Neocities

1 year ago

I've found my 'missing' acrylic paint...

1 year ago

Finished listening to Within the Sanctuary of Wings. It's a great series and I've really enjoyed them. They remind me very much so of Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, the discovery of the Roseta Stone and the beginning of the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the discovery of dinosaurs in the 19th century. They are also reminiscent of the early sci-fi books that took inspiration from discoveries in geology

bright-eyes 1 year ago

during that period, so I consider them to be science fiction, rather than fantasy, despite them being about dragons.

bright-eyes updated their site.

2 years ago

thecraftyhobbit/links

index

dwn/books

bright-eyes

2 years ago

Listening Books don't have the sequel to the Natural History of Dragons series so I borrowed a hard copy from the library. Like those Seven Kennings books, the font is small. What's the deal with it? I have other paperbacks where the font is readable, even in the smaller size paperbacks so why should a larger book have a smaller font?

bright-eyes 2 years ago

And then there are the italics... Italics are hard to read even at larger font sizes and when used for title headings so using them for large blocks of text is odd. Publishers need to work on making their books readable and large font users aren't restricted to grannies reading Catherine Cookson books.

bright-eyes updated their site.

2 years ago

thecraftyhobbit/links

dwn/books

1 like

bright-eyes

2 years ago

I'm doing more work on the Nehalennia research today and I have several questions that come across my mind: There is a recurrence of themes that appear across several cultures. The golden apples of Greek myth = the apples of Idunn, for instance. Are these retellings of the same story, or are they independent of each other?

bright-eyes 2 years ago

There are two sites where temples to Nehalennia have been found and the author of the article that I'm reading has included examples of other altars that have been found there, most prominently Neptune/Poseidon and Hercules but the author's not reproduced the inscriptions (I'm presuming that there are some) that accompany these altars. The Nehalennia ones come with them, so I presume that they should.

bright-eyes 2 years ago

The reason why I want to know if there are inscriptions is that I want to confirm that the altars are actually dedicated to those gods/demi gods and that they aren't a god that has a similar function in that culture and the author is saying that they are those gods/demi gods. Romans have clearly had an influence at the sites because the writing on the altars is latin, but they when they encounter gods of the native

bright-eyes 2 years ago

lands that they invade, they often attribute a native god in that culture that has similar traits to their own with their own god, so Thoth becomes Mercury/Hermes, Tyr becomes Aries, etc...

bright-eyes 2 years ago

Even later writers have this problem of transposing gods/goddesses from Greece and the Roman Empire to other lands - Snorri Sturluson claims that the Nordic deities are Greek migrants.

bright-eyes updated their site.

2 years ago

Isavargsbookofshadows/Nehalennia

Isavargsbookofshadows/Nehalennia/gallery

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bright-eyes

2 years ago

Today is probably the first day since I started having the problem with my left eye stinging/watering, where it hasn't bothered me.... There were some days when I thought it had gone away, but came back a few hours later, some days when it was worse than others, but today is the first one where it's not bothered me at all...

bright-eyes

2 years ago

Two of the most brutal, pointless deaths I have ever come across in TV as got to be Anita and Luke McGregor from Snowy River... You don't see it coming, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason for it to happen in regards to the story, but poof, they are gone... It makes GOT look tame, even though GOT is more violent.

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bright-eyes

2 years ago

I suspect that there are AI book scams going around... I first became aware of it when I came across an urban fantasy author who was giving his books away for free/low prices on kindle, simply because there were way too many books where he was doing this with. A second thing that made me suspicious was the copyright year - these were very close together and there were more than 10 books in total (it takes years to

1 like

bright-eyes 2 years ago

that many books, especially with the length of them and I've not seen such proliferation in a series outside of those Sweet Valley High books from the 80's/90's, but they were 200 pages long each, and these are 400 pages.) Third - I tried looking him up on Fantastic Fiction and there was no entry for him.

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bright-eyes 2 years ago

Today, I came across a set of pagan books advertised on Instagram that claimed to be a best seller on Amazon, but again, with a very low price tag. I looked the author up on Amazon to see if I could take a look at the copyright year of each of the books... On Amazon, there was no such author listed. I tried to see if there was any reference to the author on the internet since you can usually find a blog, wikipedia

1 like

bright-eyes 2 years ago

entry or something similar but no luck there (some authors choose not to sell through Amazon and some book publishers don't, either.) Again, no such luck... Either the books don't exist and you won't receive a copy, the books do exist and it's written by AI, or they are books by real authors that have had their work stolen. Beware of low price/free books.

