Author Archives: lydias

About lydias

I'm a sci-fi writer who loves lifting weights and hates eating Brussels sprouts.
October 13, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: October 13, 2018

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

National Coming Out Day. This is a good read.

Why Your Kid’s Sniffles Make Me Sweat. Cold and flu season is quickly sneaking up on us again. While I’m still young and healthy enough to only be annoyed by these diseases, there are many people out there who can become critically ill or even die if they’re sickened by those same germs.

Beware of Those Who Do Not Clap via FictionOfTruth. Yes, precisely. You can tell a lot about someone based on how they react to the successes of others.

Sometimes You Need to Reboot via JamesPackWriter. I couldn’t agree with this more.

10 Little Things Morning People Love via SophiaWhitte. There are so many people in my life who are not morning folks at all. If you’re one of them, go read this.

Pumpkins Prompts. This is a cool new weekly writing prompt thing that a friend of mine started. I highly recommend checking it out.

Harry Isn’t Quite Out of His Teens When It Fully Hits Him. Yes, this is about Harry Potter. I hope you all love it as much as I did.

 

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October 11, 2018 · 1:00 am

Why I Prefer to Exercise Alone

As I’ve mentioned here in the past, I didn’t learn to enjoy exercise until adulthood in large part because of my negative experiences in physical education classes.

To summarize that post for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, my gym teachers never explained why exercise was an important part of living a healthy lifestyle. It was something we were compelled to do without being told why it was important.

They also put such a heavy emphasis on competition and team sports that I didn’t realize there were many other options for those of us who have no interest in winning or playing on a team. While I understand that my school districts weren’t wealthy ones and couldn’t afford specialized equipment, in the post I linked to above I did come up with quite a few alternative forms of exercise that they could have incorporated into gym classes without breaking the bank.

It was only when I discovered all of the solitary, non-competitive ways to get a workout in that I began to look forward to this part of my regular routine. Not everyone has these same needs, but I’m happier exercising alone for the following reasons:

1. Peace and Quiet 

Some people are energized by loud music or the cacaphony of sounds that occur when a large group of people are all using the same facilities.

I am not one of them. While I do spend time in loud, crowded places, they are never the first place to come to mind when I’m deciding where I’d like to go. To me, this would be like going to your dentist’s office just to hang out and listen to the distant hum of the dentist drilling someone’s tooth to fix a cavity.

If that’s something you find amusing, fantastic. I can think of a very long list of places I’d rather be instead, though, and none of them involve drills or ear-splitting gym tunes.

2. No Scheduling Conflicts

Many of the people I know do not greet mornings with joy. While I’m leaping out of bed and feeling my highest energy levels of the day, they’re drinking coffee and barely keeping their eyes open.

If we were to attempt to synchronize our schedules, it would be tricky to balance their sleepy reactions to the morning with how I tend to behave in the evenings. There have also been times when my workouts lasted for shorter or longer periods of time than I thought they would based on how I was feeling that day.

Exercising by myself simply makes more sense until or unless I meet another unapologetic morning person who takes the same approach to fitness that I do.

3. Personalized Fitness Goals

As I mentioned above, competition does nothing to encourage me to exercise. In fact, it discourages me from pushing myself harder due to how much I dislike the winner vs. loser approach to getting fit.

What does work for me is to set personalized fitness goals that I can easily measure and track. This could be a short-term goal like increasing my step count or a long-term goal like reducing my body fat percentages. I like the process of keeping track of numbers like these and seeing how they change over time. If a friend wanted to see my statistics for some reason, I wouldn’t have a problem sharing them.

It’s the competition I’m really trying to avoid, and keeping my goals personalized is an excellent way for me to do just that.

4. Shorter, More Efficient Workouts

Occasionally, I have exercised with other people. It’s been my experience that a lot of folks enjoy talking throughout their workouts.

I enjoy conversations in just about any other setting, but I really don’t like pausing a workout in order to chat. If I’m lifting weights or walking briskly, I want to focus on how I’m moving my body instead of what so-and-so said last week.

Socializing is important, but I’ve found that I get much better results when I completely separate that from staying fit.

Do you prefer to exercise alone or with a group of people?

