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- Losing Weight and Building 6-Pack Abs – Scooby’s Home Workouts – It’s not that hard and its not that complicated. The changes you need to make to lose weight and reduce your bodyfat are much smaller than you fear and they are easier to live with than you could possibly imagine! A common sense approach involving exercise and nutrition is all that is required to get ripped, washboard abs. When most people think about losing weight, what comes to mind is words like “hunger”, “deprivation”, “diet”, and “agony”. No! Losing weight properly will not result in any of these, the key is in the above two words “common sense”.
- Morning Star :: Fantastically profound – Joyce was intensely proud of his roots and once said: “I’ve taken a conscious decision to explore the lives of people who are still ignored by a majority of writers.” He enjoyed his success but expressed sadness at feeling “educated out” of the environment and culture into which he was born.
- This is a jar full of major characters … | Time-Machine? Yeah! – Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.
- Amazon.com: The Man in the High Castle [HD]: Amazon Instant Video – Free pilot of the television series
- Sleeps With Monsters: I Want More of Everything I Like | Tor.com – I’ve spent the past little while, in fact, dwelling on the kinds of books I’ve read (and reread) in the last year, and considering the kinds of books I would give a wisdom tooth to see more of.
- 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 –
- In The Second Year : Storm Jameson –
- A Month Soon Goes, Storm Jameson | It Doesn’t Have To Be Right… – Storm Jameson was prolific and successful, writing around sixty books between 1919 and 1976 – fiction, criticism, biography and history. None of her books appear to be in print now. At least two of her novels, In the Second Year (1936), set in a fascist Britain, and Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942), about a Nazi invasion of an invented country, qualify as science fiction although I’m not aware of them being claimed by the genre.
- New Statesman | Attention, #NaNoWriMo Fans: No One Cares How Your F***ing Novel Is Going – Because one of the most boring things in the world is watching a person write. They do not move. Their google searches are tedious; they google synonyms for words they just made up. If you ask a novelist how they wrote their book, it’s always “I researched a bit and then I didn’t get out of my pyjamas for properly ages.” That’s it. There was probably an exiting moment when a blob of apricot jam fell off a bit of their crumpet and they had to suck it out of the lapel of their dressing gown to avoid having to wash it properly. That’s it.
- Five Ways To Respond To A Negative Review: A Helpful Guide! « terribleminds: chuck wendig – Go punch a punching bag. Write in your bedside Twilight Sparkle diary. Go fire off an email to an author or artist friend and be all like AHHH DID YOU SEE THIS REVIEW (and if that author is truly a friend that author will say, yeah, yeah, that sucks, the reviewer sucks, but hey don’t get cuckoo bananapants, maybe go have a drink, go for a run, eat a cupcake, something, anything, calm thyself because this shit happens all the time).
- The Liberal Democrat approach to campaigning: the history and debunking some myths – Most notably, far too many accounts of British political campaigning are written without noticing how dramatic 1997 was, not just in terms of a Labour landslide, but also in terms of the impact of constituency campaign tactics. Fail to understand what happened in 1997 and why and you not only fail to understand British political campaigning but also, closer to home, fail to understand the roots of more recent events involving Chris Rennard.
- Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants? – The Awl – At the same time, focusing on race in Lovecraft can also lead to a greater appreciation of his work, and a better understanding of its horror. Joshi may think he's protecting Lovecraft's legacy by minimizing the role of race in his stories, but the truth is that, to the extent that Lovecraft is still meaningful, it's in large part because of his portrait of his own racism. Lovecraft isn't a great artist despite being a racist, as Joshi would have it. Nor is he a lousy artist because he's a racist, as Older says. He's a great artist and he's a racist: Lovecraft's world is one in which racism poisons everything, in which the fear of anyone who isn't white is so overwhelming that it fills the seas and the skies and everything in between with gibbering demons and cosmic despair. The bleak, clotted hatred with which he renders that world is precisely what makes his work valuable.
- What to read on the Tory proposals for a “Bill of Rights” | Jack of Kent –
- GUEST POST: Of Meat Hooks and Desire by Max Gladstone | Brian Staveley – There’s more to life than stabbing people in the gut. Or melting their faces off with a fireball. Or being dropped out of a helicopter, or tortured with a potato peeler.
- Fantasy-Faction World Tour of Wonderment: The Netherlands | Fantasy-Faction –
- Marvel & Jack Kirby Family Settle Long-Running Legal Dispute – Page 5 – So what happened wasn't that the Kirby family sued Marvel just because they one day decided to up and want more money. They didn't even sue. What they did was file for termination of copyright assignment — the very thing that the law allows creators to do. They didn't do this against the wishes of Kirby himself — Kirby had been all for doing it, ever since the law had been changed. But they had to wait a certain amount of time, and Kirby didn't live long enough to see it happen. But he was always on board with it.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds – The Daily Beast – Fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she acts like she’s not interested is, generally, something that ends badly for everyone involved. But it’s a narrative that nerds and nerd media kept repeating.
- #GameOverGate (with images, tweets) · strictmachine · Storify – Zoe Quinn blows #GamerGate wide open.
- Timothy Snyder’s Lies | Jacobin – In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Hitler and Stalin are one and the same. And the partisans — Jewish fighters included — only encouraged German crimes.
- Whirling Nerdish: Asthma and THE MIRROR EMPIRE – I’m particularly interested in how Hurley handles this character because all my life, I was told by movies and TV that people with asthma were nerds. They were geeks, dweebs, losers. Pathetic little wastes that fly into a wheezing, gasping fit when things get difficult while, meanwhile, the HERO goes and kicks the bad guys ass and handles his shit.
- A few disjointed thoughts on other cultures and diversity in SFF – Aliette de Bodard – Researching another culture is freaking hard work, PLEASE do not undertake it lightly (and when I say “freaking hard work”, I don’t mean a few days on Wikipedia, or even a few days of reading secondary sources at the library). And PLEASE do not think you’ll be exempt of prejudice/dominant culture perceptions/etc. No one is.
- Public Domain Super Heroes – Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book, comic strip, film, literary, pulp, mythological, television, animation, folk stories, etc… Characters in the public domain fitting in genres such as the masked vigilante, caped crusader, villains, scientists, magicians, robots, jungle lord, and their supporting characters.
- Pioneer winners — Butler: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom – “There certainly seems to be something of a boom. To a certain extent these things are always artefacts―there’s no objective criteria by which one can judge ‘boom-ness’ (boomitude? boomosity?―so the fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on”