Filed under: Amazon, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, jim downey, Kindle, marketing, promotion, Science Fiction
Just a quick reminder: Communion of Dreams is free today! Yay!!
The promotion started yesterday, and so far has had more than 100 downloads world-wide. I still think that it’s fun that people in a wide variety of different countries (as represented by different Amazon portals) download it with each promo. This time the list already includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, and The UK. That’s just cool.
So, share the news, and go download it if you haven’t already!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Feedback, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, dementia, direct publishing, feedback, free, Her Final Year, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, memoir, promotion, reviews, Science Fiction, thanks
There are a couple of new reviews up on Amazon which I’d like to share. The first is for Her Final Year:
A story worthy of five stars but I found it kind of difficult to keep straight, which family and patient they were talking about. The author did a good job of writing about the difficulties faced by the family caregivers. I hand it to them for staying with a very difficult task for a very long time.
The second is for Communion of Dreams:
James Downey has created a novel that compares favorably with the old masters of science fiction.
Our universe would be a better place were it more like the one he has imagined and written about so eloquently.Thank, sir, you for this wonderful escape from reality.
To show that appreciation, this coming week both books will be available for free download, but at two different times. The Kindle edition of Her Final Year will be free Monday through Wednesday, and the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams will be free Thursday and Friday.
Thank you.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Connections, Health, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion | Tags: Alzheimer's, blogging, care-giving, dementia, direct publishing, Ether One, free, game, health, Her Final Year, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, memoir, Michael Thomsen, promotion, The New Yorker
OK, a bit flip, there. Sorry. This actually sounds like a really interesting game, and the people who are involved with it seem to understand about the limitations inherent in it:
Ether One: The Video Game That Tries to Simulate Dementia
Ether One, a first-person puzzle game made by a six-person team at White Paper Games, in Manchester, England, is about the slow dissolution of the brain. The game casts the player as an employee of a futuristic memory-retrieval company called the Ether Institute of Telepathic Medicine. Your job is to dive into the mind of Jean Thompson, a sixty-nine-year-old woman diagnosed with dementia, and retrieve a series of lost memories. Using scans of the woman’s brain, the Ether Institute reconstructs 3-D simulations of what remains of her memory. Players must reassemble the story of her life using the oddly alien artifacts (the symbolic significance and basic operation of which remain a mystery) left behind in the fraying simulation of her past home and work places.
* * *
Ether One is built around a central control room from which players access the four main areas of Jean’s past—a seaside town in England, an industrial mine, a processing factory, and a lighthouse overlooking the ocean. Each area is filled with hundreds of tchotchkes, mementos, and mundanities that could hold some long-forgotten significance. Players are asked to “collect” the memories and are limited to carrying only one object at a time. At any point in the gameplay, they can instantaneously teleport back to the control room, which is lined with empty shelves to hold anything they collect. As a player, you’re never sure what’s important and what isn’t, so the system encourages you to take everything.
This hoarding is repaid with periodic puzzles, such as a door with a numeric lock whose code can be found on the bottom of a previously collected mug. As the game progresses, these puzzles increase in complexity, as does the array of random objects filling the shelves. The collection gradually overwhelms the player’s ability to remember just where all of these things came from and why they seemed important enough to retrieve. Why did I bring this plate all the way back here? Whose hat is this supposed to be again? It’s a tidy simulation of the cognitive degradation of dementia.
The author of the piece, Michael Thomsen, has first-hand experience with a family member who suffered with dementia. Here’s his concluding insight about Ether One:
Playing Ether One, I can’t say I felt any new illuminations about the disease. Most of the things I watched my grandmother go through were missing in its simulation, but I was reminded of the helplessness I felt. After solving the first few puzzles in Ether One, I realized that I’d been storing way too many items back in the hub world. It reminded me of my grandmother’s stuffed bookshelves in her nursing home room—old books, half-used perfume bottles, porcelain ferrets, a piece of Bohemian glass I’d given her once—we’d kept as much as we could when she moved in, trying to guess what might mean something to her and what might be lost for good. If video games indulge in a fantasy of objects—swords, spaceships, and the like—it’s one that’s hard to translate into a room filled with forgotten things. In Ether One, I found that the distance between these seemingly incompatible worlds lessened just a little. Even though I couldn’t quite forget myself inside its artifice, it was comforting to have the space to try.
