Ben Crowder

Ever since moving my Twitter feed onto my main blog, the urge to blog has evaporated — not to mention that I can’t even remember when the last time I blogged was. So, Twitter’s back to its own feed. And then I can start blogging again, and my thoughts won’t be solely confined to a 140-character limit. That will be good. :)

In a related vein, I recently ran across this quote by Mark Twain: “My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.” Growing up, I loved the British authors (and still do), to the point that I tried to emulate them, picking up Anglicisms left and right. I’d even hear a British accent in my head when I wrote. But somewhere along the way I realized that trying to be British just wasn’t going to work, so I may as well accept my own real voice and get on with it. Still not completely there, but blogging has helped with shrugging off fake identities and revealing the real me.

One last thing: I think I’m going to bring comments back. We’ll wait another week or so and see, but I’m leaning heavily in that direction. Hollering into what feels like an empty void is strangely…well…hollow. And to be honest, I miss your comments. :)

It’s done! I’ve gathered all of my blogs into this one, BenCrowder.net. No more spreading myself too thin trying to maintain seven or eight different blogs. Simplicity is a wonderful thing. :)

The non-blog side of things is still a work in progress, however. I’m moving stuff over from both Blank Slate and Riverglen Press, so this site is a little bare at the moment other than the blog half. But that will change soon.

One last thing: all the old URLs on the old blogs are still alive but I’ve set them to redirect here, with the hope that in a year or two I can phase them out completely. (By then Google and most other search engines should have reindexed with the new site, I hope.)

Just now I did some quick pruning of the list of books I’m currently reading, and I realized it’s been a while since a book post on here. Time to change that. :) Here are the fifteen books I’m reading right now:

I’ve been dipping into the Chronology volume of Scull and Hammond’s J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, and it’s terrific inspiration for the writerly side of me. This is a long-term read, though.

E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is a nice piece of YA fiction that I’m reading and enjoying. Also in the YA category are Jerry Spinelli’s Love, Stargirl (which I really like, and I wish there were more Stargirl books, and yes, as a guy I feel really weird proclaiming that to the world, but what the heck :P) and Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (which I also really like — it’s a book about books, after all :)).

Moving from YA fiction to non-YA fiction, I’m 70 pages into Connie Willis’s Passage (liking it so far — and I’ve loved the other Willis books I’ve read, like Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog). I just barely started Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (another book about books! Hurrah!) and Brandon Sanderon’s Elantris (this is my third time trying to get into it; hopefully I’ll make it further this time). I’m also reading Jerome K. Jerome’s hilarious novel Three Men in a Boat and slowly making my way through Dostoevksy’s The Brothers Karamazov, which I absolutely love. And in the theatrical end of things, I started Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie a couple days ago.

Now for non-fiction. I’m a chapter or so into Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and wow is it interesting stuff. I’m going to be reading the rest of his books. I’m a hundred pages into Robert Spolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir, which is a fascinating book about his studies of baboons in Kenya. Similarly, I’m a hundred pages into Gordon Thomas’s Gideon’s Spies, a riveting history of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency). I’m just over halfway through Jacques Lusseyran’s And There Was Light. He’s a blind Frenchman who made a big difference in the French Resistance during WWII, and it’s a very, very interesting autobiography. (Reading it has also made me feel that it actually wouldn’t be all that bad to go blind, to be perfectly honest.) Finally, I bought a copy of Montaigne’s Essays a few days ago and read the first essay last night. Mmm.

You know, early this past week I signed up for Netflix, thinking it would save me money. My first two DVDs arrived on Thursday and by yesterday I’d decided to cancel my subscription. Not only do I not watch enough movies as it is to justify the cost, but I’d much rather spend that time reading books instead.

Want to talk books? Email me — I can’t overstate how much I love talking about books. :)

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve closed comments on this blog. I’m moving the blog to a new location (part of my consolidation effort, which matters more to me than to any of you, actually ;)) and need to freeze things for the transfer. But with the move I’m also trying something different: a blog sans comments.

It’s not because I don’t love you, or because I don’t like your comments, or because of the recent kerfuffle over Prop 8. (I’ve actually been planning this for almost half a year now.) In all honesty, I don’t know exactly why this feels like the right thing to do right now, but it does. It’s time for a few changes, and this is one of them. (The others will be forthcoming and relatively minor in comparison.)

Now, I’m not trying to shut you down as an audience. I care very much what you think and say, whether I agree with you or not, and I hope that comes across. (Apologies if it hasn’t.) I’m still interested in your thoughts, so if you do have something to say in response to a post, please feel free to send me an email. What I hope will happen is that this will make the conversations more intimate and meaningful. (Which isn’t to say the ones on the blog weren’t meaningful. :))

Anyway, I hope to have the switch to the new site ready within the next few days. There’ll be a new URL, but the old one will redirect to the new one and so things should work just fine. And hopefully this is a step forward. :)

P.S. I’m interested to hear what y’all’s perspective is on this whole shutting off of the comments thing, so shoot me an email if you’ve got an opinion. Thanks.

After hashing out several site designs and getting bored with each of them within a day in turn, this afternoon I came up with this one. It’s simple but works well, I think. Several hours later, I’m almost done with tweaking the WordPress theme code to be the way I want it, so from here on out it’s just migrating old content over and making sure things don’t break. (One thing I’ve noticed from importing other blogs in is that images don’t import well. I’ll probably have to go through every single post that has images and fix it by hand. We’re talking two thousand or so posts. O joy.)

Earlier this afternoon Google announced SearchWiki, which is pretty darn cool:

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs.

This is great for research. (Though it’s less useful for egosurfing, I do have to say. :P) Make sure you watch the video on the announcement page. Dang, this is sweet.

You can tell society’s screwed up when you get sites like the Ashley Madison Agency popping up. Good grief. (Don’t worry, it’s not one of those kinds of sites.)

I try not to get grossed out when guys walk straight out of the bathroom without washing their hands, but it’s hard. It’s not like I’m OCD about germs or anything — two years in Thailand cured me of any tendencies I might have had in that direction — and yet the thought of beelining it out of the bathroom without washing your hands is just weird. I mean, even if they just pretended to wash their hands, it would be better. (What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right? :P)

And don’t get me started on the guys who don’t flush…

I’ve never actually seen Minority Report, but the user interface in the movie is legend. And legend is swiftly becoming reality:

Pretty dang amazing, and this is just the beginning. It’s even made by the one of the guys who designed the UI for the movie, interestingly enough. I hope these things drop down to consumer-level pricing someday… (Courtesy Gizmodo.)

As I’ve been slowing getting back to inbox zero, a remembrance of things past has shimmered up to the surface: I love long letters. When I was younger — in my heyday, if I can call it that :P — I had tons of pen pals and would write long emails and letters all the time, and get them in return, and it was great. There’s nothing wrong with short emails, of course, but long ones give you so much more space to roam, and it’s like a little Christmas every time a lengthy email shows up in your inbox.

The one downside is that it takes a lot longer to reply to long letters, but am I really in such a rush that I can’t slow down to savor things like this? Maybe I need to shift my priorities around again.