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Dead Winter's Night (Formally Bright Eyes)
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I suspect that there are AI book scams going around... I first became aware of it when I came across an urban fantasy author who was giving his books away for free/low prices on kindle, simply because there were way too many books where he was doing this with. A second thing that made me suspicious was the copyright year - these were very close together and there were more than 10 books in total (it takes years to
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I am becoming over sensitive to irritants in the environment. It started out when we lived somewhere were there was a lot of building work going on where we lived (about three building projects one after another, four if you count the demolition of a tower block of flats), as there was lots of dust in the atmosphere. More recently I've had problems with dog hair and pollen, and now wadding fibres. I don't think -
bright-eyes
3 months ago
black mould helped the situation in the previous home we were living in had. (We were unaware of how bad it was because the mould was hidden behind furniture.)
I strong suspect that Nehalennia might be another name for Ran, though this needs more looking into.
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I've gathered quite a bit of information on Nehalennia, so I can soon start work on content for the website. I've not been able to get access to all of the articles that I wanted, though, since some of them are behind an expensive paywall - that's the problem with academic content. £39 a time soon adds up, even when you have the funds to access them.
I'm going to have to get some peel and stick wallpaper to decorate the Ikea desk shelves. I hate the white, but it only comes in that, and the scrapbooking paper I bought won't cover it fully because what I thought was all the same height between shelves is not.
The Natural History of Dragons and it's sequels has to be (currently), my favourite series. It gives fantasy a different dimension and I have always loved tales of Victorian Era Natural History. Instead of Dinosaurs, and Darwin, though, we have dragons.
bright-eyes
4 months ago
Also, now that the lilac bush has started to lose its flowers, I've noticed that the eye irritation that I've been experiencing has started to settle down. I think what happened is that the dog caught my eye, which caused a slight injury and then this combined with her moulting, and the pollen, it's irritated my eyes more than normal, and my left eye caught the brunt of it because of her catching it with her paw.
bright-eyes
4 months ago
I noticed that when we had Jaffa and we were in the car with him while he was moulting it irritated my eyes, nose and throat, but it lessened when we were in a less enclosed space.
The NHS need to communicate properly with people and stop relying on nonsensical, cryptic text message spam that doesn't tell you anything.
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Apparently, Frig has a chariot pulled by sheep... As she and Odin are equal in everything, it would be funny if Odin turned out to be a shepherd, instead of a god of war.
I'm currently listening to A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan. A charming book - it's nice to come across characters that I find relatable. It's quite similar to Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, but it's the scholar/Natural History aspects of the books that I like. (I need to finish reading the Emily Wilde book, but was interrupted because of the eye/allergy issue.
that many books, especially with the length of them and I've not seen such proliferation in a series outside of those Sweet Valley High books from the 80's/90's, but they were 200 pages long each, and these are 400 pages.) Third - I tried looking him up on Fantastic Fiction and there was no entry for him.
Today, I came across a set of pagan books advertised on Instagram that claimed to be a best seller on Amazon, but again, with a very low price tag. I looked the author up on Amazon to see if I could take a look at the copyright year of each of the books... On Amazon, there was no such author listed. I tried to see if there was any reference to the author on the internet since you can usually find a blog, wikipedia
entry or something similar but no luck there (some authors choose not to sell through Amazon and some book publishers don't, either.) Again, no such luck... Either the books don't exist and you won't receive a copy, the books do exist and it's written by AI, or they are books by real authors that have had their work stolen. Beware of low price/free books.
I continue to buy real books from real bricks and mortar bookstores, so this isn't an issue I've personally dealt with. However, I've seen a lot of advertising recently about how to use AI to pump out novels and make lots of money. It potentially serves someone's bank balance, but it certainly doesn't serve the cause of reading or readers.
I usually buy books from authors that I know I like (most of it years before this AI nonsense started), but a lot become out of print, you can't order from the bookshop because it's not released here, the bookshop doesn't carry it, or if it's second hand, is way over priced. The local Oxfam sells books at inflated prices now and the font size used can be a problem - I had to give up on the Seven Kennings Trilogy
because the font was too small, so kindle is useful because I can change the font sizes. If it wasn't for that, I would prefer print books. There has always been bad books around, but it seems to becoming more common.