“
Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.
”
”
John Green
“
You are a terrible liar. You do want this. Just as badly as I do.”
My mouth opened, but no words came out.
“You want this as badly as you want to go to ALA this winter.”
Now my jaw was on the floor. “You don’t even know what ALA is!”
“American Library Association midwinter event,” he said, grinning proudly. “Saw you obsessing over it on your blog before you got sick. I’m pretty sure you said you’d give up your firstborn child to go.”
Yeah, I kind of did say that.
Daemon eyes flashed. “Anyway, back to the whole you wanting me part.”
I shook my head, dumbfounded.
“You do want me.”
Taking a deep breath, I struggled with my temper… and my amusement. “You are way too confident.”
“I’m confident enough to wager a bet.”
“You can’t be serious.”
He grinned. “I bet that by New Year’s Day, you will have admitted that you’re madly, deeply, and irrevocably—”
“Wow. Want to throw another adverb out there?” My cheeks were burning.
“How about irresistibly?”
I rolled my eyes and muttered, “I’m surprised you know what an adverb is.”
“Stop distracting me, Kitten. Back to my bet—by New Year’s Day, you’ll have admitted that you’re madly, deeply, irrevocably, and irresistibly in love with me.”
Stunned, I choked on my laugh.
“And that you dream about me.” He released my arm and folded his, cocking an eyebrow. “I bet you’ll even admit that. Probably even show me your notebook with my name circled in hearts—”
“Oh, for the love of God…”
Daemon winked. “It’s on.
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Onyx (Lux, #2))
“
My name is Victoria Spring. I think you should know that I make up a lot of stuff in my head and then get sad about it. I like to sleep and I like to blog. I am going to die someday.
”
”
Alice Oseman (Solitaire)
“
In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
There is a movement happening, a quiet one.
A low-profile, low-resolution revolution.
Comprised of writers and dreamers, of guerrilla artists and thought-ninjas.
Those with something to say.
They communicate through text inscribed on true public spaces, rather than blogs and forums.
Choosing fewer words, even without being bound by 140 character limits.
Using ink instead of pixels.
Sending messages in living, breathing space.
Pens scream louder into the void.
Even if permanent ink is not aptly named.
”
”
Erin Morgenstern
“
Well, bingo, his name popped up in the database on this crime ring’s computer as one of their own. Sloane, Wilma, KazuKen, Celi-hag, BunnyMuff, were all part of the illegal and criminal cyber-bullying ring that used blackmail to extort celebrities and famous authors, musicians, schools like Aunt Sookie Acting Academy for money or they will post lies, false rumors, photo shopped fake photos, and accusations of fake awards, fake credentials on the internet. They did that to Summer and tried to do that with Aunt Sookie, apparently. But as seemingly innocent as they seem, using young girls’ photos as their supposed fake identities, they really were part of a larger crime ring.”, Loving Summer by Kailin Gow
”
”
Kailin Gow (Loving Summer (Loving Summer, #1))
“
You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.
”
”
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
“
Before we were the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane—before everyone from Connecticut to California knew us by that tagline, and blogs ran pictures of our faces, and searching our names led to sites that crashed from all the traffic—we were just girls, and there were only two of us.
”
”
Lauren Oliver (Broken Things)
“
I've always felt like my calling was to inspire people. And not with famed, epic accomplishments, but with imperfection, struggles and humanity. I want people to read my stories and books and blogs, and look at my life and say, "She should have had nothing going for her. Meager means, questionable looks, no apparent safety nets and an absence of impressive letters after her name. But she followed her bliss anyway. If she can do it, I can do it. I'm not giving up.
”
”
Jennifer DeLucy
“
...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get.
See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On.
The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour.
And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente
“
Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.
We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.
And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente
“
I wasted time scrolling through the photos and errant musings of people I should have long since forgotten, and exchanged endless, searching emails with friends, in which we swapped inexpert professional and dating advice. I read the online archives of literary magazines that no longer existed, digitally window-shopped for clothing I could not afford, and created and abandoned private, aspirational blogs with names like A Meaningful Life, in the vain hope that they might push me closer to leading one.
”
”
Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
“
But since Catt was more realist than fabulist, she understood her actual death at the hands of her killer would be something much slower. It would be a classical feminine death, like a marriage…Raised by meek working-class parents, she despised petty groveling and had no talent for making shit up. She wanted to be a “real” intellectual moving with dizzying freedom between high and low points in the culture. And to a certain extent, she’d succeeded. Catt’s semi-name attracted a following among Asberger’s boys, girls who’d been hospitalized for mental illness, sex workers, Ivy alumnae on meth, and always, the cutters. With her small self-made fortune, Catt saw herself as Moll Flanders, out-sourcing her visiting professorships and writing commissions to younger artists whose work she believed in. But she’d reached a point lately where the same young people she’d helped were blogging against her, exposing the ‘cottage industry’ she ran out of her Los Angeles compound facing the Hollywood sign … the same compound these bloggers had lived in rent-free after arriving from Iowa City, Alberta, New Zealand. Loathing all institutions, Catt had become one herself. Even her dentist asked her for money.
”
”
Chris Kraus (Summer of Hate)
“
Just the other night, when I was drafting a blog post, I’d gone to listen to our Spotify playlist, only to find that the name had been changed from “zoe + eliza g8 hits” to “recs for divya.” Which, rationally speaking, is a small thing. Insignificant.
”
”
Ann Liang (This Time It's Real)
“
Anywhere you wanted to travel to?”
‘I’m suffocated by the darkness and this question.
I wish I was brave enough to have travelled. Now that I don’t have time to go anywhere, I want to go everywhere: I want to get lost in the deserts of Saudi Arabia; find myself running from the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas; stay overnight on Hashima Island, this abandoned coal-mining facility in Japan sometimes known as Ghost Island; travel the Death Railway in Thailand, because even with a name like that, there’s a chance I can survive the sheer cliffs and rickety wooden bridges; an everywhere else. I want to climb every last mountain, row down every last river, explore every last cave, cross every last bridge, run across last beach, visit every last town, city, country. Everywhere. I should’ve done more than watch documentaries and video blogs about these places.
”
”
Adam Silvera (They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1))
“
This denial is bizarre. Last time Chomsky denied something I attributed to him, it was Chomsky's word against mine and there was no way to resolve this argument. This time, however, there's some fairly conclusive evidence. Look at http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. It describes itself as 'the official weblog of Professor Noam Chomsky', and it is attached to Z Magazine, for which Chomsky has regularly written for over a decade. It claims Chomsky makes direct blog entries. Yet Chomsky claims he has 'nothing to with with it'. Are we really meant to believe this? If it is true, why does he carry on writing for a magazine that publishes a false blog in his name?
