#WordWeavers 6/3
Who is your most creative character?
Definitely the minstrel, Shawmelle. She sings, plays a lute and writes her own songs. Her father was a minstrel, as well, and was the one who taught her to play.
She's also very lucky, in that one of the kingdom's squires takes a liking to her. 🙂
I’m excited to say that I turned in my manuscript for the ActivityPub book for O’Reilly Media today. I started working on it in September of 2023, with a lot of interim checkpoints and deadlines since. In April 2024, I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Over the month of May, I’ve been working on improvements suggested by the technical reviewers who agreed to look over the book, and from my own re-read.
In total, my TODO file for this month has about 250 changes to be made. Some are small — just changing a word or two — but one required adding a whole new chapter, and many required multi-paragraph sections.
I took the last week of May off from my work at Open Earth Foundation to concentrate on making changes. My team was really supportive, which I deeply appreciated. I went to our country house in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and I spent the week writing, editing, drawing and thinking.
Now, the next stage of book making starts: production. The production team at O’Reilly will be copyediting, indexing, and laying out the book. Their designers will be taking my UML diagrams and turning them into professional-looking illustrations. We have two rounds of quality control on code samples and fact checking on content.
In September 2024, the final e-book will be available for sale. I’ll have a link here for the pre-sale version when it comes out. If you’re eager to read the book, I highly recommend reviewing the early release version.
Thanks so much to my friends, family and colleagues who’ve made space and time for me to do this work. It has meant a lot to me. I hope the final product helps more developers create cool projects using ActivityPub.
"Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside." –Ursula K. Le Guin
A VIRTUOSO RIFF ON AN AMERICAN classic: the inimitable Percival Everett retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, transforming it from a familiar picaresque to a more complex adventure and a meditation on code-switching. A MINUS
My #bookreview is brief/won't spoil, to spread good, great, & spectacular #horror#books far & wide.
💙📚 You may presume you'll know the story that unfolds in I THINK I'M ALONE NOW, but you'll be wrong as hell. I read this novella in a single sitting: Ali Seay has written a thoroughly enjoyable, vivid, violent, deliciously dark chunk o' horror set in the 80's that's, like, totally rad. (Grindhouse Press)
I am currently engrossed in reading the Expanse book series. In the universe of these books, humanity's advanced space-faring civilization still grapples with familiar issues like geopolitical tension, inequality, and exploitation.
The arrival of a mysterious new technology ignites intense reactions from governments, individuals, and political ideologies.
In these books, I see many parallels to how people currently interact with AI. #book#scifi
STUMBLING TOWARD ENLIGHTENMENT in Seoul: university friends now in their thirties find heartbreak and lesser forms of anomie in this eloquent, multivocal experimental novel rich with details of life in today’s South Korea. B PLUS
I can hardly wait until the release of 'The Auroras & Blossoms PoArtMo Anthology: Volume 5', with haiku, poems and a short (fictional) story by me. Pre-orders of this beautiful e-book until 3 June for just $ /€ 4,99 instead of $/€ 9,99.
If your child is a food lover, the ABCs of Indien Cuisine will certainly be a great read. Full of adorable illustrations, this picture book introduces young readers to different Indian dishes, all organized following the alphabet’s letters. From Aloo Gobi to Zeera, young readers discovers twenty six very tasty flavors presented in rich and powerful colors.
The original game Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All (or just Fantasy Wargaming in some editions) was a 1981 book by Bruce Galloway, a clear variation on Dungeons and Dragons, based on Galloway’s home rules. Unlike it’s competition it was not afraid of using actual historical concepts like astrology and occultism in it’s descriptions, although it also was written so densely it was hard to make sense of it in any shape or form by someone not already familiar with roleplaying games. And, well, it was called Fantasy Wargaming.
Which made this a problem, as the game was published both in the UK and the US by mainstream publishers obviously trying to break into the nascent TTRPG market. The most available version was most likely the one published by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, which made the game available to many people who did not have any experience with roleplaying games before.
Unfortunately one has to say, as the game’s size (300pgs) and conceptual denseness made parsing the book quite a feat, meaning if people used this as an introduction to roleplaying, it might not have been very successful.
The Story of Fantasy Wargaming goes into this, and into the development of the game. It could have been a bit more thorough and a bit more critical, but for what it is it’s a nice look into the environment that created it. And well, it’s free.
(I learned about this book from an episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast which had the author on and talked about this project. Well worth a listen)