The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

 

Anime

There’s an interesting article on the NewsHour site about anime’s absence from the Oscars this year. It mentions the movie Your Name, which I’ve heard a lot about, but haven’t had a chance to see. (As far as I can tell, it was only released for a short run in 2016 in the US, to qualify for the Oscars and won’t get a “real” release until April.) I don’t know much about the director, Makoto Shinkai, but he seems to be well-regarded, so maybe I should hunt down some of his older movies.

I’ve been getting interested in anime again lately. This week, I watched the first three parts of Ghost in the Shell: Arise on Netflix. It’s not nearly as good as the GITS: Stand Alone Complex series, but it’s not bad. And I really liked the music, some (or all) of which is by Cornelius. There’s even one song which, apparently, is a collaboration between Cornelius and Sean Lennon. It seems like only those first three parts of Arise are available on Netflix, so now I need to decide if I want to buy the rest on Blu-Ray from Amazon, or maybe from iTunes. The series is a bit confusing, just in terms of the way it was released. Wikipedia does a (relatively) good job of explaining it. There are five main episodes, each about an hour long. In the US, they’ve been released on Blu-Ray as Borders 1 & 2 and Borders 3 & 4. (I’m not quite sure about the fifth episode, “Pyrophoric Cult”.) There is also something called The New Movie, which completes the series (I think). Those episodes/movies have also been re-edited into an anime TV series, with typical 30-minute episodes. That TV series is available on iTunes.

All of this leads me to think that I should maybe dive back into my old pile of unwatched anime DVDs.

Pocket acquired by Mozilla

Well, this is interesting. Mozilla has acquired Pocket. I blogged recently about Instapaper, and their acquisition by Pinterest. Now, their one big competitor has been acquired too. That’s a little disappointing, but maybe not unexpected. Though I wouldn’t have guessed that Mozilla would be the one to buy them out.

I’m still using Instapaper. They’ve restored all the data that was lost in their big crash a few weeks ago, and their site has been working fine for me ever since. So I’m hoping that they’re doing OK.

WordPress on .NET

I don’t think I’d ever want to run WordPress on .NET, but it’s interesting to see that it’s (kind of) possible now. This is being done by compiling PHP to .NET, and using Kestrel as the web server. It’s interesting to read about the work that goes into something like this.

Amazon Affiliate Links

Amazon has recently made some changes to their affiliate program that are going to have a negative impact on some bloggers. Here are a couple of articles about the change, from The Verge and The Digital Reader.

I’ve been using Amazon affiliate links here on my blog for a long time. And I’ve never earned a penny from them. And that’s fine. I used to use SiteStripe to generate fancy image links, but I’ve had problems with those since I switched from Blogger to WordPress. So lately I’ve just been using SiteStripe’s short URL links. For me, it’s really just a way to get a short URL that might (but probably won’t) make me a buck or two at some point. But there are some sites that have based their “business model” on Amazon affiliate links, and they’re going to be in a bit of trouble. The Wirecutter and The Sweethome used to be in that category, but since they’ve been acquired by the NY Times, maybe they don’t have to rely so much on Amazon.

Either way, relying on something as fragile as affiliate links for anything other than a little extra coffee money has always seemed a bit daft to me. On the other hand, online advertising is a mess too, with so many people using ad blockers, and getting people to pay for content doesn’t usually work out too well either. I’m glad I have a good day job!

The Book of Dust

I was pretty excited to find out this week that Philip Pullman will be releasing the first volume of his new trilogy in October of this year. The trilogy isn’t exactly a sequel to His Dark Materials, but it’s in the same universe, and features some of the same characters. More details can be found at NPR and The Guardian.

I read His Dark Materials back in 2004, starting in January and finishing in June. I remember it well, since I was reading it when my brother passed away, in February 2004, so those memories are linked together in my head. It was also the first time I read anything substantial in ebook form. (I was reading it with Microsoft Reader on a Toshiba Pocket PC. It wasn’t a horrible experience, but neither was it a good one, and I never did buy anything else to read on that device.)

At some point in 2010, I think, I bought a trade paperback of the trilogy, with the idea that I’d reread it eventually. (Of course, the Pocket PC was long gone by then, along with the DRM’d ebooks that were tied to it.) I still haven’t gotten around to rereading it, but I’m thinking about it again.

I could just go ahead and start into the trade paperback, or I could listen to the audio version of Golden Compass, which I seem to have bought via iTunes in 2007 and forgotten about. Or I could buy the graphic novel version of Golden Compass, which I didn’t know about until I started poking around on Amazon tonight. So, plenty of options.

