Tag: books
Library builder’s monument of books
At some point this year, a child somewhere in the developing world became the ten millionth beneficiary of Room to Read, a non-profit organisation created 15 years ago after a high-flying Microsoft executive quit his job to help children in Nepal.
Read more here.
Did Dickens invent time travel?
From Ebenezer Scrooge to Doctor Who, fictional characters’ journeys through time and space still continue to fascinate. No time machine, no fancy science, but A Christmas Carol (1843) contains the first time-travel jump in modern fiction.
Read more here.
17 Secrets Only Book Lovers Are In On
Secret #12: Reading is one of the few forms of procrastination that will actually make you smarter.
6 Ways to Read More Books
The good things…
“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
~ Edward Gorey
Book quote
“She buried herself so deep in the book no harm could ever find her.”
– The Broken Book by Susan Johnson
More online communities 2
I’m very interested in learning new languages and practicising the ones I already know (to some extent). Over the years I’ve been a member of a couple of different ones. The one I’ve liked best is LiveMocha. It works like this: if you’re studying a language, you can get help from native speakers. Or you can help someone studying your language. Many people ask me for help with Swedish language exercises and once someone even asked me for help with one in French. It wasn’t hard, fortunately, something like what I did when I first began to study French at the age of 13.
Since I’m a major booklover, I’ve joined three (four if you count a Swedish one) book sites.
LibraryThing
GoodReads
Shelfari
You can post all your books (or as in my case, the titles I can remember – long story), read reviews or post reviews. There are more features but those are the ones I’ve used. You can post a LibraryThing author tag cloud in the sidebar of your WordPress blog or in some other places too, if you want them to show up on your blog. There are other widgets that you can post too.
Second Life is a community, but it’s a bit different from many others. It’s in 3D. You get an avatar (not quite like in the movie) that can move around and interact with other avatars. You can customize that avatar pretty much any way you like, add virtual pets, change hairdos and go on shopping sprees with it. If you’re interested in building/creating things in a 3D environment, you can, but you’ll need to pay a little to upload your ‘textures’. You can ‘buy’ or rent ‘land’ and all kinds of things. And you can chat. Voicechat or text chat, whatever you like.
I’m not entirely happy about SL. You hardly ever run into so many nutcases as you do there. Some can be very annoying. Many people have ‘sexual’ relations in there. Cartoon sex. Pretend sex. LOL. (I didn’t make this up, but it’s too funny not to share it: Second Life – where men are men, and so are the women, and the children are FBI.) It’s also very much about money, though you can experience SL without paying for anything other than your computer, software and internet connection. There are an almost limilless number of ‘sims’ – regions – that can be beautiful and intricate and fascinating. And you can go ‘shopping’ in huge stores. Strangely enough, it’s very relaxing. I’m not really into shopping in real life, but in SL I love to browse those stores, even though most of the clothes in there are slutty, to put it bluntly. My sister and I have had to learn to design our own, but that’s another story.
There are real businesses in SL and some universities teach courses in the 3D environment, so it’s not all ‘fake’. I’ve heard companies have staff meetings in SL and I know real famous singers have concerts there. The trouble is I always get to hear about it too late. Apparently, you can also ‘watch tv/movies’ too, but I’ve never tried that. You can also display your photos or art work. It’s a bit difficult to learn to move around in there, but I’m living proof you can learn how to do it. I even made a good friend in there, which was totally unexpected.