Which book took you the longest time to actually finish reading?

For me: Underworld. 17 years from buying it to actually getting around to reading it, and maybe 19 months on and off to make myself read it until the end.

Still, ticked it off the list ✔

In the shadowy corners of the shortwave spectrum lurk the Numbers Stations: strange radio broadcasts of mysterious blocks of numbers in creepy monotone voices!

It's actually an old form of spycraft which is still in use today. And as it's #WorldRadioDay let's take a listen...

A Numbers Station is a type of one-way voice link for sending information to spies in foreign countries.

Operating on Short Wave radio bands they transmit a secret code of spoken numbers. Use of Numbers Stations peaked during the Cold War, but some are still operating today.

Numbers Stations are operated by various national intelligence agencies. At set times on a pre-arranged frequency a musical tone is played, followed by a speech synthesised voice reading out blocks of numbers. To most listeners it sounds both creepy and meaningless.

However to spies it can be vital. The numbers can be decoded to reveal a message, provided the spy has the right One Time Pad (OTP) - a random number key that is only used once before it is destroyed. OTP encryption is impossible to break if done correctly.

Why broadcast your secret message on Short Wave? Because it can be picked up across the globe. All a spy needs is a shop bought SW radio, a pencil, and the correct One Time Pad and they - and only they - can decipher the message. No complex kit is required.

As it's #AppreciateADragonDay let's do some classic covers from Dragon magazine!

Tony DiTerlizzi's cover art for Dragon magazine #242, December 1997.

Dragon magazine issue 106, February 1986. Cover by Keith Parkinson.

Dragon Magazine #71, March 1983. Cover by Clyde Caldwell.

Dragon magazine issue 65, September 1982. Cover by Clyde Caldwell.

Today in pulp I look back at the world of Soviet women's fashion!

It's not all berets, but it mostly is...

Now you may think that fashion and the Soviet Union go together like Groucho Marx and Friedrich Engels. However that is to misunderstand the nature of the Commad Economy: if she commands it, you'd better buy it for her!

So there is a rich history of fashion and fun (along with the tractor factories and endless ballet performances) in the old USSR. Let's take a sashay along it...

At the start of the Soviet years women's fashion, let's face it, tended towards the functional. Red was popular, as were headscarves, hobnail boots and the ability to field strip a 3-line rifle.

But all that was about to change...

...because Russia had a new fashionista in charge: Stalin! He hated the peasant look of War Communism because it made socialism seem synonymous with poverty. He ordered Soviet Woman to spruce herself up.

It's now over half a century since 1970, and I'm starting to wonder if we should bring back its concept of gracious modern living...

You see we've grown so used to Swedish-style modernism that we've sort of forgotten that maximalism, rather than minimalism, was once the sign of a cultured abode.

The 1970s in many ways reached back to the rich ideas of Victorian decor: heavy, autumnal and cluttered. Home was meant to be a baroque and sensual experience, rather than a 'machine for living in.'

Gaudy was certainly in by 1970: colour choices for interior design were rich and varied, with every room becoming a boutique of signature design.

Experimentation and adventurism were also coming to the fore: now we had landed on the Moon surely we should start to live like astronauts on Earth.

Are you writing a sci-fi or fantasy novel? Are you struggling to choose a title for it?

Well good news! I've just analysed the titles of 1,500 DAW sci-fi and fantasy novels, and I think I've found the secret!

Come with me...

Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

1/

The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

2/

Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

3/

Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

4/

When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

5/

I am going to say something very uncomfortable. Read before you react please.

Purity culture encourages pedophilia, a thread:

Purity culture encourages pedophilia.

Some of the standards of purity culture are innocence (pretty much ignorance about sex), submission (for women), virginity as the ultimate standard, and “modesty” (for women that is wearing clothes that don’t reveal their adult curves)*
1/

Purity culture makes the desirable standard a child. It makes child likeness desirable in regards to sexuality. It makes virginity, and innocence, and submission; what the male brain should want most in a partner. And your brain doesn’t rewire just because you get married.
2/

This doesn’t mean every man raised in purity culture is a pedophile, that’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that purity culture wires the brain of men to desire child likeness, which encourages pedophilia. After all desire and objectification happen in our brain.

3/

Now if you are a pedophile who wants to act on those desires, purity culture does a lot of the grooming for you. Purity culture discourages comprehensive sex education leaving children without the ability to know what’s appropriate and what’s not.

4/

I am reading through reams of late-1920s communist poetry and easily my favourite title so far is: "To a Lady who Rejected a Poem about Spring as a Petit-Bourgeois Deviation"

The last lines:
"So here's my hat into the air,
Three cheers for your amazing hair,
For coal mines, and for turbines, too,
For steel, the Comintern and you!"

A not exactly graceful (though possibly satirical) title: "Lines Disassociating Myself from Yessenin and Supporting the Otherwise Unfounded Legend that I am a Foremost Proletarian Writer"

An excerpt:
"Goodbye verses of Yessenin
Goodbye literary slop-
You are not the line of Lenin
You are not the line of WAPP

Never shall I moan a
simple lyric from the heart
I'll devote my new corona
to the proletarian art"

The poet was Joseph Freeman, who published much of his revolutionary verse in the New Masses, a stylish journal of the interwar American literary Left.

[thread]

Folks at Marvel were trying to figure out how to launch phase 4 of the MCU, incorporate the addition of the X-Men, the relaunch of the Fantastic Four, and help the MCU on Disney+ get off the ground, and Feige was like:

The meta goes deep on WandaVision. This bit might be unintentional, but there's poetry in Marvel Studios launching its first foray into TV shows with a show about TV shows. Some history:

The previous Marvel TV properties were (mostly) run by Marvel Television and Jeph Loeb. They did some brilliant work, but the MCU films largely ignored the goings-on over there.

Now everything is in one house. It has the potential to be a huge freaking mess.

Part of the problem is how to insert the "first family" of Marvel comics into the MCU timeline. The Fantastic Four are old-school. The MCU heroes we know looked up to them and went to them for advice. Now they are going to get an MCU origin story. That's a conundrum.

Kevin Feige is a big comic nerd with a whole team of comic nerds, and one of them was probably like:

"Hey, did you know the witch who mentored Wanda was a nanny for the Fantastic Four? Maybe she could be in this."

Pierre Boulle was born today in 1912, so what better time to look back at his sociological science-fiction classic that paved the way for Star Wars and the MCU.

This is the story of Planet Of The Apes!

Pierre Boulle is probably best known for his 1952 novel Bridge On The River Kwai, based on his wartime experiences in Indochina. So it was possibly a surprise when 11 years later he authored a science fiction novel.

However Boulle had been a Free French secret agent during the war. He was captured in 1943 by Vichy forces in Vietnam and sentenced to hard labour. This experience of capture would shape his novel La Planète Des Singes.

Published in 1963 La Planète Des Singes recieved good reviews. An English translation - entitled Monkey Planet - was issued the following year. It was a story that seemed to strike a chord with readers.

In the novel two rich travellers find a manuscript written by journalist Ulysse Mérou. It tells a fantastical tale: how he travelled with two wealthy explorers to Betelgeuse. They land on the planet Soror, a world of primitive humans ruled by advanced civilised apes.