I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it at this point, but I’m developing an application, called Biblish, that is meant to offer small utilities that augment the process of reading, writing, publishing, and distributing literature. One piece of that is a note taking software, called Papertrail, that allows you to take notes for books you are reading in print, and other users can subscribe to these notes and see them on a page by page basis as they read the book themselves.
I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.
In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.
I’ve been working on a note taking app specifically for literature where the idea is that small groups of writers will come across one another’s notes while they’re reading the same work. By responding to another user’s notes the original note taker then has the opportunity to revisit the note and also a book that they may have finished days, weeks, or months ago. It works alright, and I use it extensively, but as you might imagine taking notes on books is a pretty high hurdle for your average user to get over. I’m still hopeful I can find a small market.
It would be great if you could find the machine that is closest to 2 or more different locations, like if I want to challenge several friends across the country to post our high scores in a group message, and we needed to know what the shortest drive each of us would need to take in order to play the same make and model machine. Maybe it’s in the app, or I missed it.
Worth noting the performance characterizations of an individual machine can depend on how it’s maintained and how the operator chooses to set it up - so this may not be a completely level playing field.
On the other hand, if you’ve figured out which Medieval Madness in your city you play best at, you can leverage that information to your advantage :)
there’s an api you can use to get machines near a gps location and then you can look through that for machines that are the same. not a feature of the website proper but something you can do if you know a little scripting
I've been doing research into the high-rise housing projects in Chicago. One of the things I'm curious about when it comes to advocacy for more housing and to have that housing be accessible regardless of mental health or substance abuse issues is, does that not pretty much look like high-rise housing projects? If you want more diffuse housing that is accessible and also available regardless of other contributing factors, then it seems to me you would have to build this well outside of urban centers, as the land is too expensive, but then I doubt urban homeless would find satellite housing desirable.
I do a fair bit of local politics work on this issue in Chicagoland (specifically, Oak Park) and no, advocacy for building more housing mostly takes the form of replacing SFH lot zoning with 2- and 3- flat zoning; "big" projects here (and by "big" I mean "6-month long yard sign campaigns to try to halt them) are 5-story buildings here.
The term of art is "missing middle housing".
The concentrated high-rise public housing model was an obvious failure and I don't think anybody is ever going to try to reproduce it. Ironically, where you see high-density high rise construction proposed (and resisted) most often now are luxury condo buildings.
The concentrated high rise public housing model was panned in its own time. The housing advocates at the time encouraged diffuse public housing.
Instead the existing (white) political machine used high rise public housing to explicitly punish and break up an ascendant black political block. They used highways and a university campus to the same effect.
In fill housing, at least in Chicago, is not a problem as we have both empty lots and tons of single family homes that can become 2 and 3 flats. Along with that you can add small specialized housing for various populations that need it.
Yeah, I wish not only self-publishing one’s own work, it also creating a small journal for publishing other writers was the first instinct of young writers, especially young writers of fiction, rather than seeking publication through more traditional outlets. I think small collectives of dedicated writer and self-publishers and self-producers is literature’s best hope for a new epoch of great writing.
A reading habit, past a certain point, is self-propagating, in my experience. Based on conversation, explicit reference in other texts, and a general sixth-sense of what books to read next, I find that I rarely have a miscue. Abandoning a book that’s no good, or that you simply can’t get into for whatever reason, is a big part of making a self-propagating sense for reading highly reliable. I write a lot about what I read, and I think this further helps to direct my reading.
You can try writing a little testimonial when you start a book that would include your reasons for reading the book. When the book no longer seems to satisfy that rationale, it may be a good sign to abandon the book.
What about when your reasons for continuing to read the book change as the book progresses and perhaps turns out to be different from what you were originally anticipating?
