Recent content by Mogador

"You've simply gotten too fat and too conceited" --- Archie Goodwin to Nero Wolfe "I am no fatter than I was ten years ago. We are both considerably more conceited, and why the devil shouldn't we be?" --- Nero Wolfe Rex Stout. From memory so presumably badly mangled.

I make a living for me and about ten or so others through writing. One way or another it all comes down to my ability to write and tell stories, but not through literal fiction. So lets see if I can think of anything that's more useful than off topic... - Believe in what you're writing...

Agreed, it sounds epic and interesting as a story. As an *outline* though it gets skimpy in the last itemised points. Whereas you have fleshed out the first two acts fairly thoroughly (this magic scorpion, that incident in court, etc) the last act is missing that same level of detail. Are...

When I was a child mobile devices were boring dangly things that hung above cots. I did once unplug the rotary phone and take it up into the attic to dismantle it to find out where the noises came from. It was I suppose a tempirarily mobile device, as it was being lugged up the stairs. (It...

Thanks @Homer Potvin, Companero's in, this shelf is filling up nicely.

I'm primarily interested in books that stand out as being fascinating to read for reference regardless of my personal prio interests. I knew very little about the Aztecs until I read a brilliant book about them, for example. If that's too vague because everything on your Latin America shelf is...

These are all *excellent*. Thank you. On Latin America, certainly. I should have already heard of Orbis, for professional reasons, but hadn't . Now I do, cheers!

That's great, thanks both

Some suggestions please for the ideal bookshelf for the platonic ideal of the eclectic author that lives in our heads. Research and reference focused please, but that doesn't exclude fiction, so long as it has a looking-something-up quality. My starters, in no order, are: - The Book of...

In the mean time can we all agree to formally deny the personhood of the business acquaintance who explained to me in our last meeting how he was able to fire his communications team because now an AI will write his heart-wrenching yet engagement-boosting LinkedIn posts about his latest charity...

Everything makes we want to take up smoking again. This stuff makes me want to take up smoking creosote. The misanthropy of the whole AI boom is deeply depressing. The lengths people will go to to not employ a person. There's 7bn of us and we are still, by all accounts, the most sophisticated...

Ge'eil [Geh-heel], a very old, worn down, barely sentient shell of a demon who for the past fifteen years has lived in the ticket disposal bin near the front of the no.29 bus that goes from the town centre to Bellinford estate, somewhere in Hampshire, England.

On a related note, you just made me lose The Game.

Once upon a time I enjoyed watching Brandon Sanderson's 2020 multipart (five?) lecture series recorded at the university he teaches at. It got several million views and it looks like he's repeated the trick, but I've only watched those originals. For your research purposes I would define them as...

I would subscribe and watch, best of luck.