I’ll make this short. Van der Kolk shares some of his theories on trauma,
however he shares traumas of his clients that can triggering without any
warning. I was recommended this book by a therapist, and I don’t think laypeople
are the right audience.
I don’t recommend this book. The trauma stories were too much.
Chivalry depicts Mrs. Whitaker, a widower that unknowingly finds the Holy Grail
in a charity shop. After cleaning, polishing, and displaying it, she sets it on
the her mantle to enjoy.
Sir Galad arrives shortly after, seeking the Grail. When he sees it, he’s
overcome because his quest is over. But only if he can convince Mrs. Whitaker to
trade for it.
Part comic, illuminated manuscript, the story highlights how an artist can play
with the comic format.
A fun read.
Editor: Sylvia E. Kamerman
Rating: 4-star
Publisher: The Writer, Inc
Published: 1978
Pages: 216
Find a copy at a local library
Are you interested in writing book reviews? Do you want to turn that into a
paying job? You could do worse than reading this book for advice. 21 essays,
edited by Kamerman, provide guidance for breaking into and writing reviews for
print, radio, and television. While you won’t find advice for posting reviews
online, much of the advice still applies. Be brief. Be consistent. Be bold. Be
honest.
I’m struck that several of the essays touched on reading books. As in, you must
actually read the book, sometimes twice, to provide a honest review. I thought
this seemed evident, however a recent article in Writers Digesti suggested
that reading the first 30 and last 40 pages of a book is sufficient in a pinch.
And I seriously hope folks don’t take that to heart.
In any case, if you’re serious about improving as a writer covering books, I
recommend that you find a copy of Book Reviewing. I think it is well worth
your time.
India Holton’s third entry in her Dangerous Damsels series continues to
deliver silly house-escapades led by lady pirates and witches, but this
installment focuses on the spies that watch the pirates and witches.
Alice Dearlove and Daniel Bixby are rival agents for A.U.N.T., a secret
organization that’s infiltrated the likes of the Wisteria Society of Lady
Scoundrels and The League of Gentlewomen Witches. An unusual assignment forces
the pair to work together as a married couple to recover a potentially powerful
weapon at an upcoming gathering for the Wisteria Society. An assignment that
both rivals would rather do alone.
However, persist as a pair they do, for love and for country. Alice and Daniel
seem clueless that their cover is blown nearly the moment they enter, in large
part because the Wisteria Society humors them at nearly every step of the way.
Devious or not, the pirate society provides plenty of room for love to blossom
between Alice and Daniel.
The book is chock full of literary nudges and winks to the reader, and all sorts
of double entendres filling in alongside the action.
The book works well as a comedic romance, and I felt that the literary
references were a love letter to books on Holton’s part. The innuendo was
kind-hearted to the heroes, often portraying them as delightfully clueless or
innocent, depending on how you wish to approach matters.
I recommend it.
Zauner’s memoir reflects on her childhood and her relationship with her mother
through the lens of caring for her mother as she dies. Zauner looks back at how
her mother connected through food and Zauner’s desire to fit in as a multiracial
person in the United States.
She has a complicated relationship with her mother. Expectations for school,
beauty, and connection to her Korean heritage constantly seem at battle with
expectations for growing up as an American. Zauner unpacks a lot in this book.
I think Zauner handles it all deftly and with care, demonstrating her
complicated relationship with her mother and how much that relationship matters
to her.
It’s a well-written book, even as I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Death is a
hard topic to navigate. I can’t fault Zauner for that, and she did it
splendidly. That said, this remains a book that I respect.
While moving my blog to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I figured it would be handy if I
could automate building and uploading. Euan Torano has a promising looking
guide for Deploying Hugo on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET with
Git,
and Jesse Squires has Building a site with Jekyll on
NearlyFreeSpeech.
While following these guides, I ran into issues with the site.git
directory
containing the actual git content under site.git/site
; I’m not by any means a
git expert (I’m learning as I go along with this site, picking it up in the last
couple of months), so I have no idea why my setup is off.
The next thing I wanted to solve was avoiding placing the actual remote git repo
on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, instead using my diminutive print server at home, so
that I could avoid duplicating the content on the server.
Finally, I wanted my Git hooks to build and then upload the blog content my web
directory on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. While doing that I discovered that missing a
/
uploaded my content into a subdirectory on the server.
So, here’s a slight remix of what I got working. In the following, my
workstation is running Debian 11, my print server is running Ubuntu 22.04, and
my web host is running FreeBSD 12.4-RELEASE.
Before you begin
Ensure that install Ruby and other prerequisites for
Jekyll.
If you haven’t, place existing Jekyll content under Git version control.
Create a bare Git repository
Create a bare Git repository. Later you’ll use this as your remote to push blog
changes from your workstation.
Run the following commands to create a bare Git repository. I ran the
commands on my print server, the other tutorials suggest doing this on the
NearlyFreeSpeech server.
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, uncomment the following line
# cd $HOME
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, comment the following line
cd $HOME/private
mkdir site.git
cd site.git
git init --bare
Create a checkout directory
This contains a checkout of the repository that Jekyll works on. What I gather
happens is that a Git hook that you’ll create uses this directory to checkout
the Jekyll content on the remote and then use that copy to build your site.
Run the following commands to create a checkout directory. Again, I ran the
commands on my print server.
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, uncomment the following line
# cd $HOME
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, comment the following line
cd $HOME/private
mkdir site_checkout
cd site_checkout
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, uncomment the following line
#git clone $HOME/site.git
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, comment the following line
git clone /home/private/site.git/
Create a post-receive Git hook
The following script runs each time you run git push
to the remote repo. In
the site.git
directory (the bare git repo), there is a hooks/
directory with
sample scripts that you can look at for ideas of other things you can do with
hooks.
