text:
Prose Poetry Code
The Three Written Arts
On the Fediverse
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Innocence Reborn (prologue)
Nocturne (sample)
The Shape of Things (sample)
Lair of the Wizards (sample)
Innocence Reborn
The Shape of Things
The Linear Cycle
Twospeech: An experiment in English diglossia
Paperback Release: Lair of the Wizards (Hidden Hills 1)
On luck
Angel's Sin, by James Potter
Magic and Tech
Let's Make a Language
Miracles, by Michael H. Potter
Either Side of Night
The Last Captain
Forged in the Fires
The North Wind Blows
The Final Sacrifice
Release: Destiny Fulfilled (Tales of Two Worlds 5)
We've come a long way. Some of us more than others. And in the case of two characters from this installment of Tales of Two Worlds, the distance is unimaginable.
For some, the other world is home, and ours is the alien land. A man on a mission discovers that the land he believed a paradise is instead something else entirely. His sister, happy in the life she has made, fears for him, yet she wants him to experience the same wonder she had a year ago. And her husband would gladly forget about the other world altogether, but he knows he can't. The bonds of family are strong, even when pulled to their limit.
Since it's an Otherworld story, you know it's exclusive to my Patreon. And you know it only costs you 3 bucks a month to pick it up. So I don't need to say that…except that I already did.
Well, no matter. The next in line is also the last. Tune in this November for the Tales finale, "The Price of Freedom". Until that day comes, keep reading!
Posted on September 29, 2020 January 25, 2020 Categories WritingTags otherworld, patreon, releaseLeave a comment on Release: Destiny Fulfilled (Tales of Two Worlds 5)
Thoughts on: The Lightbringer series, by Brent Weeks
I don't often do book reviews. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it's mainly because I feel I get too immersed in a novel. For things like the Summer Reading List Challenge, I'll do my best. Otherwise, I'd rather talk in more general terms than a single work.
Well, let's do that, then. Instead of reviewing a book, I'd like to offer some thoughts on an entire series. Specifically, the Lightbringer series, written by Brent Weeks, which I just finished reading.
This fantasy novel series consists of five entries, making it as much of a trilogy as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Lately, it seems that five-part series are gaining popularity, as this is the fourth I've really delved into in recent years. (The others, if you're wondering: Peter V. Brett's Demon Cycle; Django Wexler's Infernal Battalions; and The Dagger and the Coin, by Daniel Abraham.) I will say that I like this better than the traditional trilogy for genre fiction. It allows more room for expansion, more detail, and an overall slower pace. Some of my favorite things, in terms of reading.
As this isn't a book review, I won't go into great detail about each individual novel, but it helps to know something about the story.
First off, the list:
The Black Prism
The Blinding Knife
The Blood Mirror
The Broken Eye
The Burning White
Each has its own story, but they are by no means self-contained. Later installments directly continue storylines started earlier, and The Burning White begins with an author's note that some of its events are concurrent with the conclusion of The Broken Eye. So it's very much a series, not an anthology.
The overall story revolves around a war between the corrupt, bureaucratic Chromeria and the anarchic White King. In the first novel, those seeds are planted, and they grow throughout the series, coming to a climax in The Burning White. Along the way, we follow a small cadre of characters who play various parts on both sides. Almost all are larger than life, or else they become so. There's magic, cloak-and-dagger politicking, lots of humor, and an incredible number of battle scenes. Something for everybody, assuming you're into epic fantasy.
And I would call it epic. Lightbringer features world-changing magical powers, godlike entities, ancient secrets, and anything else you might look for. Weeks builds the tension and the stakes as the series progresses, so it feels natural that the farm boy grows into a hero for the ages. It's "The One" told in a good way.
In my opinion, the absolute best part of this series is its worldbuilding. You know I love that. (If you don't, just read, oh, anything else I write on here.) As we're dealing with fantasy, that includes what I consider the most innovative aspect of Lightbringer: its magic system.
The whole thing is based on light and the spectrum, hence the "Chromeria" name above. Magic users in the setting are able to draw on light to activate their powers, which manifest in one of two ways: an effect or a physical substance called luxin. Different colors have different powers, though the people of the setting divide the rainbow into only five colors—indigo and violet are left out. So blue is the highest, and it covers intelligence, rationality, and general left-brained thinking. Not bad for my favorite color.
Going down the line, green is mainly for raw strength, yellow covers a nebulous sort of balance, orange works on fear and similar emotions, and red covers "passions" such as anger and lust. But here's where the trick comes in. Some of those who can use these powers also have access to other parts of the spectrum. They can literally see into the infrared ("sub-red" in the text, to represent their lower state of advancement or something) or ultraviolet ("super-violet") parts, even though this is physically impossible for human eyes.
Believable it is not, especially when you get into the rare magic users who have access to the forbidden "colors" of paryl (high-frequency microwaves) and chi (long-wavelength X-rays). Still, it's fun, and there's a lot of deep thought behind the lore. Yellow is supposed to be the balance color, for example, but it's the most unstable when brought into material form, meaning that the spectrum is a source rather than a sink. Tetrachromats exist and are known; they're the only ones who can properly stabilize yellow, and (this is accurate) they're almost always women. One of the main characters is red-green colorblind, which comes into play. Infrared magic controls fire and allows one to see heat, naturally enough. Despite the fantastical parts, it's logical, something I believe is the hallmark of a good magic system.
Downsides are necessary to explain why magic hasn't taken over the world, and Lightbringer gives a pretty good one. People can only use a finite amount of color magic in a lifetime. They even have a visible manifestation, in the form of "halos" of the color they've drawn on that slowly grow to fill their irises. Once they burst through, that's a sign that the magic has begun to take over the user's mind. Responsible people go to a willing sacrifice. Those who don't become "wights", and are often hunted. And this forms the central conflict of the series.
The Burning White gives a midichlorian-like explanation for the process, but that's not necessary. What matters is that it all comes together. Using too much magic drives you insane, says the common lore. But what if that's wrong? What if you could reverse the process? Some people are immune, so it makes perfect sense that these would reach positions of power.
Beyond the magic system, Lightbringer offers a somewhat atypical fantasy world. There's a mishmash of influences from Europe and the Middle East, with the primary empire called the Seven Satrapies (satrap comes from Persian). Religious and magic-related terms and names tend to be Latin or Greek. Fallen immortals all have names drawn from Near Eastern mythology, such as Abaddon and Belial. One territory is full of Irish influences; another uses Hebrew. Very little fantasy, though.
Technology is another important part of a fantasy setting. Here, Weeks bucks the traditional trend of the High Middle Ages, instead placing his world in a kind of early modern era. Gunpowder weapons are common, from cannons down to pistols. A number of mechanical devices exist. And the technological progress is deftly interwoven with the magic system: lenses, glassmaking, anything to do with light is far beyond the circa 1600 feel of the rest of the world.
Magic and religion also tend to have a curious relationship. With Lightbringer, they're again combined in a reasonably intelligent manner. The Chromeria represents a monotheistic (and very Catholic) faith, while the enemies are often described as pagans. Cosmic beings lesser than the creator deity exist. Many of them are called "fallen", mirroring Christian legend. Prophets abound on both sides, and some of them even have a true gift. The sacrificial ceremony for magic users who have gone too far is a sacred one. And so on. Again, smart, and a good use of existing pieces.
The culture, much like the naming, shows a number of influences. Fortunately, modern identity politics doesn't seem to be one of them. One minor character is a confirmed lesbian (the text uses the term tribadist, another of those little details I like). The protagonist is described as having darker skin, but it seems to be closer to Mediterranean or Arab than African. But that's about it. Races and sexes mix freely. Merit and magic are the ideals for advancement, although political connections often overshadow them. It's refreshingly escapist.
An innovative magic system, a sensible cultural context, a lack of annoying modernity. The setting for Lightbringer comes closer to my preference than anything I've read not written by Brandon Sanderson or, well, myself. But setting does not a story make. We need good characters, too.
Well, here's where things start to get a little hairy. Yes, this series has some great, memorable characters. The protagonist, Kip, begins The Black Prism as…not one of them. He's an overweight loner who spends his days being bullied by neighbors, his nights abused by his mother. Beaten down, no friends, the object of mockery. Hmm. That sounds awfully familiar.