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readingproject 2 years ago

I continue to buy real books from real bricks and mortar bookstores, so this isn't an issue I've personally dealt with. However, I've seen a lot of advertising recently about how to use AI to pump out novels and make lots of money. It potentially serves someone's bank balance, but it certainly doesn't serve the cause of reading or readers.

1 like

bright-eyes 2 years ago

I usually buy books from authors that I know I like (most of it years before this AI nonsense started), but a lot become out of print, you can't order from the bookshop because it's not released here, the bookshop doesn't carry it, or if it's second hand, is way over priced. The local Oxfam sells books at inflated prices now and the font size used can be a problem - I had to give up on the Seven Kennings Trilogy

1 like

bright-eyes 2 years ago

because the font was too small, so kindle is useful because I can change the font sizes. If it wasn't for that, I would prefer print books. There has always been bad books around, but it seems to becoming more common.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

I am becoming over sensitive to irritants in the environment. It started out when we lived somewhere were there was a lot of building work going on where we lived (about three building projects one after another, four if you count the demolition of a tower block of flats), as there was lots of dust in the atmosphere. More recently I've had problems with dog hair and pollen, and now wadding fibres. I don't think -

bright-eyes 2 years ago

black mould helped the situation in the previous home we were living in had. (We were unaware of how bad it was because the mould was hidden behind furniture.)

bright-eyes

2 years ago

I strong suspect that Nehalennia might be another name for Ran, though this needs more looking into.

1 like

bright-eyes

2 years ago

I've gathered quite a bit of information on Nehalennia, so I can soon start work on content for the website. I've not been able to get access to all of the articles that I wanted, though, since some of them are behind an expensive paywall - that's the problem with academic content. £39 a time soon adds up, even when you have the funds to access them.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

I'm going to have to get some peel and stick wallpaper to decorate the Ikea desk shelves. I hate the white, but it only comes in that, and the scrapbooking paper I bought won't cover it fully because what I thought was all the same height between shelves is not.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

The Natural History of Dragons and it's sequels has to be (currently), my favourite series. It gives fantasy a different dimension and I have always loved tales of Victorian Era Natural History. Instead of Dinosaurs, and Darwin, though, we have dragons.

bright-eyes 2 years ago

Also, now that the lilac bush has started to lose its flowers, I've noticed that the eye irritation that I've been experiencing has started to settle down. I think what happened is that the dog caught my eye, which caused a slight injury and then this combined with her moulting, and the pollen, it's irritated my eyes more than normal, and my left eye caught the brunt of it because of her catching it with her paw.

bright-eyes 2 years ago

I noticed that when we had Jaffa and we were in the car with him while he was moulting it irritated my eyes, nose and throat, but it lessened when we were in a less enclosed space.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

The NHS need to communicate properly with people and stop relying on nonsensical, cryptic text message spam that doesn't tell you anything.

1 like

bright-eyes

2 years ago

Hippies have turned up in Call the Midwife.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

Apparently, Frig has a chariot pulled by sheep... As she and Odin are equal in everything, it would be funny if Odin turned out to be a shepherd, instead of a god of war.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

I'm currently listening to A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan. A charming book - it's nice to come across characters that I find relatable. It's quite similar to Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, but it's the scholar/Natural History aspects of the books that I like. (I need to finish reading the Emily Wilde book, but was interrupted because of the eye/allergy issue.

bright-eyes 2 years ago

Listening Books has all of the Natural History of Dragons series on it.

bright-eyes

2 years ago

We should really bring back the humble disc drive to computers. Why does everything take three hours or more to install? When everything was on a disc drive, it only took 30 minutes. Also, this downloadable software decreases security because of all the bogus malware sites that masquerade as software sites.

bright-eyes 2 years ago

It's like using mobile phones to store your banking details, relying on mobiles for payments, doctors appointments, etc, when they can easily get lost or stolen, and mobile phone numbers are constantly being recycled so you can never be sure if the person you are ringing is the person you want to speak to.

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