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October 8, 2018 · 1:00 am

Characters I’d Invite to Thanksgiving Dinner

Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian readers! I’m enjoying a nice, quiet Thanksgiving this year while also wondering what it would be like to celebrate this holiday with characters from some of my favourite books.

If I could, I’d sure love to share this holiday with the following people:

1. Anne Shirley from the L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series.

She’d be welcomed to bring her legal guardians, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, along as well. As someone who is almost always quiet, I’d love to listen to her chatter about whatever it was that had happened to her recently.

It would also be interesting to get more details about her life before she was adopted if she was willing to share them.Some of my favourite scenes in this series were the ones that showed how they all enriched each other’s lives.

2. Afsan from Robert J. Sawyer’s Far-Seer trilogy. 

Not only would it be cool to see what a Tyrannosaurs would want to eat for Thanksgiving, I’d love to talk to this character about his impressions of human customs in general. (His species was sentient and quite intelligent in this series). He’d almost certainly be as horrified and/or amused by some of the things we do as we would be by certain Tyrannosaurs customs.

3. Starr Carter from Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.

Starr was such an easy character to love. My sympathy for her only grew stronger after she watched a police officer kill her best friend in one of the earliest scenes of her story. I’d want to fix her a big plate of food and offer her any comfort I could over the holidays.

4. Anna from Claire Cameron’s The Bear.

Anna was a six-year-old girl whose family went on a camping trip in a remote section of a national park. After her parents were killed by a bear, she had to figure out how to get her younger brother and herself to safety.

This was one of the most intense things I’ve ever read. I wish it were possible to catch up with characters years later to see how they’re doing. She was so young when the attack happened that she didn’t understand what was going on. While I would never ask about the deaths of her parents specifically, I’d love to know what her life was like after the events of the final scene.

5.  Patricia Cowan from Jo Walton’s My Real Children. 

Patricia might have lived in one of two different timelines during the course of this book depending on which memories of hers you tend to believe are the genuine ones.

Not only did the course of her life take radically different turns in each timeline, the course of human history did as well. I can’t say much else without giving away spoilers, but I’d sure like to talk to this character so I could find out which version of the events she remembered actually took place.

6. Hattie Shepherd and her descendants from Ayana Mathis’ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.

The first chapter of this tale showed Hattie desperately attempting to save her first two children, a set of twins who were dying from pneumonia in 1923 when such a disease was much harder to treat than it is today. The rest of the storyline showed what happened to this woman and the nine other children she had after the deaths of her first two babies.

Her extended family as a whole wasn’t a particularly emotionally healthy one. I believe that Hattie would have been diagnosable if she’d lived in a time and place where seeing the doctor for mental health concerns was socially acceptable. As it was, her undiagnosed illness damaged her relationships with all of her surviving children and their families.

Sometimes dysfunctional ways of interacting with the world can be passed down for generations when people either can’t recognize the harmful patterns in their family or aren’t willing to try to change them. I’ve seen it happen both in real life and in fiction. It’s as sad as it is fascinating. I’d love to invite different combinations of people from this family to various dinners to see if I could figure out how they’ve changed over the years.

Which character would you invite to your Thanksgiving dinner?

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October 6, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: October 6, 2018

Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian readers! May your meals this weekend be immensely satisfying. Here is this week’s list of Thanksgiving-related blog posts and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

Are Potatoes Good for You? Thanksgiving is one of those meals when I don’t worry about the nutritional content of my dinner in any way. I think it can be healthy to eat food based solely on how much pleasure it gives you every once in a while. With that being said, this was still a fascinating look at the latest research on how potatoes affect the human body. Spoiler alert! Depending on how they’re prepared, they can be very good for you as a regular part of one’s diet.

Literary Thanksgiving via CandyKorman. Star Trek and other pieces of hopeful science fiction set in the future are my literary thanksgiving. What’s yours?

A Case for Canned Cranberry Sauce: Defending Thanksgiving’s Most Controversial Side Dish. Yesterday I made fresh cranberry sauce for the first time and learned that I do not like the homemade version of this dish at all. This came as a bit of surprise to me since I don’t mind the canned version. How do you all feel about cranberry sauce?

Is Thanksgiving Trying to Kill Me? via Austin_Hodgens. If you have ambivalent feelings about this holiday, go read this post.

