It’s been a while. Here a sketch that looks unfinished. If I lay a couple of fingers over the light green and house, it looks like something. I’m letting it sit for a while before I decide.
Good news today, for me anyway! Still in remission! Yay! Three years and four months. My type of cancer has an 11% survival rate.
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
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.
Don’t necessarily need a new theme, but definitely a few more widgets.
I’ve been thinking for a while that with 320+ published posts, it’s getting a little difficult for readers to find what they might be interested in or read, for example, Avatar Remaindered sequentially … I see evidence of that frustration in the stats. For myself it’s the frustration in locating posts that I might’ve originally decided to amplify.
So, two things I need to do. One, is to re-jig the number of Categories. I haven’t decided yet what will be more efficient, an increase or a decrease. Second is to install the widgets that will give us a better reading and finding experience.
I can’t believe I don’t even have a Search Bar yet when I use it frequently on other people’s sites.
Clouds of Categories seem to work best on sites that specialize in a particular topic, and have relatively few categories. Although I enjoy using them, I will probably give that function a miss. Although just having seen one on the Locus Magazine’s site I may give it a go.
Comments on these matters are welcome.
Some people keep their piles at their bedside. I don’t sleep when I read in bed. This pile —
is beside me, on my couch. Plenty of paperwork under them as well, as you can probably see. My tax return for 2022-2023, for instance. Late already, it’s very forgettable.
Three of the books relate to Interpreting Dreams, the online course I’ve been studying. I’m halfway through but seem to be marking time, like I’m stuck on learning about shadows, and getting side-tracked on a bunch of other interesting stuff.
Ursula K LeGuin’s Tao Te Ching is a wonderful interpretation that I wouldn’t like to do without now. I have three bookmarks in it but most often I “make my daily march with the heavy baggage wagon”. From 26, Power of the Heavy.
Second from the bottom is my health journal wherein I keep track of what my Low Dose Naltrexone regime is doing to me. Good things, so far. Much less inflammation.
Then Sapiens: A brief history of mankind by Yuval Noah Harrari. Have to admit I’m past what’s most interesting to me which is humankind’s early history. I’m struggling through Roman times and the age of the empires.
Next up, is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Lui, famous Chinese SF author. Translated by Ken Liu. Unfortunately I started watching the TV series of the same name before the book arrived via snail mail. While the TV series is an easy and engrossing watch, the book is every bit as cryptic as has been said. Reading it, I keep trying to match events in the TV series.
Last in the pile, there’s Revenger by Alistair Reynolds. It’s just as rich and baroque as the first and second times I read it. It’s meaty with a thick silky gravy, excellent food for my SF hunger. And in addition I’m on the watch-out for the pirate captain’s magnificent orrery that influenced me to purchase the much paler Lego version. My next purchase will probably be the third installment of this trilogy.
Rita de Heer 