interesting things

Randomness for 5/6

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1) The world’s first zombie-proof house.

2) It’s the newest fad! White guys across the globe are going to be sporting this baby soon. Real soon.

3) Amazing WWII monuments in Yugoslavia.

4) “Who is Osama bin Laden? Is he famous?”

5) If Superman was an alien in other movies.

6) “Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.” The ten oddest sentences from conservative editorialist David Brooks’s new book.

7) Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day: Which offerings are good and which are not? And if you drop by a comic shop, be sure to buy something, too.

Randomness for 4/30

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1) 35 Fantastic Lego Ads.

2) Every Time Magazine cover in one image. Warning: big file

3) The Sartre Star Wars. Video. via Tor.com. The YouTube user’s other videos are pretty good, especially “Be A Good Sport, Sport.”

4) Now for a big change. Gorgeous… and I do mean gorgeous time lapse photography from a mountain in Spain. Video. Really amazing.

5) It’s been a while since I dropped politics into one of these link salads, but here’s one: Three important health care graphs. This is why I support effectiveness studies, which Republicans oppose: we’re already spending too much, and we don’t take the time to find out what works and what doesn’t. The first thing we should be cutting from our health care spending is a treatment that doesn’t work. Plus, I happen to believe we can learn something from the good examples of others.

6) Vintage condom posters.

7) This is awesome, and they need help from book collectors.

Randomness for 2/26

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1) This is crazy and awesome: Man builds functional CPU in Minecraft, using only redstone dust, torches, levers and stone. Of course it’s bigger than two city blocks (and I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about as he describes the parts, but it’s freaking awesome. via @laura_hudson

2) Try to watch this video without reading the comments first. It’s pretty funny and kind of brilliant.

3) The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.

4) Silent security cam footage of a tornado hitting St. Louis airport. Video. Brr.

5) Animated gifs as art.

6) Awesome! Check out the new trailer for THOR… as made my mockbuster crap-slingers Asylum Entertainment. Video.

7) Cousins fight over GAME OF THRONES tv show. lol.

Randomness for 4/21

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1) “Speed-climbing” the Eiger. This dude is nuts but the footage is gorgeous. Video.

2) “You will ripen with my child, faerie girl.” I don’t like to take digs at romance novels because so many people do it out of ignorance and misogyny, and I think the genre is unfairly maligned. Still, these excerpts from bad romance novels are pretty damn funny.

3) Curious to see what a professional comic book script looks like? Greg Rucka helps you out.

4) DIY Bacon Roses. via Jay Lake.

5) Ten Important Tax Charts.

6) Ten Deadly DIY Gadgets. The “flame gloves” pretty much qualify you as a Batman villain, and the crossbow that shoots machetes would be perfect for a zombie apocalypse, but it’s the car you can drive with an iPhone that really scares the hell out of me. via Jay Lake

7) An interactive map showing how much oil each country produced over the last fifty years. Just click “play.”

5 Things Make a Post

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1) I have three things left to do before I send Twenty Palaces to my agent: clean up some formatting issues like chapter headings, spellcheck, and check every instance of “him” in the script to see if I should have changed it to “me” when I went changed the book from a third person pov to a first person pov. So incredibly dull but I’m really catching some embarrassing errors, like “I jumped to his feet.” Oh well.

2) Here’s my Norwescon schedule:

Friday: Whatever I want.
Saturday: Whatever I want.
Sunday: Stay home and hang out with my son.

Hah! I’ll be there as a regular attendee, mainly to look around and see whatever this is to be seen. It’ll be my first convention, so I don’t expect to know anyone. If you’re going to be there and you see me, please feel free to say hello. I look like this. Also, I have a terrible memory for faces and names, so don’t be offended if it takes me a couple of seconds to “place” you.

3) Seattle is enduring the coldest April on record. I’m sorta sick of it.

4) Revisions on Twenty Palaces have taken control of my life. I can’t wait to send them off, if only so I can go back to responding to comments promptly (as opposed to passive-aggressively complaining on my blog, like this post) and reading books. Honestly, I can’t wait to spend some hours every day reading.

5) This NY Times article (only available if you haven’t used up your 20 articles/month) isn’t the first time I’ve heard that fidgeting has a powerful effect on weight gain and loss. I’ve been using my standing desk more often (thanks to the Topricin my wife just bought me) but I attribute most of the weight I’ve lost recently to the fact that I’m getting the sleep I need. I still have a long way to go, of course.

Randomness for 4/15

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1) Breaking it down.

2) The Pierley/Redford Disassociative Affect Diagnostic. About as accurate as any internet personality test, but this one’s actually cool to take (and only 20 “questions”).

3) The Amazing Media Habits Of 8-18 Year Olds

4) Seven basic things this Cracked.com writer thinks you’re doing all wrong, for certain values of “you.” The only one my household didn’t know about was the brushing after meals thing.

5) Borders execs try to justify bonuses on the revenue their company will bring in someday after they get this little bankruptcy thing straightened out. God forbid their bonuses should reflect what they’ve already done, rather than what they expect to do.

6) Book reviewers, let me point out a thing that is not cool.

7) This is simply wonderful. Play with it when you can listen to sound on your computer.

Randomness for 4/10

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1) Slow motion photography. Exploding cakes. Techno. I promise you that you will love this: Video. And it even comes with little stories! via @ChuckWendig

2) “I like big butts and I cannot lie, but is there some evolutionary reason as to why?” Sir Mix-A-Lot mashed with the modern just-so stories of sexual selection pressures. The comments are stone hilarious.

3) The sounds of Minecraft, as music. Video.

4) New Zealand brewer markets a “breakfast beer.” I’m not opposed to the idea of a (small) beer at breakfast, but this sounds god-awful.

5) “How I got a blank book onto the Amazon.com bestseller list.” via @victoriastrauss

6) Some posts on the resurgence of “epic” fantasy: One. Two.

7) Alternate Star Wars. What if George Lucas had been inspired by a Kurosawa film other than HIDDEN FORTRESS?

Annalise online

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So, I was making a Minecraft skin for Annalise, and I turned to Google Images to take a quick look at a fireman’s jacket. Clicking that link will take you there.

What did I see on the 12th line, third from the left? Marissa Merrill in costume as Annalise herself! It’s from this page on the Black Gate blog, where Marissa is turning and giving someone a very un-Annalise-like smile.

I dunno. I think it’s cool.

Randomness for 4/5

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1) So you want to get published? A flowchart. Is it just me, or are flowcharts made of awesome?

2) “Don’t you have any vegetarian meat?”

3) A big discussion on selling stolen IP in the Kindle format.

4) Advice for writers who suffer the pangs of jealousy.

5) Nerf guns painted and modified to have that steampunk look.

6) How slavery really ended in the U.S.A.

7) Black Gate is having a sale on their back issues. I have stories in issue #2, #3, and #10.

Randomness for 3/30

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1) Canadian politics made fun by nitpicking about monsters. Via James Nicoll.

2) Shit my students write.

3) Jon Stewart on class warfare, without ever mentioning class. Video.

4) This is genuinely awesome. It’s better than GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD.

5) This writer’s evening is nothing at all like mine. How to be a social writer. via James Enge

6) Are these the best D&D adventures ever?

7) Sixty completely unusable stock photos. This is hilarious wtf-ery, but it will take a while to load. Open it up in a tab and do something else for a while, then come back to it. Seriously, people, I can’t pick the worst one (okay, I can: it’s the blackface one).