I thought I was doing so good on my "finish all the books you've started and then gotten distracted from" goal - I finished twenty-eight books in the month of January! Eleven of them were even ones that were on my list of things I needed to finish! And I made serious progress on several more! And I haven't started any new books that were left lingering for weeks! I got the list below 30 and have kept it there!

But then Librarything (finally!) instituted tag autocomplete, so I started trying to clean up the tags on my books, and discovered I had a "started to read" tag with. uh. Sixty-five books in it. Granted, some of them are ones I am NEVER going to finish because I have better things to do with my time, because literally anything would be better (DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, most awful book I have ever attempted to read, omg) and ten of them are duplicates from the list I'm currently working through, but. um. yeah.

And then there's the "early review" books which I got in exchange for agreeing to read and review and then punted when I had a really bad year. There's six of them I haven't read. I went ahead and added those. So much for keeping the list under thirty. I have another one coming too because I lack willpower. (One of 'em's by the same dude as Day of the Triffids though. I may just ignore that one.)

...also of course "A Companion to Wolves" which I still have out from the library.

Anyway this whole LibraryThing recheck has me thinking out how badly I need to reshelve my books in a more orderly way. What do you folks thing of reorganizing my nonfiction collection along these main sections:

( Read more... )

Good idea? Bad idea? Best idea? (It's not quite as silly as it sounds: about half my nonfiction is on topics that would not be out of place in the Hogwarts library: I have about forty books tagged "divination" already.)

--Anyway I feel like my DW has been higher on boring life stuff than fandom content lately. My fandom life lately has been a) les mis chat, which is very rarely about les mis anymore; b) re-reading old JVJ longfic; and c) obsessing over a Winter Soldier AU where the Soldier is sent to honeytrap Captain America rather than kill him. SERIOUSLY. If that already exists I have failed to find it. Somebody tell me I just haven't looked hard enough. I don't even ship the damn pairing

I think ... I think I may have just got the first Dreamwidth post to get linked on metafandom.

(And there is a DW metafandom now! Yay! This place is waking up *so fast*, omg, I blink and another whole segment of fandom is here, it seems like.)

Anyway, with encouragement (in the form of "I wish our users would stop being so damn chicken", though possibly with more profanity) at the stitch'n'bitch Sunday, I finally sent some beta-y-notes to domtheknight; hopefully I will send the ones that go to denise today. (This seems like small news, but omg, I am so bad at interacting at any sort of official level about anything, it's really really sad.)

I'm actually sort-of doing site beta stuff on three different places now: closed beta at http://dreamwidth.org ; http://librarything.com which has been in beta for five years now, is still in beta, and will always be in beta; and http://interrobangstudios.com, the artists' collective/independent comic studio I work in with some RL people, that is in the middle of yet another redesign. And the process is so very different!

For interrobang, which consists of five people and one site and spare time, it consists of messing with stuff and then yelling at das Flughafen over Skype when I see something that looks off, and then having formal meetings where we talk about design and vision and all sorts of deep stuff.

For librarything, it consists of going on the site talk, bug collectors, and recommend site improvements boards and whining about whatever's wrong, and if the developers notice and feel like it, they'll fix it, and if they don't you keep whining until they do. (It's only been four years of whining for some features!) Meanwhile we write haiku back and forth with the people in charge. LT is a hobby site that got out of hand, and the guy in charge is the sort who in principle likes open source, but in practice is too ashamed of his coding practices to let the public see what he's perpetrated.

And then there's DW, which is all about teamwork and openness and joy! And once you've figure out who you need to talk to and where you need to go and what documentation you need to look at, things just get done!

So, we have recently cleaned out our book collection, and as a result, there are a whole *ton* of books I am getting rid of: lots of older SF particularly, but also some general fiction and some non-fiction.

If anybody on my flist wants any, I will send them to you for the shipping costs (if the shipping turns out to be <$1, like for one paperback, or I can just give them to you in person, it will be free.)

Claim them in a comment here, and then I'll get in touch to get your address and confirm your claims.

I'm not guaranteeing condition, and it's first come first serve 'cause I'm also offering these in a couple other places.

Everything tagged _togoaway in my LibraryThing account is going.
LINK TO LIST OF FREE BOOKS.
(There are ~650 books up for grabs, but you can sort the list by any of the columns to make it easier.)

Also up for grabs is what's going from my Dad's collection, here, another 215, mostly non-fiction. Same procedure.

ETA: Time out. Okay, the site I was going to use for this is currently having major issues, so there will be a new give-away post when I figure out a new way to post the list. Feel free to use this one meanwhile if it works for you.

So my newest Early Review book for LibraryThing is The Art Of Darkness, about undercover work; and there's been all this talk about the far north lately; and I had a whole bag of mending to do, and needed something to watch. So (as could be clearly deduced from that list of circumstances) I pulled out the tape I got at con.txt of the dueSouth pilot.

Several things:

No amount of fanfic, icons, picspam, or squee posts can possibly prepare you for just how indescribably, irrepressible-grin-inducingly cute Constable Fraser is.

No amount of fanfic can prepare you for how *bad* Ray's fashion sense is. I am more convinced than ever that he's actually a Time Lord. (Though another thing that fanfic hadn't conveyed is that Ray is apparently already doing primarily undercover work, which does make that whole two-Rays thing make a lot more sense without having to bring in regeneration.)