When I started reading The Black Prism in 2011, I saw a lot of myself in Kip. He quickly became one of my favorite main characters in fantasy, simply because of how real he was. This was the escape I needed: someone like me becoming better. By the time I finished The Burning White nine years later, I have to say that my opinion hasn't changed. The character did, yet so many of the more mundane changes mirrored my own.
Specifically—and I realize I'm digressing here—Kip gets forced into a political marriage, then comes to love his new bride. She started out in the first book as just another bully he had to face, the stereotypical "mean girl" at school who sabotaged his entrance exam and made fun of him for being fat and awkward. Later, we learn that she has plenty of her own problems. She's highly intelligent, but people consider her a bit of an airhead because she's, well, busty. Her sister's orientation brings her further mockery, and events conspire to bring her low at the same time Kip's rising.
Kip thinks he's unworthy of someone so beautiful; I think the same. His wife tells him it's okay, that they can make things work as long as they have love and trust; my partner says the same. Some of the moments they share in The Burning White rang so true to me that I was almost brought to tears. "I have to help her help me," Kip thinks at one point, words I needed to read at the perfect moment. "I believe in you," she tells him at a pivotal point, "but that's not enough for you, is it? You have to know. For you." We've had that exchange almost word for word. During the final book's climax, Kip tries to find a way out of a…predicament, and he reflects on all the things he could have done better: "If. If. If." I wrote those exact same words in a therapy workbook last Friday.
So I'm emotionally invested in the protagonist, far more than in any other series I've ever read. But the rest of the main cast is strong. Karris goes beyond the "warrior princess" angle to become not just the strong, independent woman Hollywood wants, but a true leader. Teia has a winding story arc that only ends after a series of epilogues to make Peter Jackson blush; she embodies loyalty and angst and even teenage hormones in a way that leaves her endearing, if a little insane. In later novels, Kip's soldier bodyguards grow into heroes in their own right, while the head villain of the tale is a proper megalomaniac.
That's not to say everybody hits the right note. The secondary protagonist is Gavin Guile. The Prism, leader of the Seven Satrapies and the Chromeria, commander of the victorious forces of the civil war a generation before. He's an interesting man, for sure. His dark side is creepy, but you can see that he tries to hide it as best he can. But Gavin is one of the main problems with the story as a whole, and here is where we enter spoiler territory, as well as my biggest problems with the Lightbringer series. If you don't want to know the big twists, skip the next section.
Brent Weeks is a good writer. He's a master at worldbuilding. He can describe cinematic action scenes in a way I envy. But he can also come up with some of the most ludicrous plot twists I've ever seen. The kind of thing even writers of fanfiction would call unbelievable. His other series, the Night Angel trilogy, became legendary for this. I've never read it, so I can't say whether it's worse than Lightbringer in that regard, but I dearly hope it's better.
Mostly, the fault I find is that everyone is related, and the relations are downright convoluted. Kip discovers in The Black Prism that he's Gavin's son. Except that Gavin isn't actually Gavin. He replaced his twin brother at the final battle of the civil war they fought twenty years ago. One brother or the other slept with a random woman from the town nearby, and thus Kip was conceived. Except that Gavin's father claims he actually did that. Meanwhile, Gavin's other son, Zymun, is a psychopath. Oh, and Karris is his mother. And her brother is the main bad guy.
It only gets worse from there. The real Gavin is alive, we find out in the first fifty pages of The Black Prism. He's being held in a secret dungeon underneath the Prism's tower. Except that the fake Gavin goes to kill him one day, only to find he was never there at all…despite a dozen or more chapters from his point of view! The whole thing is a trip, and you can't blame it all on magic. Some of it has to be the author's fault.
It's as though Weeks stopped seeing the forest for the trees. The set-piece reveals are excellent. On their own, I'd eat them up and clamor for a movie version. Too bad they don't fit into the narrative.
I could say the same for the entire climax sequence of The Burning White. All told, it takes up about a third of the book, almost 300 pages with barely a break to breathe. And it feels like a snowball that turns into an avalanche of insanity. Magic flying everywhere, a conspiracy unmasked, people on all sides looking for whatever advantage they can find. Climax, for both the novel and the series as a whole.
But Gavin's storyline goes in a different direction. He's been tasked by assassins with an impossible mission. I'm not making this up. He's sent to kill God. It makes more sense if you've read the books, but not a lot more. Problem is, he's fully willing to do it. He's an avowed atheist due to the benevolence paradox, so he wouldn't even mind succeeding. Then he meets a figment of his imagination in the form of his dead younger brother (this series has a ton of those) who causes him to have a complete change of heart and a renewal of faith. That transformation felt so forced that I almost started rooting for the bad guys. The most skeptical man in the world suddenly becomes the most zealous? The swiftness with which it happened made me think far less of both Gavin and the writer who created him.
So much else happens in that novel-within-a-novel that it's hard to keep track, and the carefully crafted setting tends to go out the window. Just about every main character ends up going full-on Super Saiyan, none so much as Kip and Gavin. There was always an element of the mythic in the series, but this sequence ramps that up to absurd levels. It left me turning pages frantically, wondering what would happen next, yet dreading how it would be written.
That, I think, is an apt description of Lightbringer as a whole. It's a flawed masterpiece. There is a great story in there. The magic system is top-notch, and the setting as a whole just clicks. I found, after years and years of searching, a character that truly felt like me, who even grew with me. A million and a half words over five books and almost a decade, it's still what I'd call time well spent.
Yet I'm troubled, because I feel it could be so much more. Some of the red herrings were too predictable. Not all of the twists made sense. A few plot threads were left incomplete. I cringed at the prose more than I have for any other book. The whole thing is ambitious, but that ambition sometimes comes out a mess.
That said, I loved it. Flawed though it is, Lightbringer is epic fantasy, with heavy emphasis on the "epic" part. That seems to be the Brent Weeks style, which is fine. (I tend to write "lower" fantasy, and I do like to read it more, so maybe that bias is coming through in some of my criticism.) Often, I wish a series wouldn't end. In this case, I'd gladly read ten more books in the setting. Because, no matter our preferences, we could all use an escape from time to time.
Posted on September 25, 2020 September 24, 2020 Categories ThoughtsTags fantasy, reviewLeave a comment on Thoughts on: The Lightbringer series, by Brent Weeks
Politics and the escape
Seems like we can't get rid of politics these days. It's an election year, combined with a manufactured crisis, a race war, and whatever else is going on in the world. No wonder stress-related health problems have skyrocketed in 2020. Not just for me, but for the whole country.
In times of trouble, when the real world is an awful place to be, I normally turn to fantasy or science fiction. Some people have other escapes, but my strongest has always been my imagination, aided where necessary by the words of "genre" fiction authors. The past decade has allowed me to make my mark, and I have consistently stated that I write what I do because I am, at heart, an escapist.
But it's getting harder and harder to avoid the thorny political problems of the world around me by diving into a novel. That isn't because I'm having trouble reading. Oh, no. Since being placed under effective house arrest in March, I've read more than a dozen different books. Most are nonfiction, history or science books that caught my eye. A couple were fiction, part of my ever-growing "books to read" pile.
I have others in that. I started reading Brent Weeks' The Burning White this week. Blood of Empire (Brian McClellan) still waits. The Infernal Battalion? Still untouched. And so on.
Why haven't I been reading as much speculative fiction? If you asked me a while back, I'd say it was because I didn't have enough time. Or I didn't feel like committing to it. Those are both lies, of course. I've got nothing but time. I have no problem rereading my own novels. I don't mind checking out an archaeological history of England, a humorous account of mathematical errors, or a study of idioms originating in the King James Bible.
No, my present problem with fantasy and sci-fi boils down to politics. As part of my treatment for depression and anxiety, I've been tasked with a series of introspective exercises, and those have helped me come to terms with this.
It isn't politics per se that turned me off fantasy. I don't mind a novel with political wrangling, as long as there's a good story in there. But I feel like I've read all of those. Martin has basically stopped writing. So has Scott Lynch. Jim Butcher needed six years to come up with a new Dresden Files entry, and the reviews I've seen of Peace Talks say it's incomplete at best.
