Semi-ironic (if possibly-obvious) thought of the day: contemporary novels evoking Jane Austen and set in the Regency era dating scene are much less like the hard-edged contemporary satire Austen wrote than like the pseudo-historical yarns of Walter Scott. Who is usually held up as the exact opposite of Austen. This is probably especially true in […]
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Happy New Year to all and sundry! Here’s my latest post at Black Gate, a look at Sean Howe’s recent book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Worth looking at, I thought, for people interested in the field.
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Just a note to say that the inactivity around here the past few days hasn’t just been due to Christmas running-around, but to my now-traditional Christmas Flu (or possibly Christmas Really Bad Cold. Tough to say). I seem to be on the mend, so hope to be posting again regularly soon. And to have fiction […]
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Earlier tonight I watched a copy of an episode of the PBS TV show Nova about the building of medieval cathedrals. Some fascinating material in there, and solid information, though I felt it was jazzed up a bit more than needed (architectural surveyors use LASERS! Also, medieval masons may have incorporated references to the Bible […]
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It’s been a while since I reviewed the posts I’ve put up here on the blog, so I’ll just do that now.
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I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate about my bad habits in reading. It’s stuff that’s difficult to articulate, but I think I managed to express myself. I’m particularly happy I managed to mention the way sentences in prose act like panels in comics, insofar as I’m increasingly fascinated by the disjunction between […]
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A 2005 Livejournal post by Scott Lynch has gotten a fair bit of play over the past few days. It’s a nice piece in which he demolishes a critic who wrote in to complain about the existence of a middle-aged female pirate in one of Lynch’s books (oddly, the reader claims female pirates are unrealistic […]
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I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate, trying to put into words what makes J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth’s Moonshadow so powerful. I don’t know if I wholly succeeded. Judge for yourself here.
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A brief conversation the other day on Facebook led me to refer to the Dunning-Kruger effect: briefly, the tendency for stupid or incompetent people not to realise how stupid or incompetent they are, and therefore believe themselves to be highly intelligent and highly incompetent. Basically, the more sure you are about something, the more likely […]
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Another post from me today at Black Gate. After being pretty ill last week, I got last week’s post up Saturday, then today’s post should have been up yesterday. However, I’m all caught up now, which is good. The post itself is about Zenna Henderson, and her collection The Anything Box. It’s 1950s sf that […]
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