1) Grippy not Sticky: Stanford engineers develop a material that sticks without getting stuck.
2) Modern superhero comics done in a Golden Age style.
3) KITE FIGHT, a five minute documentary about the sport of soltar pipas, popular in the favelas in Rio. Video.
4) Segmented Glass Sculptures, via Marc Laidlaw
5) Boy Wonders. ::sniffle::
6) A plea for culinary modernism. Being honest about the way people *used* to eat.
7) Taylor Swifties.
1) Immortan Joe’s War Boys leave product reviews on Amazon. Shiny!
4) Showing what’s real and what’s cgi in Mad Max: Fury Road. People have been praising the practical effects in this movie, which some internet bozos thought was a claim that there was no cgi at all. Which is ridiculous. Check out the before and after shots. Pretty interesting.
5) How Hollywood keeps women out.
6) Joint pain, from the gut. Dealing with auto-immune issues through the microbiome. It’s more complex than taking a probiotic.
Wow.
And I thought Fury Road was going to be the best action movie of the year.
#spoilers
2) Pancakebot will print your pancakes in any shape you can draw.
3) Norway is planning to ditch FM radio.
4) Why are board game boxes so big? I assume the transport issue is the difference in weight between 10 games and 16; the fewer games stacked on a palette, the less likely the ones at the bottom will be crushed.
6) “My daughter spent this whole week preparing to GM her first D&D game.
1) The day Hank Aaron’s bodyguard didn’t shoot.
2) Onlookers mistake fallen construction crane at Dallas Museum of Art as an art installation.
3) Yelp reviews of new-born babies.
4) A person is creating 3d printing templates for every creature in the Monster Manual.
5) The simple brilliance of David Aja. This dude is half of the reason that the Hawkeye comic has been so amazing. I really love the design sense that artists bring to comics now. They’re so much more interesting than they used to be.
6) Why don’t our brains explode when we see movie cuts? (What a sensible way to phrase that question.)
7) Pictures of food that very little kids “can’t eat” and why.
1) A map of all the places mentioned in Tom Waits songs.
2) An autobiographical webcomic imagining Conan the Barbarian as a spirit guide.
3) Reader, I LOL-ed. Reaction Table: High Level Cleric of Law Asked to Raise Dead Associate(s).
4) Every Frame a Painting on film editing, video essays, and creating narrative. Video.
5) When Nerf Modding goes too far.
6) Understanding Art: The Death of Socrates. Video. Interesting to see a tool as simple as masking in Photoshop used to such good effect.
1) Man trolls bookstore w/ fake self-help book covers.
2) A super-tall webcomic about unhappy stories.
3) Double space after a period? Single space? A history.
4) Arnold Schwarzenegger went to reddit to encourage a guy who had a rough day at the gym.
5) Joy Division + Teletubbies = This video
6) A businessman’s affair with his secretary, meticulously documented.
1) A Choose-Your-Own adventure game based on Twitter accounts.
2) Photographs of an iceberg that had recently flipped over to reveal the gem-like underside.
3) A very long exposure photograph of a rock climber wearing glow sticks.
4) Seattle sidewalk art that is invisible until it gets wet, aka “rain art”.
5) Amazon readers post troll reviews of anti-vaxxer’s “pro-Measles” children’s book.
I didn’t get a chance to mention this yesterday with all the Book Day activity (Book two of my trilogy is out. Look at that cover! Then buy book one because these things don’t stand alone. Book three comes out in less than three weeks.) But, I had a brief conversation with my agent, and I started talking about the book I plan to write next. This is what I told her:
It’s a present-tense, second-person epic fantasy called Only You Can Save The Kingdom, Farmhand. I was originally going to use “Farmboy” but that would cut out half the readership. The best part was, when readers got to the part that read “You sneak up behind a guard and knife him in the back,” the reader would actually have to sneak out and kill a security guard.
Which I thought was absurdly hilarious, but from her? Nothing. Silence.
See, she reads queries, so whatever I try to think up, as a crazy, ridiculous idea for a book is pretty tame compared to what she’s used to. And that, frankly, is funnier than the joke I was telling.
Tough crowd.
Also, buy my books.