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Monday , 3, August 2023 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentPublishing (Walker’s Retreat): Rothfuss got outed as another Martin-tier procrastinator by his editor today. He ain’t the only one. ‘Kingkiller Chronicle’ Editor Believes Author Hasn’t Written Anything for Years http://t.co/SLM3CAGEXd— LJ Ramones (@LjRamones) July 29, 2023 This is a major problem with OldPub authors. Scalzi’s been hammered for it. Scott Lynch got nailed for it. Years-long delays that fuck up publication schedules and hurt both the actual target for OldPub authors (the publishers) and the purported target (the readers) accordingly are too common, and sadly not even for reasons one could excuse if there were measurable results to offset them.
T.V. (RMWC Reviews): The third of Tsuburaya Productions 10th anniversary
shows, Jumborg Ace was different from Ultraman Taro and Fireman in that it was chock full of robots. Jumborg Ace began airing on January 17, 1973 on Mainichi Broadcasting System, the show ran for 50 episodes and was primarily produced by staff who had previously worked on Mirrorman under the direction of Yoshiyuki Kuroda.
New (Wasteland & Sky): Finally, today is the day we’ve been waiting for. The Pulp Mindset is out for everyone on amazon. This guide has been in the
works for awhile and now I can finally show you just what I’ve been working on behind the scenes for the past couple of months. It’s a guide for new creatives who wish to understand just how to approach art in the modern age, and for those who wish to understand just what this NewPub thing is about. You can find it on amazon here. Read More
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Sunday , 2, August 2023 T.V. 3 Comments
A case can be made that Miami Vice was the quintessential crime show of the 1980s. The show caught my notice in 1984 when home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I watched episodes on rerun in summer 1985 and made the effort to watch the second season. The show was stylish with the sun, glamor, pastels, cars, music.
Somewhere along the line I lost interest by the third season. That is how I missed “Viking Bikers from Hell.” It originally aired April 3, 1987. It did not help that Miami Vice ran at 9:00 P.M. Eastern on Friday nights. I was generally going out at that time. Read More
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Saturday , 1, August 2023 Uncategorized Leave a comment
“They called me [Hell’s Legionnaire] in the company. They couldn’t understand why I never had anything to do with women or liquor. They thought the devil was saving me for same vast purpose.”
Best known for being the king grifter of a genre known for its rats, L. Ron Hubbard’s literary career is overshadowed by his involvement with Scientology. Perhaps the casual reader might recall Battlefield: Earth or another of his science fiction tales. But Hubbard wrote fifteen million words in over 200 publications under 16 different names. Like many of his contemporaries in the pulps, Hubbard did not limit himself to one genre. Although science fiction would later define him, Hubbard wrote air adventures, sea adventures, Westerns, chinoiserie, and mysteries. But it’s to the once-popular Foreign Legion stories we turn to today, with Hubbard’s “Hell’s Legionnaire”, originally published in July 1935’s Mystery Adventures.
“Hell’s Legionnaire” begins in the thick of an ambush. In classic pulp fashion, Hubbard assumes readers are familiar with the brass and tack of the period and spares no time in the action to bring new readers up to speed on legionnaire jargon. Grab a dictionary or the glossary modern editors have appended to the end of the collection. Context alone is not always enough. After the dying is over, Ann is looted by the raiders.
What follows next might better fit the spicies and the weird menace genres. Ann is stripped then lashed by her captor, Abd el Malek, and is only saved from rape by the bugle of the French Legion. Or rather, a single deserter, Dusty Colton. Colton ambushes the camp with his automatic rifle, then frees Ann. But tickets back to America cost money, so Colton and Ann hatch a scheme to steal Abd el Malek’s fortune. Read More
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Saturday , 1, August 2023 Uncategorized Leave a commentDiscover interstellar cops, cyberpunk agents, and vengeance-driven chi cultivators in this week’s new releases.
Alliance Rising (The Star Guild Saga #3) – Brandon Ellis
The aliens want her dead. Easier said than done.
