Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
I’m pretty brain-dead right now from a lingering sinus illness, so, here, have an article about some MIT dudes imagining whole-house batteries and totally failing to take the fire hazard into account:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/02/mit_concrete_battery/?td=rt-3a
I prompted a bunch of Oz-themed images about a year ago, so I thought I’d compare and contrast those with the most recent ones I’ve gotten out of Midjourney.
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: The Emerald City of Oz” →
To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…
I plan to drop new episodes for this serial every Sunday in the Kindle Vella store for the foreseeable future. To learn more about Vella, keep reading.
Continue reading “New Episode for Hunter Healer King” →Let me just pause and say: I’m not covering Mr. Collins here, because I can’t think of any choices I like. (My only guiding principle would be: “as much unlike David Bamber as possible.”) I’m not covering the other four Bennet sisters because it seems like pretty much every version manages to come up with acceptable if not necessarily great versions of Jane, Lydia and whichever of Kitty and Mary are included. Ditto the Lucases, the Hursts, Anne De Bourgh and Georgiana Darcy. Where these characters are concerned, I’m open to anyone who could be a plausible relative (if relevant) to the characters I’ve mentally cast.
For accompanying pictures, and accompanying disclaimers of disinterest in making actor demographics perfectly match the book character demographics, see Monday’s post. Please note that I namecheck some pretty obscure actors from older versions below, feel free to search-fu their names.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Explaining the Fan Casting for P&P” →Today we have a bunch of contemporary actors in Regency dress, as generated by Midjourney and cleaned up by me. I will invite you to guess who I was casting in which Pride and Prejudice role. Yes, some of them are not very good likenesses, and no I am not going to reroll in Midjourney again. Yes, very few of them are in the age bracket now that the characters were in the story. No, I don’t really care. Yes, a couple of them have been in Pride and Prejudice before, and no, I am not casting them in the same roles.
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Fan Casting for Pride and Prejudice” →To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…
I plan to drop new episodes for this serial every Sunday in the Kindle Vella store for the foreseeable future. To learn more about Vella, keep reading.
Continue reading “New Episode for Hunter Healer King” →This one is a fellow writer from a discord I belong to, very thoughtful and far-ranging person: https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/
This is a prepper’s blog that some writers from the same discord have contributed guest posts to: https://bluecollarprepping.blogspot.com/
About ten years late to the party, I watched the Keri Russell film Austenland (2013) about an American woman who goes to England to participate in a Jane Austen LARP at an English manor, only to discover that she bought the basic package, which is a lot less fun than the top end package which her two co-LARPers bought. I’d avoided the film for years due to bad reviews, and then on watching it decided I rather liked it. (This, too, is the story of Pride and Prejudice 1980).
I’m not sure if I can recommend it to other people. The slapsticky, PG-13 comedy at the surface is rather dull – lame gags about women talking/acting bawdy and men being either uncomfortable with it or encouraging – but the core romance track is sound and there are some interesting in-jokes and subtexts that the reviews seemed to overlook (or not talk about). I thought I would summarize them here. Warning: spoilers below, including for a core plot twist from late in the film…
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Austenland Decoder Ring” →To claim her inheritance, Chloe Fortabat has to leave her ranch and come to the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the exact type of monster he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…
I plan to drop new episodes for this serial every Sunday in the Kindle Vella store for the foreseeable future. To learn more about Vella, keep reading.
Continue reading “New Episode for Hunter Healer King” →https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/tolkien
Most of this 1966 interview with Tolkien, conducted by a former pupil, is pretty banal stuff that most interested parties today would already know. (Actually interested in Tolkien, I mean, not just the PJ movies or Rings of Power.) There is a cool moment, however, where he talks about a passing reference in Lord of the Rings to the Cats of Queen Beruthiel, says he doesn’t have a backstory for them, and immediately starts speculating to the interviewer about what kind of backstory they might have.
Jaglion Press