hermiene.net

I added publisher information to my books, and started scanning my covers (front, back, spine, and in a few hardcover cases, the flaps of the dust jacket). I should be done with the scans pretty soon as I'm not Photoshopping them much. I don't remove creases, sticker smudge, and the like. I might do that in the future, though, when I have more free time on my hands than I currently have.

I added a series system to my Books page and assigned every applicable book to a series. I'm not entirely sure I've done every book correctly; there are many disagreements and there are many hard-core fans, so there are many ways to do it. I've toyed with the idea of also assigning every book with a series to a universe, where series is a subset of (and completely enclosed by) universe. For instance, Ringworld is now in the Known Space series, but arguably that's the Known Space universe, where the series is the eponymous Ringworld series. And to further complicate things, authors sometimes merge series, as in Asimov's Robot series which merges into the Empire series which merges into the Foundation series. Some people even sub-divide the Foundation series into Pre-Foundation, Foundation, and End-Foundation. And then there's the problem of parallel series, as in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game novels, which run parallel to his Ender's Shadow novels. And all of those combined might be said to reside in the Enderverse. Oy vey!

I went through every post and updated the links to suit my new Books page scheme. Now, every link to a book is a permalink. Also, I've thought of some new features for the page which I'll incorporate in the next few days.

My new and spiffy Books page is up. Shiny! It now works approximately like I want it to. In particular, I haven't yet figured out how to make it display books that are in the intersection of a set of categories; instead, it currently spews forth books that are a result of the union of that set. So, if I'd want to display only SF anthologies, my Books page would list all books in the category "Science fiction" and all books in the category "Anthology". I get all my SF anthologies, plus a bunch of books I'm not interested in. It does this for some reason, and I have a strong hunch that the same reason is behind another annoying "feature" (bug) of my Books page. Namely, books that are in several categories will only show the category (or categories) currently selected. I suspect that I'll solve both of these deficiencies in one fell swoop.

So, with a working books page, here are the books I've read recently: Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor's Tale, and The Old Man and the Sea. The URLs are now pretty nice, aren't they? I dread having to go through the entire archive and fit the previous posts' mentioning of books to this new scheme, something I'll force myself to do. Soon.

Nowadays I don't discover many new good web comics, but one recently trickled in: Drawing Board.

Pollen and heat are making my life pretty miserable. Fortunately, I have medicine for the former and a desktop fan for the latter, though they only partially mitigate the horrors. Bleah.