Imi > Recent Status Updates

As we get to the end of the year, I wanted to ask if any of you have and use StoryGraph? Yes, the GR competitor. I think I'm not alone in worrying about the future of GR. I thought it would be good the check out the current alternatives, and recently I've settled on StoryGraph. I'm not leaving GR, rather in 2025 I'm planning on logging on both websites. My SG username is imijen. Let me know if you're also there!

I haven't picked this up at all since October, when I was in the middle of story #3, so I've decided to start again from story #4 and maybe come back to #3 another time.

I wanted to share this script for anyone who like me is really, really struggling with the new bookpage.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/453...

It doesn't fix my biggest problems with the new design (shelves, or as they seem to be called now, tags, are now really hidden and hard to find/edit), but it does mean I don't have to scroll for miles to get to different parts of the page.

Many composers have played the viola. It does not have the brilliance of the violin or the power of the cello, but when playing it your hear everything going on around you, all the relationships and harmonies, from inside. It's a writer's instrument, inward and between.

God was dead: to begin with.

And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead.

He catches fever, shivers till the morning coach.
His bag, his manuscripts, are soaked.
Sometimes, in catastrophe, you have to slam the door
and save what you've made as best you can.
He shows his friends the music: waterstains
like scars on a country terrorised by war.

who was weak now, had to prop his elbow
to hold a violin. [...]

The names of where these players came from,
Ljubljana Hungary Germany Iraq,

[...]

I learned that music comes from everywhere.
That it takes strength to hold a violin,

that music crosses languages
and is mysteriously connected
to what we feel

Now so many people I loved have died,
others lost in the wisps and fogs of Alzheimer's,
I'd like to hold on to that
looking back
to us three struggling with the notes
and the other two listening, waiting their turn.
Here we are still, the five of us,
trying to get the counting right.

but he was the one who made you,
beat the notes into you on the clavier
viola, violin

your response to challenge ever after will be attack.
You will need no one. Only the relationship
of sound and key. You improvise.

They say the ear bone, shaped like the bowl
of a tiny spoon, lasts longest when we die.

For far too long, in our social and political dealings, we have consulted the same old leather-bound dictionary that was for the most part compiled in the aftermath of the Cold War. So accustomed have we become to using this weighty tome as our reference that we no longer feel the need to look up rudimentary words, taking it for granted that we already know well what they mean.

Sometimes, where you genetically or ethnically seem to fit in most is where you least belong. Sometimes you are at your loneliest among people who physically resemble you and seem to speak the same language. There are many citizens across the world today - and their number is growing - who have a hard time recognising their countries, walking like strangers in their own homelands.

I might never have developed the skill [of writing] were it not for a singular letter in the Turkish alphabet.

It was called the soft g - a 'g' with a little squiggle on top, like this: ğ. [...] It did not have a voice of its own. Every other letter made a distinctive sound, expressed itself loud and clear, except this one. The soft ğ did not talk. It did not complain or articulate opinions or demand anything

It was the best decision to start re-reading this beauty just before the new year!

...all the evidence suggests that we should turn to the maxim 'freedom within constraints' as the best way to understand culture's influence on the choice of coordinate systems. Nature - in this case the physical environment - certainly places constraints on the types of coordinate system that can be used sensibly in a given language. But there is considerable freedom within these constraints...

'Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.' The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express - for in theory any language could express anything - but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

And if you are still tempted by the theory that the inventory of ready-made concepts in our mother tongue determines the concepts we are able to understand, then just ask yourself how one would ever manage to learn any new concepts if that theory were true.

The more common ground you share with your hearer, the more often you will be able merely to 'point' with your words at the participants and at the place and time of events. And the more frequently such pointing expressions are used, the more likely they are to fuse and turn to endings and other morphological elements.

The degree of morphological complexity in a language is not usually a matter of conscious choice or deliberate planning by the speakers. After all, the question of how many endings there should be on verbs or nouns hardly features in party political debates. [...] the reasons must be sought in the natural and unplanned paths of change that languages tread over time.

Couldn't we decide, for instance, that the complexity of a language is defined as the difficulty it poses for foreign learners? But which learners exactly? The problem is that the difficulty of learning a foreign language crucially depends on the learner's mother tongue. Swedish is a doddle - if you happen to be Norwegian [...] But neither Swedish nor Spanish is easy if your native language is English.

And yet the similarities among languages in the choice of foci are still far too striking to be dismissed as haphazard: the great majority of languages still behave in a highly predictable way that would be hard to explain if cultures were free to divide the colour concepts entirely at whim. This uneasy balance between conformity and divergence is particularly evident in the order in which colour names...

When they asked speakers of different languages to point at the best examples of various colours, there was surprising cross cultural similarity in the choice of foci [...] They concluded that these foci were universal constants of the human race that are biologically determined and independent of culture.

Culture is understood here as all human traits that are not the result of instinct - in other words, as a synonym for nurture as opposed to nature. Culture thus encompasses all aspects of our behaviour that have evolved as social conventions and are transmitted through learning from generation to generation.

Today language abandoned me. I could not find the word for a simple object – a commonplace familiar furnishing. For an instant, I stared into a void. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Later, I made an inventory of the room – a naming of parts: bed, chair, table, picture, vase, cupboard, window, curtain. Curtain. And I breathed again.

And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

Oh no.... Looks like the new Goodreads books page has finally reached me and I can't find any way to change it back D: I'm so lost.

....the same regions in the visual cortex light up whether one is seeing an object live—“online”—or merely recalling or imagining it, off-line. This suggests that the ability to visualize our thoughts should be the rule rather than the exception. Some neuroscientists suspect that during normal waking hours something in the brain inhibits the visual cortex...

“Each generation of children confronts a new environment,” she explained, “and their brains are particularly good at learning and thriving in that environment [...] Children don’t invent these new tools, they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in it. Childhood is the species’ ways of injecting noise into the system of cultural evolution.”