I'm not even opposed to political allegory, if done properly. I mean, I'd be a hypocrite if I said otherwise. My Nocturne, written in November-December 2016, was unabashedly political. (Funny how its themes are still relevant now.) I don't mind exploring an important topic through the metaphorical lens of fiction.
But there are good and bad ways to go about it. Lately, I see too many authors—prominent, professional authors who really should know better—taking the bad route. It's one thing to write a character, even a central character, to hold a firm opinion on an issue. I've done it often. In my Otherworld series, Ashley starts out as a stereotypical feminist, while Damonte is openly socialist. Martevis, a protagonist of my Hidden Hills novels, might have common friends, but he retains an aristocratic view of social class. The Modern Minds short stories feature a character whose mother is a very…zealous evangelical.
Too often, the pros I once idolized have made the decision not to write characters like those. Instead, they preach. It's not enough for the characters to believe in a cause. No, the narrator has to believe in it, too, even when that narrator has no connection to them. And the cause has to be front and center at every possible opportunity, whether or not it contributes to the progression of the story.
Most of the examples I see in fiction today are of the leftist bent. As I've stated in prior posts, I'm, well, not. "Classical liberal" is the closest label I've found to describe my leanings, and it's far from perfect. But I'm not complaining because I disagree with the politics. I'd say the same thing if the narrative preaching were progressive, conservative, libertarian, authoritarian, anarchist, or any other form you could imagine. (Seriously. Ask me about Ayn Rand sometime.)
No, it's not that I don't like what you're saying. It's that I can't stand how you're saying it. Berating the reader is never a good recipe for success. Beating me over the head with political theory in what was supposed to be a fun, relaxing escape from reality takes away any joy I might have gained.
Illustration 1: The Expanse
It wouldn't be a PPC post without some illustrative examples, so here's what I'm ranting about this time. First, The Expanse, by James S. A. Corey. I enjoyed the opening book, Leviathan Wakes. It got me back into space-based sci-fi after a decade away. And the series continued to impress. Cibola Burn had some major plot holes, Babylon's Ashes was forgettable, but the whole thing was just so fun and refreshing.
In the seventh book, Persepolis Rising, I became thoroughly disillusioned. It was around that point that I noticed there were no stable, monogamous, heterosexual relationships anywhere, except for the villains. Holden and Naomi are content to FWBs. Alex is coming off one failed marriage when the series starts; he adds a second in the 30-year jump between books 6 and 7. Amos is a psychopath who avoids commitment. Holden's "parents" are a group of seven people who did some genetic trickery to have a baby sharing DNA with all of them—mostly for tax purposes, not because they wanted to perpetuate their lineages.
Yet there are plenty of…alternative arrangements that take center stage. In Abaddon's Gate, we see a lesbian couple whose names I can't remember. Babylon's Ashes has Pa and her polyamorous crew. The only "traditional" family that gets more than a brief mention is that of Duarte, in Persepolis Rising. The megalomaniacal Martian who (spoiler alert!) ends up conquering the entire solar system with the help of alien technology is just about the only man with any serious screen time who has a wife and a child. Earth's population had somehow reached fifteen billion by the starting point of this series, and I'm left wondering how.
The Expanse's political browbeating doesn't stop there, alas. Early books were fairly neutral. Earth has its share of good and bad. Belters very naturally develop a terrorist wing due to their constant persecution. As the series progresses, however, it takes a hard left turn. Corporations are ubiquitous in the setting, but they are rarely, if ever, shown in a positive light. The idea of "consent of the governed" is widely viewed as fringe, if not crazy.
The killing blows, in my opinion, are twofold. Persepolis Rising introduces the new bad guys, and I couldn't help but imagine the authors (James S. A. Corey is a shared pseudonym) saying, "Why don't you understand that we're talking about Trump?" It's okay to base a foe off an important historical figure, but this is much too transparent. Adding insult to injury is the way essentially every male character has been marginalized or emasculated. In the future, apparently, boys aren't allowed to have heroes.
Illustration 2: Demon Cycle
Peter V. Brett's Demon Cycle series is another one I liked to start. The Warded Man was a great book, and I've sung its praises on this site before. Brett has a great worldbuilding mind. He can handle dialect, something few others bother to try. And he made a great antihero in Arlen Bales.
It's everything else that's the problem. The enemies of the setting are the Krasians, who are best described as Muslim ninjas crossed with the Bene Gesserit from Dune. Arlen's first meeting with them is as a trader who joins their fight against the nocturnal demons who haunt the world. He leaves in disgrace, beaten and raped, and this seems to be a common theme in the series. Okay, that happened in history. Not so bad, right?
But it goes downhill from there, in my opinion. The patriarchal, indeed misogynistic (and I, unlike your average Twitter user, do not use that term lightly), Krasians are secretly controlled by their women. Their emperor's wife uses blood magic to control his mind—when sex doesn't work, anyway. His daughter secretly creates a women-only assassin squad. The whole thing is more full of holes than the official coronavirus narrative.
It takes away from what was otherwise a decent, innovative fantasy series. The whole message at every turn seems to be "White men can't do anything right unless they're helped." Arlen was a prodigy, but he's about the only one. Rojer comes across as somewhat bumbling, and ends being manipulated by women. Jeph, Arlen's father, is just plain pathetic. Every other white male character is an oaf, an opportunist, or a cuckold. Meanwhile, the women of the setting rule everything, whether behind the scenes or out in the open.
Go broke
If that phenomenon were limited to a single series in fantasy or sci-fi, I wouldn't have much to say. I'd just not read those books. But this is pervasive, and it all goes in only one direction now. It's the same problem Hollywood has. It's the same problem video games have. Story so often takes a back seat to diversity, yet diversity of thought is never allowed. The good guys must never be just guys, for instance, because that's sexist. Capitalism always results in dystopia. Religion is only ever tyrannical, unless it's tribal shamanism, in which case it's the most powerful force in the world.
But that's not an escape. If I wanted to read about the black transgender heroine facing off against the evil colonial corporation that's all-white, I'd just go on Tumblr, or Reddit, or Twitter, or Mastodon, or…you get the idea.
Fantasy worlds aren't ours. They don't have our problems; they have their own instead. I've written scores of articles about this very thing, but it's only getting worse. The political cancer has spread into my last refuge. Is it any wonder I'm depressed, or that I've switched to reading history and science books?
I don't care what you believe. If you want to think that communism is great, fine by me. I vehemently disagree, but that's your right. Think that America should expel anyone who isn't a white Christian? I'll oppose you with all I've got, but I won't stop you from expressing your opinion. Until your ideology infringes on my rights, it's none of my business.
That said, is there any reason to force it into your writing? The answer, of course, is a resounding no. Nothing should be forced. That's just poor writing. You may pat yourself on the back for making your characters so "woke" that you get all the internet points, but it doesn't make them deeper. Cardboard cutouts are boring no matter where they fall on the Political Compass.
No, if you can't be subtle about it, leave the real-world politics in the real world. I didn't come to your book for a lecture on how awful the conservatives/progressives/whatever are. I came to get away from that.
Posted on September 11, 2020 September 8, 2020 Categories Thoughts, WritingTags politicsLeave a comment on Politics and the escape
Summer Reading List 2020: Finale
The past few weeks have been utterly miserable for me. What reading I've done has mostly come while I was eating, because that's the only time I can keep my mind focused on something other than how awful I feel. That I managed to finish two more books despite the depression, the anxiety, and now the dissociation boggles my mind.
But enough about that. Let's see the other two entries in the Summer Reading List Challenge for the worst year ever.
History (non-fiction)
Title: Northumbria: The Lost Kingdom Author: Paul Gething and Edoardo Albert Genre: History/archaeology Year: 2012
I'm an archaeology nut. Ever since I started writing my Otherworld series, I've found a passion for studying ages past. More recently, I became enamored with the series The Last Kingdom, first by reading the Bernard Cornwell book of the same name, then watching the show. It's gritty, it's fun, it's epic, and I love the setting for multiple reasons.