Ali, archaeologist and expert at cuneiform translation, knows about the long-departed Anunnaki slavers, not just because of the ancient writings she has found in Mesopotamia, but because she has their blood running through her veins.
Now Ali’s found a terrifying truth:
The Anunnaki are coming back.
The powers afforded by Ali’s dangerous mixed blood make it just conceivable she can stop them… once she hooks up with the Space Templars.
Oh, and they have to fix a little problem: the Anunnaki left behind portals all around the Earth through which they can pour millions of troops in a matter of minutes.
So the race is on:
Can Ali kill the portals before the Anunnaki kill her?
Edenet (Singularity Sunrise #1) – Kit Sun Cheah
The 22nd century brings an era of technological wonders—and horrors. Cybernetics and genetic engineering. Mass surveillance and social credit. Full body cyborgs and nanoscale engineering. And the pinnacle of human achievement: machine intelligence.
Edenet is the next generation of the Internet. Designed by Anatol Corporation, it will bring the power of a supercomputer to the fingertips of every user, anywhere in the world. At the heart of Edenet lies a cutting-edge artificial intelligence that regulates all traffic on the network.
And one of its lead scientists has disappeared.
Fearing the worst, Anatol hires psychic contractor James Morgan to track her down. Accompanying him is Eligia Ogrod, the mysterious assistant to Anatol’s CEO. Their investigation takes them through the militarized streets of Warsaw, a corporate fortress in Shenzhen, and the human hives of Hong Kong.
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And what is the truth behind Edenet?
The Elements (Silver Coin Saga Book 1) – Mark Stallings
Death comes with the Harvest. Salvation lies in the Valley of the Moon, along the path of Martial Magic.
Xan always assumed he would be apprenticed to an herbalist in the sleepy village of Mogu and follow the Path of Peace, just like his father before him. It is the way—has always been the way.
But when his village is sacked by a raiding force of vicious monsters, corrupted by dark Qi, life as Xan knows it is over. Family dead. Villagers slain. His home burnt to ash.
Now, all Xan wants to do is figure out why his people were targeted and get revenge on the merciless creatures sweeping across the continent like a plague of locusts. Spreading their vile corruption. His only hope at salvation and retribution lies in the Valley of the Moon, at the fabled Xing Yi School of Martial Magic. If he is to succeed, he will need to learn to cultivate the energy of the elements, hone his martial and crafting skills, and complete the school’s harsh tests and trials. It will take more than a passing grade at this school, though, and not all that fail survive the experience…
Memetic Drift (Sol Arbiter #4) – J. N. Chaney and Jia Shen
“They call us Arbiters. We arbitrate conflict to keep the peace.”
In 2853, humanity has established a presence across the solar system. Linked by a network of FTL gateways called Boson Apertures, travel between the 7 colonized worlds and thousands of space colonies takes only hours.
The Sol Federation is the final authority, and the Arbiters travel the system to maintain order.
In 2854, Section 9 uncovers the location of an illegal technology that could unmask a member of The Eleven, their mysterious enemy. Tycho Barrett is grievously wounded during a mission to seize this technology from aboard a ship docked in a remote settlement on Europa, his life saved with cutting-edge cybernetic augmentation.
Tycho and Section 9 must now race against both time and a revenant from the past to recapture the ship and its cargo before the trail vanishes and The Eleven once again return to the shadows. Read More
黑洞加速器在线下载苹果
Monday , 27, July 2023 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentTolkien (Scifi Scribe): If you want to create a high fantasy game that is in the same vein as Tolkien and checks off all those “woke” boxes you so desperately want to check off, you can easily do so without using any of the characters or places in his classic work. It isn’t that hard to do. I did it. Its called Minya’s Legacy. The game never got produced but I created the entire story and bible for it. I’ve been considering making it into a full-blown novel down the line.
Comic Books (Tentaculii): The third volume of the sumptuous Savage 
Sword of Conan reprints is now shipping in the USA, including a 160-page Conan the Buccaneer adaptation that is effectively a graphic novel. No sign of the book on the UK Amazon, though. Volume 4 is now announced there for November 2023, adding another 900+ pages of reprints.