”
”
Johann Hari
“
Bucket had started his criminal career in Braas, not far from when Allan and his new friends now found themselves. There he had gotten together with some like-minded peers and started the motorcycle club called The Violence. Bucket was the leader; he decided which newsstand was to be robbed of cigarettes next. He was the one who has chosen the name- The Violence, in English, not swedish. And he was the one who unfortunately asked his girlfriend Isabella to sew the name of the motorcycle club onto ten newly stolen leather jackets. Isabella had never really learned to spell properly at school, not in Swedish, and certainly not in English.
The result was that Isabella sewed The Violins on the jackets instead. As the rest of the club members had had similar academic success, nobody in the group noticed the mistake.
So everyone was very surprised when one day a letter arrived for The Violins in Braas from the people in charge of the concert hall in Vaxjo. The letter suggested that, since the club obviously concerned itself with classical music, they might like to put in am appearance at a concert with the city’s prestigious chamber orchestra, Musica Viate.
Bucket felt provoked; somebody was clearly making fun of him. One night he skipped the newsstand, and instead went into Vaxjo to throw a brick through the glass door of the concert hall. This was intended to teach the people responsible lesson in respect. It all went well, except that Bucket’s leather glove happened to follow the stone into the lobby. Since the alarm went off immediately, Bucket felt it would be unwise to try to retrieve the personal item in question.
Losing the glove was not good. Bucket had traveled to Vaxjo by motorbike and one hand was extremely cold all the way home to Braas that night. Even worse was the fact that Bucket’s luckless girlfriend had written Bucket’s name and adress inside the glove, in case he lost it."
For more quotes from the novel visit my blog: frommybooks.wordpress.com
”
”
Jonas Jonasson (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man, #1))
“
And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn’t really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre’s origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn’t post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there’s no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there’s nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there’s nothing wrong with SF getting called ‘dystopia’ when it’s marketed to teenage girls, because girls don’t read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so.
It’s not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the works we think are problematic for fear of being ostracized. We need to get over this crushing obsession with niceness – that all fans must act nicely, that all authors must be nice to each other, that everyone must be nice about everything even when it goes against our principles – because it’s not helping us grow, or be taken seriously, or do anything other than throw a series of floral bedspreads over each new room-hogging elephant.
We, all of us, need to get critical.
Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA
”
”
Foz Meadows
“
Anointed means the presence of God Almighty in a person, entity, nation, article or book or anything….Presence of God is what matters in everything done, or said, or written…Holy, holy, holy God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, seas and oceans, rolling rivers, waterfalls, lakes and everything in them…To the glory of God the Father…Hallelujah!
”
”
Stellah Mupanduki (Bog 9: Blogging Of A Healing Blogger In The Name Of Jesus Christ)
“
First of all, I’m sorry to hear that you and your whole family suffer from such serious name recalling issues. I know they’re working on a cure for it, fingers crossed.” Mike held up two fingers and crossed them. Jess closed her eyes, mortified. “And second of all, Mike is a really hard name to remember. It’s kind of unusual, and it’s hard for some people to pronounce.
”
”
Ryan Ringbloom (Books, Blogs, & Reality)
“
The name of my blog was already Life from Scratch, and the food became a natural extension. It turned out that writing about food was the perfect jumping board to discussing the rest of my life too. If nothing interesting was happening, I could talk about how I learned to roast potatoes (the trick: put the cubed potatoes in a bag; splash in the olive oil, salt, rosemary, and garlic powder; and then shake to coat each potato evenly.)
”
”
Melissa Ford (Life From Scratch)
“
Sometimes they’d make a donation to charity in the name of the blog or respond with a self-deprecating parody on YouTube. I took care to focus on satire, poking fun at the extremes, playfully objectifying these untouchable gods among men. Women, especially females of notoriety, in our society had to suck up and swallow daily doses of criticism about everything—too fat, too skinny, wearing the same outfit twice in public, having an opinion—from fake TV personalities and tabloid vultures. In comparison to these self-esteem vampires, I provide a public service.
”
”
L.H. Cosway (The Hooker and the Hermit (Rugby, #1))
“
Dead on time. Not late at all. He was small, white as a sheet, thin as a specter, always moving, even when he was still. The twenty-nine-year-old veteran. He was dressed all in black. He saw Westwood and headed over. He nodded three ways and sat down. He said, “The Valley likes irony, but you got to agree happy hour in a Soviet shrine is the ultimate contradiction in terms. And speaking of the former USSR, my blog alerts tell me a Ukrainian named Merchenko was a mob hit last night. Which is a happy coincidence. But he will be replaced. The market will fill the void. So I’m still not going public.
”
”
Lee Child (Make Me (Jack Reacher, #20))
“
The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. 5
”
”
David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly)
“
When God Almighty blogs, then I blog, I put to writing what he says at any time and at any place. May God our Father bless the internet and all social media and public publishing platforms in the name of Jesus Christ. Through these Social Media and healing platforms, the Lord God Almighty has brought the message of healing, cleansing, protection, salvation and peace, ability and stability, joy and happiness, justice and peace to all people without bias....Father God, the Lord God Almighty says this to all his vessels he uses for his glory and honour, "You rise above in greatness for I am with you and in you. I will lift you up to the greatest heights, for you are mine all you innovative entities and people.
”
”
Stellah Mupanduki (Blogs From God Almighty: Books Of Strength)
“
it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.
May 14, 2011 Blog post
”
”
Foz Meadows
“
They're not just looking to be offended. They are hunting for opportunities to vilify people. These opportunistic attacks are impossible to anticipate because in many cases the target doesn't even know the SJW who complained to Human Resources or contacted the media, and even in the case of a public accusation on Twitter or a blog, he probably won't be aware of the attack until it has already blown up on social media because he doesn't follow his accuser. Sir Tim Hunt had probably made similar jokes about female scientists in laboratories before, but he had not made them in front of a status-seeking SJW like Connie St. Louis. Sensing an opportunity to make a name for herself by vilifying a Nobel Prize winner, she struck, and in doing so promptly put herself in front of the charge.
”
”
Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
“
Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea
Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications?
No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country.
The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there.
Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you?
Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank.
But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.
