The Return of the Serpent
25/11/2015 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIzzie has finally slinked out of the dungeons. The days of slaving over a steaming keyboard are now over. I lingered for a day or so before trading in the pretty green skin for the purple banner of Nanowrimo victory.
The slow and steady plodding has finally paid off. The muses dropped by once or twice during the whole first three weeks before gate crashing the party on Monday. They've been hanging around ever since providing inspiration from the unlikeliest places.
So much nasty awful stuff has been going on in the real world. They made my own attempts at inventing a nihilistic death cult look exceedingly pathetic indeed. It's just as well the wannabee writers are not running the world. It would be a whole lot worse than it already is.
After all "Only Trouble is interesting"
I gave in to the temptation of buying a particularly wicked and twisted collection of writing prompts but still not worked out how to get the thing out of the Kindle Cloud and on to the crappy little tablet.
I will be saving this special stash of nasties for the new year since it would only have been a distraction in November.
Having proved that the inner serpent can churn out the words given a deadline, the next step is to master the dark art of finishing stuff and putting it out there. The inner critic is not amused at that appalling idea.
So now it's time to go sniffing, snooping and shopping in MOOC land again. This time last year I had started a fascinating course on Terrorism and Counter terrorism but had to drop it half way due to unexpected events and overseas adventures.
So many courses are now available all year round to do at your own pace including that one but one thing I have learned from Nanowrimo is that there's nothing quite so motivating as an external deadline.
Just slinked over to Coursera to take a quick peek. Looks like they've nuked all the old records from the golden days of the Freebies. (They didn't but just made them very hard to find)
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
The slow and steady plodding has finally paid off. The muses dropped by once or twice during the whole first three weeks before gate crashing the party on Monday. They've been hanging around ever since providing inspiration from the unlikeliest places.
So much nasty awful stuff has been going on in the real world. They made my own attempts at inventing a nihilistic death cult look exceedingly pathetic indeed. It's just as well the wannabee writers are not running the world. It would be a whole lot worse than it already is.
After all "Only Trouble is interesting"
I gave in to the temptation of buying a particularly wicked and twisted collection of writing prompts but still not worked out how to get the thing out of the Kindle Cloud and on to the crappy little tablet.
I will be saving this special stash of nasties for the new year since it would only have been a distraction in November.
Having proved that the inner serpent can churn out the words given a deadline, the next step is to master the dark art of finishing stuff and putting it out there. The inner critic is not amused at that appalling idea.
So now it's time to go sniffing, snooping and shopping in MOOC land again. This time last year I had started a fascinating course on Terrorism and Counter terrorism but had to drop it half way due to unexpected events and overseas adventures.
So many courses are now available all year round to do at your own pace including that one but one thing I have learned from Nanowrimo is that there's nothing quite so motivating as an external deadline.
Just slinked over to Coursera to take a quick peek. Looks like they've nuked all the old records from the golden days of the Freebies. (They didn't but just made them very hard to find)
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
no subject
Date: 2015-11-29 10:40 am (UTC)Yep, sometimes I wonder if one of us psychos out there is subconsciously writing the script for real world...
You can convert your Amazon books by importing them from the Kindle Reader application (free, available on all platforms) into Calibre. It's very easy, google for the instructions. But only non-DRM-ed books; AFAIK the Calibre DRM plugin only works for Windows. Unless you want to go into the trouble of installing a Windows emulator (WINE). (That's how it works for me under Linux, btw.)
I really like the new Coursera format with soft deadlines. It's nice that if you miss a deadline, you can transfer to the next session of the course (next month or so) with all your previous results intact. But even more importantly, all the course content, together with the assignments, is available right away, so you can work through it as fast as possible, while your enthusiasm still lasts ;) No painful wait for the new lectures every week.
Completely self-paced courses, though, are a different matter. It's impossible to implement peer-graded assignments, so there can be only machine graded quizzes... better than nothing, but boring. (Or are there self-paced courses with proper peer-graded assignments?) I don't like peer grading, but it seems to be the only way to leave some room for creativity.