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Sunday , 26, July 2023 T.V. 电脑上搭梯子
挂梯子上外网教程 was my favorite T.V. series of the 1980s. The basis of the show was Robert McCall (Edward Woodward), a spy, calls it quits and decides to help people in trouble. Set in 1980s New York City, it was the anti-Miami Vice. It was dark, gritty, and infused with a Cold War paranoia. No sun and pastel in this show.
A friend of mine from college that I ran into told me about the show. I did not start watching it until summer 1986 on re-runs. I was hooked. It was about the only show made a point of taking time out to watch.
“China Rain” was the second episode and I believe the first one I saw. It originally ran September 25, 1985. Read More
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Saturday , 25, July 2023 Uncategorized 求一个电脑上能用的梯子
With the recent publishing of Mortu and Kyrus stories in 电脑上搭梯子 and The Penultimate Men, let us revisit the first, “Mortu and Kyrus in the White City.”
“Come then, try my steel and I will send you to hell where you belong. The gods of my people look down upon those that prey on the weak. There is no honor in it. There is no honor in you. I will enjoy killing you.”–Mortu
In Mortu and Kyrus in the White City, Schuyler Hernstrom returns to sword and sorcery, blending Dying Earth, Mad Max, and even a little Shaw Brothers kung fu into a future Earth recovering from the heavy hand of an alien overlord. The namesakes Mortu and Kyrus, a pagan motorcycle barbarian from the North and a Christian monk from Zantyum respectively, are on a quest to break the sorcerer’s spell that chains Kyrus into the form of a monkey. On the long road, they find a caravan attacked by nomads and a wayward Christian knight. Mortu and Kyrus intervene with a few sharp strokes of Mortu’s axe, and in gratitude, the caravan invites the duo to their White City. Within moments of their arrival, Mortu and Kyrus are swept up in the dark secrets beneath the foundations of the City.
Following in the well-worn path of sword-and-sorcery duos inspired by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Mortu and Kyrus split the questing responsibilities in the traditional way. When presented with a mystery, Kyrus, as befitting a trickster or a thief, discovers why the mystery happens, while dour Mortu is called in to make sure the mystery ends. But Mortu is more in the mold of Conan than Fafhrd, a barbarian suspicious of civilization, not infatuated with it. Kyrus is a blend of Eastern and Western monk archtypes, a true believer, but a wandering monk nonetheless, full of the trickery and misfortune that such monks herald. Laudably, Hernstrom does not take the easy route and make Kyrus a hypocrite.
But then Hernstrom refuses the easy path throughout Mortu and Kyrus. None of the Christian characters are treated as hypocrites and monsters, a rarity in a genre that has long been hostile to Christianity (as E. Hoffman Price’s The Book of the Dead reveals). He treats the Cross as a civilizing force and a general good, although one Mortu still remains skeptical if it is an absolute good. While this is the first adventure available to readers, this is not an origin story. Mortu and Kyrus’s relationship is presented as established, and we are not forced to follow detailed stories of how Mortu and Kyrus met, how Kyrus got turned into a monkey, or of Mortu’s earlier life as a solo adventurer. At best, we see quick mentions, no more than needed in the course of brief conversation. The departure from current fashion is refreshing, and it hints at a greater world beyond the White City. Hernstrom deftly balances the mysteries of his wider world with the immediacy of sword and sorcery action. He accomplishes more worldbuilding with a few scraps of description than most writers accomplish with paragraphs of exposition. The effect is reminiscent of Vance’s The Last Castle, where entire swaths of human history are revealed in snatches of description and custom.
