If you lift your head from the eye- watering amounts of money being pumped into AI innovation, you can see that there is already meaningful harm caused by the use of AI and related technology.
Maybe the people profiting from it are not the right people to identify the problems or to ask for solutions.
... why don‘t you start on that project...? It would be so interesting, like that Windrush thing they did some time ago on television, about the first immigrants to this country. I‘m sure you must have a story to tell. Why not start to get it down? I‘ve just spoken to Dr Raines and also to Rhoda from occupational therapy and they think it‘s a great idea....‘ Not sure if I want my life looked into like a Third World museum.
pickTwo word review? Very Swedish.
Young people have undiagnosed mental health problems whilst not having to worry too much about £. Or rather, kroner. Lovely turn of phrase though, and a definite fit for the books about books trend too.
Everyone I know remembers the time right before the turn of the millennium with a certain embarrassment since the excitement seemed so disproportionate after the fact, so headless; silly, in a way. It was a collective impulse, like a global popular movement, but nobody could give it a more profound explanation than 'the passing of time'. The numbers felt magical, and they were magical, but only in the way that numbers are.
#InternationalBooker Shortlist 2024
A real dog, named Patron, is the most famous animal in Ukraine... he helps Ukrainian sappers find Russian landmines.... Ukrainian children all know his story, love him and want to have their own fluffy version of this canine hero. Children also follow Patron on Instagram (at ua.patron), where he teaches children how to take care of themselves should they chance upon any explosive objects.
In Berehove on the Hungarian border, Alena, and her new refugee friends attend Hungarian language courses. Each lesson lasts three hours and those who have signed up for the course take it as seriously as if they were preparing for an exam.
....
Alena has a favourite phrase in Hungarian: Jó reggelt kivanok! - "Good morning!" This sounds a little funny to Ukrainians because it reminds us of the Ukrainian words for "hedgehog under the sofa".
I do know that bees have also been its victims, along with books, as well as books about bees, such as my latest novel. You cannot buy it in Ukraine now.... the publishers cannot reprint it and bookshops as such no longer exist. In Mariupol and cities in other cities in the south and east they were destroyed along with the books; in cities elsewhere in Ukraine, they simply shut down as a result of the war.
She was once invited to a private viewing of the work of an Icelandic artist... she turned out to be the only Dane present. She spent the entire afternoon at a party where the only language used was Icelandic, even though everyone was practically fluent in both English and Danish. It wasn't hostile, the party - there were smiles and nods, acknowledging her presence, and in her silence, rare for Hannah, she had felt social for once.
All the Ukrainians who have left their homes will wait for the moment when it will be safe to return. Just as I am waiting.
I am waiting for the opportunity not just to return to a peaceful Kyiv but to return to my library, to my desk, to the archives was using to write my latest novel, to my plans for the future, to the world that I have been creating around me for decades, a world that made me happy.
In recent weeks, many Ukrainians have become military experts. Me too. I already know that an advancing army loses manpower in the ratio of 10 to 1. That is, the losses of those defending territory are one tenth that of those who are advancing.
so-soA rather long-winded (for my money) account of an unlikely whirlwind romance. Is David a spy, a conman, or something far more strange?
Lots of detail about Venice for those who love books with a strong sense of place.
Just some of the options... #Porto #CityofBooks
Central image is of the library at the art gallery 'Serralves'.
This looked good (but I have no idea if it's available in translation).
I love seeing international editions of my favourites.
...the theme of Chairman Diesel was... Venice, or rather its famous carnival, which towards the end of the eighteenth century and of the Republic lasted for six months - a whole city singing and dancing for half a year in its campi and campielli, day and night, in a fatal fever of dissolution. So did this good man hold forth in a Venetian palazzo; he was the sort of conversationalist that would have explained the Trojan War to Homer.
pickRubbish day. Great book though.
Has anyone been? Is it worth buying a gold ticket to "skip the line"? I am not sure I'm up for queuing for over an hour - one blogger's experience... but will it be this bad? ?
A totally narcissistic city, remarked someone.
