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Hi. I'm new to this instance. My former account was @SlowRain.

I'm a Canadian expat teaching ESL in . My interests are:

(I also roast coffee at home)






More on bookshop.org. This really is a great idea!

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Bookshop.org raises £1m for UK's indie booksellers amid lockdown

theguardian.com/books/2021/mar

SlowRain boosted

Today's castle of the day is the Claypotts Castle located in the town of Broughty Ferry, a crossing point of the Firth of Tay east of historic Dundee. Claypotts is a 16th century Z-plan tower house, with round towers at opposite corners of the central square tower. This allows the towers to fire along the flat lengths of the wall, which might otherwise be blind spots. Claypotts is built on a domestic scale. It wasn't designed to defend against an army. But a mob, sure!

"Novelists should feel free to write from whichever viewpoint they wish or represent all kinds of views," he said.

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Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear'

bbc.com/news/entertainment-art

SlowRain boosted

Have any book people on here tried BookLikes? How is it compared to GoodReads? I tried bookwyrm.social, but it's either laid out poorly or has too small of a user base. It just seemed it wasn't applicable to me.

booklikes.com/

bookwyrm.social/

Thanks

I have always liked Michelle Pfeiffer. However, this ranking of her best movies doesn't include The Russia House. It can't be taken seriously. Try again, Peter Bradshaw.

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The 20 best Michelle Pfeiffer films – ranked!

theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/

@joaopinheiro
I have one complaint, though. The boosts show up as your toots, so it looks like they're from you. It compensates for this by including some annoying text explaining who wrote it & when. Other instances just repost the original toot from the original poster with a tiny little note saying who it was boosted by. If I want to check out the original poster's account, I get taken out of Mastodon to blog-like page. I have to jump through too many hoops if I want to follow them.

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@joaopinheiro
I accidentally deleted this account when I was doing some housecleaning. It's good you posted this.

@joaopinheiro
Oops. I think I accidentally unfollowed your main account. Which one do you mostly use for socializing?

Don't teach your students the phrase "smells like" if you're not prepared to hear various sentences about, "The teacher smells like..."

The barista at a café I frequent either has really good social skills or else really bad math. I said I wanted to retire in about 30 years, & she was surprised I wanted to/could retire when I was 60.

Or maybe she has bad eyesight. The lighting was kind of dim in there.

Gotta give ol' Kanye credit. He actually made decent folks sympathize with a Kardashian. That's no easy task.

It's Feb 19th. As of today, I have been in Taiwan for 18 years. And, as it currently stands, I have been in Taiwan longer than my oldest student.

It's going to interesting to see what happens with Covid after all the traveling during the week-long holiday. The outbreak in that hospital in Taoyuan has mostly been contained (21 people that they know of so far). But it's the unknown cases that are the danger now. I guess we'll know more in a month or so.

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Well, folks, that's it. Lunar New Year is over, & everyone is heading back to work this morning. It will be interesting to see if people used the extra day off ahead of the holiday to alleviate traffic on the roads. I enjoyed having an extra day, even if we have to make up for it this Sat, so I hope they do it again next year.

Fortunately, we get another holiday the last weekend in Feb.

Anyone wanna guess the name of this café at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan? One word, 3 letters.

I'm pretty sure my 97-year-old grandmother can use Zoom better than I can.

Easy. It's a novel about pretending to be more than what someone or something is. It was very early post-modern metafiction in that regard. 😉

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The world's most misunderstood novel

bbc.com/culture/article/202102

This is a really weird time to be in Taiwan. By time, I mean on the clock, not on the calendar. It's about a quarter to 7pm, & almost everyone is at home for the family dinner. There are hardly any cars or scooters on the street. It's actually kind of eerie how quiet it is. Sort of like when the villain comes to town in a Western & everyone closes up shop & hides & the streets are empty.

Cue the tumbleweed...

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Mastodon

Server run by the main developers of the project 🐘 It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
https://mastodon.social/@SlowRain
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