”
”
Paul Theroux
“
In November 1914, the British government issued the first war bond, aiming to raise £350 million from private investors at an interest rate of 4.1% and a maturity of ten years. Surprisingly, the bond issue was undersubscribed, and the British public purchased less than a third of the targeted sum. To avoid publicizing this failure, the Bank of England granted funds to its chief cashier and his deputy to purchase the bonds under their own names. The Financial Times, ever the bank’s faithful mouthpiece, published an article proclaiming the loan was oversubscribed. John Maynard Keynes worked at the Treasury at the time, and in a secret memo to the bank, he praised them for what he called their “masterly manipulation.” Keynes’s fondness for surreptitious monetary arrangements would go on to inspire thousands of economic textbooks published worldwide. The Bank of England had set the tone for a century of central bank and government collusion behind the public’s back. The Financial Times would only issue a correction 103 years later,7 when this matter was finally uncovered after some sleuthing in the bank’s archives by some enterprising staff members and published on the bank’s blog.8
”
”
Saifedean Ammous (The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization)
“
Seth Godin, author of more than a dozen bestsellers, including Purple Cow and Permission Marketing, understands the importance of frequency and consistency in a book marketing and public relations campaign. He practices these through following these seven steps: Permission marketing. This is a process by which marketers ask permission before sending ads to prospects. Godin pioneered the practice in 1995 with the founding of Yoyodyne, the Web’s first direct mail and promotions company (it used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to participating users). He sold it to Yahoo! three years later. Editorial content. Godin was a long-time contributing editor to the popular Fast Company magazine. Blogging. Seth's Blog is one of the most-frequented blogs. Public speaking. Successful Meetings magazine named Godin one of the top 21 speakers of the 21st century. Words used to describe his lectures include "visual," "personal," and "dynamic." Community-building. His latest company, Squidoo.com, ranked among the top 125 sites in the U.S. (by traffic) by Quantcast, allows people to build a page about any topic that inspires them. The site raises money for charity and pays royalties to its million-plus members. E-books. Godin took a step to publish all his books electronically, then worked with Amazon on his own imprint, Domino, which published 12 books. Recently, Godin ended that project – since as he said in a blog, it was a "project" and he is always looking for more and different opportunities. Continuous improvement. Godin is always on the lookout for more ideas, more business opportunities and more engagement with his community.
”
”
Michael R. Drew (Brand Strategy 101: Your Logo Is Irrelevant - The 3 Step Process to Build a Kick-Ass Brand)
“
Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival. 13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart, Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear. 14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/ feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others. In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.” 15
”
”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
“
The tech start-up world from which Musk hails embraces disruption as one of its organizing principles, encouraged in part by the influential blog TechCrunch, which named its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, for the concept. Silicon Valley’s budding capitalists have long been encouraged to use their software prowess and processes to disrupt existing industries, and hence we have Facebook, which disrupted the news media industry, Airbnb, which disrupted hotels, and crowdfunding, which disrupted traditional investing. When Ted Craver asked Musk to share his thoughts on disruption with an audience of old-school electricity providers, you could see why the chairman might nervously fiddle with his pen. Could Tesla, with its emerging energy-storage business, disrupt the utilities? It might have come as some comfort to those at the conference that Musk is no fan of disruption. Indeed, he and Straubel were probably there to convince utilities to work with Tesla on energy storage projects that could benefit both parties. But the industry’s fear that it might have been on the wrong side of history would not have dissipated completely. The same was true for at least one auto industry leader. The man who, until May 2017, was CEO of the Ford Motor Company is one person who does appear to be a fan of disruption. Mark Fields, a Harvard business grad and Clayton Christensen follower, was fifty-three when he was appointed to succeed outgoing CEO Alan Mulally.
”
”
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
“
We couldn’t stop following the news. Every ten seconds we refreshed our browsers and gawked at the headlines. Dully we read blogs of friends of friends of friends who had started an organic farm out on the Wichita River. They were out there pickling and canning and brewing things in the goodness of nature. And soon we’d worry it was time for us to leave the city and go. Go! To Uruguay or Morocco or Connecticut? To the Plains or the Mountains or the Bay? But we’d bide our time and after some months or years, our farmer friends would give up the farm and begin studying for the LSATs. We felt lousy about this, and wonderful.
We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us— or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came— somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone.
Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wodnered how they managed it. Did they work form home?Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always.
But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections— if we were all slowly dying — then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.
”
”
Kristopher Jansma (Why We Came to the City)
“
Then I’d scroll to the comments, and read the names of every blog reader who had promised to pray for me. Sometimes, I’d read their comments out loud. Lying in that bed, I pictured myself as a big sponge, enthusiastically absorbing all the love and peace and joy and light that these prayers were sending out in my direction.
”
”
Rosemary Thornton (Remembering The Light: How Dying Saved My Life)
“
By mid-2010, a thirty-four-year-old attorney named Alexey Navalny was drawing tens of thousands of daily hits on his blog,
”
”
Masha Gessen (The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin)
“
Editor’s introduction:
Welcome our guide on guest blogging in seo. That’s right, send it a spot on profcontent from our friend alex. Alex breaks down everything beginners need to know to start blogging on the web. Take that, Alex.
What is good blogging?
Guest blogging- also referred to as blogging – is the need to contribute to another person’s blog to build relevant exposure, leads and links.
Link are a primary ranking factor in goggle, and seo offer a strong chance of getting a link back from another website, among other marketing considerations in guest blogging.
Guest blogging build a relationship with the blogger hosting your post, connects with the blogger hosting your post, connects with their audience for additional exposure, and helps you build authority among that audience.
The premise is simple: you write a blog article tailored to the needs of a particular blogger and get a backlink in return, What Is Guest Blogging in SEO? A Guide for usually below the article in what’s called an author box.
Blogger are inserted in publishing high- quality content on their blogs that they can use to attract new readers as well as share with their exiting audience. This makes guest blogging a win-win solution for both website owners who want to rank higher in search engines (and need link to do so) and bloggers who want to drive more readers to their blog. Interested in attracting more readers their blog.
Is guest blogging good for bloggers?
The short answer is yes again. As extensive as the blogger is shrewdness and eager to spend time sifting through and excision posts from outside bases, guest blogging can be a great source of valuable content for the blogger’s audience.
An important portion of removal any external role is reviewing the links inside the content Take a look at this (or another) post a bout guest blogging and inbound marketing written by Neil Patel. Almost every paragraph has an external link. You get, Neil knows that links add price to a post by if more material and additional incomes. Be like Neil.
To be on the benign side, examine guest posts for superiority and make sure you only link to superiority websites that add price to the mesh.
To type sure the websites you’re involving to are immobile available, aren’t recurring 404s, or readdressing to dissimilar content.
1.find list of top blogs.
The first step of prospects is pretty obvious: type a phrase like “ top [ industry specific] blogs list” into goggle and review the results.
Opinion all the blogs registered one by one on each sheet in the search fallouts.
Most likely you find great blogs this way, but only a few of them can accept guest articles from contributors.
2. Advanced search with search strings:
Google has many hunt strings to help you find exact happy on the web, which you can syndicate into search If you are novel to this, you can learn extra here or here. If you search for [“keyword” and “write for us”], your results will look like the image under.
3. Shadow people or businesses who actively visitor blog.
One of the best ways to find great guest blogging opportunities is to find other people who consistently contribute quality guest posts to industry- related websites.
Most people and companies share their posts through social media profiles. Once I ran across a twitter profile that was basically sharing their guest posts, so I pretty much grew my list in no time.
Stab this search thread to find sites anywhere a precise person or business published a guest post: “individual name “or” corporation name” “guest column”.
