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A Blade for Monsters Part 2
Modern technology was a wonderful thing. During the daylight hours Beringer planted tiny glasses around the necropolis, rigging them to alert him when they spotted motion. As the necropolis closed, he hid himself away inside an unused mausoleum and waited for nightfall. The taint of the Void was upon this place. Flowers lay scattered on…
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A Blade for Monsters Part 1
Alan Beringer had learned the hard way never to assume he had seen everything. It was perhaps the only reason he managed to hang on to his breakfast. The bodies, or what was left of them, were scattered across the hall. In the middle of the aisle was a heavily-gnawed arm, the flesh only mostly…
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Training for Life
When starting out in the martial arts, it’s easy to get caught up in the intricacies of technique. How to bend and break someone a dozen ways, a hundred ways to throw and submit an opponent, a thousand methods of defending and countering any and all attacks. In the training hall, a student narrowing his…
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Twenty Million Dollar Diplomacy
Singapore needs the world. The world doesn’t need Singapore. This is the heart of Singapore’s foreign policy. A tiny island surrounded by much larger neighbours, whose only resources are people and proximity to the Straits of Malacca, Singapore cannot afford to isolate or be isolated by anyone, least of all the great powers of the…
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Between Pulp Wonders and Light Novel Trash
In his last podcast, JimFear138 sat down with Rawle Nyanzi to discuss the concept of genres in a freewheeling discussion that spanned, among other things, My Hero Academia, the blurry line between science fiction and fantasy, and, at the 40:15 mark, Japanese light novels. Rawle didn’t have a high opinion of most light novels. I share the…
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Series Review: Writing Violence by Marc MacYoung
Marc ‘Animal’ MacYoung watches rom-coms because Hollywood gets action scenes wrong. Having worked as a court-recognized expert witness, correctional institute director, bodyguard, bouncer, cooler and event security, he has decades of first-hand experience with violence and criminals. His street name came from a high-risk lifestyle filled with life-or-death encounters on the mean streets of Los…