Well, the protagonist of The Last Kingdom, Uhtred, hails from the English town now known as Bamburgh. Long ago (before the ninth century, when the series is set), Bamburgh, with its imposing castle overlooking the North Sea, stood as the seat of a kingdom: Northumbria. And the castle has offered up a wealth of archaeological findings that help us better understand life in Anglo-Saxon times. How the people there lived, what they ate, what they wore.
Gething and Albert explore the strange world of ancient Northumbria in this book. They call it a "lost" kingdom for many reasons. It's obviously just one corner of England now. It was the first Saxon kingdom to fall to the Viking incursions. And we simply don't know much about it. But now I know a lot more than I did, and I find myself even more interested in that long-gone world than before.
To be fair, there are problems with the book. At times, the authors come across as overly preachy. They do the usual politically correct dismissal of the term "Dark Ages", which is entirely appropriate for a period of centuries with social and technological stagnation, if not regression. They're always quick to go on about ethical concerns. On the whole, though, it's not too obtrusive. The faults are minor, and they don't distract from a lively, humorous, and above all informative journey through Anglo-Saxon times.
Suspense (fiction)
Title: Verity Author: Colleen Hoover Genre: Suspense/mystery Year: 2018
Rules are rules, and one of my self-imposed rules was to read something from a genre I don't normally read or write. Fortunately, my partner had talked enthusiastically about a novel she read some months back. She's big into mysteries and thrillers, neither of which normally tickle my fancy, so I thought right then and there that her suggestion would make the perfect addition to the Summer Reading List.
Verity was a short novel, but a hard read for me. Partly, that's from parts hitting too close to home. The protagonist, Lowen, is an author. She's had a lot of family troubles lately. She lacks self-esteem and pride in her work. She suffers from anxiety. The parallels are obvious, but they end pretty soon. Lowen actually has things I don't: a publisher, an agent, a portfolio that gets her a job ghostwriting for the preeminent author in her genre, Verity Crawford, who has suffered a major accident that leaves her unable to continue writing. Thus begins the mystery, because something is up with the whole situation.
Without going too far into spoiler territory (it's a mystery, people!), I'll say that I was somewhat hooked. The way the story is told left me jarred, as it cuts between the first-person perspectives of Lowen and—through an autobiography manuscript Lowen finds—Verity herself. Even I couldn't pull that off in Nocturne. Credit where credit is due, because Hoover managed it. The autobiography parts left me feeling unclean from the sheer depravity that sometimes came out, while the "main" narrative eventually veered into some quite explicit romance that made this red-blooded American male a bit uncomfortable.
I'm constantly comparing myself to "professional" authors of fiction. I can't help it. Lately, in my preferred genres of fantasy and science fiction, I've judged my own efforts equal to, if not better than, the pros more and more often. As I've never written suspense or mystery stories, I'll withhold judgment here, apart from a couple of nitpicks. Hoover's prose is occasionally…off, in some way I find hard to explain. She repeats herself too often for my tastes, and I almost wonder if that was padding a word count for what was already a fairly short novel. The final twist also left a bad taste in my mouth. It doesn't come completely out of nowhere, but it was definitely a blindside hit. In all honesty, I feel it's the weakest part of what was otherwise a great, if unconventional, novel.
Another summer is in the books, but I'm not done. Later this week—assuming nothing else goes wrong—I want to look at a couple of my aborted attempts at the challenge. There's a very good reason, one I'm not going to tell you just yet. Always leave them hanging, you know?
I hope you enjoyed the last three months more than I did. If you participated in the challenge, I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart. Win or lose, you've done a great job. If you're just here to read about me, then I have two things to say. One, you probably need your head examined more than I do. And two, I did have fun with these books. Maybe they aren't perfect, and they might not be to my exact tastes, but they were worth my time. I'd like to think I'm worth yours.
Thank you again, and remember to keep reading!
Posted on September 7, 2020 October 22, 2020 Categories Thoughts, WritingTags reading, summer1 Comment on Summer Reading List 2020: Finale


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Wall Street to kick out Chinese telecom giants
THE New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said it will delist three Chinese telecommunications firms based on claimed links with its military.
China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom Hong Kong have all been targeted by the Trump administration.
Shares in the telecoms giants will be suspended on the NYSE next week while proceedings to delist them have begun.
The companies earn all of their revenue in China and have no significant presence in the US.
The delisting is seen more as a symbolic blow amid heightened geo-political tensions between the US and China.
The three firms' shares are thinly traded in the US compared to their primary listings in Hong Kong. The state-owned companies dominate the telecoms industry in China.
President Donald Trump signed an order in November barring American investments in Chinese firms owned or controlled by the military.
The order prohibited US investors from buying and selling shares in a list of Chinese companies designated by the Pentagon as having military ties.
Mr Trump has targeted a number of Chinese companies including TikTok, Huawei and Tencent on the grounds of national security.
China responded with its own blacklist of US companies as tensions between the economic giants escalate.
The shares of China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom Hong Kong will be suspended from trading between 7 and 11 January, the NYSE confirmed.
Courted
US stock exchanges including the NYSE and Nasdaq courted Chinese companies during the past decade to list their shares on their stock markets.
There are currently more than 200 Chinese companies listed on US stock markets with a total market capitalization of $2.2tn (£1.6tn).
But as relations turned sour with the US, many Chinese firms have sought dual listings in China and Hong Kong.
Companies including Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.Com also have listings in New York but have conducted secondary listings in Hong Kong in the past two years as the trade war between the US and China intensified.
Last month, the US House of Representatives passed a law to kick Chinese companies off US stock exchanges if they do not comply with its auditing rules. – bbc.com
Impala boss dies
South Africa mulls over revisit of alcohol ban as virus cases surge
Trump decree on Covid visiting rules rebuffed as he enters final day
Biden inauguration: Executive orders to reverse Trump policies
Uganda election: Bobi Wine 'fearful for life' after Museveni win
Ugandan election marred by delays
'Nesango' film set for March
Four suspected carjackers nabbed
More free festive season condoms

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Born: 7/12/1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Full name: William Henry Cosby Jr.
Noted For: actor and comedian; "I Spy" (Alexander Scott, 1965-68), "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" (himself/Fat Albert, 1972-79), "The Cosby Show" (Cliff Huxtable, 1984-92), Ghost Dad (1990). Convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman (2018).
Copyright © 2021 by David Carson. The Dead or Alive Data Base is brought to you by Living Water Specialties.


We're delighted to announce that an array of exciting events and activities to mark Africa Day 2017 will be taking place in various locations around Ireland this year.
In addition to established Africa Day hosts Galway, Cork and Limerick, celebrations will also take place in Kilkenny and Kildare for the first time.
Read about the Africa Day celebrations set to take place across the country below to get an idea of what to expect and see which event is closest to you.
Galway: In Galway, a number of Africa Day festivities will run from 17th – 25th May and will include an interactive music workshop, which will celebrate African culture through music and song at the United Methodist Presbyterian Church. The workshop will be facilitated by Helen Webb and SONKE Multicultural Choir and will be open to the public. A football event will take place at the Westside Astro facility at which eight primary schools from Galway City will participate.
The 10th Galway African Film Festival will take place from 19th – 21st in the Mick Lally Theatre (Druid). The film festival will highlight the variety of life experiences on the African continent through screening a selection of short films, feature films and documentaries.
A special Africa Day event will take once again place in Doughiska, Galway's most multicultural suburb. Hosted by the ARD Centre, the event will run at Merlin College in Doughiska and will aim to raise awareness about Africa and promote African culture here in Ireland. Open to people of all ages and nationalities.
Limerick: In Limerick, Africa Day 2017 will comprise of a number of events over the week commencing with a photoshoot and official launch by the Mayor of Limerick on Monday 22nd May. The theme for 2017 is "Beyond Africa", whereby the local community will aim to highlight the positive experiences of living in their new country and in their new homes "beyond Africa".
On Thursday, 25th May, there will be a symposium of talks held in the Strand Hotel. These talks will be set up in an interactive World Café style to maximise participation.
The final event will be a family fun day in the Milk Market on Sunday, 28th May. Activities will include music, dance, crafts, children's entertainment and food. A volunteer recognition event will be held in City Hall afterwards with the Mayor presenting certificates to all the volunteers involved in this year's programme.
