In my wild opinionated youth, I was something of a disdainer. Where other readers and writers widely explored what certain genres had to offer; I tended to stick with the first thing that brought me in the door. I liked Star Wars, and never found another sci-fi world that interested me until I read Heinlein.… Read More Entertainment vs. Edutainment: The New Pulp Narrative
In the last Shallow & Pedantic podcast, I went off on an extended tear on a literary podcast that I used to listen to with great interest, but stopped. I removed the section from the finished product, but I’d like to address it now. A while ago, I became the kind of guy who Listens… Read More Rabbit Riot, or The Mystery of the Missing Micro-Press
There’s a new publishing platform out there called SubStack. I heard about it on Twitter. It looks cool, it’s free to use, and it’s got a bunch of features like MailChimp that cost extra on WordPress (the number of things this blog doesn’t have because I don’t feel like shelling out for a WordPress business… Read More SubStack, Marketing Lamentations, and Cover Design Refreshes
As you can see from the episode list, this is our longest episode to date. We ramble along quite nicely, thanks to some excellent porter, and give Stephen Brust and Fritz Leiber some shout-outs for being creative, witty worldbuilders and writers. We’re also up on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Deezer, and YouTube, with iHeartRadio… Read More New Shallow & Pedantic Podcast: Brust & Leiber
This became a minor meme boomlet for a few days last week: Obviously, the first response, the intended response, is laughter. A political meeting is a ridiculous place to discuss what pub food is called. On top of that, you can pull/impose a “commentary on the absurdity of our politics” if you’re in the mood.… Read More The Saucy Nugs Guy and The Treachery of Rhetoric
It seems that people have been left by their education unable to put values in the correct order. People who consider themselves intelligent and sober are defending twerking 11-year-olds for no better reason than to annoy conservatives, because apparently child exploitation doesn’t count if it’s done on the set of a movie in France. Let’s… Read More I Don’t Care If Cuties is a Good Movie
Jean Artur Rimbaud wrote strange prose-poems in the Belle Epoque. He was an exceedingly odd duck: not ostentatiously wierd like Van Gogh, but the sort of man who could drop everything and spend his final years as an arms-dealer in North Africa. He’s kind of like William Burroughs, except his stuff is short enough so… Read More Rimbaud Dreams of War
Much of Ruskin’s On the Nature of Gothic involves a pre-Marxist critique of industrialization. I’m not sure if it qualifies as being From the Right, as I’m not certain of Ruskin’s politics, but it reads very Romantic, which is at least half a Reactionary movement. The old-school Romantics and Goths gazed back at pre-modern “natural”… Read More Notes on Ruskin: The Absurd Rule
No, not really. That’s the sort of click-bait stuff that everyone talks about as the Almagamation of Awesome, but no one actually reads. And with good reason. Juxtaposition for its own sake usually hides a paucity of narrative. Instead, an authorial update to announce progress. First, I have in fact, completed a thing long talked… Read More Caligulia Fights Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
I’ve never seen Black Panther. I think the last MCU movie I saw was the first Avengers. This is due to indifference. I’m not big into Marvel, and only slightly more into DC (the last DC movie I saw was Dark Knight Rises, which doesn’t count). That whole journey went right by me. Don’t take… Read More Chadwick Boseman’s Death is a Reminder of All That We Do Not Know
Content Blues 