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The Future of Humanity

I have always loved the dystopian genre. I think what the author writes reflects how they view our world and what they think will come of it. Books like these have always captivated me as they transport my imagination into a potential version of the world I see today. This month I read Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and it led me to question how I believe the world will change in the future. Personally, I believe that unless the majority/ the entire human race changes our way of living we are going to destroy our earth. With that being said I also believe that our earth is on an undefined time limit, meaning that sooner or later our earth will end/ it won't exist anymore whether that is due to climate change and pollution or some other unidentified threat. In the maze runner there was a disease outbreak which eventually led to an apocalypse like world where there was a dictatorship and a rebellion. This view of how our world could unfold made me think about how human actions speci...
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Rereading the Harry Potter series

      I recently saw a blog post about rereading books, and how enjoyable it can be. This idea is one that I share, and I often reread books that I have enjoyed in the past. I decided after reading that blog post that it was about time I read the Harry Potter series again. I have read this series too many times to count, but almost all of them were in a very short span of time, when I was much younger. Did the magical experience still hold up?     It did. I found myself staying up late night after night reading, and instead of playing videogames in my free time, my nose was stuffed deep into the world of Harry Potter. Just ten minutes ago I finished reading the final book in the series, and I felt very accomplished indeed. This is one series that will never get old for me.      One thing that I found interesting as I was reading was comparing and contrasting my experience of the book now vs. then. When I first read Harry Potter, there was a lot ab...

Why didn't Armando Dippet assassinate Hitler?

Why didn't Armando Dippet assassinate Hitler?  I touch on that one later. In other news,      I love urban fantasy. It's great! You can expore the infinite possibilites of magic in the familiar framework of our world. And that's really fun, because magic is fun.      But, if you're some variety of masochist and regularly read what I spew out, you'll know that I put a lot of stock into worldbuilding. And unfortunately, urban fantasy is really, really hard to worldbuild convincingly.      The most important factor in urban fantasy worldbuilding is the question of "how public is the magic?" (in the rest of this blog post, I'll be using "magic" as a catch-all term for fantastical elements in urban fantasy. Sometimes urban fantasy takes the Men in Black route where the magic is actually aliens or something similarly sci-fi, but it has essentially the same impact)      The publicity of magic is rarely a sliding scale; it's almo...

Ghostwriters

     Ghostwriters are authors who write works that are credited to someone else. The work itself could be a novel, song, or movie. This week, I'm gonna take a look at some interesting cases of alleged ghostwriters you may not know about. Keep in mind that the point of being a ghostwriter is to not be known, so a lot of ghostwriting cases can be made up of rumors.  James Bond      Ian Flemming's famous series was most likely written by himself. The one book people suspect may have been ghostwritten is The man in the Golden Gun . It had been published after his death. Apparently, Flemming had written all the novel but wasn't entirely happy with it. After his death, the publisher sent the book to Kingsley Amis to look over. The publisher says that Amis did not add anything to the book. Of course, rumors spread about how Amis did make changes, perhaps adding to the book or entirely rewriting it. Like most ghostwriting cases, we don't know the tru...

Aesop Fables life lessons pt. 2

 Last month I was captivated by Aesop's fables short stories mixed with life lessons. Because of how much I enjoyed the reading I decided to finish the book this month and I wanted to share with you some of the fables that stuck out to me. THE FOX IN THE WELL An unlucky Fox having fallen into a well was able, by dint of great effort, to keep his head barely above water. While he was there struggling, and sticking his claws into the side of the well, a wolf came by and looked in. "What my dear brother," said he, with concerned concern, " can it really be you that I see down there? How cold you must feel! How long have you been in? How did you fall in? I am so pained to see you. Do tell me about it!" " The end of the rope would be of more use to me than all your pity," answered the fox. "Just help me to set my foot once more on solid ground, and you shall have the whole story." saying well is good, but doing well is better -PG. 91  This is one ...

Every Day

     Every day a different body. Every day a different life. Every day in love with the same girl.       Every Day is a book about a being named "A", who is cursed. Every day, A wakes up in a different person's body, and has to live their life for them. The person that A wakes up in can be tall or short, fat or thin, boy or girl, as long as they are around the age of A, and in the same part of the world. Because of this curse, A learns firsthand how it feels to have abusive parents, or be morbidly obese, or even blind. A learns all about other people's lives, but never anything about how to live "his" own. I say "his" because I think of A as a him since I usually identify with the main character when I read books, but really A is genderfluid.     As the book progresses, A finds love when he wakes up in the body of a bad boyfriend named Justin. The girl Justin is dating, Rhiannon, tries to be kind to Justin, and cares about him a lot, even tho...

The worst trope in fantasy

     Oh boy, a catchy title that makes a massive generalization.       What I'm about to talk about probably isn't the worst trope in fantasy. But it's definitely one of the weirdest, especially in contemporary literature.      For some reason, fantasy authors just LOVE monarchies.      I don't get it. Pretty much every fantasy book that I've read (that involves succession or just a king, which is most of them) implicitly supports monarchies. Sure, they have the evil king Mazgarazoth, iron-fisted tyrant of the grim lands of Scary Sadness. But, opposing the vile blackguard is the good king John, who rules his lands with a soft hand and loves his subjects. He also somehow maintains the economy even though he takes pity and lets peasants not pay taxes, and also, quite luckily, is descended from a long line of similarly paragon rulers, and his son is virtuous and angelic, and will grow into a good king.      (If...