Cork: In Cork, Cork City Council in association with African communities in Cork and in partnership with the HSE, Community Gardai and NGOs working in this field have come together to organise a number of events to celebrate Africa Day. This year a public outdoor event will be held in Cork's flagship park, Fitzgerald Park on Saturday, 27th May from 12noon to 6pm. The family focussed event will have plenty of activities for children, drumming workshops, hair braiding, face painting, balloons, bouncy castles and cultural games with prizes. Professional food vendors will be on site to cater to the celebrating crowds.
In Kildare, Kildare County Council with support from the County Kildare Integration Strategy 2014-2019 Implementation Group and the Kildare Integration Network (KIN) will host a "Taste of Africa" Festival Day taking place in Newbridge Town Hall on Saturday, 20th May. The event will showcase the diversity of African Culture and will be a magical day of celebrating African food, dance and music.
Kilkenny: In Kilkenny, a series of three events will take place over the June Bank Holiday weekend, kicking off with a seminar and workshops on "Leveraging 'Imported' human capital through entrepreneurship opportunities – A strategic collaboration between Africa and Ireland" at Maynooth University, Kilkenny Campus on Friday, 2nd June. This will be followed by a Mini Trade and Business Fair at MacDonagh Junction on Saturday, 3rd June, where African entrepreneurs and business owners in Ireland will be invited to advertise/showcase their products, services and ideas.
Africa Day celebrations will conclude on Sunday, 4th June with performances by African, Irish and ethnic minority cultural groups; a fashion show; a comedy show and a special area to taste African cuisine at The Parade.


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Bruins On Jimmy Vesey's Short List
Filed Under:Boston Bruins, Jimmy Vesey, NHL, Sports News
Jimmy Vesey poses with the Hobey Baker Award. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
BOSTON (CBS) — For Jimmy Vesey, and Boston Bruins fans, August 15 can't come soon enough.
That's when the 23-year-old North Reading native will become an unrestricted free agent, giving teams around the NHL a chance at signing the Harvard standout.
And Vesey's hometown B's are on the short list of teams he'll chat with when August 15 rolls around.
"I've said it all along that Boston is definitely on my list of teams that I'd like to talk to. It's a team that I've rooted for all my life, and it's a team that I watched win the Stanley Cup in 2011," Vesey told CSNNE's Joe Haggerty on Wednesday. "I'll definitely be meeting with Boston in August.
"I was a huge Joe Thornton fan growing up. He wore No. 19. I wear No. 19. He was my favorite player. I got to know Torey Krug a little bit through playing with him at the world championships last year. So it would be really cool to play with Torey and put on the Bruins jersey. It's the team that I've watched for my whole life," he added.
Vesey would slide right into a top six forward position on the Bruins, potentially replacing the production of departed winger Loui Eriksson. Haggerty believes that along with the Bruins, the Buffalo Sabres, Toronto Maple Leafs and New Jersey Devils make up his short list, with the Pittsburgh Penguins a dark horse team.
Vesey won the Hobey Baker Award in 2016, netting 24 goals for the Crimson as a senior. Drafted in the third round in 2012 by the Nashville Predators, he opted not to sign with the team last season. The Predators traded his rights to the Buffalo Sabres for a third round pick last month.


Tight throat when you perform? Here's the answer.
Our brains do crazy things to our bodies when we're nervous. How many of you have experienced shaking limbs, sweaty palms, and panicked breathing when the pressure is on? For a singer or an actor, one of the most troubling aspects of getting nervous is a throat that tightens up. We have a series of muscles that run down the back of our throats called constrictors, and they contract when the "fight or flight" response kicks in from our sympathetic nervous system. These constrictor muscles are very strong and are part of swallowing; to get a sense of how much you don't want these muscles on when you're singing or speaking, just try to talk and swallow at the same time. Not so easy, right?
Be precise with your movements.
Use firm pressure, but not enough to cause pain.
Assess and reassess after each part of the massage. Pick a phrase to sing or speak before and after you work with each body part. Use your voice to notice improvements.
Keep track of what works for you, and repeat these massage elements before you perform.
There are three jaw muscles that exert a great influence on the larynx. The first is the masseter, which clenches your jaw. To massage this muscle, run your thumbs down the sides of your cheekbones in front of your ears, from your temples to the bottom of your jaw. Now find the pterygoid muscles, which are attached below your cheekbones and help you with chewing. Make small circles in this area in both directions. Finally, take your hands above your ears on both sides to find your temporal muscles. (If you open and close your mouth, you'll feel movement here.) Make broad circles here in both directions.
Place both thumbs underneath your chin and make circles in this area (the root of your tongue). Now stick your tongue out and repeat the circles. Try this with the tip of the tongue pointing down and then the tip pointing up.
The hyoid bone is a U-shaped bone in the crook of your chin that attaches to the larynx. If you're a male, find your Adam's apple (thyroid cartilage) with your finger and move your finger up a little. Then, press back until you feel a bone. If you're a female, it's easier to start with your finger on the cricoid cartilage (a protruding bump about in the middle of your throat), and then move up to the thyroid cartilage and eventually the hyoid. Once you are there, put your finger and thumb on the bone (slide your finger and thumb backward from the front of the bone—it will feel firm under your fingers) and move it side to side.
Take the backs of your hands on either side of your throat, and move the larynx from side to side (the backs of your hands should be touching the middle part of your neck). Notice if your larynx moves easier to one side or the other. Now, hold the larynx to your right and take several slow, deep breaths through your nose. Repeat to the left.
A lot of what is described in this article is easier to see visually, so please click here if you want to see these techniques in action and check your form.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Myriad DNA-patenting Supreme Court case: Scalia says he doesn't get the science.
Today, the court ruled unanimously that natural genes cannot be patented—a decision that will likely help breast and ovarian cancer patients as well as cancer researchers (and biotechnology firms). Behind that unanimity, however, lay a small crack: Scalia, as is his wont, concurred only in part, adding a brief but telling qualification to his vote.
Scalia, in other words, doesn't really understand the scientific basis of the case. And—unlike, implicitly, some of the other justices—he's not going to pretend to.
Basically, Thomas gets the science right. But it isn't pretty. The Thomas family has a history of struggling with science—his wife once conducted a fawning interview with a notorious climate-change denier—and the explanation of the human genome that he provides is so dense as to be nearly opaque. It seems unlikely, moreover, that the other justices had mastered the science any better. During arguments, Elena Kagan's keenest insight was that "chromosomes are very useful." And Samuel Alito teased out a wandering, Breyer-esque hypothetical about a tree branch that, after being "manipulated by the waves" for "many millions of years," is "washed up on the shore—and what do you know, it's a baseball bat!" Yet both joined Thomas' opinion in full and without comment.
Scalia will have none of that. He remained relatively quiet during arguments, and it's obvious that he hasn't spent the interim eagerly studying the scientific record. His concurrence is a remarkable admission of bafflement by a justice who usually exudes confidence. Rather than take cover behind Thomas' blurry biochemistry, Scalia simply throws his support behind the important bit—DNA can't be patented—and ignores the rest.
Good for him. Some might be tempted to see Scalia's disclaimer as part of a broader, deeply worrisome trend of American scientific illiteracy. It's not. The Supreme Court isn't the Science Bar, and we shouldn't expect it to be. So long as the justices grasp the fundamental questions involved, they can work out the fundamental truths. In this case, the court sided with the vast majority of scientists and cancer researchers, which certainly isn't always the case. In deciding his vote, Scalia's scientific "knowledge" and "beliefs" played no role, only his basic understanding of the legal disputes. That's all he needed to vote the right way. We shouldn't criticize him for disregarding his own (probably tenuous) grasp of the science, as many no doubt will. We should applaud him. And considering some of his other "beliefs," maybe we should wish he ignored them more often.


The Joe Homan Charity has been rasing funds for needy children overseas since 1965. Seen by many people as a friendly, caring and sharing chairty.
