Most Popular Books by Steven Gordon

This book is an unauthorized summary and literary criticism of the plot and characters of George R.R. Martin''s novel "A Game of Thrones", with a detailed chapter by chapter analysis. It is written humorously, but covers a lot of serious topics.We don''t cover the hundreds and hundreds of character names, we focus on the central characters and central events of the story, to give you a fighting chance to understand what is going on.

The standards in this book will enhance teaching and learning. The list of the book’s contributors reads like a “Who’s Who” in the field of instructional supervision. These standards are practical, specific, and flexible, so that schools and districts can adapt them to their own contexts and goals. Each set also includes activities for professional development.

Written by Illustrator artist Sharon Steuer with many new and improved features, the Illustrator 9 Wow! Book has grown over 100 pages, and covers step-by-step material for beginners through advanced users. In addition, readers get the goodies that come with full-color Wow! books, making this book educational and inspiring.

The Graftonites had incredible reflexes, making them superior bounty hunters and almost unstoppable gunmen. They could draw and fire a blaster in a blink of an eye. Grafton II had evolved into a planet with no government--a purely libertarian society where all services were privatized and civil disputes were mediated by one-on-one gunfights. But when the Graftonites banded together to take over the galaxy, only superspy Clifford Croft, aided by Red Sally the always angry firestarter, the Clapper, an eccentric telekinetic who liked to clap, and the legendary bounty hunter known as the Silencer could stop them.

In the deep desert where only the bold dare tread lies the mysterious Lion''s Vault! Part three of the Fate of the Forebears Adventure Path, Lion''s Vault will take Players on a journey full of danger, ancient secrets, and dark mysticism. Beware, this module is not for the faint of heart! Your Players will need to solve complex puzzles and battle powerful foes from ages past. With great courage, luck, and a ton of skill, a party of heroes can learn the secrets of the ancient Narthaneen and discover the wonders within the Lion''s Vault!Lion''s Vault is an adventure module for the Pathfinder Tabletop Roleplaying Game.Within these pages you will find a mystical desert full of supernatural dangers, an ancient city of a powerfully evil civilization, and enough unique monsters to give even the bravest heroes pause. Do your Players have what it takes to overcome these challenges? There is only one way to find out!An adventure for 9th - 12th level characters. Part 3 of 6 in the Fate of the Forebears Adventure Path.

The Domes of Ishaq Zahur adventure is a 5th Edition RPG module featuring challenging combat and traps, a gamut of mind-bending puzzles, a completely custom cast of NPCs and monsters, detailed backstory and plot, and guidelines detailing the best ways to run the sessions standalone or incorporate them into your ongoing campaign.

The City of Sands module starts where the Domes of Ishaq-Zahur leaves off, sending the heroes from the peril of the desert tombs to the streets of the sandy metropolis, Archensheen. This 126-page adventure supports both the Pathfinder RPG and D&D 5th Edition, and will take a party of 7th level characters to 9th level over 10 to 12 sessions of play.

A young woman named Deseray Underwood has been found dead, in her London lodgings, by her fiance Samuel Mortimer. ... Lestrade, baffled by the cause of death, summons the aid of Sherlock Holmes....Holmes stumbles upon one single clue, a crystal blue bottle, which sends him and Watson on a wild chase through the streets of London in pursuit of answers to this young woman''s sudden demise. A death that would make any benefactor very wealthy. -- Cover.

"This book provides relevant theoretical and practical frameworks and the latest findings in research and practice regarding online communities and social media as agents of social and political change. This book will be an important resource for those who study social movements and for those who participate in or advocate for or against social or political change"--

For the discerning Dungeon Master looking to build a more dangerous lair. This book contains 50 traps, ready for use in your 5th Edition Roleplaying Game, and the rules to build countless more. Featuring the same custom trap creation system seen in The Total Party Kill Handbook to let you easily build exactly the trap you want for heroes from level 1 to level 20, the Trap Compendium adds new components, extra upgrades, and unique traps you haven''t seen before. Assail heroes with rolling boulders that spew fire as they go, fill corridors with webbing before unleashing a swarm of poisonous spiders, or even telekinetically hurl trespassers into a sphere of annihilation. The traps in this book offer a true challenge for your players and will make them think twice before rushing in unprepared.

