You know about that thing about shoes that women are supposed to have? As in buy a lot of them? Happily this is not the only thing that defines gender, or I'd be very, very male indeed. (My shoes have to fit, and they have to be practical. And preferably last a long time so I don't have to go shoe shopping again soon.)

There's one shoe-ish exception to my usual "meh" stance, though - and these are medieval shoes. For reenactment or living history, shoes are one of the tricky bits. Modern shoes don't cut the mustard at all, as they are constructed absolutely differently, and the materials aren't right either. Going barefoot is of course an alternative (though we don't know how common walking barefoot for grownups would have been, and I've also read interpretations of shoe finds that hint towards shoes having been very, very common) but not a very viable one for every modern person in every weather.

Which means shoes are one of the checklist items when trying to gauge the overall quality of a Living History performer or group.

Years ago, in the course of trying out lots of different techniques, I actually made a pair of medieval turn-shoes myself. It took a fair amount of time and I did have fun doing it. The resulting shoes were useable, but far from good quality in regards to the fit (and also in regards to the materials, which were sort-of-suitable leathers I had lying around at that time). It did make me appreciate proper shoe-making work, however, and wish for shoes that fit properly.

Fortunately I have a friend who makes medieval shoes for a living. I've worn a pair of nice, low-cut shoes that Stefan made for a few years now, and am still deliciously happy with how they look. However, they are not very warm, and they do not fit over warm socks, so now I have a pair to change into when it gets colder:







They fit over warm socks, and this type of shoe is one that runs for a rather long time. They also have that lovely smell of new leather shoes, and the neat stitches that I love so much in Stefan's work.

Now I'm looking forward to cooler evenings on events!

I blame a friend of mine.

Several years ago, for my birthday, he gave me as a present the DVD of Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog. That led to many, many interesting and amusing hours of DVD watching, not because we watched that half-hour thing so often (though I have listened to the soundtrack many, many times in the car), but because we branched out afterwards, wanting more from the actors. Neil Patrick Harris. Felicia Day. Nathan Fillion.

So we watched Firefly, and loved it*. We joined the mass of people who all say that it was canceled too soon (damn you, Fox!) and we'd have liked more, much more of it. But some things you don't get no matter how much you (and many others) would like it.

However. Sometimes, other stuff comes along that is also a good thing to have. And we are living in the blissful age of crowdfunding and internet communication and stuff (in short: something very much the future), so when John Scalzi posted a tweet yesterday about Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion trying to fund a tv-ish project on Indigogo, I did what you do in that case.

So @alan_tudyk and @NathanFillion crowdfunding a comedy series about science fiction cons? SEEMS RISKY TO ME https://t.co/BZk0MoeUjw
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) 11. März 2015

I went there. I looked, and I watched, and laughed, and then I waited a few long hours and showed it to the most patient husband of them all, who watched, and laughed, and logged in to indiegogo and threw some money at Nathan and Alan's project while I mumbled to myself "oh come on take our money already WE SO WANT THIS STUFF". You know. As you do.

They started their campaign on March 10. Yesterday night, when we went to bed, they had raised more than 750.000 USD, enough for five episodes. Right now, they are at a bit above a million USD, with more than 14.000 supporters. The campaign is running for a month more... they might have to invent some more stretch goals.

Oh? You want the link? Go here. Enjoy. Spread the word, if you like.


* We watched more than just Firefly, of course, but Firefly is the one relevant for the rest of the post. Just in case you are curious, though: Eureka. Castle. How I Met your Mother. The Guild. Buffy. Fun was being had, in varying degrees, though most of them were rather high.

It's been almost two years since I stumbled across HabitRPG, and I'm still using it. In fact, I'm using it daily. I can't believe it's been this long, and I am often amazed at the difference it makes in my life.

Case in point? Stressful times (like having an editing deadline) usually meant that a lot of the smaller, mundane things fell by the wayside. This includes things like getting some breakfast, or lunch, or putting away used dishes. It also meant long streaks of inactivity on maintenance tasks - getting the picture database up to date, for example, or remembering to defragment the HDD.

Chances of that happening have actually much, much diminished thanks to the "Dailies" column in Habit. Basically, I have a list of those recurring tasks that come up each week, and some of them each day - and they remind me to get my shit together and to get stuff done. For a lot of these smaller dailies, it means a frantic burst of activity towards the evening, but I won't complain about my timing here: they get done, and that is what counts.

For me, it serves as a tool to keep track of things I have to do, helps to motivate me when necessary, and helps me to structure my day. It's not always perfect, but it works very well for me, and it comes with a friendly community and is still growing new and useful features.