”
”
Sannan
“
I tap the link, and it opens up a bright, cheery, robin's-egg blue web page. P&P Bake, it's called. It's clearly one of those WordPress blogs converted into a website, but that doesn't make it any less captivating--- the pictures on the posts are so vivid, I can practically taste them through the screen.
I scroll down, glancing at the dessert names, lingering on the pictures. The most recent is Tailgate Trash Twinkies, which are apparently a homemade cake roll infused with PBR; I scroll down and see A-Plus Angel Cake, and Butter Luck Next Time Butter Cookies, and then---
And then, on Halloween, there's an entry for Monster Cake.
My breath stops before it can leave my chest, my entire body stiffening on the couch like a corpse. There's no mistaking it. I may have a bad habit of eating Pepper's baked goods so fast, it threatens the time-space continuum, but the bright colors and gooey mess of that cake are so distinct in my mind and in my taste buds, I could see it in another life and immediately identify it.
Yet my brain still refuses to process it, and I'm still scrolling as if I'll blink and it will disappear, a vivid, sleep-deprived teenage hallucination.
But the further I scroll the worse it gets. The So Sorry Blondies. The Pop Quiz Cake Pops she and Pooja were eating the other day. A few things I've never heard of before, with irreverent, silly names, some of which must be Paige's, but others that are so distinctly Pepper it stings to read.
”
”
Emma Lord (Tweet Cute)
“
Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True. (He also writes a blog of the same name.) For
”
”
D. Cameron Webb (Despicable Meme: The Absurdity and Immorality of Modern Religion)
“
The first job of an SEO specialist is, oddly, to make sure your web page shows up exactly where it should. When a user types in your company or organization name, the name of a recent blog post, or the name of an event your company has participated in, you will of course want your organization’s name to appear near the top of search results.
”
”
Kathleen Taylor (Getting a Web Development Job For Dummies)
“
Returning to the top panel, you have an opportunity to list links to your website or blog. Don’t settle for LinkedIn’s default language of “company website” or “blog” (instructions on how to do this are below). Instead, use your blog title or the name of your book, and include links to your blog, Amazon, iTunes, or wherever people can purchase your book.
”
”
Frances Caballo (Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books)
“
Tabs linking to your website or blog are great for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and book sales. SEO comprises methods you use—such as these tabs—for getting your name and your book title on the first page of Google’s search results.
”
”
Frances Caballo (Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books)
“
Memoirists collect experiences in an attempt to capture the fluttery thing we call life.
---from Blog-"Readers, Writers and Pumpkin Pie
”
”
Peggy Barnes (I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother)
“
I recently read a fabulous blog by a writer named Mark Manson, who said that the secret to finding your purpose in life is to answer this question in total honesty: "What's your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
“
Many bloggers change their topic multiple times before they find the right one. The disadvantage of a keyword-centric address is that you’re stuck with a name—even if you shift focus with your site. The advantage of a branded domain is that you can change topics and still keep the name.
”
”
Steve Scott (How to Start a Successful Blog in One Hour (Better Blog Booklets))
“
Everyone does that. We’d switch library cards, put each other’s names on blog comments, screw with the grand cosmic record of who did what.” “Why?” I asked, confused. “The world tends toward chaos, you know,” Cassidy said. “I’m just helping it along. You could too. Just write down a made-up name, or even a fictional character. And to the next person who finds this geocache, it’s as though things really happened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.
”
”
Robyn Schneider (The Beginning of Everything)
“
I recently read a fabulous blog by a writer named Mark Manson, who said that the secret to finding your purpose in life is to answer this question in total honesty: “What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear)
“
Never have I seen so many young, privileged, people trying so hard to be happy. There are countless articles written about it, blogs named for it, workshops attending to it. Who ever said we’re supposed to be happy all the time, anyway? We’re not. And the pressure to do so might be what’s making us unhappy to begin with. It’s OK if you’re not completely content with your life twenty-four hours a day. Can you imagine what a boring person you’d be if you were? Going through shit storms, feeling uninspired, hating the way you look and having guilt over not accomplishing enough are just some of the things that make you interesting, relatable and human. Not to mention, if you’re reading this, then you have internet access and if you have internet access, it stands to reason that you have a computer, which makes me think you probably have a place to live, with electricity and plenty of food to eat and clean clothes to wear, which are all things that an enormous amount of people living on the planet today do not have. This is not to say that people shouldn’t strive to better their positions in life, however it seems like so many of us are no longer content with a regular amount of happy, yet dead-set on being maniacally jubilant, all of the time.
”
”
Kelly Rheel
“
Through dreaming, we can find our voice and know who we are. When we have a clear sense of identity, we can make things happen and act on the world; we can then speak the words that make our dreams become a reality. USING YOUR WORDS . . . The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play. —Richard Strauss, nineteenth-century composer • What if you had words to describe your dreams and to advocate for your dreams and the people you love? Would being able to articulate your thoughts—verbally or in writing—help your dreams come true? • If you speak a foreign language, are you bolder in that second tongue? Do you say what you mean in a way that you don’t in your native tongue? As you are learning to advocate for your dreams, how can you draw on that “second tongue” confidence? • Does participating in social networking and regularly sharing your point of view—such as by blogging or tweeting—help you find your words and feel your way toward your dream? • We may know what our children want, but we ask them to use their words. Why is this important for them? Why is it important for us? • What can you do today to find your own voice, to trust that voice, to acquire the tools needed to achieve your dream? Can you try saying out loud, kindly, civilly what you really want, or really think, to your children, husband, friends, coworkers? • How is learning to say your name—to value it, to know that it means something—key to your dreaming? • If you’re feeling you want to get more done, what would happen if you focused on your identity for even a few moments a day?
”
”
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
“
And yet I, and others of my ilk, am reviled in terms far harsher than those kept for the real opponents like the Creationists. We are labelled ‘accommodationists’ for our willingness to give religion a space not occupied by science. We are put down in terms that denote powerful emotion, way beyond reason. In The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, I am likened to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler. Jerry Coyne, the author of both the book and the blog Why Evolution is True and an ardent fan of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, wrote about one of my books in terms used by George Orwell: ‘There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.’ The Minnesota biologist PZ Myers, who writes the blog Pharyngula, has referred to me as a ‘clueless gobshite’. And if I had a dollar for everyone who has made a pun out of my last name, I would be a very rich man. Because I will not toe the line absolutely or bow down in praise of Dawkins and company, because I laugh at their pretensions and positions, I am anathema maranatha.
