Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 3, 2025

Garlic scented books

Filed under: Books Related / Reviews,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 5:43 AM

In a desire to differentiate her novel from others (and create publicity) author Jennifer L. Armentrout along with Hellmann’s have released a collectable edition of her newest novel ‘The Primal of Blood and Bone’ which is printed with garlic-infused ink. At first when I read this I thought this is a cool idea. Even John Scalzi made a joke that he is going to print a cheese scented version of his book ‘When the Moon Hits Your Eye’ where the moon suddenly is made of Cheese.

But after thinking about it for a bit, I am not so sure of it. Garlic has a strong smell and while I love eating Garlic, it’s smell is not something I would want to linger in my room. If I buy the book then every time I enter my study there would be a faint but measurable smell of garlic in the room and it would drive me nuts.

If the book is kept in a glass shelf every time it is opened the consolidated smell would leak out and yeah… that is not a pleasant smell so while the idea sounds cool I think people should just stick with the regular book smells. Or maybe pleasant smells like very light perfumes or smell of rain or fresh cut grass.

– Suramya

October 2, 2025

Celebrating 21 Years of my Blog

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

Today marks the 21st year since I made the first blog post on this site on 2nd Oct 2004. So it’s been 21 years that I have been posting random thoughts online and life is a lot different from when I started posting here. Since I first posted on the blog, I have moved to a different continent (and multiple cities), switched jobs multiple times, got married. (Interestingly my wedding anniversary is coming up as well in little over a weeks time as well).

During this time the site has:

Total Published posts : 1,607
Total Published Comments : 793
Most popular post is: “Trip of a Lifetime: Antarctica!” with 47,249 views
The top 3 Countries of blog visitors are: US, India and Russia (Definitely wasn’t expecting Russia to make it to the top 3).

I like having a blog because I control what goes on it and how it is presented. No one can force me to remove a post or penalize me for posting something that the algorithm didn’t like and now that the blog is federated posts here are autoshared and publicly searchable on Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook (mostly as FB gives so much trouble trying to autopost). This is in accordance to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), which is the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

Thank you all for reading my ramblings over the years and letting me know that you actually like the stuff I post. 🙂

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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