Dungeon Masters rejoice and players beware! The Total Party Kill Handbook is here to help you take your game to the next level of challenge and fun with 25 encounters, running from level 1 to level 20, all designed to be dropped into your existing campaign. Every encounter can be scaled up or down to fit groups that are several levels higher or lower, and the tactics scaling sections let you make the monsters smarter or dumber to further tweak the difficulty to match your party. Within the pages you''ll also find the Trap Workshop, a revolutionary trap creation system that will let you build traps that damage, disable, and debilitate adventurers, making your dungeons even more dangerous. You tell the story, this book provides the numbers.

A surreal and fascinating month in the life of a paralysed teenage boy who converts a tower block into a zoo to experiment with evolutionary genetics.

This book is an unauthorized summary and literary criticism of the plot and characters of George R.R. Martin''s novel "A Game of Thrones", with a detailed chapter by chapter analysis. It is written humorously, but covers a lot of serious topics.We don''t cover the hundreds and hundreds of character names, we focus on the central characters and central events of the story, to give you a fighting chance to understand what is going on.

This book is an unauthorized summary and literary criticism of the plot and characters of George R.R. Martin''s novel "A Feast for Crows", with a detailed chapter by chapter analysis. It is written humorously, but covers a lot of serious topics.A sampling of the questions that will be addressed:How do we know Balon Greyjoy was murdered?Why didn''t Jaime want Cersei to give him the Hand job?Why do the Ironmen call sex slaves "salt wives"?Why is Prince Doran''s gout compared to a exotic fruit?How could Margaery possibly be a virgin?Why do the Silent Sisters have private parts that are "cold and as wet as ice"?Why is it called the House of "White and Black"?Why do kings let themselves be cut by the Iron Throne?What is the symbolism of Euron''s eye patch?Why did Arys charge Areo Hotah?Why do Faceless Men have to be "no one"?Why isn''t Jaime upset that Lancel had sex with Cersei?Why did the Hound let the monks cut the balls of his horse?Why did Genna say that Tyrion, not Jaime, was Tywin''s true son?Why do the Faceless Men make Arya sell seafood?Why did Arya tell the Kindly Man she killed Dareon?Who is the younger brother who will kill Cersei?What kind of a boy takes a job to be a whipping boy?When Brienne sees a man with a giant foot long tongue, what is she really thinking about?Why do so many characters get terrible face wounds?Why is Lady Stonehenge more interesting than Catelyn Stark?

This study applies a multi-scalar pottery analysis of 15th century assemblages to investigate northern Iroquoian childhood learning experiences in the Lower Great Lakes prior to European contact. My analysis is based on the two villages in southern Ontario: Keffer and Draper, and three villages in upstate New York: Garoga, Smith-Pagerie and Klock. I employ an ontogenetic approach that recognizes childhood perspectives and the different cognitive and physiological experiences of children as they develop. I rely on ethnographic and child development data to reconstruct past learning experiences. Through this framework, I integrate a modified approach to meshworks through a systematic study of the material interactions of social learning of community members involved with the forming, shaping, and decorating of pottery vessels. Meshworks of learning allow for the identification of the development of knowledge and skills related to a technological practice. These learning growths further included new spatial interactions in their communities, and so I conducted a spatial analysis of Keffer and Draper vessels to investigate the presence of specialized learning locales, and how spatial areas around the village were involved in learning and craft production. The results of my analysis demonstrate a learning practice that did not isolate younger potters from adult activities but relied on flexible learning that encouraged a certain level of artistic freedom with minimal adult interference that adhered to fundamental principles of potting traditions. Pottery learning did not take place in specialized learning locales, but throughout the village. Furthermore, the data indicates regional patterning in which potters in Ontario and upstate New York learned to make pottery through similar practices. I argue that during the process of making pottery, learning experiences were mediated by deeply rooted cosmologies and traditions built around maintaining balanced social relations between community members of all ages and genders in Lower Great Lakes communities.

