A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com The Technology That Keeps Us Together I hope everyone’s been having a groovy holiday season! While mine was uneventful compared to most years it was actually great considering. Because so many in my family have been ill there were no gatherings Christmas Eve or Day, so most of the gathering was limited to Facebook and our phones. But it was expected. Covid-19 has caused many of us to have to alter our festivities. It’s a lot easier to do that now with the miraculous technology of internet and social media, and the recent trend with facetime apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, than it was during the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of the early 20th century. (I say “so-called” because the flu did not actually start in Spain or any Spanish-speaking country.) Such facetime technology shows you that what science fiction prophesied, if you will, decades ago has come to be!  After virtually gathering with family yesterday, I finished reading “The Christmas Tree” ...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read blog posts like this one without ads, visit my Patreon page !   Christmas is this upcoming week and a week after that will already be the end of another year. For a while it had seemed like it was the end of the world. With Covid-19 plaguing the planet, it seemed like we would not make it to the end of 2020. Perhaps a lot of you will be glad when 2020 ends and that’s perfectly understandable considering the circumstances. However, even a bad year has something good in it. And, believe it or not, that includes this year.  So, what good things have we had in 2020? One is that we and the world are still here. Another is that genius doctors and scientists have developed a vaccine that is ready for use although it will make its way slowly through the populations, for plenty of good reason I’m sure. And yet another is that here at the li’l ol Far Out Fantastic Site there have been four of the best Book-To-Movie reviews and yours trul...

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   We’re well into the Holiday Season and the end of the year is coming. Although this year has been one of the most uncertain and scariest ever, the Holidays always bring hope of some sort. Besides, there’s never such a thing as a totally bad year. All years and eras have something good in them. And one of those good things are the best of something of the year. In this case, many blogs and publications over the internet will bring you a list of the best movies of the year or the best books of the year. On December 8th the book recommendation website, GoodReads, brought us the latter through its annual Choice Awards . The best books of 2020 were selected across 20 categories which ranged from general fiction to general non-fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to memoir and biography. Nearly half of these 20 books were speculative fiction or at least related to it.  So, yours truly ...

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   I have some Tolkien news this week. But first I want to apologise for missing last Wednesday’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. ( Alex , if you’re reading this, I personally apologise for missing.) With the Thanksgiving four-day weekend, I was a little disoriented in my sense of time of the week and forgot that the first Wednesday of the month had arrived. That’s the first time I missed an IWSG post and I’ll do everything I can to make sure it’s the last. One thing you can count on (unless an absolute emergency comes up which I’m not expecting one), I’ll have a post here for the IWSG next year, which is also next month.  Tolkien Museum Fundraiser The close of this year has been seeing big plans for commemorating authors with landmarks. I mentioned a few weeks back, that there were plans for a Harlan Ellison library . Only this past week, December 2nd, did a group of fundraisers l...