Профиль

They've been hanging around on Tumblr intermittently for a couple of years I think. I don't tend to get them here, but maybe I have the right block and mute lists active to keep them away. Because I certainly talk about eighteenth century manuscripts here as well 😅

It's not a well-designed PDF in general. I think the stylesheet was just badly suited to medieval literature, to be honest, especially a literature review of this scale. It's Palgrave Macmillan, but not one of their medieval series, I think.

I worked in a bookshop when the Odyssey was newly out so I shelved it a lot 😅 Tends to make the publication date stick in your mind.

I also colour code my annotations and pull them through to Obsidian when I can, so if my "reference follow-up" annotations are in a different document it's gonna cause havoc. They're breaking my whole workflow with this honestly.

I'm reading in Zotero on a tablet so this is not an option :') Cannot read long PDFs on an upright screen (i.e. on computer) for disability reasons, and need to be able to add proper marginal annotations. Tablet screen too small for two docs.

Yepppp. Also the author date citation style is totally unsuited to a literature review and I KNOW THAT'S PROBABLY THE PUBLISHER'S FAULT but I'm having a bad time with it. Trying so hard not to hold these things against the book as I think it will be useful to me and ultimately that's what matters.

Yeah, this is usually a quick summary paragraph at the end of a section, having gone into more detail before, but I find the choppy spoon-feeding a bit unnecessary and distracting. I can keep track without twenty headers and a summary every three pages. :')

the citations, when I can find the endnotes, are real and solid and so on – it's just clearly the exact style of writing that those systems were trained on, but my kneejerk response to a brief, vague "Some commentators say..." and "This work is described as..." closing summary is a Nope!)

I'm currently trying really hard to separate my opinions about an academic book's writing style from my evaluation of its content. Just because I don't like the sentences, doesn't mean it's bad... 😅 (I think it's partly that the style and tone of the summaries gives AI energies and it's NOT –

Ooh love that! Enjoy the array of different spine labels I'm getting. Fantasy Longman...

I just think that "X says Y in Z" should give you all three of those pieces of information on the same page, so that if Y is relevant to you, you can find Z, and you can also remember why you highlighted Z for follow-up, because it's right next to Y.

This is a lit review in medieval studies, please use a stylesheet that works for a medieval studies lit review without making everyone involved want to cry. Please. (@ the publisher not the author, I'm sure it wasn't their idea)

This section of the book is a review of past scholarship. Sometimes it describes an argument that sounds extremely valuable to my research and I want to follow it up. Keeping track of which argument belongs with which reference, however? Impossible. Way too much scrolling.

So many people are responding to it as though they expected it to be a film critic writing about purely cinematic dimensions and "therefore it's not doing its job as a review", but I'm like, if that's what I was after, I wouldn't ask a classicist to do it for the LRB, actually

The author-date citations in this book are driving me up the wall. They're hyperlinked in one direction so I can get to the bibliography to find out what they are for reference, but there's no way back to the page I was on, I just have to scroll back every time. Footnotes wouldn't hurt me like this.

I don't believe that's true? Her Iliad is from 2023, several years after her Odyssey (2018).

But items don't need to be in high demand to be valuable. They just need to be able to reach the person who will value them. And there are a lot of things out there which are much rarer than you'd think, and their continued existence more fragile.

I hope it was a person. I hope there is somebody else out there who wanted this specific obscure volume. I hope the reason my alerts remain silent isn't that one of the last copies out there got bought up for robot training and then destroyed. It's a pre-ISBN title, so maybe chances are okay.

There are several rare books I have alerts out for; one is part of a series of edited volumes, and I managed to get its pair, but the seller told me this one had already been bought. Since very few other people are interested in this topic, I've been wondering ever since who might have bought it.

With my tinted glasses it was pretty opaque, I think I had to swap to untinted partway through because it was just too dark to see with the filter. And that was on a big cinema screen. I am once again asking all filmmakers to Turn The Lights On Please