It has been a nerdy late afternoon, spelunking into quite a few rabbit holes that I would never normally have discovered. Like this post about correcting the fluttering audio on the soundtrack of Steamboat Willie, thanks to ooh.directory. I even understood some of it.

Ben Werdmuller has some excellent, coherent thoughts about what writers need to thrive independently and as part of a network. I particularly like the idea of a newsletter-based blogroll, so that if you decide to follow me, you can also sign up to follow people I follow. This could indeed foster increased readership. No idea how hard it would be to build. Mind you, I'm still too scared of losing readers to even offer paid subscriptions.

Very interesting post showing just how blunt an instrument iThenticate is for uncovering actual plagiarism. 

[N]ot one single match that iThenticate had found amounted to illegitimate copying. In the end, my dissertation’s fraud factor had dropped from 74 percent to zero.

Will anyone else do the work to ensure that, for example, copied words are from publications before the target document, or are not part of the bibliography, or are not properly attributed quotations?

It’s more than paying my costs and – while it shouldn’t take cash to show gratitude – it is pleasing that people get enough pleasure and interest from the site to pay a few $/£/€.

Ain’t that the truth!

It is always good to be reminded that some things that you might dread are not, in fact, dreadful. I wrote about my own first colonoscopy back in 2009 and luckily, unlike Jason, there was no need to refine my technique.The next time, there was less liquid to chug but the routine was essentially the same. Conclusion: just do it.