Altivo

This time with a little bit of difference:

Hear me reading my own story, "Beyond Mundane Horizons,"

which appeared in Allasso, vol. 2: Saudade edited by Brian Cook back in 2012. Today's episode on The Voice of Dog podcast.

The old vixen Naryssa, tired of her monotonous existence, gets a new way of looking at life, the universe, and everything as a result of meeting an interesting stranger.

Khakidoggy outdoes himself. Today he posted my story "Coyote's Voice," which first appeared in ROAR vol.6 back in 2012. This fable tells how Gaia made the world and all the creatures in it, then gave each animal, bird, or fish special gifts. What happens when some of them start trying to swap gifts around? Hint: Some get in trouble, but Coyote comes out sounding good. And Khaki sounds good telling the story for us, too. (About 30 minutes duration, freely accessible to all.)

The Voice of Dog: "Coyote's Voice" by Altivo Overo

I was pleased with this when I wrote it, and had fun putting it together. I think Khaki's audio version makes it even better. I hope you enjoy it.

Check out the other stories on the podcast too. Some very fine work by many furry authors you may already know. NSFW/Adult material is flagged as such.

The passing of Ursula K. Le Guin is a great loss to the English language literary world, and not just to science fiction or fantasy readers. A true Grand Master, she was a leader in the realm of speculative fiction as well as a superbly skilled artist of language and imagery.

Watching the comments of many who said they had never actually read any of her work, or had only read the Earthsea books, sent me back to my shelves to revisit some of Le Guin's works that I first read many years ago. First and foremost among these in my opinion would be The Left Hand of Darkness, published about 1969 if I remember correctly. I have read it at least twice, once as an assignment in a literature class and once on my own that I recall. Overall I have probably read about half of her published works, and have always intended to complete the list. This one book, though, stands out in my memory as perhaps her greatest and most visionary work. It deals with issues of gender and sex role quite neatly, and is often lauded for that, but there is much more to it. Political topics such as nationalism, economics, xenophobia, language and cultural barriers, greed, and power are all inherent to the story and its characters. The realities of long distance space travel are merely touched upon as an element underpinning the plot, but handled in a manner that is accurate and consistent with our current understanding of relativity and physics. Le Guin's description of the "ansible," a device that permits instantaneous communication over galactic distances, was puzzling in 1969 but fits in almost perfectly with our understanding of quantum entanglement and how it might be used now, half a century after she first described it.

Le Guin was made a Gandalf Award Grand Master of Fantasy by the World Science Fiction Society in 1975, and a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2003 (rather tardily in my opinion.) She received numerous other awards during her writing career.

The Left Hand of Darkness received both a Hugo and a Nebula.

I can't recommend Grand Master Ursula Le Guin's writings strongly enough. If you haven't read her beyond the realm of Earthsea, you should. And there is no better starting place than The Left Hand of Darkness.

[I was disturbed to find that my own local public library did not have the book on the shelf, nor was it in their circulating e-book collection. Much to my satisfaction, within a day of pointing this out and urging them to purchase this title and also The Dispossessed, both were in fact made available to users of the e-book selection.]

Some of you long time followers may recall The Clydesdale Librarian, my furry review site. It was launched on the beta Google sites, and collapsed when Google changed the code and structures so much that I couldn't keep up with the necessary revisions. Of course, it was beta after all, so what could I expect? Still, it was discouraging enough that I let the site languish for several years.

In the last couple of weeks, I've been receiving notices that Posterous, a blogging and image sharing site, is going away. I had an account with Posterous, but only used it to follow others. Nonetheless, they keep advising me that Posterous will be shut down (as of today in fact) and I should back up my content and move it elsewhere. I requested the backup file of all three of my posts, which has never arrived.

Anyway, Wordpress was suggested as one of the platforms to which Posterous material could be moved. I've meant to look into Wordpress for a while, and this gave me the needed nudge. The end result is that I spent most of Sunday manually rescuing content from the Google sites edition of Clydesdale Librarian, and translating it bodily (textually?) to a new Wordpress site. I completely deleted the old Google sites pages, which means that various links in Google are now dead. We'll see how long it takes them to catch on and update to point to a non-Google site.

The new URL is http://hossification.wordpress.com and the title is Exposterous Hossification: The Clydesdale Librarian. The first new content went up this morning, a review of Howard L. Anderson's Western-style Australian adventure novel, Albert of Adelaide.

I promised weeks ago to post a photo of the eggs from our ducks, and here, I've finally gotten round to it:



This is two days' production from three ducks, arranged like the circle of chords since I've been practicing again (with Neal and Gary today.) The white eggs are C major, and the blue eggs are G major or G7, the dominant, while the olive tan eggs are F major, the sub-dominant chord... No, I'm not drunk, just being silly here.

