[x]Blackmoor Vituperative

Tuesday, 2010-02-16

‘Tis better to be alone

Filed under: Prose,Society — bblackmoor @ 16:28

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad company.

(From George Washington’s Rules of Civility)

George Washington’s Rules of Civility is pretty cool, in a Victorian sort of way.

Thursday, 2009-12-10

An it harm none…

Filed under: Privacy,Prose — bblackmoor @ 11:17

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” — Thomas Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, 1819

“Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill, An it harm none do what ye will.” — Doreen Valiente, 1964

“I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody business but by own.” — Billie Holiday

If you have not read it (or not read it lately), I suggest you spend some time with Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, by Peter McWilliams.

Tuesday, 2009-01-13

What I am reading

Filed under: Prose,Software,Writing — bblackmoor @ 11:44

A quick list of what books I am reading right now, or intend to read in the near future:

I need to read more fiction. I will start looking at novels or short story compilations after I finish with this stack.

Saturday, 2008-03-29

Peter O’Toole is cool

Filed under: Movies,Prose — bblackmoor @ 00:20

Peter O’Toole is just so cool. I just found out that he has written two books (autobiographies, both), and is in the process of writing a third. I intend to read them. I will probably have to go to a library: they appear to be both out of print and expensive.

Tuesday, 2007-11-20

Recommended books for the Unix/Linux beginner

Filed under: Linux,Prose — bblackmoor @ 10:01

I was browsing Amazon earlier, looking for books to recommend to a friend who may be interested in getting into Linux. I thought other people might find this handy, too, so here they are. It is a very short list. There are literally dozens of other books on specific subjects that I would also recommend (the O’Reilly Apache book, a few Perl books, and so on), but this is a start. These are more or less in order of increasing complexity.

Saturday, 2007-03-03

Life imitates art imitates sex

Filed under: Prose — bblackmoor @ 16:20

In December of 2001, BBSpot published the article, Publisher Cleared in Pop-Up Book Trial, which describes a lawsuit against Random House brought by people who… well, just read it:

Publishing giant Random House was cleared of all charges in a lawsuit stemming from a fatal accident involving a pop-up book of sexual positions that they published from May 1999 to December 2000.

The class action suit was filed by Skrelnick, Callard, and Associates law firm in the Spring of 2001 when several people were injured trying to duplicate one the positions found in the book. It seems that a folding error on page 27 caused a number of couples to inadvertently snap their partners spines when attempting that position.

It took a few years for the real world to catch up, but in 2006 Melcher Media published The Pop-up Book of Sex. It appears to have received a number of positive reviews. Just be careful with the pose on page 27.

Monday, 2006-10-16

H.P. Lovecraft, the heroic nerd

Filed under: Prose — bblackmoor @ 11:16

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, “where…they ought to have been left.”[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult— there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime (apart from two slender volumes, each of a single story, published by fans) and did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching and, in the last thirty or forty years, continually on the increase, if often in extraliterary ways. Board games, computer games, and role-playing games have been inspired by his work; the archive at hplovecraft.com includes an apparently endless list of pop songs—not all of them death metal —that quote or refer to his tales; and there have been around fifty film and television adaptations, although hardly any of these have been more than superficially related to their sources.

(from The New York Review of Books, The Heroic Nerd)

Go read the whole article.

Sunday, 2006-10-08

Lovecraft and copyright

Filed under: Intellectual Property,Prose — bblackmoor @ 15:27

Julie Harris-Hulcher has an interesting article about Lovcecraft’s work and how it thrived while eschewing the protections of conventional copyright. It is worthy of serious consideration.

The article itself is part of The Reader’s Guide To The Cthulhu Mythos.

Thursday, 2006-09-28

What I am reading

Filed under: Prose — bblackmoor @ 12:43

I found a real gem today: Jack London: Writings.

Wednesday, 2006-09-27

What I am reading

Filed under: Prose — bblackmoor @ 11:12

Here’s what is on my nightstand right now:

Hindu Myths
The Historian
Persian Mythology
Persian Myths
The Superhero Handbook
Wicked
Wicked: The Grimmerie

« Previous PageNext Page »