We work in South India and Thailand to support the development of very poor individuals and communities, with particular emphasis on ensuring that children have the opportunity for quality education and subsequent transition into vocational training or higher education. This is achieved through support of local Non-Government Organisations (NGO's) in residential and non-residential projects.
Our vision is every child having the right to grow up in a safe and secure environment, free from poverty and exploitation.


In collaboration with director Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin, Rick Rubin, and the Johnny Cash Estate, we produced an interactive website and completely crowd-sourced music video celebrating "American VI: Ain't No Grave", Johnny Cash's final studio recording.
We developed a custom web-based painting tool that allowed visitors to create and share their vision for any single frame of the music video.
These original portraits were then strung together and played in sequence over the song, creating a moving, ever-evolving homage to the musical icon. Site visitors can stop the video at any point and witness that frame come to life with a time-lapse of the artist's brush strokes.
The complete crowd-sourced animated music video resulted in a breathtakingly beautiful homage to The Man in Black.


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Fire controlled in major Jerusalem Forest fire
By JTA July 17, 2011, 4:56 pm 0 Edit
JERUSALEM — Arson is suspected in a major forest fire in Jerusalem that led to the evacuation of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum.
The fire was under control by Sunday night after burning nearly 40 acres of the Jerusalem Forest and forcing the evacuation of Yad Vashem and some streets in Jerusalem neighborhoods.
The fire reportedly began burning in four areas of the forest simultaneously on Sunday afternoon, leading to the arson suspicion,
Twenty-three firefighting units and 60 firefighters from the Jewish National Fund, as well as four firefighting planes, fought the fire. At least five people were treated for smoke inhalation, according to reports.
The fire approached the Har Nof and Bayit Vegan neighborhoods of Jerusalem and an oil refinery. Some homes were evacuated as a precaution and the area around the refinery was secured. Yad Vashem employees reportedly were prepared for an emergency evacuation of the museum's most important artifacts, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The Israeli military was mobilized to help battle the blaze.


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Apologetics Share Effective Ways to Defend LDS Faith
Contributed By By R. Scott Lloyd, Church News staff writer
Daniel C. Peterson addresses FAIR conference, calling for "an army of people" to present the gospel message effectively. Photo by R. Scott Lloyd.
Article Highlights
The FAIR conference highlights LDS apologetics, which is the academic defense of the faith.
In defending the faith, guard against ego gratification, revenge satisfaction, and "righteous anger."
FAIR has helped people who are interested in the message of the Church to find the truth.
"We are called, all of us, by virtue of the covenants we have taken upon ourselves to bear record to the world, and we should avail ourselves of every tool we have."
—Brother Daniel C. Peterson
Learn more about FAIR and what they do to defend the Church.
PROVO, UTAH
When Daniel C. Peterson years ago became involved with LDS apologetics (the academic defense of the faith), it was with the intent "to help faltering Church members and to help interested observers see enough plausibility in the Church's claims to take the gospel seriously or to overcome their doubts."
But, speaking August 2 at the FAIR conference, he said, "We have to beware, because other goals can substitute themselves for the principal goal of bringing people into the Church, helping people to maintain and retain testimony."
Worthy goals, he said, "can slide into the unworthy. For example, ego gratification, revenge satisfaction, 'righteous anger'—all of those things are temptations along the apologetic path, and they're very ineffective. They don't accomplish what you initially intended to do."
A professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at BYU and a founder of the year-old online publication Interpreter, a Journal of Mormon Scripture, Brother Peterson addressed the topic "Toward a More Effective Apologetics."
Brother Peterson said people accept the gospel because for them it fulfills a "deep, spiritual hunger," though it has to make sense to them as well on an intellectual level. "That's the kind of person we want to find," he said, "the person who wants to have faith to believe."
Posing the question "How do we find those people?" he contrasted the age-old missionary activity of door-to-door tracting with the more promising endeavor of interacting with those who come to a Church visitors' center, those who are "self-selected" as being interested in the message of the Church.
"It seems to me we need an army of people going out to preach the gospel, and it doesn't always mean apologetics in the conventional sense," he said. "A lot of it is about just presenting the gospel as an option that makes sense in your life."
As "an exciting new avenue for doing some of that," he introduced the audience to a new Internet message board called the World Table, sponsored by a group called the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy. Soon to be beta tested, it is unique in a number of ways, including accountability and the fact that participants rate one another on civility.
The hope is that visitors will come to the forum with mutual goodwill and willingness to learn and converse productively.
"We are called, all of us, by virtue of the covenants we have taken upon ourselves to bear record to the world, and we should avail ourselves of every tool we have," Brother Peterson testified in conclusion.


This guest post is written by John McCarthy, CEO of Taxamo, a service solution for the 2015 EU VAT changes, outlines the EU VAT compliance challenges that await online merchants on January 1, 2015.
An estimated 250,000 EU e-service merchants will be affected by the EU's new 2015 rules on how VAT should be applied to digital goods and services. When the net is spread beyond the borders of the 28 EU member states that figure quickly rises to an estimate of 500,000 online merchants with B2C sales in the EU. It will be a major issue come the New Year, yet very few merchants know what the changes involve, or how it will affect them.
The key change enshrined in the 2015 EU VAT Directive is that suppliers of broadcasting, telecommunications and electronic services (BTEs) in the EU will have to charge VAT based on the location of their end customer (non-taxable person). This differs from the existing rules where VAT is charged based on the location of the supplier of the service.
What products/services are covered under the new EU VAT rules?
Business impacted by the EU VAT changes will in principle be required to charge, report and pay local VAT in every Member State in which they have EU B2C customers. To avoid multiple VAT registrations throughout the EU, the so-called Mini One Stop Shop scheme ('MOSS') can be used, reducing the administrative burden associated with the changes at hand. The alternative is for business to register in each of the 28 Member States.
About Taxamo. Taxamo provides a real-time solution for compliance with new EU VAT rules. It is a unique end-to-end service that enables e-service merchants to comply with these changes, without impacting the existing customer journey. In line with EU regulations, Taxamo allows for VAT calculation, evidence collection, MOSS returns and audit services. For more information visit www.taxamo.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.


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Pope.L performance at The Whitney Museum of American Art
Triple Canopy's Media Replication Services
How are the status and meaning of an artwork—whether an Ancient Greek statuary, a digital photograph, or an American naïve painting—altered through the creation of facsimiles, through exhibition, through the conversion of the object into image or code? How might reproduction, as an aesthetic strategy and a political act, present us with alternatives to the current, convoluted understanding of information as property? Media Replication Services will consist of presentations, performances, and provocations in response to these questions by artist Pope.L, scholar Lisa Gitelman, and poet Caroline Bergvall, facilitated by Triple Canopy editors. The three participants will consider, as points of departure, forms of reproduction enacted in Triple Canopy's 2014 Biennial installation, Pointing Machines.
Media Replication Services and the installation at the Museum are components of Triple Canopy's contribution to the Whitney Biennial, an issue of its magazine also titled Pointing Machines, which continues the reproduction and circulation of the displayed objects beyond the museum's walls, and includes essays, artist projects, discussions, and performances to be published and presented online and IRL in the next year. Media Replication Services will later be represented as digital projects in this issue, alongside commissioned responses by writers.
$8 general admission; $6 senior citizens and students. This program is free for members but advance registration is required by emailing memberinfo@whitney.org with your name and membership number.
Triple Canopy


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To say the comic book industry has a slight gender skew is like saying Superman is kind of strong. Comic books — much mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy the film industry they now fuel — vastly commic women. The people who write comic books, particularly for major publishers, are overwhelmingly men. The artists who draw them are. The characters within them are also disproportionately men, as are the new characters introduced each year.
The big two comic publishers, DC Comics and Marvel, 1 have taken note of this disparity and are trying to diversify their offerings.
Dark Phoenix | Villains Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia
Females 2 make up about one in four comic book characters. Among comic-creators, the numbers are even more discouraging. In August, Hanley found that men outnumbered women nine-to-one behind the scenes at both DC and Marvel.
He also estimated that 79 percent of people working on comics this year were white. Part of this strong skew towards male comic book characters — and male writers — may booo due to whom publishers have perceived their audience to be.