Vintage Photo Tuesday-Celebrating Thanksgiving Part 2. There’s something so interesting to me about seeing the way previous generations celebrated various holidays. The photo that had a table full of desserts was my favourite one. Either they were meant to serve a very large family or the person who made them really loved desserts! Either way, they looked amazing.

How to Make Thanksgiving Top-12 Allergen Free and Fun for All! This is such great advice. My Thanksgiving dinner is going to be completely dairy-free as usual, and I’m going to try to keep soy out of the equation as well this year. I can only imagine how complicated meal planning would be for groups of people who have multiple allergies or food intolerances.

Egyptian Pumpkin Pie with Almond Creme Bechamel via onearabvegan. Ooh, this sounds good. I’ve never met a pumpkin pie I didn’t like.

Thanksgiving Feast. Humans might not be the only ones having a feast today.

From Dumbkin via ‪StuartRWest‬:

You know what I found out recently?

My mom won’t pay for a can of pumpkin because it costs more than the price of tea in China.

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October 4, 2018 · 1:00 am

Hopeful Science Fiction: Semiosis

Last June I blogged about my desire to read more hopeful science fiction. Since then I’ve talked about Woman on the Edge of Time and The Lovely Bones. Today I’m back with another suggestion.

If you have recommendations for future instalments of this series, I’d sure like to hear them. Leave a comment below or send me message about it on Twitter.

Semiosis

Sue Burke’s Semiosis is a 2018 hard science fiction novel about colonists from Earth who travel to a distant planet in hope of making it their permanent home. The storyline followed the original group of explorers as well as their descendants for several generations. They knew almost nothing about the planet they named Pax  before they arrived there, so preparing in advance for what they were about to experience wasn’t easy.

Nearly every chapter in this book showed how the most recent generation in this timeline adapted to the many challenges they faced while attempting to survive on a planet where RNA, not DNA, was the building block of life. Generally, one chapter was assigned to each new generation as they came of age and began making decisions for their community.

Th experiences of the first generation were promising. The land was covered in vegetation, much of which their scans showed was safe and nutritious for humans. They quickly began attempting to build shelters and adjust to the many differences that came with living in such an alien environment.

Plot-Based, Not Character-Based

As you might have already guessed, this was a plot-based novel. Since each section more or less introduced an entirely new cast of characters (based on how many members of the previous generation had managed to live to see old age), there wasn’t a great deal of time for any one character to steal the spotlight.

I normally have a strong preference for character-based stories, so I did need some time to adjust to the fact that I would only have a short amount of time with any of the fascinating people I met as one generation was slowly replaced by the next.

Given how long it took the original group of immigrants to realize that many of their assumptions about what life on a distant plant would be like were completely wrong, it made sense for the whole adventure to unfold slowly over the courses of multiple lifetimes as new generations built on the knowledge their parents and grandparents had painstakingly put together. No individual human could ever live long enough to gather all of the clues they did over such a long period of time.

However, I would have liked to see more continuity between the generations. I understood why the lifespans were shorter for humans, especially in the beginning, but I spent so little time with the many characters that I didn’t feel like I bonded with any of them. They were there in one scene and then sometimes gone in the next.

Persistence

There are many details about the plot that I can’t share with you without giving away huge spoilers. Needless to say, the characters in this book were surprised over and over again by what life was really like on their new home in just about every way you can imagine. The food obviously didn’t taste anything like food does on Earth. Calibrating what was and wasn’t dangerous on this planet was hard for them, too, as well due to how little they knew about life on it ahead of it.

All of their previous training was useful, but it couldn’t have possibly prepared them for everything they were about to experience. They had no way to contact Earth, leave Pax, or receive any additional supplies, so they had to figure out ways to keep going no matter what happened to them.

The first generation had some really rough experiences due to a string of bad luck and not having the right types of supplies at critical moments. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. There were conversations about ordinary things like unpacking the ship or how to decide when to switch from the food they brought with them to scavenging for a fresh dinner. I especially loved the characters’ contagious excitement at finally getting to explore the land without having any idea what they might find there.

