HSU IT Department

Our dog turned 11 last week. This is VERY old for an English mastiff! This is how she looked when we reminded her of her birthday:

Short on prompts for that next fest? Desperate for an idea for your next original fic? Try PLOTTO: THE MASTER BOOK OF PLOTS!

The author, William Wallace Cook (1867-1933), knows whereof he speaks: he wrote more than a hundred novels under at least two names for pulp publisher Street & Smith, with titles like At daggers drawn, or, A pearl beyond price and Fools for luck, or, Caught in a strange trap.

I can't wait to track down a copy of this :)

...and yet it's been snowing. We are Not Pleased.

The cat's new favorite spot. Can you see her?

Recently over on GoodReads, someone started a discussion on "How Did You Become a Reader?" and kicked it off with the following three questions, to which I have added a fourth:

1) Do you remember being read to as a child?
2) Do you remember when you first realized you love to read?
3) Have you always liked to read, or is it something you developed later?
4) What are some "firsts" in your life as a reader?

I had a lot of fun thinking about these questions and my own history as a reader, and since so many of us here on LJ are avid readers, I thought I'd share with y'all. I'd love to hear your answers as well (if you answer over on your own LJ, leave a comment here and let me know so I can find it!).

I don't remember ever not being a reader. Mom was an English teacher and librarian so there were always books at our house. We went to the library A LOT and I was always allowed to take as many books as I wanted. (Our first trip to a bookstore was quite traumatic, apparently, as I did not like being limited to only two!).

Mom read to me, and later to me and my brother, until I was in my teens -- he was five years younger than me so it was quite a challenge finding something that suited both of us! I remember The Hobbit, The Paleface Redskins, Half Magic, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle...

Sometimes Mom would insist that I go outside and get some fresh air...so of course I would go outside with a book. My favorite thing to do was take a bag of apples and two books and climb a tree. I would sit in the tree happily reading for easily a couple of hours.

My parents divorced when I was really young, like about two, so for years I would go spend two weeks with my dad every summer. My stepmom had three kids when they got married; I was a pretty shy kid and they didn't like me much, or I thought they didn't, though more likely it was just that we didn't have much in common because...THEY DIDN'T LIKE TO READ (gasp). So every summer I took two suitcases, one full of clothes and one full of books. One year I didn't bring enough and had to read some of them twice.

The only time I remember mom taking a book away from me was when I was ten or eleven and I got my hands on her copy of The Godfather. Probably a good idea, I think it's a bit much for a ten-year-old. Although the best thing about books is that, unlike movies, if a kid runs into something they aren't ready for, they probably simply won't understand it or be able to picture it, so it just goes right past them.

The first book I actually remember reading was Lloyd Alexander's The High King. The first book I remember getting as a gift is Bambi, when I was about seven. The first book I remember eagerly awaiting publication of is Silver On the Tree -- I'd recently discovered the series and had zoomed through them, and was horrified to discover I would have to actually wait for the last one. I think that was my first introduction to the idea that books weren't some kind of natural resource -- they didn't grow on shelves like apples grow on trees, but had to be made -- written by a real live human being and then printed and bound and shipped and so on. (The logical corollary, which I arrived at almost immediately, was People Write Books + I Am A People = Therefore I Could Write A Book. I haven't yet, but I haven't given up on it either.) The first nonfiction book I remember reading is Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man, about her research with chimpanzees in the wild. The first book that actually changed how I thought about life was Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Growing up, I never went anywhere without a book, even if we were just running to the grocery store or the gas station. This is still true today; just as some people won't leave the house without putting on their makeup, I feel undressed if I leave the house without a book. They have been and continue to be the best of teachers and friends.

The little icons that go with each warning are HILARIOUS. I think my favorite is "excessive use of passive voice" XD

There is a meme circulating: put the letters of the alphabet into your search window and write down the first auto-complete for each. Other people get all kinds of interesting things (shyfoxling got "dg33fb led connectors" for D and "skankin' pickle" for S, which I don't know what it is but it makes me giggle). When I do it I get precisely what you'd predict if I were, say, George F. Babbitt: A = amazon, B = best buy, and so on down to Y = youtube and Z = zillow.

What does this mean? Why is my browser so conventional, so dull, so uninteresting? Let the record show that I have never searched for zillow in my life, and really who needs to google Amazon when you can just type in "amazon.com"?

I did notice today that if I type "what is" into google, the first autocomplete is "what is a caucus". No surprise there; it's a very unfamiliar concept to most Americans, even if you have had it explained to you as a child by a Dodo.

Edit: Ah, I believe I have sussed it out. It's because I do private browsing and clear my cache every time I close my browser. This means my search history never gets stored, so all google has to offer me is the most popular search for a given letter.

So my browser isn't boring, I'm just very very secretive :)