From author and filmmaker Sandi Tan, director of the acclaimed documentary Shirkers, comes a novel about a neighborhood of immigrants, seekers, lovers, and lurkers. The residents of Santa Claus Lane do their best to stay out of each other’s way, but desire, fury and mischief too often propel these suburban neighbors to collide. Precocious Korean American sisters Mira and Rosemary find their world rocked by a suicide, and they must fight to keep their home; a charismatic and creepy drama teacher grooms his students; a sardonic gay horror novelist finds that aging is more terrifying than any monster; and a white hippie mom and her adopted Vietnamese daughter realize that their anger binds them rather than pushes them apart. Lurkers is an homage to the rangy beauty of Los Angeles and the surprising power that we have to change the lives of those around us.

This SpringerBrief brings order to the wealth of research studies that contribute to shape our understanding of on-line social networks (OSNs) lurking phenomena. This brief also drives the development of computational approaches that can be effectively applied to answer questions related to lurking behaviors, as well as to the engagement of lurkers in OSNs. All large-scale online social networks (OSNs) are characterized by a participation inequality principle, i.e., the crowd of an OSN does not actively contribute, rather it takes on a silent role. Silent users are also referred to as lurkers, since they gain benefit from others' information without significantly giving back to the community. Nevertheless, lurkers acquire knowledge from the OSN, therefore a major goal is to encourage them to more actively participate. Lurking behavior analysis has been long studied in social science and human-computer interaction fields, but it has also matured over the last few years in social network analysis and mining. While the main target audience corresponds to computer, network, and web data scientists, this brief might also help increase the visibility of the topic by bridging different closely related research fields. Practitioners, researchers and students interested in social networks, web search, data mining, computational social science and human-computer interaction will also find this brief useful research material .

At head of title: Meeednight Pulp presents

David A. Riley began writing horror stories while still at school and had his first professional sale to Pan Books in 1969, which was The Lurkers in the Abyss, published in The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories. This story was chosen for inclusion in The Century's Best Horror Fiction in 2012. Over the years he has had numerous stories published in Britain and the United States plus translations into German, Spanish, Italian and Russian. His fiction has appeared in World of Horror, Fear, Whispers, Fantasy Tales, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Dark Discoveries and Lovecraft e-Zine. His first collection, His Own Mad Demons was published by Hazardous Press in 2012. The Return, a Lovecraftian horror novel was published by Blood Bound Books in 2013. This second collection brings together under one cover seventeen of the author's best blood-curdling stories.

In today’s digital world our social interactions often take place in the form of written comments. We chat, disagree, worship, vent, confess, and even attack in written form in public digital spaces. Drawing on scholarly literature from media and cultural studies, psychology and sociology, Uncovering Commenting Culture charts this commenting territory and outlines why we behave in these ways online. In this timely book, Renee Barnes provides a participatory model for understanding commenting culture that is based on the premise that our behaviours online–including those that cause us most the concern–are not so much an internet problem as a social problem. By looking at a wide variety of online commenting habitats, from the comment threads following news stories, through to specialist forums and social media platforms, the volume provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of online commenting in society and provides suggestions for how we might mitigate bad behaviours.

Beginning with a brief outline of Usenet's general structure and development over the past few years, the book addresses the problems of exploring virtual communities and distributed information systems in general, and of finding information in electronic information environments. It covers traditional approaches such as information filtering, collaborative filtering and information retrieval, outlining their successes and failures, and discusses the prospects of novel approaches such as visualisations of social processes and social navigation.

Featuring the space station that changed the destiny of an entire galaxy, the Babylon 5 RPG from Mongoose Publishing allows players to take on the role of characters from the award-winning TV series. This all new edition revisits one of the most successful sci-fi roleplaying games of recent years, bringing the game to an all new group of fans! Existing fans will not be disappointed, the rules have been tweaked so that the game is even better than before, and most importantly, is a stand-alone rulebook in its own right with no requirement for the use of another rulebook!

Using a novel approach to consider the available literature and research, this book focuses on the psychology of social media based on the assumption that the experience of being in a social media has an impact on both our identity and social relationships. In order to ‘be online’, an individual has to create an online presence – they have to share information about themselves online. This online self is presented in different ways, with diverse goals and aims in order to engage in different social media activities and to achieve desired outcomes. Whilst this may not be a real physical presence, that physicality is becoming increasingly replicated through photos, video, and ever-evolving ways of defining and describing the self online. Moreover, individuals are using both PC-based and mobile-based social media as well as increasingly making use of photo and video editing tools to carefully craft and manipulate their online self. This book therefore explores current debates in Cyberpsychology, drawing on the most up-to-date theories and research to explore four main aspects of the social media experience (communication, identity, presence and relationships). In doing so, it considers the interplay of different areas of psychological research with current technological and security insight into how individuals create, manipulate and maintain their online identity and relationships. The social media are therefore at the core of every chapter, with the common thread throughout being the very unique approach to considering diverse and varied online behaviours that may not have been thus far considered from this perspective. It covers a broad range of both positive and negative behaviours that have now become integrated into the daily lives of many westernised country’s Internet users, giving it an appeal to both scholarly and industry readers alike.

The definitive guide to film and television influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. From Alien to Hellboy to Rough Magik it's all here. Coverage of feature films, television shows, independent films, interviews with Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter and more. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.