@Ree@Dreamwidth.org

(Edited the 30th to add: Whoops, I was mistaken, Calibre is full of itself and didn't fix a damn thing.)

I'm starting to see some utility in Calibre. I still think it's a big Swiss army knife that tries to do all the things and I still hate the structure it uses to organize its books, but the blighter does come in handy.

I usually sideload my ebooks. Occasionally this results in two copies of the same book on the same Kindle, and then they get entangled with each other such that neither can be truly deleted, unless I just factory reset the thing. If I leave them be, then new books don't get indexed for search. (I use search a lot.)

But. Calibre does something differently when it add or removes books. Calibre can see two copies of the same book, tell me there are two, and remove the one of my choice. No reset, no reinstall. This pleases me.

I still hate having to put every! single! book! into Calibre or else when I put it on my Kindle, it will have the correct cover thumbnail, except that shortly thereafter whoops no it won't. I understand some of why it works out that way but it remains icky regardless. With this morning's situation, though, Calibre was a real help. Yay!

("So how many times have you managed to put a duplicate book—" Enough. Enough times. Not enough to learn to doublecheck, every single time; enough times to hate it.)

I've been feeling a little down lately. My mom was a really awesome one, and a great example that I often struggle to follow. I worry that I'm not giving my family enough, that I'm too cheap or too poor to be a good parent.

To save a little money, I've been plundering the public domain for some entertainment. This works well for reading material; viewing material is harder to come by, and seems to have a greater proportion of "meh" to "ooh!" I've gone through all the old Superman theatrical shorts (which are really good! Watch them! The animation is superb and the style will seem fairly familiar to followers of the DC Animated Universe) and am now going through some Betty Boop.

I landed on Poor Cinderella, the only color Betty Boop short. Fairy tales are always interesting. The fairy godmother's voice pinged something in my memory. By the end, I was sure: I've seen this before. It was on a VHS of old, cheap fairy tales that my mother bought to entertain a certain little fantasy fan.


So I've been worried that I'm not as good as my mother because... I cheaped out in the same way she did. Hehehehe.

Thanks, Mom.