I've tried to infect a few of our friends with the Habit virus, more or less successfully so - it's not the perfect to-do list for everybody, or so it seems. I love it, though. (In case you have tried it out - tell me what you think about it in the comments! I'd be very, very interested to hear what you think.)

After the more depressing please-help thingies I posted yesterday, here is a different one where you can help. I've stumbled across this through the chat on HabitRPG (I posted about this before, here) and it's an absolutely fascinating project - though if you want to join in, it will take a few hours of your time.

Voices, like fingerprints, are something deeply personal. For a lot of speech-impaired people, though, there are communication machines with only very few standard voices to choose from. VocaliD is a project that aims to remedy this, by blending the sound characteristics extracted from sounds the speech-impaired person can make with the (missing) rest of the voice-forming properties from an actual human voice. And you can actually become a voice-donor and help with that!

Rupal Patel explains it all in much more detail and depth in her TED talk. Which I found deeply touching - she really does bring the point across that a voice is a deeply personal thing.

If you are game to help now, you can go visit VocaliD and support them. For the moment, they are recording English speakers, but my guess is that if this works nicely, there will be a demand for other languages as well (and also, maybe, more than one language spoken by a single person).

 Are you tired abot hearing from LonCon yet? It's not too much more, I promise. Really.

I have talked to people, however, and they directed me to interesting places. Margit, for example, told me about an RSS and Atom feed reader she uses. It's an add-on to Firefox (which still, occasionally, drives me crazy with its inexplicable slowness, like today. Which is also the reason why this post is so late), and it's called Bamboo Feed Reader. She showed me her version of it with a quick explanation, and now I am slowly shifting things from my blogspot dashboard reading list over to Bamboo. Thanks, Margit!

In retaliation, I got her hooked on EscapePod. I had the pleasure of (very shortly) meeting the host of the Pod, Alasdair, in person when he and Mur Lafferty did the live recording of one episode, with a story by Kameron Hurley (who got not one, but two Hugos this year). Unfortunately, I missed him and his fiancée as they stopped by our table in the Dealer's hall, but I was told they enjoyed the sight of wool in a sea of books. If you still haven't listened to any of the Escapepod stories, I totally recommend going there right now. To be more precise, go to this page and listen to the Hugo-winner in the short story category, read by the author John Chu himself. I am thrilled that this story won - because it is awesome and one of the best, if not the best, love/relationship stories I have read in a long time.

If you are like me, you are using the internet a lot. Including doing numerous searches - for example on dict.leo.org for your German-English translation needs. I also prefer DuckDuckGo to Google as my standard search engine these days, but I frequently fall back on Google Scholar, and there's a few other things I regularly search...

Now, the normal way of doing a dictionary search is... go to the dictionary, type in your word, submit and wait for the results. Similar for all the other things except the Duck - something that was, well, not really evil but just that slight bit of annoying.

This annoyance is no more. I have discovered a nifty little Firefox app called ZappySearch, which allows you to search a page by typing a shortcut (such as gs for google scholar, for example) and your search term into the address bar, hit return, and lean back while you get your answers. Ah. Bliss.

Its developer is Matt Evans, and you can find the little app either under the Firefox app menu (look for ZappySearch) or directly on his webpage. (If you want it straight away, I recommend the website - it is the newer version, and might take a little more time to turn up in the app menu thingie).Thanks, Matt, for making my life easier!

There's things that digital books will never be able to do. The hefty feel of a book's weight in your hands, the neat rows of books standing in a shelf, the smell of printer's ink and paper, the beauty of a well-executed binding.

The way a well-loved, often-used book falls open at favourite passages. The little scars and blemishes and tiny drops of tea and tomato sauce that attest to a book's being so captivating that you had to keep reading even while eating. The fact that you can glance at where you are in that book and get a little sad that you are already halfway through... Books, real, physical books are a wonderful thing.

However, that's regarding modern books. Books that are in print, and that you can get easily. For manuscripts, though, I will sing a different tune: Manuscripts are rare, and precious, and hard to gain access to, so I am happy for every single one that gets digitised and put online.

Such as the Stuttgarter Psalter. Or the Utrecht Psalter. (You can even download the latter as .pdf, which is just wonderful.) The Codex Manesse (also downloadable).

In case you are wondering why this comes up now (again) - I am leafing through manuscripts looking for depictions of spinning women (or men, I'll take them just as gladly) from before the 13th century. Any hints, links or pictures are more than welcome!