Author Archives: James - Page 86
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Breaking Bad (season 1) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) How un-American is Breaking Bad, yo! Sorry, couldn't resist it. If you haven't seen it yet then you need to go watch it. I'm catching up on it via Netflix and so far I've made it through series 2. Unlike most US TV shows it has short series (five series muster 67 episodes in total). There are a number of other ways, all of them good, that make it stand out: * the protagonist is bad; * it is the dark underbelly; * it shows US society as fundamentally broken; * viewers need intelligence to get it; * you need to actively watch it; * loads of geek humour & science. A Good Man Gone Bad Dr Walter White is a way overqualified chemistry teacher in an Albuquerque High School. In the opening…
Book Review – Bullets and Brains by Leo Murray
Brains and Bullets: How Psychology Wins Wars by Leo Murray My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an excellent and very readable book which tries to put some hard numbers on a variety of psychological tactics that can be used to persuade your own troops to fight and the enemy to give up. This is an excellent work on what happens in combat and why. It is very readable, structured into bite sized chunks on the key phenomena and then some joining up when it has all been explained. Each chapter opens with an account from a real soldier who experienced that psychological effect in combat. This is then analysed and explained, pulling in other examples as required to show that it isn't an isolated incident but a general effect. Those examples range from the Napoleonic Wars right up…
Poetry Pointers
This is a post I wrote for Castlegreen Publishing and was first published on Poetry Pointers Given that we're looking for poetry at the moment we thought that folk might find it useful to give you some insight into what we're expecting and perhaps also some pointers on writing poetry that works for us. This is especially intended to help anyone struggling with their inner editor over whether or not their work is good enough to submit. Guidelines for the wise Poetry is a process, just like prose poems don't spring onto the page fully formed expect to polish poetry through several drafts to get it just right first drafts are always unpublishable, don't be discouraged by this, it gives you material that you can craft Poetry works best when read aloud From the second or third draft record yourself reading aloud and…
An Update
I'm a bit behind with writing things for the blog, there are about six books that I've read but not reviewed and also a continuation on a couple of projects that I'm working on that I was intending to write about. Part, but not all, of the reason for this is that I'm very busy with my day job. Over the last month I've been working much longer hours than normal, my team has doubled in size, and in the next two weeks it's going to treble in size (that's up from 7 to 43). This is a good from a day job perspective, but not so much for my side activities. I managed to completely miss doing TMA3 for B120. Fortunately I have had oustanding marks for TMA1 & TMA2, so provided I manage not to miss any more…
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Book Review – Spies Under Berlin by David Stafford
Spies Beneath Berlin by David Stafford My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a very well put together story of the Berlin spy tunnel, and some of the context that lead up to it being dug. It looks at the contemporary views and also re-evaluates the impact of the tunnel and whether or not it could be considered a success. The tale is an interesting one, because the existence of the tunnel was betrayed to the Soviets before it was even dug. Blake took the minutes of meeting that decided to build it, and told his Soviet handler about it. Despite this the KGB didn't share the information as they wanted to protect Blake as a source, so they couldn't stop the tunnel until there was a reasonable excuse from another source. For two years the British and Americans…