1. After slightly over two years, my project to re-read the entire Liaden Universe in chronological order and blog about it is now concluded. (I already mentioned that I'd finished the reading, but now the post buffer is run out so the blogging is done too.) I intend to take several months of rest before I even think about whether I want to do another one.
(If I do the one I have in mind - which is, needless to say, considerably less ambitious than this one was - the auspicious starting date would be 3 May, so I have time to think it over.)
Should you wish to try the reading-it-all-chronologically thing yourself - it shouldn't take anywhere near as long if you're sensible and
don't make yourself blog about it as you go along - I have posted a
suggested reading order. There have been chronological lists of the novels before, but I think this is the first one to include all the short stories as well.
2. I did this on the actual re-read blog already, but I also want to publicly acknowledge that the whole blog thing would have been a lot more complicated and painful without WordPress, and some of the plug-ins that extend its capabilities. I'm particularly grateful for two of the plug-ins:
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Akismet, the spam filter plug-in for WordPress. The blog has received thousands of spam comments over the years it's been running, outstripping the genuine stuff by several orders of magnitude, and it would have been practically unmanageable without Akismet.
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Editorial Calendar plug-in is really useful if you're running a blog with a log of posts scheduled in advance; it presents a calendar with all your scheduled posts marked on it and lets you do things like dragging and dropping to reschedule them. I was particularly thankful every time I had to re-think the schedule and move around a whole novel's worth of entries, but even if nothing like that ever happens it still makes the whole process more convenient.
3. Speaking of the spam comments, my favourite type was the one saying how much they loved my blog layout, and could I give them some advice about how to get one as unique and creative - I never did get around to changing the layout from the default that every WordPress blog starts out with. Though they may have been beat by one I got recently which enquired about what blog set-up I was using, and was it any better than WordPress?
4. My German studies with Duolingo continue. I was amused to discover recently that German contains an exact parallel of one of the exotic bits of phrasing that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller put into Liaden to help distinguish Liaden-translated-into-English from ordinary English. One of the ways Liadens say goodbye is translated literally as "Until soon"; in German, this is "Bis bald". I wonder how the German translators handle that; do they change it for a different phrasing, or let it go and pick up the exoticness elsewhere? (Perhaps by finding a Liaden phrasing that seems normal in English but would seem exotic if translated literally into German.)
5. In other news, the arrival of the DVDs I ordered from the sale
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lost_spook was waving under our noses a while back. There were quite a few interesting things on offer, but I did try to pare down my initial list because the postage rates for international rapidly escalate to the point where I was looking at paying two or three as much for the postage as for the contents. In the end, I winnowed it down to
The Beiderbecke Trilogy and
Children of the Stones, both shows that I've heard about for years and don't expect to find in DVD shops closer to home, and
Enemy at the Door, entirely due to
lost_spook's oppression. (Woe!) I was amused to note, when I opened the parcel, that despite having been in only two episodes Anthony Head is on the cover for
Enemy at the Door more often than some of the regular cast.
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