Erotica, fantasy, and horror writer.

Most commented posts

  1. The Worm Ouroboros
    [Reading Challenge 2018]
    — 6 comments
  2. The Lady of the Green Kirtle (Part I) — 5 comments
  3. The Wild Lands of the North
    (and a bit about Giants)
    — 4 comments
  4. All Things Charn (Part I) — 4 comments
  5. Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/30/17: Mundane Fare — 3 comments

Author's posts

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/24/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 1)

The Milky Way  takes its name from a Greek myth about Heracles (Hercules in Roman myth) the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene. His mother, fearing the wrath of Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, abandoned Heracles in the woods. But the infant was rescued by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warcraft. Not being …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/17/24: The Best of Twittersnips (Horror and Halloween)

Oh, the horrors! Here’s a selection from Twitternaps of the past. All meant in fun of course.   Horror and Halloween Horror movies The Reptiloid Slayer The Island of Medusa Echoes of the Silence Attack of the Giant Centipede Mark of the Zombie Lake of a Thousand Lunatics Blade of the Werewolf Queen Horror movie …

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Passing Obsessions 4-24

Rock band Wet Leg. There’s a new ai art engine called Sureel.ai that uses “responsively sourced” image references. Hamsters, and iPad games featuring hamsters. This one’s gonna hang around for a while. I missed the Squid Game train, but there are dozens of hamsters on YouTube playing rodent versions, which is more entertaining. Quiet on …

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Why I hate the Nirvana smiley face logo

I’m sure you’ve seen it on someone’s t-shirt: a roughly drawn smiley face with X’s instead of eyes and a protruding tongue. Together with the word Nirvana in its distinctive, elongated typeface – the font is Onyx, a popular one in the early 1990s – the effect on the viewer is striking. Right away the …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/10/24: Hamsters

When Zhu Zhu Pets came out in the beginning of the 2010s they were the hottest toy around. These little stuffed creatures were modeled on hamsters and came with wheels, so they could zip up and down trackways and do all the things Hot Wheels cars could. In addition, they made cute noises when they …

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AI Art Adventures: Hamster Accident (with Dave Grohl)

Well, I had to find some way to link the recent book review with the posts before and after it, didn’t I? Hamsters are often inflated to the size of cats when AI lends a hand. Two Daves are better than one! From an old news story about Dave.  

The Storyteller
[Reading Challenge 2024]

The Storyteller by Dave Grohl HarperCollins, 2021 [ # 19  Like a novel, only real: Creative nonfiction.] Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller is not the usual kind of rock and roll autobiography whose arc most often goes from rags to riches with a side tour into addiction. Instead it’s a series of short vignettes that illustrate …

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AI Art Adventures: Hamster Accident (Refined)

By themselves, the pics in my last post about hamsters and exercise wheels were pretty stupid. But it’s always possible to refine them. I had put “flying” in one of the prompts, but instead of giving me a hamster flung off his exercise wheel and flying through the air, I got superhero-type hamsters wearing capes. …

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AI Art Adventures: Hamster Accident

You’d think that a cute, fluffy, chubby, adorable little hamster having a mishap on its exercise wheel — a sight common on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the like — wouldn’t be a problem for AI to generate. Especially as it’s an element common to many peoples’ childhoods, a hamster running so quickly he flings himself …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/3/24: Papua New Guinea Names

Some of the first human beings ever to leave Africa colonized southeast Asian tens of thousands of years ago, using continental land bridges for transit as the sea was much lower. Since the end of the Ice Age, the islands were isolated; but the beginning of recorded history brought more visitors, among them Indians and  …

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