . .the author of this awkward line,

“. . .the lovely scars he had from the one leg being severely fractured to the point of bone poking through the skin after. . .”

. . .could have saved a whole lotta words with “compound fracture“. But because he can no longer count on his readership being much more literate than the typical eighth-grader nowadays, he had to go all around the barn to use something like ten words (no, I’ve not actually counted) to say what a literate* person could vividly grasp in two.

No, I am not using “literate” in its least form here. I use it in the sense of,

“1 a : educated, cultured. . . 2 a : versed in literature. . . 2c : having knowledge or competence. . . “

And NONE of those apply to someone who cannot read “compound fracture” and either understand the term at once OR have both the intellectual curiosity and competence to either winkle the meaning on their own from context (not necessarily easy to do in this case) or LOOK IT UP! (N.B. When I was a kid, we had a monstrously huge two-volume dictionary–which I still have–that spent most of its time near or under the head of my bed, because I not only looked up EVERY word or term I did not immediately understand from context or simply learned new words and terms from reading the thing for pleasure. And I still do not consider myself as literate as either of my grandfathers were.)

More and more folks today have vocabularies limited by what they HEAR via the Hivemind, and more and more folks today do not even understand the words they hear from that propaganda machine. And so otherwise moderately literate authors HAVE to dumb down their text. (The one who cobbled up the abortion I cited above does still have ALL his characters use “there’s” with plural objects. *sigh* It’s. . . “interesting”–in a gagamaggot kind of way–to hear characters with multiple doctorates in the sciences who are linguistically innumerate. *profound sigh*)