May be worth checking out.
Also worth checking out: the Kindle edition of Her Final Year will be available for free download next week, from Monday through Wednesday.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Gardening, Habanero | Tags: blogging, Carolina Reaper, cooking, gardening, Habaneros, hot sauce, jim downey, Moruga Scorpion, Sriracha, Trinidad Scorpion
Behold this year’s Habanero experiment:
What you’re looking at is pureed super-hot Habaneros. With just enough vinegar and salt to preserve them for canning.
OK, the full story …
This morning I made a batch of my Habanero Sriracha sauce. One of my standards. But I decided to do it a little bit differently this year. Rather than use a limited amount of Habaneros in it, and just blend them in, I added a full two gallons of frozen habs to the vinegar & tomato sauce mixture and cooked them until soft. Then I removed all the peppers, setting them aside to cool. There’s still plenty of heat and flavor from the habs in the Sriracha (recipe below).
But then I added some more salt and a little apple cider vinegar to the cooked Habaneros, and ran the whole lot through a food processor. And that’s in the pic above.
The idea behind this isn’t that you’d actually use this stuff directly on food, like you would a hot sauce or some of my Habanero Dust from a spice grinder. Rather, it’s intended to be used in very small amounts as the basis for some larger dish or sauce, giving you just concentrated (almost pure) Habanero flavor and heat. I’ll put it into 4 ounce jars for a very limited number of insane friends.
Just thought I’d share the idea.
Jim Downey
This year’s Sriracha recipe (variation on the theme of recipes you’ll find elsewhere):
- 5 quarts homemade tomato sauce
- 2 cups apple cider vinegar
- 2 cups dark honey
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 3 heads of garlic crushed
- .25 cup of Kosher salt
- 3 Tablespoons of Fish Sauce
- Habaneros (mix of super-hot varietals)
Add all ingredients into large pot. Heat to simmer, stirring often. Remove Habaneros. Simmer rest for half an hour or so, then allow to cool.
EDIT NOTE: After trying the Sriracha prior to canning, I decided that it was just plain too hot, so added another couple of quarts of tomato sauce and changed the total above. Everything else still seemed pretty much in balance after. I think the heat level was masking some other problems earlier.
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Connections, movies, NPR, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Slate, Space, tech, Wired, YouTube | Tags: ALMA, art, astronomy, Bad Astronomy, blogging, Blood Sweat & Tears, Interstellar, jim downey, Kip Thorne, movies, music, NPR, Phil Plait, photography, predictions, reviews, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, video, www youtube
The reviews have been mixed, but one aspect of the new movie Interstellar is pretty cool: the rendering of the black hole depicted in the movie. Even moreso since it is as scientifically accurate as possible, based on close collaboration with noted astrophysicist Kip Thorne:
Still, no one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually built one. Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole’s shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it. “I never expected that,” Thorne says. “Eugénie just did the simulations and said, ‘Hey, this is what I got.’ It was just amazing.”
In the end, Nolan got elegant images that advance the story. Thorne got a movie that teaches a mass audience some real, accurate science. But he also got something he didn’t expect: a scientific discovery. “This is our observational data,” he says of the movie’s visualizations. “That’s the way nature behaves. Period.” Thorne says he can get at least two published articles out of it.
The video is remarkable. Seriously. Go watch it.
And in a nice bit of serendipity, there’s another fantastic bit of astrophysics in the news just now: actual images of planetary genesis from ALMA. Check it out:
A new image from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, reveals extraordinarily fine detail that has never been seen before in the planet-forming disc around a young star. ALMA’s new high-resolution capabilities were achieved by spacing the antennas up to 15 kilometers apart [1]. This new result represents an enormous step forward in the understanding of how protoplanetary discs develop and how planets form.
ALMA has obtained its most detailed image yet showing the structure of the disc around HL Tau [2], a million-year-old Sun-like star located approximately 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Taurus. The image exceeds all expectations and reveals a series of concentric and bright rings, separated by gaps.
That’s not computer-rendered theory. That’s an actual image, showing the formation of planets around this very young star.