The coevolution of trust in government alongside the growth of government is an aspect of research on the latter topic that has not been explored. We consider this coevolution in the context of a political economy model and a public interest view of government growth and incorporate the role of trust in government. The negative association of the growth in government with trust in government is consistent with a political economy model of government growth, rent seeking/lobbying, trust, and productivity. Though such a model is broadly consistent with the historical data since the late 1950s, we present a more econometrically sophisticated examination of the data. In particular, we recognize the difficulties of statistical inference with non-stationary data and take the appropriate steps to deal with it. There is strong evidence that two aspects of government size - transfer payments and regulatory activity - align with the political economy model. Specifically, we find cointegration indicating the following: a negative association between trust and lobbying activity, a negative relationship between trust and each of these two measures of government, and a positive association of trust and productivity. Though other measures of government size do not produce as robust of findings, we do not find evidence of positive associations of trust and government size nor of trust and lobbying, as might be expected from a public interest view of government.

Star Trek: The Next Generation had a lot of good things going for it. Visually, it was a treat: the colorful uniforms, the sets, the spaceships, Counselor Troi in certain outfits, etc. Some of the characters like Picard and Data were very interesting. The show also had a lot of intriguing ideas about time travel, parallel dimensions, clones, robots and other classic sci-fi themes. But some of these ideas were either executed poorly, or weren''t written as well as they could have been. Some episodes felt like they were dropped in from soap operas or Sesame Street and had little to do with Star Trek. At times the behavior of many of the characters simply was not realistic.The purpose of this book is to show how much better The Next Generation could have been, critiquing both the plot and the characterizations.

This book is an unauthorized summary and literary criticism of the plot and characters of J.R.R. Tolkien''s almost-novel "The Silmarillion", with a detailed chapter by chapter analysis. It is written humorously, but covers a lot of serious topics.Most people who think of The Silmarillion, if they think of it at all, think of it as an uncompleted work of J.R.R. Tolkien, written in pieces many years before the Lord of the Rings but never finished. It reads like a historical appendix with thick, descriptive paragraphs and relatively little dialogue.But what is it really? If you dig into it, The Silmarillion is really ELVISH MURDER PORN. It''s the story of the suffering, torture, and murder of large numbers of elves, and, sometimes for a little variety, the suffering, torture, and murder of large numbers of men. You may think it''s just a fairy tale, and that''s how fairy tales are written. But in most fairy tales the good guys aren''t slaughtered over and over. In most fairy tales nearly all the main characters do not die in spectacularly horrible deaths, which is what the Silmarillion is all about. Tolkien creates big, extended families of elves and describes how each one dies, usually in combination with humiliation and/or betrayal and/or immense frustration. I have to wonder if Tolkien conceived this as elvish murder porn, that is, entertainment for people who love to read about the suffering and death of elves, and this analysis will go through the book step by step and explore the unusual nature of it.

IMAGINE...Imagine if Captain Benjamin Sisko''s wife Jennifer hadn''t merely been killed, but had been assimilated by the Borg, personally by Locutus of Borg.Imagine if Major Kira believed she was really a Cardassian spy, slept with Gul Dukat, and then realized she wasn''t really a Cardassian.Imagine if Nog were kidnapped by the Dominion, brainwashed, had a bomb put in his artificial leg, and then was sent with a special present to celebrate Captain Sisko''s receipt of the Christopher Pike award.Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a lot of good things going for it. A lot of compelling characters, interesting situations, interesting ideas. I really liked Sisko (the later Sisko), Garak, Damar, Kira (the later Kira), Odo, and some of the other characters. The show also had a lot of intriguing ideas. But some of these ideas were either executed poorly, or weren''t written as well as they could have been. The purpose of this book is to show how much better Deep Space Nine could have been than it was.