The Hell…? Someone please tell me what this is.
Tag: History
Notre Dame
I was lucky enough to visit Notre Dame cathedral as a child. It was August, the time when Parisians traditionally took their own vacations, and the city was quieter than it normally was. I went with my mom and dad. I remember it being shadowy and cool inside, the noises muffled. It seemed impossibly high. …
Zombies on Broadway
“Break a leg! Break off an arm, too!”
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/3/19: Steampunk Novels
Steampunk, a term coined in the mid-1980s, is a catch-all term for artistic design and subject matter that harks back to the Victorian Age, when steam-powered machinery and clockwork mechanisms began to drive the Industrial Revolution. The term was invented by SF writer K.W. Jeter in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Cyberpunk. But the term and …
Jet Age [Reading Challenge 2019]
Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World by Sam Howe Verhovek Avery, 2010 [Challenge # 25: A book in which airplanes figure prominently.] Hubris and aviation have a long, intertwined history together. Overconfidence in a flight control system most likely caused the recent crashes of a Boeing 737 Max …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 2/27/19: Let’s Talk About Chicago
I’ve always thought Chicago had a special ring to it. It’s both soft, and hard, and rolls easily off the tongue (as I also noted for the name Christopher.) It improves any other word it’s paired with. The Chicago Cubs. Chicago pizza. Chicago Transit Authority. It’s the subject of a famous poem that is famously …
Inside the Clown
I’m not rolling on the floor with laughter. Neither is the dog.
Marie Antoinette
“What, me worry?”
Those Savage Queens
These days, you can’t spit in fantasy art without hitting some variant of a beautiful, barely clad female lounging on a throne, pasties on her nipples, a pout on her pretty face. The strong suggestion is she rules by whim and her power is absolute, a thing which, I’m sure, many of the male artists …
Mari Lwyd
Mari Lwyd was a Welsh Christmas and New Year tradition in which a group of male singers carried a hobbyhorse — a horse’s skull mounted on a pole, cloaked and decorated — to houses around the village, with singing and refreshments. Happy New Year!