I’m kind of curious as to how I’d process the books right now. I think I’m a different person than I was in 2004. Am I capable of enjoying them as much as I did the first time through? Would I find new things in them that went over my head the first time? Would reading certain sections trigger specific memories? I don’t know. I’m usually not big on rereading books. There are just so many that I haven’t read yet, and I’m such a slow reader these days. But rereading these books would probably be worth my time.

Twitterrific, Overcast, and Ted Leo

Twitterrific is my favorite iOS Twitter client. (But also, honestly, the only one I’ve used other than the official one, so that’s not saying much.) I appreciate the fact that Twitter even still supports third-party clients. Facebook never really did, and Twitter’s support has wavered quite a bit over the years. But anyway, I get a lot of use out of Twitterrific. I bought it back when it actually cost money. (Now, it’s free with ads and various in-app purchases.)

I also used to use their Mac client. But they stopped development on it quite a while ago. I now just use the Twitter web page and occasionally the official Twitter Mac client (which really isn’t bad). But Twitterrific is looking to fix up their Mac client, and have put up a Kickstarter to fund new development. I’ve managed to avoid Kickstarter up until now, despite being tempted by a few things I’ve seen there in the past. But I finally gave in for this, and registered a Kickstarter account and pledged $30. That seems reasonable. The project isn’t fully funded yet, but it’s doing well, so hopefully they’ll actually do it.

And, since I have a Kickstarter account now, I’m tempted to go in on the Kickstarter for Ted Leo’s new album too. He’s one of my favorite artists, and it’s been a while since his last full album. I am worried now about getting sucked into the whole Kickstarter thing and spending money on stuff I don’t really need. There’s no reason that I can’t just wait until Ted Leo’s new album is out, read the reviews, then make an informed decision to buy it or not. And that’s probably what I should do in most cases.

Getting back to the subject of iOS & Mac software that I use a lot, Marco Arment has just released a new version of his podcast player, Overcast. This is another iOS app that I paid for the old-fashioned way at some point, but is now a free app with ads and in-app purchases. The new version is a pretty major redesign. I was pretty happy with the previous design, so I wasn’t really looking forward to this. But it’s a pretty good redesign. I’m getting used to a few things, like swiping left (or is it right?) to get to the episode notes instead of swiping up. Reading through Marco’s blog post on the redesign, it’s clear that he thought about it a lot and put a lot of work into making it as easy to use as possible. So it’s still my favorite podcast player out there. (I kind of wish he’d create a Mac client too, but I can understand why he hasn’t.)

WordPress post formats

In addition to doing my taxes today, I also spent some time messing around with this blog. The theme I’m using, Stargazer, supports post formats. I’ve messed around with them a little, marking some posts as video, audio, quotes, and images. I thought the feature was kind of nifty, though it didn’t seem to have that much utility.

Over time, though, I’ve started to see some downsides to post formats. There seemed to be some issues with the way they were treated in certain plugins. (Specifically, it looked like they were being ignored, and the plugin would only see standard format posts.) So I thought it might be a good idea to just reset all the posts to “standard,” and avoid using them in the future.

I couldn’t initially find a way to get a list of posts by format. I did some searching and found the Post Format Filter plugin. It hasn’t been updated in a long time, but it still works, so I used that to search out and reset all my posts to standard. That was kind of boring work, but it allowed me to stumble across some fun old posts.

President’s Day

I’ve got today off from work, because it’s President’s Day. (We’re not actually closed, but we get a floating holiday that can be used today.) And it’s a nice day out. So of course I decided to stay in and get my taxes done.

I’ve been using an accountant for the last several years, but I’ve been feeling kind of silly doing that, since my taxes really aren’t that complicated. So I decided to go back to using tax software this year. The last time I did my own taxes was in 2011 (for my 2010 taxes), and I used TurboTax that year. Prior to that, I’d used TaxCut every year from 2001 to 2009. I decided to go back to TaxCut this year, though now it’s just called H&R Block Tax Software. I bought it for $30 from Amazon, with free Federal e-file, and paid another $20 for NJ e-file. I paid my accountant more than $500 last year, so $50 total is a big difference.

The H&R Block software is still quite similar to what I remember from the last time I used it. One new option is the ability to download some tax documents rather than enter them. This option worked with my W-2 and my 1099-DIV, so that was nice. Overall, it was quite easy. I’m likely to stick with the H&R Block software for the next few years at least, assuming there’s no big changes in my life that complicate my tax situation.