Month: April 2015
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Writer’s Heaven
No, I don’t mean haven, I really do mean heaven. I was reading James Schmitz last night and this morning. One of the things about reading with my tablet is that when I want to read in a dark room, I can. And then when I wake up but don’t have to get right out…
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Blind Justice Texting on Her Phone
What follows is a paper I wrote for the Criminal Law class I’m taking. I think you, my readers, will find it an interesting case when you read it, and my analysis. What is the future of digital privacy, and is there a way to retain our privacy in the era of the Cloud and…
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Linky Goodness
Red Shoes In the department of really, really bad ideas, there is this one: to force young men who are training to become leaders to wear high heels for a mile-long walk. I’m sorry, but this has nothing at all to do with ‘walking in women’s shoes’ because a sensible woman isn’t going to walk…
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Fast Forward a Day
It’s Monday, and I’m not up to doing what I had planned for this blogspace today. I will return tomorrow. In the meantime, you might enjoy this soothing picture of clouds. I’ll let you pick the elevator music… Oh, and I’ve been reading rather a lot of Pratchett.
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Central American Food
What follows is the textual content of a speech I had to give in class. It ran deplorably long, because as regular readers know, I love food, and find the anthropology surrounding meals a fascinating topic. So while this seems stilted, if I start expanding it I’ll wind up with a book, and I haven’t…
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Literary Criticism
I do reviews on this blog, sometimes meh, rarely AUGH get it out of my brain!! and mostly good. I will never rise to the level Mark Twain did, in his masterful critique of James Fenimore Cooper… I’m sharing parts of it (and you can find it in whole here, and to download free here)…
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Damsels in Distress?
How about Damsels who can’t be bothered with Distress? Death before Whining! This started out as a spark off Tom Knighton’s post at According to Hoyt the other day. He wrote: “I don’t recall exactly who, but one of the better known authors of our genre once claimed that all people like me wanted in…
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Review: One of Each
I got two new books in this last week, and I managed to read them both. One fiction, and one non-fiction. Being sick helped with the reading, for a little silver lining in a cloud. I read book #6 in the Ongoing April series by Mackey Chandler. I have enjoyed this series from the first…
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Taking Counsel
Life is a Battleground I found myself walking across campus yesterday and wondering what I was doing there. It’s not that I feel like I don’t belong, although I have days like that, too. It’s more that I was feeling sick, stupid, and used up. I’m too old for this. I ought to have done…
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ETWYRT: Tom Kratman
(mirror-posted from the Otherwhere Gazette because I have an Organic Chemistry exam) Today’s reading and recipe come from Tom Kratman, best known for his military science fiction and alternative history books. I’ve been reading Kratman since his first book and his skills have grown exponentially since that endeavour. When I asked him for a dish,…
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Drawing, photos, and other artistic endeavours
Drawing class is going well. We’re working on tonal qualities, and charcoal, things that I haven’t really put too much thought into previously. Turns out that using powdered charcoal and reductive methods is difficult, gloriously messy, and not something I’m likely to master anytime soon. I’ll stick to graphite as being easier and more accessible.…
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A Little Circus
#hugoawards #sadpuppies The guy who is just too damn obstinate, brave, hell maybe even stupid to accept he’s beaten. Who takes on odds fifty or fifty thousand to one and… Probably gets knocked flat. And gets up again and tries again. It’s a frontier thing, I think. Kowtowing to authority (no matter who that…