I was glad to see this tiny patch of native moss among the giant south American exotics. Even better the clue to another species of birds to discover …
A scribbled sculptural form …
One a a pair of twins …
Its mate. They guard a pebbled through-way
In Brazil, or wherever they originate, there would’ve been a froglet living in the little pool in the heart of the floret. More on them after I re-read Wings by Terry Pratchett (1990).
I was out for my groceries. Hit a Reject Shop for some kids stickers, a birthday coming up. Saw these … lol the only fungi I’ve seen other than photos for over a month.
Surprising, that there were different sorts … Not that there was much relationship to real fungi
Good to see evidence in the sky of winter back-burning, where town councils pay teams of volunteer fireys (slang for volunteer fire fighters) to go out and burn undergrowth in an attempt to limit the fuel load ahead of bush-fire season.
Cold weather is the time to do that, much less chance the fire gets away.
That burning off had to have been done where the wind wasn’t so fierce, locally we had gusts of over 35 kph.
This morning opened the curtains to see two kookaburras on the lightpole out front of my unit.
Bit of a crummy photo, it having to have been cropped severely. I was inside, behind glass, the birds were probably about seven metres (23ft) distant, and the camera just is not interested in middle distance detail.
The kookies don’t look like they’re watching for insects in the grass at the foot of the podium, but they are canny hunters.
The lawns at Carinya are being mown, and grasshoppers will jump up to get away from the blades.
There goes one of the birds.
He glides a long slow flight to the whirring insect, snaps it up with his beak and turning his aileron-feathers slightly, changes course for a perch on a fence down there.
Gulps down the prey.
Reading Weaponized by Neal asher (2023) was a marathon.
There are a couple of Asher’s novels I’ve enjoyed, The Skinner and The Voyage of the Sable Keech, for example, the first two instalments of the Spatterjay trilogy, published in the early 2000s.
I found those inventive and engrossing. I still think with fondness about the living ship. The Polity novels that intervene between those and Weaponized are set in a human universe ruled by AIs.
In Weaponized a bunch of human characters from the polity intend to colonize an outer planet. They’re all in their second or third century and are bored. They intend to go back to basics somewhere new.
Ursula Ossect Treloon is their leader. The plot is a relentless competition for superiority between the human would-be settlers, and the native wildlife.
Neither of them wins when both appear to be taken over by superior Jain technology, from yet another universe. The end is is circular, a mystery, when a fragment of Ursula is saved by the Polity mole.
Most of the story is the ‘science’ describing the adaptations that need to be made to continue the struggle to survive an ever evolving enemy.
And this is an evolution happening at a daily at most week’s pace. The actual plot was told with a series of one liners buried in the almost baroquely detailed descriptions of the technology. Non-stop action as the back cover promises.
By about a third of the way through, I was wishing for a bit of ordinary narrative, describing the settlers ordinary time. But if anything proceedings notched up, there was never any relief.
Part Two of Blog Usability
Having a good night’s sleep often helps me to ‘think’ things through, with that kind of thinking being done in the unconscious. So while sitting down for breakfast this morning and checking the weather and my mail, I also checked how my latest blog post appears to people reading it on the their mobiles/cell phones or tablets.
First there are the four lines below: Title, Author, Categories and Date & Reading Time
Then the BLOG CONTENT, arguably the meat of the meal. My stats page tells me 8/10ths of people read just the email and they have the opportunity to Comment and or Like. Eight tenths of the time I do the same. Most mornings I have time to read things, but not comment.
People who click through and read on the Reader interestingly get the Tags in a header at the top. Nobody else does. Clicking through and reading on the Blog gets you the following list of additional bits and pieces.
Share this and Likes, another important bit. Then, Related posts. Then Tags, I was surprised to see. Then, the Published by … and About Me paragraph, followed by Leave a Comment. Finally, one after the other, the three new widgets. First the Search Box, followed by the mashed up Categories list and, finally, Recent Posts.
A lot of superfluous stuff in that list that I doubt anyone will read. One thing I dislike about the internet in the last 3 or 5 years … the amount of bloat and padding a reader needs to negotiate their way through!
It’s as if since no one is accountable for the amount of web-space being used … like we have vast distances of free geography to fill up and never mind the amount of electricity needed for cooling towers … and 3000 words looks far more impressive then 1500 words … repetition and padding are the new normal.
I grew up when paper newspapers and magazines were the go, when every inch of print had to be paid for, and flab, repetition and padding were cut ruthlessly. It seems to me we need to renew that contract. To save on cooling towers and save readers.
So. This is what’s going to happen. Starting at the end of my list, Recent posts is gone, as they are more or less taken care of in the Related Posts item. The list of Categories is gone, as the categories pertaining to that post are covered in the third line of the title block, and they are more useful to me in their nested format in settings.
While the Search Box is useful, I don’t know how useful it’ll be where it is. Wait and see is the go with that item. Then there’s Leave a Comment. I’m leaving that where it is.
Then, Published by … and About Me is starting to look rather jaded. It’s up for a make-over. Tags are said to be important but I often suspect the post’s title and categories are doing the grunt work. I might be able streamline Tags … they are a work in progress. Related Posts, Share This and Likes are all to stay.
Rita de Heer 