No, simply a city where there were no casual visitors, people who had come for reasons nothing to do with Venice, objected another.
Yes, yes, this was the point, said Curly-Head approvingly. It was like finding oneself in the entrance lobby of a bank or a hospital: you knew from the start that everyone there was thinking exclusively about current accounts, about phleboclysis...
I suppose four of six I'd liked/wanted isn't bad?
The Enright and Grenville are good reads but not my favourites of their work - wondered if they were carried by their other books / body of work rather than this book? IDK 🤷♀️🤷♀️
#womensprize #shortlist #nopleasingsomepeople
Book on the beach! (Well, next to the beach. And I wasn't stopping.)
It was a daily brutality roulette.
Map (detail) from https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/sri_lanka_map.htm
Long week, large hot chocolate, new library book
Please don't look for me. I looked for them everywhere. Of course I did. My brothers. And also Κ.
My shortlist of favourites (subject to picking up the last 4!)
#WomensPrize #Longlist2024
Nearly there with my women's prize longlist reading.
I won't finish them all, but have enjoyed the reading so far.
(I had read two before the longlist was announced, so not shown here.)
#WomensPrize #Longlist2024
Oh Sailor, I thought, the little size of you. This is what it feels like when everything goes wrong, and by your own hand. When you are caught, cornered, the one to blame, when you discover something in your nature that you did not know was there and which you do not like. Confusion, shame, resentment, regret: it's my area. Don't panic. Sit tight. I can help you with this.
'Hello,' I replied but didn't know what to add nor how to pitch it because she was three and I hadn't gotten to that page in childrearing yet. 'We're not supposed to praise little girls for their looks any more,' I told my friend, 'but for their brains, and my God but your daughter is clever. Such clever hair, such clever eyes.' She really was a beauty, that child.
'Gets it from her mother, obviously.'
I ducked around a corner. Look, Mama's going round the bend! I wanted to tell you, but oh, oh. What struck me as the starkest contradiction of all was that, having navigated this much of life the volatility of youth, of love and loss, the agony and the ecstasy - the closest I had come to losing my mind was during the period known as settling down.
Sad little book of poems about a child forcibly emigrated to Canada over 100 years ago.
I had listened to him on the other side of that door snoring away in the box room, those snug, contented snores I used to find endearing, the two of us tucked up together in the same bed on a cold night, except we were no longer in the same room. And soon we would no longer be under the same roof, nor even under the same stars. I could not get my head around it: how could my husband sleep under the circumstances?
‘Listen to this for a thank-you note,‘ she tells Lettice, finding Wells‘s letter. “Why do you attack me in this way? Is it some perverted jealousy or some insane political machinations. Read my early works you shit.”‘ Lettice chuckles.
‘Poor man,‘ she says. ‘Probably thinks you were trying to kill him.‘
‘Yes,‘ Eileen says. ‘Death by plum cake.‘
These anxieties of authenticity exist because when words go inside a reader, they make magic. They fizz and pop and conjure. They change minds. Your words may cast a spell on the reader but they cannot be felt to be a con-artist's trick, for then the reader will feel de- frauded. All the reader wants is for the avatar sitting behind the table to match their inner picture.
Owen was also a benefactor... Money from his music royalties... was being funneled into teamwork research, both in raw games like football and in VR gaming. But it had been Charyssa, a savvy media mogul and entertainment icon in her own right, who had noticed Owen's interests and decided to recruit him to her dream of a unified Earth.
"That's perfect, that is," Kanoa muttered to himself. "A former beauty queen who really wants world peace."
I do think I would have benefited at the time from some representation of a similar experience, though, whether in a book or a film, or even something small like a poem. Something for the company, just so I could feel I was walking down a path already trodden by other women, that I was not the first to cut my way through that wilderness.
Beauties of all shapes and sizes. Pleasures to suit every taste. And as long as you keep your head down and your arse up, you've a roof over your head. Just remember to stay in Mrs Fiddes's good books. And she takes a daily note, I can tell you. Now come, let me pour you a whisky and I'll tell you a tale that's taller than these high tenements...
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