If Mortu and Kyrus seems a bit more predictable than Hernstrom’s previous works, it is because he has stepped up to the Great Conversation, “the ongoing process of writers and thinkers referencing, building on, and refining the work of their predecessors.” Here, readers can see the outlines of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, a particularly notable short work dealing with the dilemma of a hedonistic Eden fueled by the suffering of one innocent. The ones who cannot accept that their paradise requires the intentional suffering and neglect of a child walk away from the city, unwilling to benefit from his suffering, but unwilling to rescue the child. Omelas has been a popular parable in science fiction, revisited time and again, and by such notable shows as Doctor Who. At best, the protagonists rescue the child, but leave the society intact. Few, if any, render judgement against the people who benefited from the abuse of the child, nor prevent that society from finding a new child to torment for their pleasures. Mortu settles the Omelas dilemma with an older, more satisfying approach:
“You may talk of cities and justice all you wish. Tonight, the pagan wins. My anger will be sated and these wicked people brought to ruin.”
It is the approach of the hero, the pagan barbarian, and the Christian knight, illustrated in blood and adrenaline. One where actions matter more than intentions, and honor has meaning.
Fortunately, Mortu and Kyrus in the White City promises to be the first of many adventures for the barbarian biker and the monkey monk. Whether Hernstrom sets out to gore more sacred cows or just let Mortu gore more villains, I eagerly await the next.
So that was back in 2018. What about now?
Time has not dulled my love for this series, nor my wait for more adventures. Mortu’s rage still provides eminently quotable lines that still run true. And others have 手机怎么搭梯子到外网 to better effect about Omelas and the moral aspects of Mortu and Kyrus.
Instead, let us turn to a different aspect of Hernstrom’s writing.
Alexandru Constantin has argued that much of today’s writing style is too thin to support the heft of many story’s themes, ideas, and action. Until recently, I had yet to see that. Until “The Battlefield of Kerres” by Jim Breyfogle. The earlier adventures of Mongoose and Meerkat are somewhat undermined by today’s contemporary classic style, although later stories are growing into something stylistic that matches the stories. Other authors have had the same problem, including a good many taught by the community around the Life, the Universe, and Everything writers’ convention. There are good lessons for craft from those circles, but the style taught there is plain, transparent, and so thin that the outline blocks and concepts can be seen like a skeleton beneath the prose.
Sky Hernstrom instead uses a deliberate style to give Mortu and Kyrus an otherworldly almost dreamlike tone that carries the moral dilemma and axe and sorcery forward to its conclusion. Mortu’s dialogue is quotable, not because it is clever or whimsical, as too many writers try for, because it is heroic, with care to the best phrasing possible. I will leave it to others more skilled in English to dissect the Hernstrom style, but read a long section of Mortu and Kyrus, The Gift of the Ob-Men, or The Law of the Wolves out loud. You will hear the difference and how a heroic style gives heroic deeds more impact.
I remain in awe of Hernstrom’s ability to imply entire civilizations worth of history in only a couple sentences. If there is one regret to the past couple years since Mortu and Kyrus was originally published, it is that the original cover is no longer used for the story. But the increased reach offered to Hernstrom by DMR Books is worth that sacrifice.
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黑洞加速器在线下载苹果
Saturday , 25, July 2023 Uncategorized 1 CommentUncover professional wizards, generation colony ships, heroes from another world, and buried alien starships in this week’s new releases.
Dragontiarna: Defenders – Jonathan Moeller
The realm of Andomhaim reels beneath the invasion of Warlord Agravhask, and Ridmark stands in his path.
Ridmark knows that Agravhask is only the servant of the mighty Warden of Urd Morlemoch, and the realm must be ready to face its true foe.
But the Warden knows that Ridmark can stop him, and has dispatched the Heralds of Ruin to slay the Shield Knight.
Third of Nightmane Forest has seen the trap, and rushes to save her friend.
If she fails, the Warden and his dark Heralds will triumph, and darkness will swallow the world…
Entropy (Forgotten Starship #3) – M. R. Forbes
The generation starship Pioneer continues her centuries-long journey across the vastness of space. Joseph has returned to hibernation. The passengers are safe.
For now.
When the ship suffers an unexpected malfunction, Preslan is brought in to help identify the source. Joining Tyson on the bridge, it isn’t long before they determine there’s more to the anomaly than meets the eye.
Much, much more.