Cyclops (Scott Summers) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books Xavier views Scott as one of his most prized pupils; their relationship exhibits He was defined by Jean [Grey] so much, and I just think that this guy is so . In The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix limited series, both Scott and. have taken note of this disparity and are trying to diversify their offerings. Part of this strong skew towards male comic book characters — and male Still, these two sites are the best resources for this kind of information. . Publishing houses have also sought to introduce more gay, lesbian, bisexual and. Jean Grey-Summers is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character has been known under the aliases Marvel Girl, Phoenix, and Her Dark Phoenix persona was ranked 9th in IGN's " Top Comic Book Villains of All Time" list, the highest rank for a female.
Once that happened, Aaron said, the industry lost a way to attract new fans. There have been a number of attempts to count how many readers are women, but none was dating chinese girl. And yet, comic book convention attendance breaks close to even between genders, Aaron said.
This could be evidence that Phlenix audience is broader than the industry has long believed, or that its efforts to appeal to new and more diverse readers are working. New readers, who may have been intimidated by the traditional comic book shop, can now find comics online, and digital sales are booming.
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That book has great digital sales. Willow Wilson, frequently comes up in talk about how the industry is changing.
She was a girl — female characters do not tend to do. And she was a minority, and minority characters do not tend to do. But the book has developed hdr devoted following online, and has posted solid numbers for a newcomer. I pulled a list of characters 6 from the two mainstream universes of each publisher.
Once I had the list of characters of interest, I mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy pulled data from different categories on each Wikia 8 — sex and sexuality, hair color, eye color, whether the characters were good guys or bad guys or neutral, whether they had secret identities, and whether they were alive or dead. The Wikias also count up the number of appearances of each character in the comic books they have in their databases. I was able to pull appearance counts for 6, of the DC mzture and 15, Marvel characters.
Women were substantially underrepresented among characters with at least one appearance. gguy
The Most Influential Pages in Comic Book History
Among the characters for which we have gender data, 12 females made up only The same trend bears out when we look at characters with higher appearance counts. When we zero in on the 2, DC and 3, Marvel characters with gender data who appear at least 10 times — the set of characters that probably gives the most consistent view of what we see on the page — female characters make up only When we focus on only the most frequently appearing characters in each universe — the big girl sex picture of the show — the data changes.
Of characters mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy gender data and or more appearances DC characters and Marvel charactersonly Miller says one possible reason we see DC with a slight advantage over Marvel in the raw character counts mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy that DC was more willing to create female counterparts to its well-known heroes — Batwoman, Supergirl.
When Marvel did start creating female versions minneapolis nsa its mainstream heroes in the s, it was for strictly financial reasons. And even then, the characters were often neglected.
Has much changed?
Looking at each year since — the year that modern Marvel comics start 14 — we can see the number of characters introduced each year for each publisher. Counting up the aggregate number of male, female and gender non-conforming characters 15 more on gender and sexual minorities later released each year, we can figure out how the state of gender parity has changed over time in each universe.
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Both universes have steadily come closer to gender parity, but each still faces a difficult-to-overcome imbalance. We can then get an annual rate of the percentage of new characters introduced each year who are female.
When we look comi what kinds of characters women are, another unfortunate picture emerges: Women and men were almost exactly equally likely to have a secret identity in the Marvel universe In both DC and Marvel, women were mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy neutral allegiance at ghetto Tucson boy wanted higher rate than men.
Men were also more likely to be bad in each universe — in fact, bad-aligned men alone outnumbered all women combined. Publishing houses have also sought to introduce more gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters into their stories.
But in recent years, a number of explicitly gender- and sexual-minority hdr have been introduced.
Erotic shemale work to get more women in comics — and more women creating comics — has been going on for years. Decades of scholarship have looked into how women are portrayed on the page, and thriving communities are discussing each and every one of these points and. Marvel because they feel change is happening in an industry and community that for years has had unwelcoming attitudes toward women.
Both Mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy and Wilson credit much of this change to the fans. Wilson saw a major leap forward as people within the industry and fans themselves became more vocal about the harassment of women at comic book conventions. And in the past several years, comics have been rocked by a series of scandals when writers were called out by women for harassment.
The fact that people now feel comfortable enough to report these events — or even to talk about them a tall — is a win, Mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy said. Wilson said attitudes among creators have come a long way over the last decade. In the early s, she said, open misogyny, and pornography, generally ruled creator forums, and discussions about gender were promptly spiked.
Compare that with this past weekend at New York Comic Con, where Wilson and a dozen other female panelists spoke onstage about women and comics.
Cyclops (Marvel Comics) - Wikipedia
But the goal is still to see women hit the top of the charts. An earlier version of this article and one of its charts misstated the name of the universe Phoebix analyzed for DC Comics.
It was New Earth, not Earth-Two. Full disclosure: Disney also owns Marvel Comics, one of the two publishers I focus on in this piece. I acquired the data used here independently of Marvel, but the publisher did make writers available Poenix interviews.
Mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy Ready Sexy Chat. Hot Horny Women Wanting Women Wonting Sex Mature Lonely Women Wants Divorce Men. Jean Grey-Summers is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character has been known under the aliases Marvel Girl, Phoenix, and Her Dark Phoenix persona was ranked 9th in IGN's " Top Comic Book Villains of All Time" list, the highest rank for a female. What should have been her moment to enjoy the cinematic spotlight in Perhaps the ultimate Jean Grey Phoenix story came in the miniseries that sought not only to bring Jean back into circulation after more than a decade—the adult Jean, It draws on all kinds of X-Men comic book history and gets more.
For the latter, I also relied on the simplemediawiki python script by Red Hat Inc. This is clearly kind of complicated.
Grabbing every comic character would mean ending weeks with several dozen Captain Americas from the different Marvel boys jerking eachother, for example. This felt, to me, like putting the thumb on the scale a bit.
So in order to make sure I minimized duplications, I only looked at one universe continuity for each publisher, the one with the longest contemporary run.
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For Marvel, this was Earth For DC, it was the New Earth universe. I pulled the appearance counts for each publisher on Sept.
As we move forward, my posted appearance data will get increasingly out of date. This data was pulled on Oct. For Marvel, I also had to pull the name of the comic. The reason for the Marvel jump is particularly interesting.
Mature Phoenix seeks her comic book type guy Wanting Sex Contacts
Characters for which we have gender data who are neither male nor female are about 0. Most often they are agender. Footnotes Full disclosure: The sole distributor of Marvel and DC comics to independent shops.
Characters were scraped on Aug. Also on Aug. In Earth, you might say. Sorry, your blog cannot share go single lady by email.
I Am Wanting Horny People
thai womens Copyright 2018


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This Was the Absolute Worst Moment of the iPhone 6S Launch, and It's Unacceptable
By Christopher Phin on at
Yesterday's Apple event, at which it launched the iPhone 6S, iPad Pro and new Apple TV, was generally a pretty congenial, upbeat affair. This was a confident, affluent company heading into its most profitable quarter, showing off some typically lovely stuff that lots of us will happily buy and happily own. There was, though, one sour note, one discordant blarp of minor-key trumpets in the midst of the joyous chorus.
During one of the demos, in order to show off one of their clever tools, a representative from Adobe took a photo of a model and used the new facial feature recognition tool to pop up a dial that could adjust the extent to which the model smiled. He took a photo with a neutral expression and made it happy instead.
And in the few seconds the segment took, many watching experienced a deeply unpleasant barrage of conflicting emotions.
This, to be sure, was impressive tech, at least within the controlled context of a demo. It looked all but automatic, and the result was not the ghastly grimace of the Joker or the silly cartoonishness you get with a liquify filter. The finished effect looked natural and believable; no uncanny valley. That itself is unsettling, though; we know – we who have grown up with Photoshop, who watched Terminator and Jurassic Park as kids, who rail against the toxic effect of impossible beauty standards – that image manipulation is universal and trivially easy, but there's something that troubles the most ancient level of our brains when people start dicking about with faces in particular. We spend so much of our lives reading faces that doing something so fundamental as changing a frown to a smile, especially in front of our eyes, is unnerving. The potential, even in the abstract, of whitewashing our past and making everyone in it happy has weird, uncomfortable echoes of a despotic regime frantically rewriting history books.
