Things 18 and 19

Here's another book review:
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11275323-raising-steam

This is book 40 of the Discworld series, and it stars Moist Von Lipwig, as well as Lord Vetinari and a few other new and recurring characters. Ankh-Morpork is taken by storm, or by steam, by a brand new invention called a locomotive. The good citizens rush forward to take advantage of this novelty, and Moist is at the forefront as usual. Just as the clacks have changed things, so does the steam engine bring new opportunities, and new dangers to Ankh-Morpork. Dwarf terrorist attacks, goblin's improvements, and the possible creation of a new goddess are just a few things you'll find in this book. As always Pratchett's writing kept me reading avidly. I did find that the pacing of this novel was perhaps a bit choppier than in the past, but maybe that is intentional, or perhaps a side effect of Mr. Pratchett having to use voice recognition and dictation software, as well as using human assistants... Somehow this novel had a bit of a melancholy tone to it. It wasn't overtly so, in fact it was as enjoyable and entertaining to read as ever. But I found that I came away with the feeling that the author was trying to tell us something. To say that all things change, and change is good. And that sometimes you have to let go of things, let go of the past to move forwards. I don't know if Mr. Pratchett is planning on wrapping up the Discworld series soon, but it seems like he's trying to pave the way with his writing, to prepare his readers, if you will. Hopefully he will continue to entertain us with his prose for a while yet.

So I tried out Scoop.it, and I can see how it can become useful in a work setting. It seems like it can become a good replacement for the endless lists of bookmarked sites that people have, you know, that "oh that looks interesting but I'll just bookmark it and read it later". Of course everyone knows you never go back and read it later; you just end up with 500 bookmarks that you can't identify, and you just delete them after a while. So I can see how this can be useful. I think if it weren't for this training, I would probably not try sites like twitter or scoop.it, as the ambiguity of what I am giving permission for them to do makes me uneasy. But I hope to find out more about how people use these sites from this training, so I'll at least understand what people are talking about!