[Curb your enthusiasm]
”
”
Michael Ruse
“
A WHILE BACK, a game designer friend of mine named Phil Fish made a plea on Twitter, “Hey bloggers, no more ‘blank rebuilt in Minecraft’ posts, please. We get it. You can make things in Minecraft. Thanks.” Fish was referring to the popular online game Minecraft, in which players hunt for resources that are used to construct models and apparatuses with the game’s characteristic, cubical visual style. The Internet being what it is, given such tools extreme fans do insane things, like elaborately reconstructing the city King’s Landing from Game of Thrones using nothing but this square matter mined from Minecraft. Seeing Fish’s tweet, an enterprising ironoiac recreated the form of the embedded tweet itself inside Minecraft, a fact that the tech blog VentureBeat then dutifully blogged about, thus completing not one but two cycles of an ironoia self-treatment the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton names “anything you can do I can do meta.”14 In a futile attempt to prevent further metastasis, the blogger concluded his post with the line, “Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.”15 But rather than satisfying anyone, such a provocation only further irritated the ironoiac itch. Fish tweeted a link to the blog post covering the Minecraft construction of a model of Fish’s tweet protesting blog posts about Minecraft constructions, which one of his followers one-upped by observing the fact that Fish had in fact “tweeted about somebody blogging about somebody making [his] tweet about Minecraft in Minecraft.” Another chimed in, “How long ’til someone recreates that blog post in Minecraft?” Each step represents an attempt to overcome the absurdity of the last by fixing it in a new voice, even though each ironic gesture was evanescent, quickly replaced by yet another layer of buffer from yet another desperate ironoiac. Why do we do it, then? Today, satisfaction is more elusive than ever. In part, the precarity of life after the 2008 global financial collapse and the Great Recession that followed it (and whose effects still linger) makes every transaction with the world feel suspect and risky. We fear that things might turn on us, because we have good evidence that they can, and do. But
”
”
Ian Bogost (Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games)
“
Early June 2012 Andy’s reply arrived a couple of days after I emailed him. His message read: Dearest Young, I’m delighted to hear from you. I googled your profile and came across your “Life Of A Harem Boy” blog. I noticed you have omitted the actual names of relevant people and places. I’m glad you thought out the details. Just like the Young I know so well. As much as I’m not in favor of you writing about the clandestine society, I also admire your honesty in telling our positive experiences during our E.R.O.S., Bahriji and the Arab Households years. Those were wonderful times we shared and I missed them tremendously. Most importantly, I missed you; the love we shared was sublime. As much as I love Albert and appreciate our precious moments together, our relationship was vastly different from the love you and I shared. The sensual, sexual and spiritual rapport we had was simply too empyrean. Since our separation I have not been able to find another to enjoy this amorous passion.
”
”
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
“
Alejandro de Humboldt National Park
Outside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people.
One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct.
The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles.
“The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Use Google Sheets as a Multilingual Chat Translator Communicating with someone who speaks and writes in another language isn't the easiest task, but this Google Sheet incorporates Google Translate so you can have a real-time chat conversation with anybody in the world. Over at the tech blog Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal created a Google Sheet that's powered by Google Scripts, and translates all language pairs that are supported by Google Translate in real-time. This means that once you save a copy of the Google Sheet to your own Google Drive, you can share it with anyone who writes in another language and have a real-time chat within the document. Just enter your contact's name along with yours in the cells provided, select each participants native language from a drop-down menu, and start typing in the colored fields. It may not be a 100% perfect translation, but it's a great way to communicate quickly with someone in another part of the world. For instructions on downloading the Google Sheet and how to operate it, check out the link below. Use Google Sheets for Multilingual Chat with Spears of Different Languages | Digital Inspiration
”
”
Anonymous
“
so obvious on large sections of the cyber-atheist community. Cyber-Atheism is the veritable North Korea of the internet, and if you intend to interfere in any way shape or form with the minds of their people, you can expect a reaction. And a new atheist reaction is something to behold indeed. Any shard of religious identity you would dare express shall be ripped asunder, sections of your brain will be ridiculed beyond reason, well-rehearsed choruses from the sacred scriptures of Hitchens and Harris will be recited verbatim in your general direction, you will be laden with the burdens of every remotely god-believing human being for the last two thousand years, reviled as an advocator of terrorism, genital mutilation and human sacrifice, but most incongruously and insultingly of all- you will be called irrational and oppressive. And I am to believe that all this is some rather eccentric attempt at courteous discourse? But do not assume for one moment that atheism has kept to itself. Oh no. The level of dedication to the atheist cause has permeated through every single major public gathering in cyberspace; video sharing websites, social networking, wiki-sites, blogs, forums, you name it. There is no mass internet-based domain wherein the territory of new atheism has not been asserted. Videos are created, posted, shared, rated and promoted, hundreds of venerated blogs and websites consistently updated with surveys, statistical analyses, all the latest updates of religious scandal and hopeful omens of the decline of faith all woven across a large, intricate and efficient social network with totalitarian tenacity. New atheism is a well-oiled digital
”
”
Bō Jinn (Illogical Atheism: A Comprehensive Response to the Contemporary Freethinker from a Lapsed Agnostic)
“
I should say that it was only for me that Marxism seemed over. Surely, I would tell G. at least once a week, it had to count for something that every single self-described Marxist state had turned into an economically backward dictatorship. Irrelevant, he would reply. The real Marxists weren’t the Leninists and Stalinists and Maoists—or the Trotskyists either, those bloodthirsty romantics—but libertarian anarchist-socialists, people like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, scholarly believers in true workers’ control who had labored in obscurity for most of the twentieth century, enjoyed a late-afternoon moment in the sun after 1968 when they were discovered by the New Left, and had now once again fallen back into the shadows of history, existing mostly as tiny stars in the vast night sky of the Internet, archived on blogs with names like Diary of a Council Communist and Break Their Haughty Power. They were all men. The group itself was mostly men. This was, as Marxists used to say, no accident. There was something about Marxist theory that just did not appeal to women. G. and I spent a lot of time discussing the possible reasons for this. Was it that women don’t allow themselves to engage in abstract speculation, as he thought? That Marxism is incompatible with feminism, as I sometimes suspected? Or perhaps the problem was not Marxism but Marxists: in its heyday men had kept a lock on it as they did on everything they considered important; now, in its decline, Marxism had become one of those obsessive lonely-guy hobbies, like collecting stamps or 78s. Maybe, like collecting, it was related, through subterranean psychological pathways, to sexual perversions, most of which seemed to be male as well. You never hear about a female foot fetishist, or a woman like the high-school history teacher of a friend of mine who kept dated bottles of his own urine on a closet shelf. Perhaps women’s need for speculation is satisfied by the intense curiosity they bring to daily life, the way their collecting masquerades as fashion and domesticity—instead of old records, shoes and ceramic mixing bowls—and their perversity can be satisfied simply by enacting the highly artificial role of Woman, by becoming, as it were, fetishizers of their own feet.
”
”
Katha Pollitt (Learning to Drive (Movie Tie-in Edition): And Other Life Stories)
“
Sometimes, I’d buy a whole series of numbers, search the Web for the names and addresses of large families (birthday party announcements on blogs were a good source), and then register the cards to those people.