(Ray is also indescribably cute. And Dief is a much better actor than I was expecting him to be. Remember when I was talking about watching Old!Who, and it's like being a historian who's heard all the myths and read all the theories, who gets a chance to actually *be there* and *see it happen* and it's so much more amazingly amazing than any reconstruction? Yeah, like that.)

Also, this song will *get stuck in your head*.


Undercover book is also making me really want fic exploring the Master's tendency to go into deep cover at the slightest pretext. And making me want to re-read A Howling In The Factory Yard, again, but, y'know, that's kind of a given.)

So, with lack of laptop, and possibly more relevantly, lack of any way to play pirate online video, I have been reading more actual printed books this week. And catching up on my LT reviews, which I was several months behind on.

I have been learning a lot!
For example: When one is pondering writing Miles Vorkosigan kidfic, do *not* read Gordon Korman novels.

Also, when one is pondering writing S4 Dr. Who crackfic, do not do NOT read books of old Charles Addams cartoons....

Have been packing.

Now that LT has power-edit back, I just did up the first shelf's worth of books: about 50 books in the "sf-hardcover-to keep no matter what" boxes (sfhctk, if you're following along on my lt tags), about 50 books in the sf-hardcover-"to read soon or get rid of" boxes (sfhctr).

The remaining ~200 books in the sf-hardcover shelves will split between "to store in boxes because I want to have them just in case" (sfhcts) and "to get rid of" (tgro) with more in the second category, but those wait until much later, since I won't be shelving them.

Then there's the other 3,000 books in my collection. Yay?
(I have hopes that they'll divide in about the same proportions into tk, tr, ts, and tgro. Of course that still leaves me with about 600 books on my "to read" pile...

That I want to be Sarah Jane Smith when I grow up.


In other news, I currently have two outstanding LT Early Review books to read, which I'm alternating chapters on, because they're both pretty interesting and pretty dense. However, I think I will have to stop doing that soon, because Book 1 is currently tearing down the concept of Platonic dualism in search of pure truth and Book 2 is currently building up a theory of truth based around Platonic dualism, and so I find I'm pitting them against each other rather than reading them for themselves.

(Alas, I rather find I side with Book 1, despite liking Book 2 better - Platonic dualism is a fun toy to play with, and it's necessary to learn it in order to understand all the art that's been built using it, but when you get down to brass tacks and strange quarks, it's got no *foundation*, and and so I've never found it particularly useful for anything *but* play. Which, yay play! The author of Book 2 could do with more learning how to play, I think. So could the Book 1 author, come to think.)

...now I want to haul out the Legos again.

LibraryThing has recently instituted a feature that lets you track your posting frequency by date, so for the first time ever I can correlate my periodic outbursts of book-OCD-related crankiness to the *other* sort of period. ifyouknowhatimean.

In semi-related news, spent most of today faffing about on LibraryThing. It's like editing Wikipedia, only much pettier! (and more useful).

Thing I have discovered as a result: The internets have no love for the works of E. W. Hildick. Why is that? Surely I am not the only person on the internets who thought the Ghost Squad were woobies made of hottness? Plus they fight Nazis!

***

Also read some more of my latest-but-one LibraryThing early reviewer book. Have just got to the bit about how our hero spent most if his childhood filling notebooks with "elaborate sexual fantasies (often revolving around the Hardy Boys or Starsky and Hutch or Hawkeye and the Mike Farrell character [B.J.] from M*A*S*H."

Said book is about the travails of growing up dirt poor and black in the Bronx in the Seventies.

***

Meanwhile I am spending the week squatting at my sister's empty apartment catsitting for stellar_dust. She is on a business trip halfway across the country, so as a public service to her co-workers to prevent them from being deafened by the squeals of "I MISS MY KITTIES!!!!!", I present part one of a daily series of photo essays, "Life With Cats."

( The worst bit is the lurking. Everywhere you turn, there are glowing eyes staring back at you - behind doors, under furniture, in the bathtub, hanging from the ceiling--- )

I've been making an effort to review every book I read at LibraryThing (especially since my first two Early Reviewer books came this week.)

His Majesty's Dragon makes 13 since the turn of the year, plus one that's not in the LT account.

Which is probably excuse enough as to why I've not been posting.

Now I am off to go play with some more books.

..so I assume that all this downtime-y weirdness is related to the Great JF Update? It would be nice if we'd had some sort of warning. ETA: And sorry about the spammage; it screwed up, and then wouldn't let me in to edit.

Have been consumed lately with the discussion around otw_news (poor metamiri, whose innocent meta-post has been taken over by acafen theorizing!)

Anyway, since I don't feel up to anything substantive, that most commonly marked 'unread' on LT books list that everyone's posting:( Read more... )

...I am kind of embarrassed by the number of these marked 'unfinished'. But classics are books I tend to pick up when I know I'll have bits of reading time, but I don't want to get absorbed in anything, so a lot of them were taken on trips or whatever and then dropped when I got to something shinier.

Also, I am deeply skeptical of all the people claiming that they have finished "canterbury tales" and "Don Quixote." Really really? The vast majority of modern editions of both of those are excerpts and abridgements - which I've read several of, but don't count as the whole thing in my book.

I want my 100 icons back, dammit!