Mixing those moments of grief in with all of the other emotions they experienced was a nice touch. It reminded me a lot of what happens in real life when someone is dealing with a difficult problem but also still has to do totally mundane things like sweep their floor, plan dinner, or take their pet for a walk. Life is hard sometimes, but it still goes on.

This feeling returned once they realized there was an intelligent life form on that planet that all of their previous scans of it had failed to pick up. I couldn’t stop reading once I reached this section, and it only got better from there.

The Big Picture

There are two reasons why I’m recommending this as a hopeful science fiction read.

Number one, we’ve all had days that were so frustrating or painful they felt like they’d never end.

This book could describe a day like that and then zoom out and see how that experience mattered (or didn’t matter) in the longterm. There were questions asked early on that didn’t receive answers until decades or even generations later.

There’s something comforting in seeing that pattern play out over and over again. What doesn’t make sense to us now might make sense years from now. Alternatively, it might fade away and not be meaningful at all after enough time has passed.

Number two, things did improve for the characters over time. The tragedies they experienced were real, but so was the hope they found as they adjusted to the challenges they faced and figured out how to look after themselves long after all of their Earth supplies had run out.

What hopeful science fiction stories have you been reading recently?

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October 1, 2018 · 1:00 am

4 Reasons Why You Should Attend Nuit Blanche

Nuit Blanche is a free annual art festival that occurs overnight or at night. The first one happened in 1990 in Barcelona. As the tradition spread to other cities and countries, they used their own language’s words for White Night as the name for this event.

Here in Toronto, Nuit Blanche generally occurs in late September or early October. It begins at 7 pm and ends at 7 am the next morning, but not every city follows this same exact schedule.

I’ve been attending this event for years now, and I thought it was high time to discuss it in detail with my readers. The photo that accompanies this post wasn’t taken there, but it did remind me of a cool exhibit from it from 2015. While I didn’t add them into my post for copyright reasons, you can see actual pictures from this year’s festival here.

If you’re ever in Toronto, Barcelona, Montreal, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Naples, Cairo, Havana, Paris, or any other city that hosts its own version of Nuit Blanche when this festival is taking place, here are four reasons why I think you should check it out.

Art is for Everyone

One of the things I love the most about Nuit Blanche is how accessible it makes art. While some of the attendees are obviously experts on the creation and interpretation of this sort of thing, many more are people who are casually interested in the topic but who have no specific training or background on it. Some of them are even small children! This isn’t something that is specifically geared towards this age group, but there are exhibits every year that are child-friendly.

I adore the mixture of people that show up for an event like this in general. You’ll see very young infants all the way up to senior citizens enjoying the exhibits, and I’m not even kidding about that first part. I’ve watch the expressions on babies’ faces at the most colourful ones, and they were definitely liking what they saw. Tourists who can’t speak any English at all will marvel at the same exhibit alongside people who have spent their entire lives in English-speaking countries. People from every race, nationality, sexual orientation, social class, and  every other possible demographic group you can imagine are there, too.

There’s something to be said for works that can appeal so many different groups simultaneously. It’s magical.

It’s Interactive

I’ve wandered into the middle of a zombie uprising, danced with spotlights, explored an abandoned subway tunnel while listening to music the creator thought would increase the chances of us spotting a ghost, and heard the stories of people who work or worked in the sex industry at this festival in past years.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the creative things artists have done for it. It’s incredible to see what the participants are able to come up with and how hard they work to make their ideas spring to life. As much as I enjoy wandering around art museums, too, this is nothing at all like that experience. It’s more like the energetic, joyful, and slightly rowdy environment you see on Church Street after the Pride Parade each summer.

No Two Years Are Ever the Same

Let me be really honest with you here. There have been a few years when I didn’t emotionally connect to any of the exhibits I saw for a wide variety of reasons. Not every Nuit Blanche has been spectacular for me as an attendee, but that’s actually a good thing.

I value risk-taking in the arts. Artists and other creative folks who are willing to stretch themselves and their creative works should be admired. It’s much easier to make something that could blandly appeal to most people than it is to drill down and come up with an idea that’s thought-provoking, shocking, humorous, or memorable.

This means that some years will be better for me than others, and vice versa. Not everything can or should appeal to everyone.