Not only is the ship off-course and headed into the middle of an ancient intergalactic war, but their best defense against the looming danger is the same thing that’s forcing them into it.
The stakes are higher, the odds are greater and time is running out. If they can’t escape the impending chaos, it won’t only be the passengers and crew of Pioneer that are lost…
…it’ll be the entire human race.
Peace Talks (Dresden Files #16) – Jim Butcher
As a professional wizard, Harry Dresden knows firsthand that the “everyday” world is actually full of strange and magical things—and most of them don’t play well with humans. And those that do enjoy playing with humans far too much. He also knows he’s the best at what he does. Technically, he’s the only at what he does. But even though Harry is the only game in town, business—to put it mildly—stinks.
When the Supernatural nations of the world meet up to negotiate an end to ongoing hostilities, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, joins the White Council’s security team to make sure the talks stay civil. But can he succeed, when dark political manipulations threaten the very existence of Chicago—and all he holds dear?
Pearl (Murphy’s Lawless #5) – Mark Wandrey and Charles E. Gannon
Taken from their planet and their century, they are…the Lost Soldiers.
Some of the hijacked Twentieth Century troops known as the Lost Soldiers have made planetfall on R’Bak and are working to establish their base there, but their commander, Major Murphy, has a problem. He knows there are weapons and equipment caches that haven’t been activated yet by their immediate enemies—the Satraps—although they are moving as quickly as they can to get to the caches so they can turn those weapons upon their new off-world foes.
Victor Allen Thomas—“Vat” to his friends—was escaping an arms deal gone bad when the helicopter carrying him crashed and he was hijacked by the mysterious Ktor. While he had military experience, he had left the military years before under suspicious circumstances. With a general discharge in his past, he shouldn’t even have been in Somalia to begin with.
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But Vat has never been good at forming relationships. He’s going to have to overcome that failing, because there are only two possible outcomes for his mission. Either he finds the pearls of great price that will allow the Terrans to securely establish themselves on R’Bak, or—if he doesn’t—the future of Murphy’s Lawless isn’t merely bleak; it’s likely to be nonexistent. Read More
黑洞加速器在线下载苹果
Tuesday , 21, July 2023 Book Review 8 CommentsThis is a guest post by Richard who has contributed a few pieces before:
Edward Frankland’s Forgotten Masterpiece
There can be few people these days familiar with the work of 
Edward Frankland (1884-1958). And even amongst this minority far fewer still will be conversant with his 1932 novel of Viking Westmorland entitled HUGE AS SIN. If Frankland himself can be said to have fallen into unwarranted obscurity over the years then it is no hyperbole to describe his novel as having all but evaporated from existence. Since the time a copy came my way by fortuitous circumstances I have yet to discover even one other being offered for sale anywhere. And as Thor and Odin are my witnesses I have looked hard enough. It is bad in itself that Frankland is being deprived of a readership and acclaim that he merits but the rarity of HUGE AS SIN is doubly regrettable because, in my estimation, it is nothing less than a lost masterpiece.
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Sensor Sweep: Viking Bikers From Hell, Lovecraft & Hemingway, Hadon of Ancient Opar
Monday , 20, July 2023 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentT.V. (Bare Bone E-zine): But Milius’ mark on Sutter’s creative process may go
far beyond simple story and dialogue. A more concrete clue lies in Milius’ end credits when Miami Vice scenes and the superimposed B-movie episode title “Viking Bikers from Hell,” pseudonymously written in 1987 by Milius, flash across the screen with other clips from his filmography. Though Sons of Anarchy is stylistically, tonally, and philosophically different from Milius’ episode, it is not a leap to see how it put the gas in the tank of Sutter’s imagination.
