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Review: Tithe
Tithe by Holly Black My rating: 3 of 5 stars Another book from that Humble Bundle that had a bunch of Simon and Schuster YA books. This book was OK. Not my cup of tea, but not bad. As I said in my status updates, Ms Black is pretty good at subverting my expectations. I’ll…
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Podcasts I’m Listening to in 2016
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Ever since I started using Doggcatcher on my cellphone I’ve been able to listen to more podcasts because, even without the pitch distortion my sandisk had, it plays the content a lot faster. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may…
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Review: Gamers
Gamers by Thomas K. Carpenter My rating: 3 of 5 stars For some reason, I’ve found myself reading a lot of YA fiction over the last couple years. On the negative side, it appears that Dystopias are the genre du jour. Nothing wrong with them, and I think something about them speaks to teens. When…
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Sex is more of a continuum than binary
So, this paper in Nature reveals that sex is much more complex than just having XX or XY. I think an awesome followup would see if trans and/or gay/lesbian people had more of these chimeric conditions. Although, everything has potential for evil, I think this would be super helpful to parents of kids who were…
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Review: Vagina Mundi
Vagina Mundi by Wol-vriey My rating: 2 of 5 stars Disclaimer: Got this book free as part of Good Reads First Reads You can take something horrible and push it so far that you move into the realm of absurdity. Some of my favorite media do this. Kill Bill takes violence to such ridiculous levels…
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February Video Game Report: Civ, Analogue & Hate Plus Review
Civilization V ( 20 hrs): Lefties Dido tried to be opportunistic and attack me while I was at war with the Celts. Now she is facing my wrath. I will not stop until she has been wiped off the map. Left a contingent behind to make sure the Celts don’t get cute. About to pay…
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Married != Sexless
“Oh, you’re getting married? I guess your sex life is over” HYUK HYUK HYUK HYUK. It’s hilarious. Oh, wait, no it’s a hackneyed joke that’s more or less run its course. First of all, it doesn’t make sense for the segment of the population that waits for marriage for sex. Their sex life is just…
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Teenagers, Sex, School Sex Ed, and The Church
When I became sexually active (which I’ll loosely define as when I started trying to kiss and touch girls), here’s what I’d been told: School: there are tons of diseases you can get so don’t have sex Parents: If you have sex, make sure you use a condom to protect from aforementioned diseases as well…
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Cancel the Russian Winter Olympics?
Stephen Fry is asking for the Olympic Committee to cancel the Winter Olympics in Russia this Winter. The reason is their recent horrible actions against LGBT people. Politically, I think Fry’s in the right. (The gay stuff plus tons of other bad things Russia’s been doing lately) But I feel it could be unfair to…
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DOMA’s Gone! A Good First Step
This Thursday morning I tweeted that I would need to take a look at the actual ramifications of the Supreme Court’s 26 June decisions before I did too much celebrating. I was right to have a tempered reaction. As is pointed out in the Rolling Stone story on the decision, all the overturning of DOMA…
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Maybe the Slippery Slope is a Good Thing? Slate Has An Interesting Call For Legalizing Polygamy
The slippery slope rebuttal can be pretty annoying depending on how dumb the person using the argument wants to be. For example, many people say all the surveillance cameras we have everywhere are a slippery slope towards totalitarian governments. While I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves before we have to…
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last.fm listening habits Q4 2012
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would…
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Comics Review: Fantastic Four, Top Ten, Generation Hope, Uncanny X-Men
Start here before FF Fantastic Four By Jonathan Hickman # 1 – Volume 1 I’ve always been a Fantastic Four fan, but it’d been a long time since I last read F4 when I picked up FF. Being as this was a #1 of a new title, I was very confused about what in the…
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Comics Review: New X-Men
Things Really get Real New X-Men Ultimate Collection # 2 – Book 2 At first the book continues directly from the previous one. We learn that Prof X can walk because Xorn healed his spine (although I thought it was that his legs were crushed? Perhaps that was retconned at some point). Prof X is…
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Top 200 Photos: #163
To a hacker conference in NYC for today’s Top 200 Photos. photo #163 is: Adrian Lamo is an ex-cracker (criminal hacker). He gained notoriety in 2010 for outing soldier Manning as the guy who’d leaked a bunch of info to Wikipedia. The funny thing is that, even though Manning mentioned leaking the State Department cables,…