Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
From Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash, which is good reading for anybody interested in the intersection of information technology, Sumerian / Babylonian mythology and the franchise system. Well, it’s good for everybody else, too.
Anyway. Universal truth, there – at least, it’s resonated with every guy I’ve ever shown it to – but there’s not really much you can do with the information, is there? Except wait for individual males to get past being 25, I suppose.
Liar's Shout (and Liar's Shout Royale) Alchemical Ritual This alchemical talisman always comes as a brooch or necklace; when activated, it uses the Corporeal Song of Cacophony to give the false aural impression of mortality. Someone wearing an activated Shout...
Liar's Shout (and Liar's Shout Royale) Alchemical Ritual This alchemical talisman always comes as a brooch or necklace; when activated, it uses the Corporeal Song of Cacophony to give the false aural impression of mortality. Someone wearing an activated Shout...
Liar's Shout (and Liar's Shout Royale) Alchemical Ritual This alchemical talisman always comes as a brooch or necklace; when activated, it uses the Corporeal Song of Cacophony to give the false aural impression of mortality. Someone wearing an activated Shout...
If you’re the sort of person who thinks that mixing higher mathematics, spy fiction, and the Cthulhu Mythos is kind of cool… well, you’ve probably already read The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. On the other hand, if the idea’s never actually occurred to you before, or you’re just looking for a good couple of books, you should pick these two up. Stross is a fun writer with a good eye for combining horror and science fiction; his alternate histories (the most developed being the Merchant Princes series; a couple of good ones can be found in his short story collection Toast) are likewise well-conceived. The space opera that he’s done has not really reeled me in as much, but there’s nothing wrong with it; I’m just more of a E. E. “Doc” Smith type.
CBS itself put them up there, in full, and in high-definition: you can’t embed them, and there are ads, but from what I can tell these are the originals, not the hacked-up syndication versions, so good deal all around.
Here’s Mirror, Mirror, which I looked up mostly because my wife and I were trying to remember whether Star Trek: TOS costuming allowed you to see belly buttons. Apparently, the answer is yes.
Kicking a man once he’s safely out of power and can’t kick back doesn’t diminish him; it merely diminishes you. But, hey: message received, Mr. President.
In the Fahrenheit 451 sense, that is. For those three or four individuals out there not aware of the book, it was set in a world where literature was banned and burned on sight, for reasons which were never adequately explained; and apparently the only way to keep books alive was to memorize them – probably because 99% of Golden Age SF/Fantasy writers were all about the flying cars, rather than convenient and ubiquitous data storage.
Not that I don’t love Ray Bradbury’s stuff anyway.
Anyway, I’m Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s Lepanto. I know that one so well that I can rap it Beastie Boys style (never listen to Licensed to Ill three times running while on a trip, is all I’m saying).
and 
. On the other hand, if the idea’s never actually occurred to you before, or you’re just looking for a good couple of books, you should pick these two up. Stross is a fun writer with a good eye for combining horror and science fiction; his alternate histories (the most developed being the 
) are likewise well-conceived. The space opera that he’s done has not really reeled me in as much, but there’s nothing wrong with it; I’m just more of a 
sense, that is. For those three or four individuals out there not aware of the book, it was set in a world where literature was banned and burned on sight, for reasons which were never adequately explained; and apparently the only way to keep books alive was to memorize them – probably because 99% of Golden Age SF/Fantasy writers were all about the flying cars, rather than convenient and ubiquitous data storage.
. I know that one so well that I can rap it Beastie Boys style (never listen to 
three times running while on a trip, is all I’m saying).