"Smile, Love, for Christ's Sake"
Yet more discomfiting still was the fact that the model chosen was a woman. "Hey, girl; you're pretty n' all, and this photoshoot cost thousands, but that resting bitch face has to go; smile, love, for Christ's sake." And I'm afraid that it just is worse than if it had been a man.
Had the model been male, all the stuff about feeling an animal revulsion to making unsmiling faces grin would still hold true, but it's simply moronic to suggest that centuries of patriarchalism hasn't weighted things such that women still come under huge and damaging social pressure around appearances and their subjugated role in society, and this casual manipulation of this woman's face to make it more palatable is nothing more nor less than yet one more wearily predictable example of the classic male gaze. Yes, that's going to be controversial to some people, but those people are fucking idiots so we can safely ignore them.
And we're not even at the worst part. The worst part is that this apparently don't occur to anyone when okaying the segment. Apple, under whose aegis this demo took place, is one of the most open and progressive companies around diversity and equality, and it seems the Adobe representative or his colleagues and bosses saw nothing wrong with the demo or its source materials. That's the problem. That's how pervasive and insidious misogyny is, and that's why it's bad; it's bad because even ostensibly caring and smart people forget to check their privilege, forget to interrogate their actions and their presumptions to make sure they're not perpetuating damaging, demeaning or unfair practices. "All lives matter" is rooted deep down in the same place; it's not wrong – just as using a picture that happens to be of a woman to demo a clever feature isn't itself wrong – but both betray a person who has been so marinaded in privilege, of their race or their gender, that they struggle to empathise with groups whom they have subjugated, however gently and however unintentionally.
Look, it's just a few seconds out of a demo of a small feature in a new app on a new tablet, I know, and I've spent a few hundred words doing what some would see is blowing a tiny and inconsequential detail up out of all proportion. It's just a picture. It could have been a man. Who gives a shit?
And I neither want to censure Apple – whose work in this area and whose acknowledgement of work still to be done is easily among the best in this or any other industry – nor single out the Adobe rep; that's why I haven't named him. There's every chance he'd be horrified at the suggestion this his actions were misogynistic, and upset that he caused offence.
Making the Same Mistakes
But we keep getting this wrong, folks. We keep making the same stupid mistakes. We need to work harder. We need to do better and better and better until we've stopped peddling discriminatory language and practices, or at least until we've stopped doing it so thoughtlessly and so often. If, like me, you're a middle class white guy, you have to work even harder still because it's so easy to forget, especially when you tot up all the challenges you find before you, how ingrained our advantages are.
It's especially true that we have to work to make tech as diverse and welcoming a place as possible, since even those of us who work in tech are probably going to be surprised by how completely ubiquitous it will become in the next fifty years. Get that right, and everyone will be happy – for real.


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Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation
X. K. Wang, K. C. Sheng, S. J. Lee, Y. H. Shen, S. N. Song, D. X. Li, Robert P. H. Chang, J. B. Ketterson
Thin films of YBaCu(F)O were deposited on SrTiO3(100) substrates by multilayer deposition from three electron guns containing Y, BaF 2, and Cu under a pressure of 5×10-5 Torr of O2. The films were later annealed in a separate chamber under a flowing O2-H2O atmosphere. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that the resulting structure is highly oriented with the a axis perpendicular to the substrate. Scanning electron micrographs show a morphology consisting of an array of orthogonal, interconnecting bars with well-developed junctions. High-resolution electron microscopy and electron diffraction patterns show that these junctions are atomically abrupt and that the associated c axes are mutually perpendicular. These epitaxial films show a sharp resistive transition with Tc(R=0) as high as 90 K. The zero field critical current density, determined from magnetization measurements, is 2.9×106 A/cm2 at 4.2 K and 5.0×104 A/cm2 at 77 K.
electron beams
electron guns
critical current
diffraction patterns
electron diffraction
magnetization
Wang, X. K., Sheng, K. C., Lee, S. J., Shen, Y. H., Song, S. N., Li, D. X., ... Ketterson, J. B. (1989). Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation. Applied Physics Letters, 54(16), 1573-1575. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.101317
Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation. / Wang, X. K.; Sheng, K. C.; Lee, S. J.; Shen, Y. H.; Song, S. N.; Li, D. X.; Chang, Robert P. H.; Ketterson, J. B.
Wang, XK, Sheng, KC, Lee, SJ, Shen, YH, Song, SN, Li, DX, Chang, RPH & Ketterson, JB 1989, 'Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation', Applied Physics Letters, vol. 54, no. 16, pp. 1573-1575. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.101317
Wang XK, Sheng KC, Lee SJ, Shen YH, Song SN, Li DX et al. Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation. Applied Physics Letters. 1989;54(16):1573-1575. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.101317
Wang, X. K. ; Sheng, K. C. ; Lee, S. J. ; Shen, Y. H. ; Song, S. N. ; Li, D. X. ; Chang, Robert P. H. ; Ketterson, J. B. / Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation. In: Applied Physics Letters. 1989 ; Vol. 54, No. 16. pp. 1573-1575.
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title = "Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation",
abstract = "Thin films of YBaCu(F)O were deposited on SrTiO3(100) substrates by multilayer deposition from three electron guns containing Y, BaF 2, and Cu under a pressure of 5×10-5 Torr of O2. The films were later annealed in a separate chamber under a flowing O2-H2O atmosphere. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that the resulting structure is highly oriented with the a axis perpendicular to the substrate. Scanning electron micrographs show a morphology consisting of an array of orthogonal, interconnecting bars with well-developed junctions. High-resolution electron microscopy and electron diffraction patterns show that these junctions are atomically abrupt and that the associated c axes are mutually perpendicular. These epitaxial films show a sharp resistive transition with Tc(R=0) as high as 90 K. The zero field critical current density, determined from magnetization measurements, is 2.9×106 A/cm2 at 4.2 K and 5.0×104 A/cm2 at 77 K.",
author = "Wang, {X. K.} and Sheng, {K. C.} and Lee, {S. J.} and Shen, {Y. H.} and Song, {S. N.} and Li, {D. X.} and Chang, {Robert P. H.} and Ketterson, {J. B.}",
T1 - Oriented thin films of YBaCu(F)O with high Tc and Jc prepared by electron beam multilayer evaporation
AU - Wang, X. K.
AU - Sheng, K. C.
AU - Shen, Y. H.
AU - Song, S. N.
AU - Li, D. X.
AU - Ketterson, J. B.
N2 - Thin films of YBaCu(F)O were deposited on SrTiO3(100) substrates by multilayer deposition from three electron guns containing Y, BaF 2, and Cu under a pressure of 5×10-5 Torr of O2. The films were later annealed in a separate chamber under a flowing O2-H2O atmosphere. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that the resulting structure is highly oriented with the a axis perpendicular to the substrate. Scanning electron micrographs show a morphology consisting of an array of orthogonal, interconnecting bars with well-developed junctions. High-resolution electron microscopy and electron diffraction patterns show that these junctions are atomically abrupt and that the associated c axes are mutually perpendicular. These epitaxial films show a sharp resistive transition with Tc(R=0) as high as 90 K. The zero field critical current density, determined from magnetization measurements, is 2.9×106 A/cm2 at 4.2 K and 5.0×104 A/cm2 at 77 K.
AB - Thin films of YBaCu(F)O were deposited on SrTiO3(100) substrates by multilayer deposition from three electron guns containing Y, BaF 2, and Cu under a pressure of 5×10-5 Torr of O2. The films were later annealed in a separate chamber under a flowing O2-H2O atmosphere. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that the resulting structure is highly oriented with the a axis perpendicular to the substrate. Scanning electron micrographs show a morphology consisting of an array of orthogonal, interconnecting bars with well-developed junctions. High-resolution electron microscopy and electron diffraction patterns show that these junctions are atomically abrupt and that the associated c axes are mutually perpendicular. These epitaxial films show a sharp resistive transition with Tc(R=0) as high as 90 K. The zero field critical current density, determined from magnetization measurements, is 2.9×106 A/cm2 at 4.2 K and 5.0×104 A/cm2 at 77 K.