Pornokitsch

The annual Jurassic London Stocking Stuffer is out now, and available as a free download.

This year's theme is "book-collecting", because books are awesome.

It includes all sorts of practical advice for bibliophiles, including:

• Where's the best book-shopping in 19th century London?
• Why should collectors be wary of limited editions?
• Why shouldn't you remove mysterious stains?
• What books did Napoleon collect?

Plus a rambling introduction from yours truly and a gorgeous cover from Sarah Anne Langton.

Have a very, very happy holiday season, and a bookish new year!

Download your copy now.

(This non-fictional Stocking Stuffer is new for 2015. If you're interested in some short-short stories for the holiday season, you can find the previous Stocking Stuffers on Amazon.)

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Jurassic London is a not-for-profit publisher, and the proceeds from the sales of our books go to selected charity partners. In 2015, these included The Eve Appeal, UNHCR, MOSAC, The Trevor Project, The Homestead and many others. Thanks for supporting us - and them. We hope you have a terrific holiday season.

In each episode of the One Comic podcast, one of us will take a turn at doing a '3 and 1' - a list of the 3 best and 1 worst comics on a particular (generally thematically relevant) topic. In the latest episode, we poked and prodded at the controversial "Shoot" issue of Hellblazer. I was on tap for the 3 and 1, and wound up going slightly off-piste with the format.

Most of us, I suppose, at one time or another have experienced a thrill of interest when some prominent personage, whom we knew well by repute, came before us in the flesh. We watched his manner, and noted all those shades of expression which in another's countenance we should have passed by unheeded. Well, it seems to me that, parallel with this experience, is that which we gain, when, reading some first-rank romance, we encounter in its pages a figure with which History has made us more or less familiar.

Stark says: I got a story that’ll stick to you like an eyeball to a cactus needle.

So what if someone told you there was a film where Wormtongue and Thulsa Doom sat around a campfire, trying to scare the bejesus out of each other? Well, that’s basically what Grim Prairie Tales is, and I couldn’t pass it by either. Plus, I’m never one to resist a title that contains a pun, now, am I…

“Oh my fucking god,” said Jerome, “the dinosaurs are going to kill us all!”

Game: SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991)

Developer: Maxis Software

Original platform: DOS, Amiga, and SNES, to name a few

Greetings, human reader. I am an ant. I have lived as an ant. I have died as an ant. I have been reborn as an ant more times than I can count. This poses some interesting questions concerning the nature of cooperative insects and the finer points of reincarnation, but these are topics best left to you modern primates. It is not my place to speak on philosophy. I am an ant.

Once upon a time there was a comic that wasn't published because of its proximity in content and time to a real world tragedy.

 'Limbic Resonance': the pilot episode of Sense8

We are excited to watch this because...

Minal: I like psychic powers and hot, powerful women of color. I really like watching or reading stuff without too much information, so all I know is that it's some sort of speculative fiction show that is probably science fiction but possibly also fantasy (magic?) and that it has some diversity to it, i.e. characters all over the world. As an American writer who has been fairly preoccupied with questions of diversity, multiculturalism, and globalization of culture for 20+ years, and also as a lover of SFF, I'm curious to see how they do it. Will the story be engaging? Will the characters ring true or will they be multiculti shells that are like demographic tickboxes (like ‘Quantico’ - here's the hot brown babe, here’s the gay dude, here’s the token straight white guy for all the “normal” viewers out there).

Kuzhali: I’m actually so excited for this I can’t even tell you. Even though I’ve been threatened by a certain acquaintance with “the Ganesha clip”, even though I’ve read waaaay too much about how the show is so great, how it is not so great, even though I don’t really know what 'sensate', 'limbic' or 'resonance' really mean, I don’t care, EXCITED AS FUCK TO SEE THIS OMG