Please do yourself a favor...

...and don't use your credit card as a book mark.

Thank you.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Book Review] Accelerando

Image
Accelerando / Charles Stross ( Powell's Books ) Manfred Macx lives on the cutting edge of future thought, and the future is coming at us whether we want it or not.  The whole concept of humanity and sentience is changing. A singularity of human existence.  Only as we become the aliens we learn there may be something else out there, and it might not have our best interests in mind.  Accelerando is a multi-generational story of post-singularity humanity and evolution. Accelerando was the July (yes, I know, it's November, this has been a difficult few months) pick for Virtual Speculation.  I find Charles Stross' Science Fiction intelligent, witty, and fascinating, with the added bonus of the author's strong information technology knowledge set.  His near future (or alternative current day) science fiction explores the what-ifs of technology and culture. The book is curious and quirky.  An idea seeded from the experiences working in IT during the late...
Read more

The Brothers Grimm & Clever Deception

As part of Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World I write weekly short essays (270-320 words).  Our first week looked at Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm from 1882 (full text available via Open Library ).  For credit on any submitted assignment each student then peer reviews 5 other students' essays on From and Content, each graded on a scale of 1 to 3, with 2 as the expected adequate work grade. What struck me very early on in this translation and edition of the Grimm's Fairy Tales is that they by-and-large were stories of utterly horrible people.  That seemed as good of a starting point as any for a short essay. The fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm are not by-and-large morality tales, but instead often tales celebrating clever deception and manipulation.  Often the rewards go not to the virtuous or deserving but to the one who thinks on their feet and is not caught.  For example, Clever Gretel is selfish,...
Read more

The Hobbit : An Expected Journey - Chapter 12

Image
Wherein Bilbo is sassy to everyone, we get to meet a dragon, and Laketown pays for everyone's hubris. I've said it before, and now Tolkien is saying it,  the dwarfs are not heroes .  This is not their hero story, it's Bilbo's. "The most that can be said of dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor little fellow doing it if he would; but they had would have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reason for being grateful to him.  There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect much." Bilbo's been gradually finding ...
Read more