Early this morning I succeeded in getting my Literati ereader to upgrade itself to version 2.0 of the firmware system, last one available. Once studied out, the solution was simple enough. The files I first downloaded to perform the upgrade were corrupt. It turns out that with Firefox, right-click "Save link as..." was not sufficient to transfer a compressed tar file unscathed. The same approach using Internet Explorer worked without corruption, as did wget used from a command line. Given an uncorrupted package file, the system was perfectly happy to read it in and perform the upgrade. Now it accepts epub files over the USB cable, either by direct copy or by transfer using Calibre, Adobe Digital Editions, or Kobo Desktop. Quite a few features were added in the upgrade as well, with better display controls, more options for finding and viewing books, and so forth. Dropping a 2GB SD card into the expansion slot gives enough memory to hold hundreds of books, an entire library's worth. I no longer need feel that I mad a mistake in purchasing this. (It's compatible with Nook and Kobo books, as well as ebooks.com and ebookwise.com. Project Gutenberg epub files work well too, and borrowed library ebooks are compatible. In other words, very similar to a Kobo or Nook ereading device, except it has a color LCD display.)

Busy weekend ahead, but I think I'm enough on top of it to enjoy it if the weather holds up.

Spent some time at work messing the the Literati, trying to get it to update its firmware, but without success. It tries all right, but comes back with the message "Update cancelled." No reason given. Also, if you try to sync it using Kobo Desktop, you get the message "Downloading update" for a minute or so, followed by "Update failed." Other possible conclusions: Somehow the available mamory in the device is locked, marked read only, or otherwise unwritable. I could offer to do this, but it seems best to leave this sort of thing to the customer.

The refurbished Kobo Wi-fi reader arrived today in the mail. Amazingly small and light weight, with supposedly very long battery life since the display is e-ink rather than LCD. The battery was already charged, so I took it with me to listen to an evening performance by Kishwaukee Rambers, one of Gary's groups. The musical performance was great as usual. The Kobo reader performed as it should, connecting by wireless, updating its own firmware, downloading titles I already own from the Kobo website, and so forth. I'm not fond of e-ink. It isn't high enough in contrast, in my opinion, and it is slow to update which gives a sort of seasick feel to each page turn. It looks as if the letters swirl around and rearrange themselves to spell out the next day's message.

But at least it works, all functions are operational. That's more than can be said for the Literati, even though both devices are obviously built on the same design and software core. I installed epub books by download from Kobobooks, by drag and drop, by using Calibre, and all of them came up just fine. At least I have an idea now what the Literati should be doing when it sits there and stares at me.

Morning meeting, afternoon shopping and chores, tired as if I'd been at work all day.

Indulgence: bought myself a new e-book reader, the Sharper Image Literati. Off EBay, half price for new unopened box. My old eBookwise has served faithfully for years, but it doesn't read the new standard formats and is obviously doomed to oblivion. I don't want to be bound to Amazon and their proprietary formats. This one will do, it's a version of Kobo I believe, and reads epub, html, pdf. Has wifi and a backlit screen. I don't like e-paper. Anyway, for the price it was worth a try.

Cool and gloomy weather, threatening to rain all day but never did. Gary cut a large part of the grass that was getting rank from rain and neglect.

He's watching all of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, one disc per night. Not sure quite why, but I'm sitting through them and being reminded of how badly I think Jackson treated Tolkien. He made a fine dramatic epic but it's not the story I have read again and again. It's another tale entirely.

...is a day with some sunlight. Maybe. Well, there was some today, by afternoon anyway.

Gary has to finish a take home exam by noon tomorrow and then he's free from school at least until fall. It will be good to have him back.

I note with regret the fact that Maurice Sendak has passed away. While most furries probably know him for Where the Wild Things Are, I will always remember him first for In the Night Kitchen, a lovely little dreamscape that set off a fury and if I remember correctly even got onto the ALA banned book list for a while. All because he drew a dream picture of a little boy with no pants on. Humans are just amazingly silly and stupid about things at times.

Finished Patricia Briggs' Cry Wolf and I recommend it to anyone interested in a good werewolf story. Neither the horrible blood and gore stuff of years ago, nor the mush of many romance novels that just use the werewolf legend as a backdrop, it's a believable story with characters well worth noticing. It's part of a trilogy, plus a prefatory novelette, and I see I'll have to read all of them.

It's late and that's most of what happened today other than the usual work, eat, sleep routines.

*trumpet fanfare*

Allasso volume 2: Saudade has arrived on the scene from Pink Fox Publications. Available in traditional print or Kindle format from Amazon, this issue contains material from no less than eight (count them, eight) members of the Furry Writers' Guild, including myself. Prose, poetry, and some nice artwork too. Don't miss it.

End shameless plug. Seriously, editor Brian Lee Cook has done a super job of bringing these materials together. You can even skip my own story if you like, but you should read the others, OK?

No more woodpeckers today. I suspect, as usual, they have gone on to look for better nesting grounds. Whatever it takes to meet their criteria, we don't quite have.

John stopped by this morning, with Linda along, to look at Tess' chipped forehoof. He smoothed the damage out with a rasp and said it should be oK as long as it doesn't crack or chip again. We're applying Rainmaker daily to try to prevent that.

Got back from work breakfast just in time to help Gary load all his stuff into his car so he could take off for his hurdy gury players meet in Indiana. He won't be back until Sunday night late.

Finished up the grocery shopping for next week, so now I don't have to go anywhere this weekend unless something irresistible shows up. Ha. Maybe I'll just stay in and read. The weather today certainly was conducive to that.