手机怎么搭梯子到外网(DMR Books): One of Lovecraft’s earliest stories written as an adult 
is “Dagon.” After his ship is sunk by German U-boats, a castaway finds himself on an unknown island. There he encounters the title creature. This story is one of Lovecraft’s earliest and one of his lesser ones; however it still has elements of genuine terror. Read More
The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly III
Sunday , 19, July 2023 电脑上搭梯子, Short Fiction 求一个电脑上能用的梯子
Every two years, a new 梯子助手怎么用-百度经验:2021-12-10 · 梯子助手怎么用,助手的应用有利于科学论文的研究，能及时跟进国际上的先进知识，通过分析得出实验结果并且应用，那么助手工具到底应该怎么用呢？本文介绍有关经验伍供参考。 volume is out. I reviewed Volume 1 in 2016, Volume II in 2018.
The Best of Heroic Fantasy III covers 2013-2015. Format is trade paperback. Cover is classic sword and sorcery by Robert Zoltan, 289 pages of text with a few end pages on Kickstarter contributors. Fourteen stories and seven poems.
Introduction by Darrell Schweitzer entitled “Sword and Sorcery is What I Mean.”
I originally read Charles Gramlich’s “A Whisper in Ashes” in Twilight Echoes. It appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly first. It has a northern setting featuring Krieg. Krieg comes across a village with a problem. Krieg agrees to help the Jarl in dealing with a supernatural menace. Read More
The Curse of the Golden Skull
Saturday , 18, July 2023 Uncategorized 2 Comments
First published in The Howard Collector, Spring 1967, VPS 搭梯子指南——shadowsocks+BBR+obfs | Solarck:玩电脑 (current) 关于我 简历 VPS 搭梯子指南——shadowsocks+ BBR +obfs 近期开会导致墙越来越高，迫不得已升级自建的 ss 服务，由于 shadowsocks 原版已经停更，shadowsocksR 也已经删库，所伍就 …, by Robert E. Howard, resembles a prose poem in the same vein as Clark Ashton Smith’s “Chinoiserie”. While there is a narrative thread throughout the short story, it does not, at first glance, map to conventional dramatic structure. The three sections, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”, “The Emerald Interlude”, and “The Orchids of Death” obscure the structure.
The first section deals with the prehistoric perils of an ancient and now doomed magician:
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Rotath spends his dying moment cursing the gods that allowed him to die. As their dark servants come for him, this sorcerer casts one last desperate and spiteful spell that changes his body, one that he hopes will wreak havoc across the ages.
In the “Emerald Interlude”, the ages pass:
Years stretched into centuries, centuries became ages. The green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible. Thrones toppled and silver trumpets fell silent forever. The races of men passed as smoke drifts from the breast of a summer. The roaring jade green seas engulfed the lands and all mountains sank, even the highest mountain of Lemuria.
That’s the entire interlude, a descriptive section filled with as much tumult and cataclysmic action as can be fit into 64 words. And, in its way, it’s emblematic of the entire “The Curse of the Golden Skull”. Howard comes out swinging with his descriptions and fills the story with the struggle of the fight. The Jeffro Johnson test for covers (have people busy with action instead of standing around looking cool) applies here. And this is just the contemplative section denoting that the time is passing.
The final section, “The Orchids of Death”, picks up with an unnamed adventurer discovering the skull and skeleton of gold:
What long dead artisan had shaped the thing with such incredible skill? He bent closer, noting the rounded ball-and-socket of the joints, the slight depressions on flat surfaces where muscles had been attached. And he started as the stupendous truth was borne upon him.
The adventurer, of course, is doomed. But is it from the curse or from natural causes? Like most short stories of the era, it all hinges on a twist at the end, a terrible denouement that alters everything that has come before.
The sections and the uneven lengths obscure the dramatic structure present. The first line immediately thrusts a problem upon Rotath. 600 words in, almost the exact center of the story, Rotath attempts his spiteful defiance, the turning point for the story. And in the last lines, we learn whether or not his dying action succeeded. This follows the conventional five-act dramatic structure, albeit with an abbreviated introduction and denouement, and without acts. And Howard’s conflict-filled prose is well suited for drama, even if ages fly past in mere lines.
“The Curse of the Golden Skull” was a happy little discovery nestled deep in the lines of a search engine. As such, it is a delightfully harrowing read that rewards the critical eye’s scrutiny. For, like a good house, the construction is as sound as the facade is beautiful.