Kyle Lambert’s mashup of Toy Story and The Shining.
Author: Jonathan Frei
Romance authors get a free pass
Romance authors get a free pass
Maria Bustillos on romance novels:
So there’s no sniffy condescension or po-mo posturing in a romance novel; they’re the least stuck-up books in the world. Everybody knows that they are written and read just for kicks, and that gives the author an enviable freedom within which she may permit her imagination to run riot. And does it ever. These writers hve no authorial brakes at all, and their irrepressibility is enchanting all by itself. What other kind of author is free to name her hero Sin Watermount or Don Julio Valdares, Tarquin Roscuro or Duc Breul de Polain et Bouvais? There is generally a wild, far-flung and exotic locale: Queensland, the Western Cape of South Africa, the Scottish Highlands. There are impossible situations, natural disasters, a whole pantheon of dei ex machinis, drama galore. And there is, always, falling in love.
Although romance novels as a genera are easy to ignore, they are a deeply ingrained part of the culture.
It doesn’t matter whether you call this “serious” literature or not, really, though it seems to me that when millions and millions of people are involved in the same reading, it is very serious indeed.
What happened to newspapers?
Hint: it happened big in the 2000s? I think the chart speaks for itself:
The Ciphers of Social Media
Kevin Kelly:
[B]eware of large numbers in social media. The larger the number, the more fluffy it is.
Google+ has big numbers in their user stats, but as anyone who logs into the site can tell, it’s a ghost town. Big number on social media are good for the ego, good for selling to advertisers, but not good for much else. Direct engagement is where the real value is held.
How parents harm their kid’s education
How parents harm their kid’s education
SMBC:
“I got her a good grade.”
“Shouldn’t we let her do that on her own?”
“Well, kids these days aren’t very self-reliant.”
The modern Japan
Tom Downey:
Japan has become the most culturally cosmopolitan country on Earth, a place where you can lunch at a bistro that serves 22 types of delicious and thoroughly Gallic terrines, shop for Ivy League–style menswear at a store that puts to shame the old-school shops of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spend the evening sipping rare single malts in a serene space that boasts a collection of 12,000 jazz, blues and soul albums. The best of everything can be found here, and is now often made here: American-style fashion, haute French cuisine, classic cocktails, modern luxury hotels. It might seem perverse for a traveler to Tokyo to skip sukiyaki in favor of Neapolitan pizza, but just wait until he tastes that crust.
Yes, I’d like to visit there someday. Who’s in?
10 Commandments for Con Men
1.Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
Why read books above your ‘level’
Why read books above your ‘level’
Ryan Holiday:
Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.”