About J-Sun Space
I'm going to dive right into "things to know" before moving on with some backstory.
Hopefully Helpful Hints
This is primarily a capsule for me to review what I've read, at least as far as the science fiction goes. There is also a section of reviews of the stuff I've watched, another of a more personal or "about the site and gemini and such" nature, and some other odds and ends. I hope some of at least the reviews are interesting to you.
Since gemtext lacks inline italics, I resort to using underscores for _Book Titles_ and things like that and may also use asterisks for *additional emphasis*. Also, much of the pre-2024-09 content has a probably excessive number of footnotes and links which I apologize for and will try to keep to a useful minimum in the future. Those notes and links are generally segregated under their own headers with numbered notes and lettered links. If you have a client like Lagrange or Kristall which shows header outlines, this makes navigation a little easier. Contrary to the excessive notes and links, there may not be enough images: on the blog almost every review had at least one image but, on this capsule, I've only included an image if it's referenced in the text and not if it's simply illustrating the book. I hope I haven't missed any such necessary images but I may have.
In the book reviews, unless there was a serial publication significantly before the first book publication, I've tried to make the first line consistently be the data for the first edition in the form "date, publisher, id, price, pages, format" (where date (like almost all dates on the site) are 1-3 elements in YYYY-MM-DD format, "id" is the ISBN if it has one or a catalog number or other unique thing if not, and "format" is hc(=hardcover), pb(=paperback), or tp(=trade paperback)). There is usually a second line in the same format detailing which version I actually read, if different. (Serial versions are recorded in "Date-of-1st-issue+number-of-subsequent-issues Magazine-title" format.) For collections (and maybe someday for anthologies), in the tables of content, after the title I include parenthetical information on the original publication source, the date of that source, and the category of the fiction. Dates are in the format 'YYYY-MM' possibly with a '+n'--for instance, something published in two parts beginning in the January 1946 issue of a magazine would be 1946-01+1. The categories are no=novel, na=novella, ne=novelette, ss=short story, pm=poem, nf=non-fiction.
All bibliographical information comes from the books themselves or isfdb.org unless otherwise noted.
In the video reviews, numbers like "1.10" indicate the first season's tenth show.
If there are any inconsistencies or incoherencies anywhere, please let me know and I'll do my best to fix it or clarify it.[1]
History of Previous Incarnations
I had a "J-Sun-Space" website at freeshell.org from August 2007-January 2017 before starting a "Featured Futures" blog at Wordpress (which included some re-posts of some of the material from the previous site) from January 2017-September 2024 (but only active to April 2023), at which point I discovered gemini and decided to convert most of it into a capsule and re-start it.
In a little more detail, quoting from the 2017 freeshell index, "after briefly being a sketch at a pile of web pages, and at least twice trying to be a blog, [the web space] again became a pile of web pages in May 2010. While retaining that form ever since, it was chiefly devoted to computers until taking its present focus on media (chiefly books, chiefly SF) beginning in January 2012." When I started "Featured Futures" at Wordpress, that was originally intended to be a place where I reviewed only things I liked, mostly from webzines, but turned into a review of every SF/F story published professionally on the web and in print. That came to an abrupt end in September 2019 and, after I removed most of the content, the blog limped along as a review site of classic SF and some current books until the middle of 2023. After a nice long break, I'm ready to give internet posting another go in this form.
Gemini and Me
To again quote from the 2017 index, the site "was originally written in intentionally minimal HTML and CSS until I decided to bow to a little more [CSS] style to provide better navigation. But there is still no javascript, flash, ads, cookies or anything of the sort on this site." Naturally, I expect gemini to be a better fit than Wordpress was, though the lack of inline emphasis is distressing and the source needing to be in long lines is unpleasant for a Linux/vim user and command-line/text-mode fan. That said, I only discovered gemini on September 6, 2024 after giving the Dillo web browser another spin and seeing that its plug-ins included gemini. (I've now tried that, amfora, bombadillo, kristall, and lagrange. I've settled on the latter as the primary client for now.) So this capsule will probably leave something to be desired unless and until I learn how to do this right.
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Note
[1]: Speaking of (and already going against my new Footnote Principle), each item has a "Page created" date and a "Last changed" date. I haven't tended to mess much with things after I wrote them other than correcting the typos or the worst of the grammatical mistakes I happen to notice. I don't date those or the conversions from various markups or format changes, such as the way bibliographical data is presented, but I do try to date notes and any changes of substance to the bodies of the items. However, it's possible I've forgotten to note some or otherwise made mistakes.
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Page created: 2024-09-29 Last changed: 2024-10-14