”
”
Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website)
“
… I am at best an ‘arranger’ of sorts. Someone who gets lucky at times in arranging those meaningless letters in a sensible pattern; letters that have in them the power of endless possibilities. End of it, despite my best efforts, some of my writings may still remain as disjointed and incoherent as they are on a QWERTY keyboard. And that to me is the rationale for the name of this blog: Worthless Whispers. To sum up, I am like the curious kid who runs his tender fingers on the melodiously mysterious piano, unwittingly hitting the right notes, alternating between music and noise, as if his fingers are guided by the will of the invisible.
”
”
Rasal (I Killed the Golden Goose : A COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS, THOUGHTLESSNESS, SILENCES, POEMS & SOME ‘SHOT’ STORIES)
“
I read a post on Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet’s blog claiming that Facebook was blocking the term “Palestinian” from being used in page titles. The post included a screenshot of an attempt to create a page called “Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet,” with a warning splashed across the top that read: “Our automated system will not allow the name ‘Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet.’ It may violate our Pages Guidelines or contain a word or phrase that is blocked to prevent the creation of unofficial or otherwise prohibited Pages. If you believe this is an error, please contact our Customer Support team.” The blogger, Rex Brynen, tested several similar titles, replacing “Palestinian” with “Israeli” and “Afghan.” Both worked, so he wrote to the support team.
”
”
Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
“
Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She
made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then
looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio:
Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I
design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m
trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I
don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t
make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog
someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m.
I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you!
What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan?
The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made
it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was
flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy
shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s
clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something
only children did.
The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing
different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama
with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy.
And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little
captions about how the products inspired her.
Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at
an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d
been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out,
but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for
yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated,
hated most of all.
I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this
blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator?
This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your
formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have
lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies!
“Everything okay?” asked Jillian.
“Yeah, what?”
“Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and
everything.”
“Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan.
“It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?”
“What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan.
How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy?
What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-yearolds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more
acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now
there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that
they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even
bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?
”
”
Halle Butler (Jillian)
“
He lays out the methods to achieve this, which he describes as “mind manipulation.” The goal, Nir says, is to “create a craving” in human beings—and he cites B. F. Skinner as a model for how to do it. His approach can be summarized by the headline on one of his blog posts: “Want to Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy.” The goal of the designer is to create an “internal trigger” (remember them?) that will keep the user coming back again and again. To help the designer picture the kind of person they are targeting, he says they should imagine a user he names Julie, who “fears being out of the loop.” He comments: “Now we’ve got something! Fear is a powerful internal trigger, and we can design our solution to help calm Julie’s fear.” Once you have succeeded in playing on feelings like this, “a habit is formed, [and so] the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while waiting in line,” he writes approvingly. Designers
”
”
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
“
What is Outsourcing?
"Outsourcing" is the short form of the English word Outside Resourcing.
The term outsourcing was first coined around 1989 and was first seen as a business strategy. Later in the 1990s, this subject was included as an important component of business economics. Since then people started to have various interests in outsourcing.
Out means 'Outside' and source means 'Source'.
In other words, the whole meaning of Outsourcing is "to bring work from an external source".
Here are the key aspects of outsourcing:
1. Opportunities: It can encompass a wide range of functions including customer support, information technology services, human resources functions, manufacturing, accounting, marketing, and more.
2. Benefits: Outsourcing offers several benefits including cost savings, access to specialized skills and technology, increased efficiency, scalability, and ability to focus on core competencies.
3. Global Reach: Outsourcing is not restricted by geographical boundaries. That's why companies can engage service providers from around the world to access global talent pools and cost advantages.
4. Types of Outsourcing: Outsourcing can be divided into several categories. Such as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO), Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), and many more depending on the nature of the service being outsourced.
5. Challenges: Although outsourcing can offer many benefits. It also presents challenges related to data security, communication, cultural differences, and the need for effective management of outsourcing relationships.
6. Outsourcing model: Companies can choose from several outsourcing models, including offshoring (outsourcing to a service provider in another country), nearshoring (outsourcing to a service provider in a nearby country), and onshoring (outsourcing to a service provider within the same country).
Outsourcing means the process of taking the work of an organization or company from an external source. For example – “You Can't find any qualified person within the company to do a job in your company. So you offer some money to an outside freelancer to do the job and he agrees to do the job. Well, that's called outsourcing”.
Simply put, Outsourcing is basically the payment you pay a freelancer to do the work they are good at.
Please Visit Our Blogging Website named (Bhairab IT Zone) to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.
”
”
Bhairab IT Zone
“
With these ideas in mind, I decided to create a blog, Council of European Canadians, early in the summer of 2014 ‘dedicated to the promotion and defence of the ethnic interests of European Canadians.’ I called for a strategy in which European Canadians would make use of the current policy of multiculturalism in Canada, using this policy for their own ends by asking for a seat at the table as a people concerned for the preservation of Canada’s European heritage. As part of the ‘beliefs and goals’ of the Council, I stated: We believe Canada is a nation founded by Anglo and French Europeans. In 1971, over 100 years after Confederation, the Anglo and French composition of the Canadian population stood at 44.6 percent and 28.7 percent respectively. All in all, over 96 percent of the population was European in origin. We therefore oppose all efforts to deny or weaken the European character of Canada. We believe that the pioneers and settlers who built the Canadian nation are part of the European people. Therefore we believe that Canada derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and that Canada should remain majority European in its ethnic composition and cultural character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into Canada that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority within our lifetime. In subsequent months I posted articles on a whole range of subjects. From the beginning the blog became a subject of controversy with numerous complaints filed against me to the president of the university where I was working, The University of New Brunswick, and to other members of the administration, followed by TV interviews, many articles in the mainstream media, student university papers, and radio debates. It was obvious I had hit a nerve in the Western establishment. You must not question mass immigration in the name of the ethnic interests of Europeans.
”
”
Ricardo Duchesne (Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age)
“
Take the tech blog Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most visible blogs on the web, but they create very little original content. Rather they act as a filter for the morass of information, pulling up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing they’re linking to. The culture of citation and name-checking on the web has resulted in a cascade of “re-” gestures: retweeting, reblogging, regramming, and reposting
”
”
Kenneth Goldsmith (Wasting Time on the Internet)
“
Then use the following formula on your opt-in form: “YES! SEND ME [NAME OF OPT-IN] SO THAT [BENEFIT].” OR “[PROBLEM?] Get my [SOLUTION] and [RESULT].
”
”
Meera Kothand (The Blog Startup: Proven Strategies to Launch Smart and Exponentially Grow Your Audience, Brand, and Income without Losing Your Sanity or Crying Bucketloads of Tears)
“
Visual aspects are important. But beyond visual branding, your name has to evoke certain emotions.
”
”
Meera Kothand (The Blog Startup: Proven Strategies to Launch Smart and Exponentially Grow Your Audience, Brand, and Income without Losing Your Sanity or Crying Bucketloads of Tears)
“
As well as sniffing my mum's precious bottles, I loved squirting the perfume onto myself, so from a very young age I walked around in a rather overpowering haze of scent. My father started calling me Fragrant Cloud, after his favorite rose- hence the name of this blog.
