Erotica, fantasy, and horror writer.
This short story about a near-future NYC. Netflix’s Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, about doctor and charlatan Paolo Macchiarini who implanted artificial tracheas in patients without adequate testing. Forgotten mascots of the Christmas season. See my list of fictional ones. Eigengrau and CEV. Hairless dogs.
It’s not really Christmas unless you eat or bake some sort of traditional German cookie! Like Lebkuchen, better known to the English-speaking world as gingerbread. Pfeffernusses are also popular as well as Spritzgeback, those cookies you pipe through a cookie press to form decorative swirls. In the US they are called Spritzen or simply …
Crown of Starlight (Chapter One) by Cait Corrain Everybody’s been talking lately about the publishing scandal involving debut author Cait Corrain and her fantasy novel Crown of Starlight, so I thought I’d put in my opinion. The whole story is here and tells it more eloquently and completely than I can, but the gist is …
Santa Claus is a European invention, and the idea of Santa wearing a red suit with white trim, black boots, and a stocking cap, an American one. Courtesy of the Coca-Cola company which costumed him such to match the red in their company logo, which was for an ad campaign. But even so, the same …
One of the things that fascinates me about visual AI generations is how they allow one to peek into the multiverse. Not the real multiverse, mind you. That hasn’t been proved to exist. But an illusion of a multiverse, with different products, people, animals and buildings, all skewed greatly or slightly from our own …
Curse tablets were a cottage industry in ancient Greece. Spells embodying the caster’s desires were written on plaques of stone, clay, papyrus, wax, even thin sheets of gold. Then, to reach the gods, they were thrown into wells or buried with the dead (often without permission from the dead one’s next of kin.) It’s likely …
Greek myths were chock-full of magic items, most of them made by the gods; and with a few exceptions, most of the humans who meddled with them came to a bad end. Take the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. It’s a very long and involved one, but the gist goes like this. Disinherited …
This timely and thought-provoking deconstruction of the Dragonriders of Pern series by silveradept. True identity of the stick-carrying man on the Led Zeppelin IV album cover discovered. Imaginary books about the imaginary Hyperdimensional universe. The many varieties of domestic peacock. Political commentary from historian Heather Cox Richardson.
One of the more oddball Greek myths I am fascinated with is that of Zeus and Ganymede. It’s NSFW so buckle up, and like most Greek myths, differs according to who tells it. Basically, Ganymede was a comely youth who caught the eye of Zeus so Zeus kidnapped him in the form of an eagle, …
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang First Second Books, 2006 American Born Chinese is a graphic novel about the experience of Asian Americans trying to come to terms with their heritage in mainstream American society. It was published in 2006, so it’s a few years short of its much-deserved twentieth anniversary –- it’s still …