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