A.E. Shaw's Blog

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I mean, how else to start this ramble?

No, I know it’s almost been a year since I wrote anything here, but it’s been a terribly long and not particularly pleasant one, and if you don’t have anything good to say, sometimes it’s okay not to write thousands of words across the internet.

But I have a few good things to say. Mostly because I’ve started going to the cinema again, after Odeon finally decided they would introduce the Unlimited thing that Cineworld did for so long, and I could justif...

Calling all teachers, students, parents! We’re launching a new project, and we’d love your help sourcing old reading lists! If you’re curious, please read this whole lengthy post …

Source: The #PatCReadingListProject!

Exactly a year ago, I started counting my macros properly. For 363 days (there are just two where I didn’t get around to it), I’ve logged into one programme or another (mostly MyFitnessPal because Android

I first encountered Sohee Lee several years ago, when we were both on the same fitness forum. She was studying at a fancy American university, and I'm from London and didn't study at a fancy American university, rather, I went to a slightly grey and soggy Welsh one, so I remember when peopl...

If you didn’t see Labyrinth, starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie before the age of five, you missed a thing.

If you were a girl in the 1980s and you didn’t see it, you missed your chance for the best female inspiration in cinema, the most imagination-awakening piece of joyful abandon, and the most…David Bowie in tights.

I did see it though. It was raining, and one of our teachers had a grainy VHS copy of it from who-knows-where, and it was lunchtime and we sat in the school hall and st...

Well, it’s an incredibly long time since I posted here, isn’t it? So long, in fact, that the whole interface has changed. I see.

But you see, I’ve been busy. Thinking back on 2014, that’s the most overriding thing of all. I’ve been SO CRAZY BUSY.

Moving home. Sorting home. Cleaning a decade of bits from a place I didn’t love any more, in a city a 300-mile round trip from home. I clocked up thousands of miles in the first half of the year, and spent every day off from February to May moving ho...

Having had and been involved with several successful online businesses, I’m very familiar with the blogosphere’s role in promoting and reviewing such things. We get a lot of requests around all these businesses for reviews, features, requests for donations to things, offers to sample our products, any which way you can think of phrasing the getting of something without paying for it, we get them. Thing is, whilst, as I say, we know and love a good reviewer, we very rarely end up responding to...

thisaeshaw:

Such a good list. Resulted in a sudden epic scifi haul.

Originally posted on chronicles of harriet:

GREAT BLACK AUTHORS OF SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY: Past & Present

Ask people to name Black authors of science fiction and fantasy and only a few names will be repeated, if any names are known at all: Octavia Butler…Tananarive Due…L. A. Banks…Walter Mosley. While, most certainly, these brilliant authors should be in everyone’s library, you are cheating yourself if you do not know of – or...

**This post contains spoilers for the entire Song of Ice and Fire series, and for the TV series up to S04e03**

I don’t have a problem with the continuous references, threats and instances of rape in A Song of Ice and Fire. It isn’t pleasant, and sometimes it’s incessant, but you look at wartorn or fraying countries past and present, and you’ll see infinite instances of rape used as a constant weapon against an entire female population. Rape in A Song of Ice and Fire has context. The victims o...

Time is a funny thing. Bits of it move far, far too fast, and great long swathes of it are mudthick and sloooow and exhausting. At half seven this evening I was itching for it to be evening and dark so I could get to bed because I’m so completely knackered, but now it’s approaching ten and I’m not sure where the last three hours went, but I was going to be sleeping by now. Some of the time was spent fighting irritably with washing that didn’t want to be the shape it was when it went in the ma...

I’ve had THAT box of clothes since I was about sixteen. The clothes from when I was fourteen, which didn’t fit any more. The clothes from when I was even younger, that I didn’t wear because, well, I was sixteen and they didn’t have holes in them or the right band logos or superclever slogans scrawled all over them.

Since that time, more things have been added to THAT box. The designery things I bought when they were supercheap on sale in TKMaxx or on eBay, ‘just in case’, even though it was a...