Will you choose winter or summer? Will you walk with friends or alone?

[sovay]

So I'm pleasantly surprised: I read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon yesterday, and liked it well enough that I have just returned from the bookstore with Throne of Jade. Yes, yes, I'm behind the times; everyone else has read these already; I needed something to read while curled up in bed, all right? And it was much, much less like Anne McCaffrey than I'd feared.

I suspect that I can't appreciate the books fully, since my knowledge of Patrick O'Brian and C.S. Forester is nonexistent, unless one counts Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but I am fond of the slightly archaic style and the alternate natural history is very neatly worked in. Of course, I couldn't reconstruct even the real-world Napoleonic Wars if I was hit with a treatise on them, so I can't tell whether any striking political-military changes have taken place (beyond the basic existence of the Aerial Corps, which I'm very sure I would have remembered), but I don't think that's critical to the plot as yet. I am enjoying the ways in which the mythology of dragons has been tinkered with. History? History's flexible. But if someone botches the myth . . .

I probably should have saved myself the trouble and bought Black Powder War this afternoon, but this way I can at least pretend that I am exercising self-restraint.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I cannot recommend being hit in the head with a treatise on the Napoleonic Wars. Very little knowledge transfer happens that way, in my experience, and you can get a nasty bump.

Just sayin'.

---L.

[sovay]

Very little knowledge transfer happens that way, in my experience, and you can get a nasty bump.

Oh, now you tell me . . .

*unsteadily returns volume to its shelf*

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in naominovik's LiveJournal.

[sovay]

I hadn't thought to look for hers. Thanks!

[ombriel.livejournal.com]

I hope you'll pardon an unrelated question...

How do you get lj to show Greek letters? I haven't been able to figure it out, and I've got stuff to type up for my Greek-knowin' readership. :)

Thanks.

[sovay]

How do you get lj to show Greek letters?

I copy them from Perseus or the TLG; any of the Unicode settings work. I've never been able to get Greek text to transfer from Word files to Safari (which is what I use) without turning into gibberish, so if anyone knows how, I'd love to find out . . . I'm afraid this might not help at all.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I think it's probably going to take some fancy font footwork and even with that it may never work. Chronically, character-set incompatibilities between the sets used by MS products (and possibly others, they're just the really obvious and deliberate offenders) and the standardized sets make seamless cut-and-paste a thing that, as desirable as it is, does not exist.

Character sets are tables that assign a number to each letter or symbol in a font. Gibberish ensues when someone decides they need not adhere to the standards for placement of characters in the tables.

Copying from Perseus is about as good as it's going to get, as far as I know. (However, you can cling to a straw: I haven't been following this stuff closely lately. Maybe someone came up with a killer app.) The only other way I can think of to do it reliably would be to hand-hard-code Greek characters in HTML.

[larryhammer]

As Moving says. Copying within a browser or coding the HTML characters is about all you can rely on. The mysteries that are Unicode coding will almost always whap you, otherwise.

---L.

[ombriel.livejournal.com]

Perseus provides copiable Greek text, but it's littered with inexplicable squares. Maybe toying with the configuration will fix that. In any case, it's a start. Thank you for the suggestions, much appreciated. χαί̈ρε!

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, I'm behind the times; everyone else has read these already; I needed something to read while curled up in bed, all right?

Actually, I'm waiting on them till next year (though I do intend to read them early next year); got too many series irons in the fire this year already. (The last volume of Slewelling's Tamir Trilogy, hot off the presses, landed on my doorstep yesterday. Joy.)

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

*Flewelling, of course. I really should proofread.