”
”
Maggie Alderson (The Scent Of You)
“
As for a domain name, I strongly recommend that you choose something that accurately describes your business, your personality, or both.
”
”
Raza Imam (Six Figure Blogging Blueprint: How to Start an Amazingly Profitable Blog in the Next 60 Days (Even If You Have No Experience) (Digital Marketing Mastery Book 3))
“
Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.39
”
”
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
“
Steven Odzer is a successful American entrepreneur. Since the age of 18, Stephen has developed and led businesses in the distribution industry. In 2000 he was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur. Now, with 30 years of experience, he serves as CEO of YBT Industries, a new company looking to transform the distribution landscape.
Steven Odzer New York,
Steven Odzer Linkedin,
Steven Odzer Facebook,
Steven Odzer Youtube,
Steven Odzer Scholarship,
Steven Odzer Buy LifeGuard,
Steven Odzer Las Vegas,
Steven Odzer Medium,
Steven Odzer Nevada,
Steven Odzer Blog,
Steven Odzer Charity
”
”
Steven Odzer
“
The beauty of having blog books 1 to 9 by Stellah Mupanduki, is that, they strongly touch your life in a random way because of the Holy presence of the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God, who knows how to intercede on your behalf in matters you know nothing about. You will be uplifted and strengthened with sound healing, cleansing and protection coming from God Almighty for your your body and life and everything in your life. Amen…
”
”
Stellah Mupanduki (Blog 8: Blogging of a Healing Blogger In The Name of Jesus Christ)
“
You do not need to be desperate...you just have to read and be in fellowship with the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. When life is not making sense for you, just get hold of this healing blog book and read through and it will uplift your spirit....and comfort your soul with divine healing. Blog 9: Blogging of a Healing Blogger In The Name of Jesus Christ This blog 9 healing blogging book comprises of cleansing and healing blogs that were posted on internet Social Media by Stellah Mupanduki for the benefit of the healing of the people of this world. These living and active healing blogs remove desperation and hopelessness from people. This blog book has unpredicted, random unparalleled expressions of healing and visual depiction of the prevailing love, mercy and protecting power and the healing presence of God in and on anything on this earth; be it a society, a system, an entity, a people, a soul, a country, a continent and the whole creation of God. If you feel lost, when your spirit is low, when you need the comfort and presence of God, just open this blog book and read randomly and the Lord will speak to your heart and soul and ease your troubles and concerns of your life. These are healing blogs that bring salvation to people and to this world. Many were healed through them as they were posted on Facebook. For years, these blogs were there to help people in times of hopelessness. The author moved according to the command of the Holy Spirit in fulfilling her vows that she made to God when she was facing times of trouble, when she said everything about her work belongs to God Almighty and he does what he wants with it. So the Holy Spirit did what he wanted by allowing these healing blogs to be given freely at that time through social media. Good and wonderful testimony from those healed came out of these healing blogs. Now they are powerful books and they are living and active because of the presence of the Holy Spirit who heals, liberates and anoints the reader at any point of life as he/she reads in truth and in spirit. You do not need to be desperate...you just have to read and be in fellowship with the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. When life is not making sense for you, just get hold of this healing blog book and read through and it will uplift your spirit....and comfort your soul with divine healing. (less)
”
”
Stellah Mupanduki (Healed From Drug Addiction: Healed From Mind Erosion)
“
Jeffrey Lewis, an honorable EMP critic that is despised and derided by name by such EMP advocates as Peter Pry has made excellent commentaries and done great research on the EMP “threat inflation industry” as he calls it. He wrote a piece on ForeignPolicy.com titled, “The EMPire Strikes Back” on May 23, 2013 that described the sensational doom-and-gloom falsely attributed to EMP. However, referencing that article in a blog post titled “More EMP Nonsense” on June 10, 2013, even Lewis concedes that EMPs are real, but overblown:
”
”
David Hathaway (EMP Hoax)
“
For me, writing any piece of advertising is unnerving. You sit down with your partner and put your feet up. You read the strategist's brief, draw a square on a pad of paper, and you both stare at the damned thing. You stare at each other's shoes. You look at the square. You give up and go to lunch. You come back. The empty square is still there. Is the square gonna be a poster? Will it be a branded sitcom, a radio spot, a website? You don't know. All you know is the square's still empty. So you both go through the brand stories you find online, on the client's website, what people are saying in the Amazon reviews. You go through the reams of material the account team left in your office. You discover the bourbon you're working on is manufactured in a little town with a funny name. You point this out to your partner. Your partner keeps staring out the window at some speck in the distance. (Or is that a speck on the glass? Can't be sure.) He says, “Oh.” Down the hallway, a phone rings. Paging through an industry magazine, your partner points out that every few months the distillers rotate the aging barrels a quarter turn. You go, “Hmm.” On some blog, you read how moss on trees happens to grow faster on the sides that face a distillery's aging house. Now that's interesting. You feel the shapeless form of an idea begin to bubble up from the depths. You poise your pencil over the page…and it all comes out in a flash of creativity. (Whoa. Someone call 911. Report a fire on my drawing pad 'cause I am SMOKIN' hot.) You put your pencil down, smile, and read what you've written. It's complete rubbish. You call it a day and slink out to see a movie. This process continues for several days, even weeks, and then one day, completely without warning, an idea just shows up at your door, all nattied up like a Jehovah's Witness. You don't know where it comes from. It just shows up. That's how you come up with ideas. Sorry, there's no big secret. That's basically the drill.
”
”
Luke Sullivan (Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads)
“
Her name is Lenore Skenazy, and she founded a blog, a book, and a movement called Free-Range Kids.
”
”
Kim Brooks (Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear)
“
4. What does your group think about similar products on the market? If you have a group of products you’re thinking about focusing on, you can start to identify “holes” in the marketplace by listening to what people are already saying. Read customer reviews and look at internet forums. You can also start vetting your idea by posting about it online. My buddy Moiz tried using Tom’s natural deodorant, and he hated it for a simple reason: It didn’t work. He thought, I wonder if I could do this better. So he started asking questions on online forums, getting feedback from other natural yuppies like him. From the response, he knew there was interest. He did a $500 round of prototypes and sold out immediately. That was the beginning of Native Deodorant, which was later acquired by Procter & Gamble for $100 million. It took Moiz only eighteen months to go from a $500 prototype to a million-dollar brand (and it sold for nine figures!). 5. Where does your person hang out with others? With an idea of what we might sell, we can start to think about where our first customers might come from. It’s much easier to make sales when you can drop your product in front of a group of your ideal people. Does your target customer listen to specific podcasts? Do they follow certain influencers? Do they belong to specific groups? Do they read certain blogs? Brainstorm where your ideal customer focuses his or her attention, and you will quickly know where to put your product in front of them. In the next chapters, you will also learn how to develop a micro-audience that is ready to buy your product from you. I also like to write down the names of ten friends who will get excited about a product because your ideal customers know other people just like them.