Wow.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Connections, Faith healing, Science Fiction, Survival, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, blogging, Darnell Sidwell, excerpt, jim downey, miracles, Roman, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Wales, writing, Y Gaer
An excerpt I thought I would share. I had been planning on the current chapter being titled “Maen-Du Well”, but have decided instead on going with “Y Gaer”, which is just the Welsh name for “The Fort” — this fort, actually. The following happens there in the ruins:
A path led around past the buildings, then into a fair-sized rectangular terrace, the remnants of the Roman walls still clear and exposed in places. And the western and southern gate foundations were still surprisingly intact, from what he could see even at a distance of a hundred meters or so. He decided to cross the grounds of the old fort, go directly to the south gate.
As he approached the south boundary, he saw a man sitting on the gatehouse foundation, looking across the river. An old man, his aged leather rucksack on the wall ruins next to him. Eleazar didn’t look back, didn’t say anything as Darnell entered the small fenced-in area which protected the ruins from grazing sheep. He just looked out across the valley, until Darnell sat down beside him on the sun-warmed stone. “I thought I might find you here.”
Eleazar smiled. He pointed down the slope. “It was a good posting. The old road used to run just there, between us and the river.”
“You make it sound as though you were actually here,” said Darnell.
Eleazar shrugged. “For a while. It was good to get back to Britannia, and my passage was with a cavalry unit, part of which wound up here.”
Darnell studied the man. For a while, Eleazar just continued to look out over the small river valley. Then he turned, and considered Darnell in return. “You’re looking for miracles. Are you so surprised to see evidence of one?”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Fireworks, Gardening, Habanero, Humor, Music | Tags: blogging, Carolina Reaper, cooking, ethylene, gardening, Habaneros, hot sauce, jim downey, Moruga Scorpion, music, Rolling Stones, Sriracha, Trinidad Scorpion, Wikipedia
It’s Habanero season again!
I noted a few weeks back that I had harvested the first of this year’s crop, and that I thought that things looked promising, if the weather held. Well, all together I harvested about 200 fully-ripe peppers, seeding freezing them in small batches, and I’ll make some of my Habanero Sriracha with that later. But last Friday we had the first hard freeze of the season, so I picked all the rest of the remaining fruit off the plants. Here’s a the pic of that:
Now, since turning whole peppers into hot sauce is the sort of thing which can drive any sane person out of the house, I waited until today to do this year’s production. Why? Because my wife is a poll worker, and so is gone all day. Well, here’s that exact same box of peppers, which had just been closed up since Friday:
Fun, eh? Welcome to ethylene gas. Yup, the peppers are a LOT more ripe, just from being shut up for a few days. Not as ripe as last year’s end-of-season harvest, but not bad at all. And since my version of Sriracha is fairly sweet, I decided to make a less sweet batch of sauce out of the above, since it will tend to accentuate the citric qualities of the not-entirely-ripe peppers. So, here’s this year’s recipe:
- Approximately 335 peppers, crown removed and cut in half
- Not quite a gallon of natural apple cider vinegar
- 8 tablespoons of Kosher salt
- 3 heads of garlic
- 2 large yellow onions, rough chopped
Prepare all ingredients. Saute onions and garlic until soft. Add vinegar, salt and peppers to 5 gallon stock pot, simmer until soft, stirring often.
Scoop into blender, do a rough blend for 15 – 20 seconds. Then pour into Foley food mill, and crank until just seeds and skins are left. Transfer to jar, can.
Edited to add later: Total of 22.5 half pints. Which works out to about 2 habaneroes per fluid ounce, which is what my standard ‘Evil Green’ (previously my hottest sauce) runs, except that this has a much higher % of fully or mostly ripe habs.And this is clearly hotter than anything else I’ve ever made. Pic below – need a good name for it. It’s the one on the right, the reddish one is my Sriracha (about the color of tomato sauce) for comparison.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Book Conservation, Connections, Failure, Health, Marketing, Publishing, Survival, U of Iowa Ctr for the Book | Tags: appendectomy, appendicitis, art, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, bureaucracy, health, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, mortality, survival, teaching, training, University of Iowa Center for the Book
The summer before this past one I almost lost my wife to appendicitis.
All my adult life I have known that sudden, unexpected death can strike those we love. And I have tried to live my life accordingly.
The flip side of that, of course, is that I know I could die suddenly, as well. And while I have done a number of crazy and stupid things, I’ve always tried to keep an eye on the real risks involved. It’s not smart to lose track of the fact that you’re mortal.
