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An Etymologist's View of the World features a series of maps that appear to be just regular maps, but look a little closer and you'll see that more familiar place names have been replaced with what they translate as. Totally awesome, and if you were looking for ideas on how to name places in your fantasy/sci-fi worlds, this might give you some inspiration.
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elfwreck brings us the Pagan Bingo card, for when you're really sick and tired of all the "witty" responses that come from mentioning that you're pagan/a witch/et cetera. (I haven't had this problem much, myself, since I don't really talk about spirituality all that much, even in my tight group of friends who respect me and accept me. My parents have leveled a few of these at me when I first admitted I'd turned away from Catholicism, though.)
kaigou has a series of interesting posts here and here regarding various aspects of Japanese culture with regards to the anime Mo No No Ke.
The Turkey City Lexicon gives names to various recurring patterns in genre fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Man, I wish I'd known the term "countersinking" a year or two back - I was MSTing a fic that was absolutely riddled with the problem.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term "fundies." Bzuh?!
A rather concisely humorous overview of the political clusterfuck going up in Canuckistan.
Holy crap! It's NaNoWriMo wank that has nothing to do with NaNoWriMo being the death of Real True Writing!
***
I finished reading Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters by Peter Vronsky, which I borrowed fromlysis_to_kill a couple of months back. It's a brief, accessible overview to the history and psychology of female killers, and if you're interested in the subject and don't know much of anything about it (unlike lysis_to_kill, who knows a shitload), I'd recommend it. (It would be nice to see a book on this subject done by a woman, however.)
One thing I found jarring, however, were the major shifts in Vronsky's tone that popped up every now and again in the first half of the book, but became really pronounced during the second half, especially towards the end when he begins talking about the "Nazi bitches" Irma Grese and Ilse Koch and the Manson Girls. He keeps a casually academic tone for the most part, but then you run into things like a footnote on LaVeyan Satanism on page 415 with regards to one of the Manson Girls that reads:
And then earlier on, on page 19, as an editorial comment on a quote from a radical feminist:
Whether you find his comments to be spot-on or not (I actually do think he has his points in his scathing comments regarding the ridiculous ways in which feminists of a certain stripe hold up female serial killers as martyrs and victims of a phallocentric patriarchy), they also seem ridiculously out of place in this layman's academic text, and it had me going "Just shut up and get on with the facts!" every so often. Seriously, man, what are you writing, a post for a snark community or an informational book?
***
Making progress on learning "Those Who Fight", although there's no way I'd be able to perform it in time for Borders on 12/5. Not that that particularly worries me, since it's not like that'll be the only time I'll perform there (...I hope). I am proud of being able to hit difficult notes with some relative measure of cleannesswithout completely killing my wrists or fingers, and I can roughly play the first three pages from memory now. I'm working on memorizing the next three pages (though I have a random part from them sort of memorized), and I'm learning the last three pages (which I didn't even touch the first time I had this sheet music). I can play through up to page 7 with some degree of competency now, though.
-Reileen
we're here where the daylight begins
elfwreck brings us the Pagan Bingo card, for when you're really sick and tired of all the "witty" responses that come from mentioning that you're pagan/a witch/et cetera. (I haven't had this problem much, myself, since I don't really talk about spirituality all that much, even in my tight group of friends who respect me and accept me. My parents have leveled a few of these at me when I first admitted I'd turned away from Catholicism, though.)kaigou has a series of interesting posts here and here regarding various aspects of Japanese culture with regards to the anime Mo No No Ke.The Turkey City Lexicon gives names to various recurring patterns in genre fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. Man, I wish I'd known the term "countersinking" a year or two back - I was MSTing a fic that was absolutely riddled with the problem.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term "fundies." Bzuh?!
A rather concisely humorous overview of the political clusterfuck going up in Canuckistan.
Holy crap! It's NaNoWriMo wank that has nothing to do with NaNoWriMo being the death of Real True Writing!
***
I finished reading Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters by Peter Vronsky, which I borrowed from
lysis_to_kill a couple of months back. It's a brief, accessible overview to the history and psychology of female killers, and if you're interested in the subject and don't know much of anything about it (unlike lysis_to_kill, who knows a shitload), I'd recommend it. (It would be nice to see a book on this subject done by a woman, however.)One thing I found jarring, however, were the major shifts in Vronsky's tone that popped up every now and again in the first half of the book, but became really pronounced during the second half, especially towards the end when he begins talking about the "Nazi bitches" Irma Grese and Ilse Koch and the Manson Girls. He keeps a casually academic tone for the most part, but then you run into things like a footnote on LaVeyan Satanism on page 415 with regards to one of the Manson Girls that reads:
*LaVey was the founder of the San Francisco-based Church of Satan - a pseudosatanic cult for wankers with fat wallets and small brains.
And then earlier on, on page 19, as an editorial comment on a quote from a radical feminist:
Perhaps this will yet represent a frightening future wave of feminism that will insist, as Morissey's publisher describes her book's argument, "that by denying the possibility of female agency in the crimes of torture, rape, and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human."
Please, a little less freedom and humanity for all of us then!
Whether you find his comments to be spot-on or not (I actually do think he has his points in his scathing comments regarding the ridiculous ways in which feminists of a certain stripe hold up female serial killers as martyrs and victims of a phallocentric patriarchy), they also seem ridiculously out of place in this layman's academic text, and it had me going "Just shut up and get on with the facts!" every so often. Seriously, man, what are you writing, a post for a snark community or an informational book?
***
Making progress on learning "Those Who Fight", although there's no way I'd be able to perform it in time for Borders on 12/5. Not that that particularly worries me, since it's not like that'll be the only time I'll perform there (...I hope). I am proud of being able to hit difficult notes with some relative measure of cleanness
-Reileen
we're here where the daylight begins
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