Your Definition of What Art Is Might Change

This year there was a dumpling exhibit that caught me a little off guard at first. You could go into it, buy real dumplings (all of which smelled amazing), and eat them while you walked around looking at other artistic displays.

I never would have thought something as ordinary as food preparation could be reimagined as art, but that exhibit was extremely popular. The lines for the dumplings were huge, and everyone who got one looked pretty happy.

As someone who is casually interested in this topic, I appreciate the fact that this event stretches my understanding of what art is or could be. It made me think of what I generally consider to be the fairly mundane practice of cooking and baking food in a new light.

The next time I make cookies, shepherd’s pie, or any number of other dishes, I’ll see it in a way I’ve never seen it before. (I still won’t look forward to washing the dishes, though!)

That’s the beauty of art. If nothing else, I hope that will be what you take from Nuit Blanche if or when you ever see it for yourself.

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September 29, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: September 29, 2018

Here is this week’s list of links from my favourite corners of the web.

Anxious Always via JamesPackWriter. If you’ve never had anxiety, go read this. It’s a wonderful explanation of what it feels like.

How Mars Will Be Policed. I sure hope someone writes a story about this soon. There’s so much material here waiting to be explored.

How Muscular Dystrophy Shaped Me as the Person I Am Now via kerrymThompson. This was a very interesting read. I’d never randomly ask someone who had muscular dystrophy such personal questions about their life, so it’s nice to find the blog of a person who is willing to talk about it.

End Procrastination in 1 Step via Iedab. I can’t stop laughing at this.

Diagnosing the Past. This is for you, mom. You’ll love it.

‘A Lot of Hate and Bigotry Around’: Church Terminates Sign Contract Over Refusal to Post Gay-Positive Message. If you need a pick-me-up, go read this. I wonder if I would have kept attending church for many more years if I’d had access to something like this? My best guess is that I would have…. and that my deconversion would have been a happier process. As much as I love the idea of a truly LGBT+ affirming congregation, even that wouldn’t have been enough to keep me around longterm. It’s hard to say for sure without inventing a time machine, though.

Finally, I have a short assignment for all of you. Go watch Lord of the Rings (but with Mice) if you had even the slightest bit of interest in the original story. I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post, or you can click the link above.

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September 27, 2018 · 1:00 am

Popular Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors I’ve Never Read

Anyone who has known me more than a few hours knows both what a bookworm and huge fan of the SFF genre I am, so it may come as a surprise to you to learn just how many well-known science fiction and fantasy authors I’ve yet to read.

At first I thought I’d already written a post about this topic, but I couldn’t find it in my archives anywhere. I think I misremembered that because I’ve spent so much time recently thinking about all of the authors I haven’t tried yet. If only we could live a few hundred extra years to get some more reading in, eh?

Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed by some of the entries on this list. I do keep meaning to give their work a try, but newer authors keep writing beautifully distracting stories that demand to be read. Before I know it, another year has passed and I still haven’t picked up the books I’ve been thinking about checking out for a long time now.

There’s also the issue of being in the right mood for certain types of writing. Just like it would be true for any other genre, older stories in this genre are products of the time they were created. This isn’t to say that I judge them by the standards of today, but sometimes I do need to be in the right frame of mind in order to read something that modern readers would find offensive for a wide variety of reasons.

I believe you can acknowledge the sexist, racist, homophobic or other prejudiced themes of an older work while also understanding how time and place in which they were written influenced what was and wasn’t acceptable to say in that era. It’s not a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater or ignoring the fact that a certain part of a famous book might be problematic. You can love something while also criticizing it when necessary.

Not all of the authors on this list are from eras when that was more common, of course, but it is something that crosses my mind every time someone mentions a well-known SFF author who published much of their work decades or centuries ago.

With that in mind, this is my list:

  • Iain Banks
  • Greg Bear
  • Jim Butcher
  • Orson Scott Card
  • C.J. Cherryh
  • David Eddings
  • Diana Gabaldon
  • Frank Herbert
  • Robin Hodd
  • Dean Kootz
  • N.K. Jemisin
  • Robert Jordan
  • Diana Winn Jones
  • Fritz Lieber
  • Anne McCaffrey
  • Michael Moorcock
  • Larry Niven
  • Andre Norton
  • Frederick Pohl
  • Patrick Rothfuss
  • R.A. Salvatore
  • Brandon Sanderson
  • James Tiptree, Jr.
  • Brent Weeks

I have no idea what I’d think of any of their work, but I’d like to find out someday.

hich Sci-fi and fantasy authors have you not read anything from yet?