But being there in the hospital with my wife, as she recovered from an emergency appendectomy, reflection on my own mortality took a slightly different direction. Rather than just thinking about what I had accomplished, and whether it had been a full life, I got to thinking about what I had to offer. And one thing I started thinking about was that I had accumulated a lot of very specific experience which was fairly rare: my book conservation skills.
Now, there are some really good schools out there to train conservators. As well as professional organizations, and workshops and all the sorts of things you would expect. But not a lot. Certainly not enough to meet the need for trained conservators; a need which will only continue to grow as more and more books and articles are published only in electronic format, and the current inventory of printed material starts to age and grow fragile.
Since I have been in private practice as a conservator for 20+ years, I haven’t done a lot of just low-level routine repairs. Rather, I’ve worked on the more valuable items from both private and public collections — the sorts of things which individuals and institutions felt it was worth paying me for my expertise. In other words, I’ve been fortunate enough to work on the cream of the crop from multiple collections, as it were, which has given me the opportunity to further hone a wide range of techniques and demanded that I do my very best by the books and documents entrusted to my care. And with that experience came judgment about what techniques are appropriate in what cases, what will work and what won’t. Judgment which often isn’t even conscious, but lives in my fingertips and can only be shared by close example and repetition.
That’s what I have to offer. And that’s what would be lost were I to die suddenly.
That’s what I got to thinking.
As luck would have it, about the same time I started working with an old acquaintance who had developed an interest in medieval bookbinding. He doesn’t live close, so we had to discuss things online and over the phone, with his coming to visit for weekend training now and then. Because *nothing* compares to hands-on, face-to-face training.
And working with him reminded me of how much I enjoy sharing my skills and love for my craft. Oh, I’ve taught plenty of bookbinding classes over the years, and that has been enjoyable. But there is nothing like working with a student who shares my intense passion for caring for historical texts, rather than someone who just wants to make some blank books for Christmas gifts or needs to have another example for their arts portfolio.
So I got to thinking of how I could find another mechanism to share my skills with people who already share my passion. And I decided to sound out a local institution about perhaps training some of their staff (many large libraries and archives have one or a few preservation technicians, who do the valuable basic repair work on the collection). I knew that while the budget environment wasn’t good, there might be a way for us to work out an arrangement for long-term, careful training in depth of some of their staff, allowing me to transfer both specific skills but more importantly nuances in judgment through hands-on work of items in their collection.
The institution was certainly receptive, and for a while we worked hard to see how to bring my initial thoughts into reality within their system. Meetings were held, brain-storming sessions conducted. Lots and lots of meetings, involving lots of different people and departments, different budget lines and facilities. The prospects were very promising, and I was very excited about the possibilities to begin a new phase of my book conservation career, teaching others part-time. But ultimately the bureaucracy proved too hard to overcome; rather than starting a long-term, fairly permanent training program, the bureaucracy could only accommodate a temporary ‘pilot’ program within its usual rules and guidelines for professional development.
And here is where the title of this post comes into play: knowing when to walk away.
Because when all was said and done, there was a chance … but only a chance … that the temporary pilot program teaching two or three people might find a home (and funding) within the institution. Maybe.
What should I do?
I considered and consulted with some close friends. After all the discussions, after all the meetings and brainstorming, I was deeply vested in seeing this work out.
But I had to take a step back and think about my initial goals, and rationally assess whether or not this would accomplish what I wanted. I decided that it didn’t — that I would be committing too much time and energy to trying to meet the needs of the bureaucracy rather than my own needs, and that I would have too little control over what I could teach.
I can’t blame the bureaucracy; it exists for a reason. Trying to change it, to get it to do something unique and risky, was probably a fools errand from the start.
So, failure.
Maybe.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, though. The bureaucracy at the institution in question, as well as the bureaucracy at many such institutions, is already set up to handle another version of training for their staff: specific workshops conducted by outside consultants, lasting from a few hours to a few days.
So that’s what I am going to do. In the next couple of months I will put together the initial offerings of training workshops for specific conservation techniques. All will have detailed descriptions of what the workshop will include. All will include plenty of hands-on practice under close supervision. All will be completely modular, so that any institution can select from the menu of offered workshops without being committed to other workshops.
I may not be able to do in-depth training of a small number of people, but I can share my skills and judgment with a much wider selection of institutions. It’ll be a lot more work on my part, but will hopefully also accomplish more.
We’ll see. I’ll keep you posted as to developments as things happen.
Jim Downey