White House hopeful (more likely hopeless) Ron DeStalinist insists that a school has not banned a famous poem. The federal government says book removals in Georgia may have violated federal law. There’s another free-speech lawsuit against a Florida school-district book ban. A bill in Connecticut would create sanctuary libraries to hold challenged books.
Scholastic picked up Maggie Takuda-Hall’s children’s book but asked her to remove references to racism. She refused. On Twitter, she restates the truth: The Japanese American internment was racist.
Since the current book-ban wave began, people have joked about how the Bible has scenes in it that should be banned. Now it’s happened.
In Florida, a high-school yearbook included a couple of pages for the schools LGBTQ groups. Moms for Fascism complained. The school is providing parents or kids who complain (four complaints so far) with reprints with the material deleted.
The messiness of the Elvis Presley estate. The messiness of how the media treated actor/model Brooke Shields.
AI writing is not writing. Which doesn’t mean film studios won’t embrace AI scripts. The Mary Sue adds more.
AI not only scrapes published, copyrighted works, it rips off fan fiction.
Disney’s not using screen villains much in its cartoons. Is that a good thing?
What happened to hit comedy films? Although as Louis CK is back in business, that part of the article hasn’t aged well.
“We have written music in our hands from 3500 years ago called Hurrian songs from a Canaanite city called Ugarit in what is now northern Syria. It survived because it was carved into clay tablets. But even though they are clearly music symbols, we don’t know what they signify in terms of pitch and rhythm.” — from an article on the challenges of preserving ideas, writing and art.
The messy, toxic culture behind the scenes at Lost.
A high school canceled a school play because of its LGBTQ content. The students staged it off-campus.
Another digital-media pioneer goes down.
Alex Haley’s interview with Martin Luther King may include made-up quotes criticizing Malcolm X.
What goes on behind the scenes at the Guinness Book of World Records.
I sat down and rewrote the third chapter of Let No Man Put Asunder as I’ll be reading that to the writing group soon as I get on the schedule. I realized the fight scene needed a lot of work — too much banter instead of attacking — and I think I’ve fixed it. We’ll see what the group thinks.
Plus I’m in Con-Tinual’s YouTube channel discussing 
That was in February of 2009. After wrapping up the series, I watched a few more things through June (I was on the one-DVD-at-a-time plan) including Coupling, The Big Lebowski and the British Jekyll. Starting in June, though, everything through April of the following year was movies or TV shows I watched for 
That included multiple series such as 
I also caught 
Other films, such as 
Another week where things did not go as well as planned. But let’s start off with good news: I had my semi-annual checkup this week and all my signs (cholesterol, weight, blood pressure) are better than last time. So yay! This is good.
Does that look like a plain Jane to you? Another post looks at how often superheroes wind up fighting when 
Two of the Con-Tinual panels I’ve been on are up on YouTube, one on 
(Here’s another photo of Wylan the kitten, with one of his favorite toys.)
As for this week’s performance, it was underwhelming. Even with a writer’s work day last Sunday, I just barely made my hours for the week. Maybe it’s that working six days is pushing it, or some other reason but today and yesterday I really slumped. It felt like the days before TYG worked from home, when the dogs would scrunch up with me and erode my personal space to the point my brain fried. As I haven’t had more dog-care than usual this week, I don’t know why that would be. But it was.
That doesn’t mean “
No real deep insights, I know, but I still find Camestros’ comment interesting.
I wound up spending a lot of time on my Savage Adventures book about Doc Savage because polishing and expanding 
I got some more work done on my Doc Savage nonfiction book, including rereading The Red Skull; despite the relatively low stakes (land containing valuable deposits) it’s a dynamic, action-packed adventure and a pleasure to reread. There are no scenes as cool as the James Bama cover though.
Over at Atomic Junkshop I look at 
#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders, Millie cover by Stan Goldberg, Undead Sexist Cliches cover by Kemp Ward.
(As TYG and I stayed in Pittsburgh for a Mensa event some years back, my photos might be useful too, even though they’re not period).
— they’ve prompted my mind to start thinking of other locations. Rather than the big old church, it’s now a small church in a working-class neighborhood; when Paul and Mandy run they hop a chain link fence into a warehouse parking lot, then sneak under the nearest road via a drainage culvert. That’s much more what I’m shooting for.
But as I’ve said before, that’s the nature of “average” — some days just by blind chance will come out below average. I recovered today, applying for a writing gig and submitting a couple of shorts, but I wound up short of my hours for the week. I’ve been over in other weeks, though, so that averages out too.
#SFWApro
Fraser Sherman's Blog 