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September 24, 2018 · 1:00 am

4 Things I Want to Accomplish This Autumn

There’s something about the autumn season that makes me want to write out lists and accomplish things. Maybe it’s because of how much I generally looked forward to school beginning again when I was a student.

A blank notebook can hold an endless number of possibilities. Several months from now they’ll be full of lecture notes, but there might be poems or little drawings scribbled in the margins. The smell of fresh paper is enticing, too.

An unread textbook is often full of interesting things that you never knew about the world before. Sometimes I even read parts of my textbooks – especially the literature ones –  that were never assigned to us for the sheer fun of it.

It’s been well over a decade since I took any courses, but I thought this year it might be helpful to set a few non-academic goals for myself. This post will be shorter than usual. My goals are fairly simple, and I see no reason to pad them out  since they don’t require a thousand words of explanation.

1. Spend One Hour a Week Lifting Weights.

I’m currently recovering from a minor injury that temporarily derailed my normal weightlifting routine. As soon as I’ve healed, I’m going to leap back into my normal routine of lifting free weights. I can’t tell you how much I miss that. In the meantime I’m trying to do some bodyweight activities that don’t aggravate my injury to keep up my strength as much as possible.

2. Meditate for 20 Minutes Every Day.

Honestly, my meditation habits have been pretty erratic these past six months. That needs to change.

3. Join New Social Groups.

One of the downsides of being a writer, and especially a full-time writer, is how much time we tend to spend alone typing on a keyboard. While I’m incredibly grateful for the many benefits of this career choice, I think it would be healthy for me to get out and socialize with other people at times.

Ideally, I’ll find at least one group that had nothing to do with writing so I can meet people from other professions and walks of life. I’m open to all possibilities, though, and hope to blog about my experiences once I find a couple of groups that suit my interests and schedule.

4. Write My Second Sci-Fi Novel.

This is by far my biggest goal for the autumn. A while ago I began a novel that was about a woman living in what used to be Arizona several generations from now after climate change permanently altered the landscape there and North America at large. I got stuck 30,000 words into it and have yet to finish it. I’m hoping I’ll be able to figure out how to do that one if I work on a entirely new story in the science fiction genre.

I’m tentatively planning to check back in with my readers in December to discuss how many of these goals I’ve reached and what’s happening with them in general.  My hope is that I’ll be very motivated to accomplish them now that everyone knows what I’m trying to do.

What are your goals for the next few months?

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September 22, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: September 22, 2018

Happy Autumn! If you live in a part of the world that isn’t about to erupt into dozens of various shades of reds, yellows, and oranges, this is a taste of what we’ll have here in Ontario soon. Here is this week’s list of links from my favourite corners of the web.

Herbs and Gardens – 17th Century Home Remedies in New England via pk_adams. There are a lot of reasons why I think it’s important for fiction writers to study the past. This is one of them. I appreciate it when I read a story set hundreds of years ago (or in a time and place where modern medicine is unavailable) that acknowledges the limits of traditional remedies for diseases. Were some of them effective? Absolutely, but many others either did nothing or made people even sicker. Finding the balance between showing what average people can and can’t treat under those circumstances based on the plants nearby is one of those things I’d love to see more of in the wide world of fiction.

Doctors Told Her She Was Just Fat. She Actually Had Cancer. I wonder how often this happens? If anyone who has experience with doctors not listening to them is willing to share their story, I’d be quite interesting in hearing it.

Thirty Days of Gratitude via GKSihat. Will any of you be taking on this challenge?

Inside the Slimy Underground Hunt for Humanity’s Antibiotic Saviour. As rare as they are right now, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are one of the things that scare me. The thought of scientists working this hard to find other antibiotics in such a remote place is reassuring to say the least.

Where Can You Find Royalty-Free Stock Photos and Images via audendj. This is an incredibly useful post for bloggers, writers, Youtubers, and anyone else who needs free stock photos.

A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon. Ooh, this was good.

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