James

“We’ve got you; it’s going to be okay.”
Amelia looked back to find her father’s face amidst the noise and the wind. There was the outline of a figure, a retinal scar so bright it hurt her eyes. Amelia blinked but there was only the still marsh, reaching out towards the coast of North Wales

I asked a group of 16 years olds today who their favourite pop star is?

They asked what "pop-star" meant.

I quietly turned to dust and blew away.

If Paddington had been there, they would have all lived and an nice old lady called Mrs Patel would ended up with the diamonds to help her feed her cat.

Orbital got the press for poetic space books, and is great. But your treatment dwarfs it in terms of depth and variety.

It honestly deserves one.

Imagine having that budget, that cast size and thinking - lets make the sort of thing people can watch as they play Candy Crush.

I hoped The Long Walk and The Monkey had put pay to this sort of guff.

Just watched Welcome to Derry. I found it poorly characterised, badly paced, devoid of narrative tension and lacking in any sense of authenticity.

Honestly, what are you all seeing in this patronising garbage?

Cool looking zine. Well done.

The UK has a skills shortage.

The best people to fill this are 19+ NEETs from disadvantaged backgrounds.

There is no financial support. So parents have to foot the bill. And this isn't viable in a cost of living crisis.

No mention or thought of this in the FE Whitepaper.

#edusky

That's the dream.

My wife is tracking my family history. Basically, it's 700 years of peasantry and then the records stop.

That's social mobility in the UK for you. Three generation had the first name Archer though, of which I am deeply envious.

No idea. Sorry.

Arbutus and Towson are both decent.

YA came in around 91, because most literate teens were shunning the teen sections.

I read a bunch, S E Hinton, Lois Duncan and some others. It was mostly decent. Top pick would be Janni Howker's Nature of the Beast.

A giant teddy bear slouches against a tree stump in a graveyard at night.

Someone has dumped a large teddybear in the graveyard.

It is not by a child's grave. Nor a recent grave. It's just there propped up a tree stump.

I hope there's not a corpse inside it.

A man in a purple hawaiian shirt, sits in a cafė adorned with artwork.

There is a cafė in Colwyn Bay where people just go and make art. Great music too.

It feels like it should be in a large bohemian city.

Ink, Colwyn Bay - my kind of place.

Andy's fantasy novel is finally available, and it's wide at all APPS and available for libraries. Sword and Sorcery. Inspired by the New Wave fantasy of Moorcock, McCaffrey and le Guin. Existential journey in unfamiliar lands. Action, quest and adventurers. A standalone story. “Everything decays, but the glass’steel decayed at a rate so slow as to be invisible on the scale of a single lifetime. In the sword she saw visions of her home. Her home so far away, deep down in the reflection of her elven eyes, sunk deep in her memory, transferred to the blade, as far away as a million years is long.” Zana Hala’Kaalni is a warrior princess in exile, untethered from her home, and from her sense of self. Allowing chaos to lead her, she enters a nation on the verge of civil war, a quest for a failed utopia, and the ruins of a long dead era, the lost history of her world. Aertelis combines the action of classic Sword & Sorcery, the literary themes of the Sci-fi Fantasy New Wave, and the character-driven storytelling of the modern era. Aertelis is a standalone story in the Kalni Chronicles anthology.

Do you want a character-driven adventure echoing classic Sword & Sorcery film and TRPGs, but also the literary style, worldbuilding and themes of the New Wave writers like Moorcock and Le Guin?

It's wide + available to libraries.

UBL: books2read.com/u/bz9BOE
#booksky #fantasy #sword&sorcery
📚💙

Robert Graves' Claudius novels are what you want to read next.

Especially if you're looking for the second world experience fantasy used to give you.

It's weird that you know a lot of kids.

You don't know many kids, do you? I teach around 200 year. If you can use Discord, Roblox, or any console you can turn on VPN in Firefox or Edge. It's less steps than logging into a school lunch account.

Mildly harder to watch, and massively harder to regulate content.

Dude, they're rigging the face recognition by showing it game characters. They don't have to be savvy, they have to be able to use Google, Firefox or Edge. I do think it will beef up their tech skills a little but it absolutely will not stop them getting porn.

I'm not sure it was the intention of the UK Online Safety Act to teach an entire generation of kids that breaking the law is easy and fun. But...

It's a slippery slope.

Women have menopause for like 10 years. That's a health issue that impacts 50% of the world's population for a decade of their lives. I make that roughly 0.6-1.2 billion people at any given time.

HTF is there not a common medicine that helps with this?

ASCAB?

The UK heatwave is great. It has reduced all smalltalk to one topic that everyone has the same opinion on.

"Aye, it is hot."

I was very excited to watch it, thinking it would be a monster flick with bubbling test tubes, those big electric switches, and head clutching transformation scenes. But it turned out to be an effort at serious drama that my parents enjoyed.

Let me know if I'm remembering the wrong version

TBF, I am guessing she was the female lead. I think I was about 8 when I last saw this.