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- The Millions : A Year in Reading: 2014 –
- Best Books of 2014 : NPR –
- Emic, Etic, and the depiction of Otherness in SFF | Safe – SFF writers depict aliens and fairies in loving detail, giving them whole histories and complex societies and yet casually dismiss the Others in their midst with stereotypes, tired tropes that do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. This recursive, ouroboros-type, self-perpetuating mythology makes it obvious that the writer has been watching TV as research.
- Top Ten Tips for Being a Vigilante On a Budget – My friends and I got into a discussion on vigilantes this past weekend, or, more specifically, what it would be like to be Batman on a budget. It was fun throwing ridiculous ideas into the air but I started to really think about it.
- Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich: ‘an example of the almost-lost art of romantic townscape’ | Municipal Dreams – Kate Macintosh designed Dawson’s Heights back in the Sixties when she was just 26 years old. If she weren’t very much alive and kicking – and still fighting the cause of high quality social housing – I’d call it a worthy memorial. It remains much more than that in any case. Beloved by architectural groupies and a striking presence on the local skyline, most importantly it has provided a decent home to many.
- The Wire – Drexciya: Fear Of A Wet Planet –
- Divinity Wiki –
- Kenneth Goldsmith – If It Doesn’t Exist on the Internet, It Doesn’t Exist – It is our obligation as educators and intellectuals to make sure that the bulk of our production ends up there, preferably with free and unfettered access to all. This means not making materials available only for those affiliated with our institution, our students, or our colleagues, but giving free and unfettered access for all. Doing so means posting our works on the world wide web so that anyone, anywhere, at any time can have access to them. In this way, we will ensure that our work exists
- Free French sf –
- De post-betoging blues | Jan Blommaert (en z’n gedachten) – Meer nog: het is net het overweldigende succes van deze manifestatie dat moest worden verkleurd tot een antidemocratische ramp door media – wiens media, nietwaar? – die dit scenario al wekenlang in schetsen hadden gezet. De focus op de rellen is dan ook – paradoxaal – een signaal dat de betoging een gigantisch succes was. Zo’n succes dat zij die dit vervelend vinden erg bang geworden lijken te zijn en nu al, bij het begin van de hete herfst, tot extreem verdraaide beeldvorming moeten over gaan.
- False Steps | The Space Race as it might have been – Hi there. My name is Paul Drye and False Steps is my project blog for a history book of the same name which looks at the Space Race as it might have been. Beginning with what I think to be the very prehistoric beginning of manned space travel (the so-called Magdeburg rocket of 1932) I aim to trace the ways in which people tried to travel to space and came close to accomplishing it, all the way through Nazi German rocketry, the post-WWII fallow period, the crazy times of Sputnik through Apollo, the second down time of the 1970s, and the gradual revival of human space travel from then into the present day.
- DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go | Society | The Guardian – A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
- Dear Griff Rhys Jones: if you don’t like tax, why not move to the Central African Republic? – Fleet Street Fox – Mirror Online – You’d have to be a complete idiot to leave a country where many of the citizens give you lots of cash and you live in great comfort, writes Fleet Street Fox
- shapeless, I’ve had a lot of people ask why I’m retracing… –
- Miles Davis Albums From Worst To Best – Stereogum – Ranking a catalog the size of Miles Davis’ is an impossible task. There are so many lavish boxed sets, live releases, compilations issued during his hermit period, etc., that in order to make this article at all manageable, major cuts had to be made before it could even be begun. So here’s how this is going to work: I chose studio albums only. But to truly understand Davis’ catalog, there are a bunch of essential live releases, including Live-Evil, In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea, and The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: Live In Europe 1967. So consider the 30 albums below a starting point. There’s so much more.
- A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names | Laura J. Mixon – Friends, the tl;dr of this very long, comprehensive, analytical report is that up-and-coming John W. Campbell nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is also rage-blogger Requires Hate, who is also several other internet personalities including Winterfox, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, and others) (oh yes, the list goes on), is VERY BAD NEWS.
- Cat Trap – Trends Addict – it's a cat trap Billy — and you're already caught!
- Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) – The Atlantic – Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Hineline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”
- 179 RR Accountability and Diversity with Meagan Waller – DevChat.tv – a treasure trove of insights and info about unconscious biases , diversity, employment, culture, tech, and more.