”
”
Ryan Daniel Moran (12 Months to $1 Million: How to Pick a Winning Product, Build a Real Business, and Become a Seven-Figure Entrepreneur)
“
I have two kids: Gomer (age ten at the writing of this book) and Adolpha (age eight). Before you have a hissy fit and sit down to write me a nasty letter about my children’s horrible names, just stop. Of course those aren’t their real names. Their real names are worse, but I can’t take the ridicule, so I just made up what I consider to be horrific names for my blog, People I Want to Punch in the Throat, and my books. Are you still writing that letter? Why? Because your kid’s name is Gomer and you take offense that I just called it “horrific”? Ugh. Actually, you know what? Go ahead, I don’t care. Write away. As long as you bought this book, you can bitch at me about anything you’d like.
”
”
Jen Mann (Spending the Holidays with People I Want to Punch in the Throat: Yuletide Yahoos, Ho-Ho-Humblebraggers, and Other Seasonal Scourges)
“
Feminist blogs and social media sites declared Mehreen “a destroyer of trolls,” “a legend,” and “an icon.” For this attitude, as well as for her tenacity, hopefulness, and hard work, Mehreen was awarded the feminist Edna Ryan Grand Stirrer award in 2017, particularly for her role in the decriminalization of abortion. She was named one of the one hundred most influential engineers in Australia, and for women in Pakistan, Australia, and around the world, she has won over hearts for being unapologetically, loudly, beautifully a “brown, Muslim, migrant, feminist woman.
”
”
Seema Yasmin (Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration, and Adventure)
“
For Amazon, savings are more than a corporate competitive matter. Indeed, the company holds “frugality” up as one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles as it “breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention.” In an interview with CBS’s Bob Simon for 60 Minutes, Bezos connected frugality to his #1 rule: Think about the customers’ needs first. “It’s a symbol of spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on things that don’t,” Bezos explained to Simon.33 The company still hands out the “Door Desk Award,” a title given internally to select employees who have a “well-built idea” that creates a significant savings for the company and enables lower prices for customers. It’s not just blog names and door desks that keeps the Day 1 mentality visible, either. When Amazon grew to occupy its own office building in Seattle, Bezos named the building “Day 1.” On the side, Bezos added a placard34 reminding everyone who enters the building of the founding Day 1 principle from the 1997 Letter to Shareholders: “There’s so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.” —Bezos (1997 Letter)
”
”
Steve Anderson (The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon)
“
These are the ten steps Peg uses to promote a blog post: Write multiple interesting and click-worthy versions of the blog title. Create three images in Canva: 735 by 1102 pixels, 788 by 940 pixels, and 512 by 1024 pixels. Pin the 735-by-1102-pixel image on Pinterest with two links (one in the description field and one in the source field) back to the blog post. Embed the pin in your blog post with the Pinterest widget. Share the link to your post on LinkedIn with the 788-by-940-pixel image. Make sure the image name matches the title of your post, because LinkedIn shows the image name—for example, “image819809754.jpg” is awkward. Create a longer post on Google+ with the 735-by-1102-pixel image, a link to the blog, and a link to your Pinterest post. Share a short post on your Facebook profile and Page with the 788-by-940-pixel image. Add a question to start the conversation on Facebook, along with two links—one to the blog and one to the Pinterest post. Tweet the blog post with the 512-by-1024-pixel image. Schedule additional tweets with quotes from the post using the different titles. Share your article in relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups and Google+ communities. Add relevant hashtags when you share your post so more people can find it.
”
”
Guy Kawasaki (The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users)
“
On Twitter not too long ago, I was discussing the term “dope slap,” which I had traced back (using what was available to me at the time) to Tom Magliozzi, one of the hosts of NPR’s show Car Talk. A dope slap is, as Ray Magliozzi, Tom’s brother, says, “kind of a quick slap to the back of the head when the recipient is unaware that it’s coming,” and when Tom Magliozzi first used it in a Car Talk blog post, it was clear that the dope slap got its name from the dopey target of the smack: “Well, the first thing I’d do is give that kid a dope slap for driving home after the oil light came on. When the oil light comes on, you should always stop the engine immediately.” “I scoured all my sources and found nothing earlier than that,” I said. “Which means that someone will antedate it immediately.
”
”
Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
“
Time has taken such a turn that the definition of saints and businessmen has completely changed. The ones, looting millions of people in the name of hypocrisy, have come to be known as 'saints'. Whereas, true saints are those, who have established and expanded businesses by their assiduity and have given employment to millions of people.
”
”
Deep Trivedi
“
To initiate its EIR program, USCIS would also turn to an agitator. Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and prolific blogger, had become exasperated when officers of two promising startups under his watch were forced to return to their home countries because they couldn’t secure visas. He shared their story on a blog, attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, including Ries, who couldn’t understand why there was no visa category for an entrepreneur with American investors and employees. In lieu of that category, many entrepreneurs were at the mercy of visa examiners who didn’t understand how they operated. At the point of visa application, many startups had not hired many employees or generated much revenue. This confused traditional visa examiners, who would then ask odd and irrelevant questions, often before a denial. To give just one example, it’s been years since AOL required a compact disc to use its service. And yet, visa examiners were demanding proof of a warehouse, where software startups would store their CD inventory for shipping to customers. As Feld’s idea of a “startup visa” became intertwined with, and paralyzed by, the broader debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the USCIS, with White House support, sought to accomplish something administratively within the existing law. It instituted an EIR program, to organize and educate a specialty unit of immigration officers to handle entrepreneur and startup nonimmigrant visa cases.22 The project also called for educating entrepreneurs about the available options, one of which they may have overlooked. For instance, the O-1 visa, which was reserved “for those with extraordinary ability,” had proven a successful channel for actors, athletes, musicians, directors, scientists, artists, businessmen, engineers, and others who could provide ample evidence of their unique and impressive abilities, attributes, awards, and accolades. It had even created some controversy, when visa evaluators took the term “model” to an extreme, awarding a visa to one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, a Playboy centerfold from Canada named Shera Berchard.23 If she was confident enough to assert and explain her “extraordinary ability,” why weren’t entrepreneurs?
”
”
Aneesh Chopra (Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government)
“
From my recent blog tour interview:
I recently spent time updating my Goodreads page to include the names of authors whose works inspire me, and as I thought about it, the characters in the books I liked all share certain traits in common.
The heroes of the novels were highly competent men in the world of work. They had great families and friends. They were experienced with women. Everything was great, but something was missing. They were adrift in that their relationships with women didn't fulfill them emotionally. It was something they were actually aware of, or something acted as a catalyst that brought them face to face with their reality. I especially liked when the heroes were introspective enough to realize that they needed to do something about their lives.
”
”
Barbara James