In this case, create a new file in /home/private/site.git/hooks/post-recieve
and add the following content:
#!/bin/bash
set -ex
# I set $HOME explicitly on my print server
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/.gems
export PATH="$HOME/.gems/bin:$PATH"
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, uncomment the following line
# SITE_CHECKOUT=$HOME/site_checkout/site
# If you're using this on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, comment the following line
SITE_CHECKOUT=$HOME/private/site_checkout/site
GIT_DIR=$SITE_CHECKOUT/.git
BUILD_WWW=$HOME/www
# The following is the WWW directory on your actual web server
PUBLIC_WWW=/home/public/
cd $SITE_CHECKOUT
git --git-dir=$GIT_DIR status
git --git-dir=$GIT_DIR pull -f
git --git-dir=$GIT_DIR status
# Uncomment the following line to update your Ruby gems every time that you run
# git push
#bundle install
bundle exec jekyll build --destination $BUILD_WWW
# The following fix any permissions on directories and files before upload
find $BUILD_WWW -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find $BUILD_WWW -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
# For the following rsync commands, change the following:
# username: your username
# web_server_ssh_address: the ssh address to connect to your web server
# Use the following rsync command to test that rsync uploads the files that
# you expect and to the locations that you expect:
rsync -v -rz --checksum --delete --dry-run $BUILD_WWW/ username@web_server_ssh_address:$PUBLIC_WWW
# After verifying that the test command works as expected, comment it out and
# uncomment the following line:
#rsync -v -rz --checksum --delete $BUILD_WWW/ username@web_server_ssh_address:$PUBLIC_WWW
exit
Run the following command to set the execute bit on the script:
chmod ug+x /home/private/site.git/hooks/post-receive
Create a remote repo on your workstation
Run the following command:
git remote add local_remote trunk ssh://username@local_server/home/private/site.git
Change the following:
- local_remote: a name for your local_remote repository
- trunk: the name for the main branch, typically
trunk
, main
, or master
- username: your username
- local_server: the server the remote is on; in my case, it’s my printserver
Edit, commit, build and upload
Create a blog entry with your desired editor. Then, run the following commands
to commit your changes:
git add file_name
git commit
Replace file_name with file name(s) that you edited. When you run git commit, an
editor is displayed; enter a commit message and save.
Then, push your changes to your remote:
Pushing your content causes the post-receive script to run, which builds the
site and uploads necessary changes to the web server (saving you space and
network transit fees).
I started this blog in 2022 to play with cloud infrastructure while recording
short book reviews. I started on Google Cloud with
Wordpress. I migrated from Wordpress to
Jekyll so that I could write my entries with Neovim in
Markdown. Migrating from Wordpress also meant that I could build and test my
blog locally, and reduce my reliance on a database and PHP.
I saw folks at work recommend Linode for cheap VMs,
so gave that a go. I spent less than $8 a month hosting my site on the smallest
VM that Linode offers. Their getting started documentation is pretty good, but
once you start branching out from that I noticed some edges were frayed. Not
bad. Google Cloud tends to focus on enterprise developers, and Linode (at the
time I started using it) tended to focus on smaller non-enterprise developers.
I’m not sure that’ll remain the case, as Akamai purchased Linode and is slowly
retiring the Linode name. I won’t be surprised if targeting Enterprise customers
is next.
Google and Squarespace announced last week that Google is selling Google Domains
to Squarespace. I already have ill-feelings with Reddit’s handling of things as
of late, and I don’t want to wait around and find out what happens with
Squarespace. So I moved domain registrars this weekend to
namecheap, closed my Google Workspace account
(for reasons), and moved to Zoho Mail. And because
I’m up for a challenge, I took the advice for cheap hosts by moving my blog to
NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
I’m less than thrilled with Zoho’s belief that they need to spam my inbox with
their advertisement crap. Namecheap seems alright. NearlyFreeSpeech.net is dead
honest about their spartan support; on the other hand, I don’t mind that I’m not
paying for a full VM that I’m mostly not using.
Time will tell how I feel for all of these for sure.
Williams’ second book in the Winnowing Flame trilogy starts to bog down a
little. She splits the protagonists for the majority of the book, something I
understand as she’s trying to demonstrate the various actors in play, but that I
also feel weakens the story in this case.
Coupled with psychological drama and introspection, the action moves from moving
about a large and dangerous world, to navigating several set pieces that focus
on how each group of characters is dealing with change or how new discoveries
shake their fundamental beliefs.
All that said, I enjoyed the book, even with the slower pace. And it leaves room
for book 3 to maneuver the protagonists into action against larger groups that
Williams has built through the first two books.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Williams ties everything together.
Newlevant recounts a summer clearing ivy from Portland’s Forest Park. She is
homeschooled, which she later learns because her mom didn’t want her in contact
with Black people. Grappling with the discovery, she further learns about
racism in Oregon’s schools. While working her job, she witnesses racism at work
and experiences sexism in her job.
The story is awkward at times, as Newlevant captures teen-aged desires fairly
well. I’m left feeling that Newlevant begins to have her eyes opened to a darker
past in Oregon’s history, but I’m not sure if she effectively grapples with it.
As a memoir, I understand that coming to terms may not be the point; perhaps
just starting to realize the darker world is itself the message?
It’s an interesting book. I enjoyed it as en example of using comics for memoir.
Nora had a string of bad boyfriends, until she meets Bear. Bear seems to meet
all over her emotional needs, but has issues that are unique to him being a
bear.
An interesting critique on relationships.