A very quick note this week: Shady Characters now runs exclusively over HTTPS. What does this mean? Well, rather like my recent post about how references work here on the blog, my hope is that very little will change — other than an extra ‘s’ in the site’s address.
We’ve visited Ampersand Mountain, with its eponymous creek and hotel, and we’ve heard tell of mythical San Seriffe Island; now, welcome to scenic Asterisk Pass in Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park! This excellent image was taken by Travis Kochel of Trail Type. Many thanks to him for permission to republish it.
Giving credit where it’s due has been an important part of writing for Shady Characters since I started back in 2010. Where I use an image that I don’t own myself, for instance, I try my best to find the owner, obtain their permission and then credit them in the caption for their work. Equally as important, I try to link to or cite all of the sources I use when writing about a given subject. That last part has given me no end of grief, and that’s what I’m going to write about today.
Some exciting news! The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is BBC Radio 4’s next Book of the Week! The first 15-minute episode will be broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow, Monday 14th May, at 09:45 BST (it will be repeated again tomorrow night at 00:30) and will be followed by four more daily episodes to be broadcast and repeated at the same times for the rest of the week.
Readers in the EU may have heard about something called the GDPR, or “General Data Protection Regulation”. This is an upcoming change to EU law that clarifies and expands on prior rules relating to how organisations (even one-man-bands such as Shady Characters) obtain personal data such as email addresses and how they manage that data once obtained. As such, I’ve updated my page on Privacy, Cookies & Personal Data to make it clear how I handle personal data. I’d encourage you to take a moment to read the new wording, but in brief: