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Randomness for 9/21

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1) Parasite eats fish’s tongue, then lives in its mouth feeding off its food. This one gives me goosebumps.

2) For The Love Of Scottie McMullet — Romance novels retitled to match their covers. I wish they’d do some sf/f/h novels.

3) PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, a micro-budget horror film from a few years ago, is finally going to get a release. Check out the trailer, too.

4) Making your own video game monsters. I don’t know a thing about Bioshock, but even I know this is cool.

5) OMG, one week until Child of Fire‘s book release day.

Randomness for 9/16

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I was planning to take a break from these for a couple days, but the universe has other plans.

1) The Philadelphia Free Library is closing for lack of funding. The city of my birth is about to join southern Oregon as a place I will never, ever live in.

2) On a lighter note, a haiku about the Sub-mariner, in comics form.

3) The Dan Brown sequel generator, which I can’t see at work. Is it funny?

4) Birth of a meme! “Whose responsible this!” via glvalentine

5) Dungeons and Dragons, the sodas! I’m going to be all over Digby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer.

Randomness for 9/15/09

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1) Tron light cycles build out of Lego. Pretty cool, but it’s not something for my son–he’s never seen the movie.

2) Strange and spectacular sinks/wash basins. I expect you think I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, link-wise, but these are pretty amazing. I want the Art Ceram, myself. via marthawells

3) Newsweek does a story called The Real Cause of Obesity: It’s not gluttony. It’s genetics. Why our moralizing misses the point. The comment section, as you might expect, is a disaster of dim-witted moralizing. “Mr. Friedman is not very well informed. Genetics is only a very small factor in obesity. The role that it plays is that as a person eats junk food, is sedentary in their overall activities, it weakens the genetic code and gets passed on. But not only do the genes get passed on, the bad habits get passed on to the offspring and the genetic code continues to get weaker. ”

4) Sexual assault prevention tips that are guaranteed to work when employed correctly. via james_nicoll and theweaselking

5) One thing I struggle with in my writing is how to show mental states of many characters in a first-person POV. This TED talk about the development of the part of the brain that recognizes other people’s mental states doesn’t address my struggles specifically, but it’s pretty interesting.

6) You know who wants more Americans to have government-run insurance? Doctors. Yeah, doctors complain about Medicare reimbursement rates, but private insurance is an even bigger headache.

Randomness for 9/12/09

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1) Toilet Birthdays. Because every blog needs a purpose. Or every purpose needs a blog.

2) You know that new show The Vampire Diaries? Well, it’s based on some very strange books. Very.

3) “Whiteout” is so staggeringly bad that it achieves a kind of transcendent poetry. It’s ignorant of how things are in the real world, of what makes a thriller a thriller, of why people seek out entertainment. It’s a movie made for an irony-free world populated by impaired moviegoers who are amused simply by shapes and sounds and shiny things…

A chimpanzee could’ve finger-painted a better movie. A chimpanzee, somewhere in the world, probably has.

Attention, chimpanzee: Send your finger-painted screenplay to Tom Skerritt. He’ll sign on for it. He signed up for “Whiteout,” after all.

4) How to hide an airplane factory.

5) Writer Beware examines the myth that you have to know someone to get published. ::raises hand:: As a data point, I didn’t know my agent or my editor before I signed with them, and I didn’t have any connections, either. I did it by cold-query.

6) A Main Force Patrol T-shirt. I’m thinking my friend Mike would love this one, but check out the categories. The designs are really well done. via serialkarma

Randomness for 9/10/09

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1) MightyGodKing offers an interesting take on secret identities for two of the most iconic superheroes in comics.

2) The browser on my work computer won’t let me comment there, but Genreville’s Josh Jasper draws the line and I am in complete agreement with him. That bullshit should never be tolerated.

3) A review of The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable Girl. (Weirdly, the URL has “playbot” instead of “playboy,” which is not a thought I needed to have right now.

An R-rated Harry Potter

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Over on his blog, Nathan Bransford is asking people if children’s books should have ratings, the way films and video games do.

Me, I think this misses the point. Books don’t need ratings stating which age groups they are appropriate for. All that does is embarrass readers who are enjoying a well-written adventure that lacks cursing or violence, and makes kids seek out forbidden ratings.

What I want are labels. Here is my suggested list:

Rated S: Contains stereotypes
Rated HP: Contains “helpless princess” characters who must be rescued by a male character.
Rated J: Contains Jingoistic attitudes toward foreign peoples/governments
Rated MN: Contains “Magic Negro” character with no life beyond the assistance character gives to Our Hero
Rated DA: Contains dead animal for purposes of unbearable pathos
Rated DV: Contains characters and plotting that you’re seen a hundred times before, but might be new to an 8-yo.
Rated LM: Lacks Monsters or other supernatural elements.
Rated MBS: Mocks Belief Systems
Rated NF: Not as Funny as it thinks it is.

Any others I should have included?

Atheists promise to care for pets…

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… Of people taken up in the Rapture.

For a fee, of course.

8 Questions

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Eight Questions about health-care reform answered. For those who might not be following the political process closely.

Randomness for 9/7/09

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1) MightyGodKing’s latest Stab at Relevence, the card game.

2) F=MA? Or F=MAWill(MagicNecklace)? From a blog created by filmmakers planning their first hard-sf indie feature film.

3) RT Book Reviews gives Child of Fire four and a half stars. (I hope that’s not out of ten) Unfortunately, I can’t read the review because I don’t subscribe.

4) Don’t settle for cheap knock-offs! A dieselpunk ray gun commercial

5) Outrageous burgers across the nation. Starting with, you guessed it, a burger with a donut for a bun.

6) 20 Neil Gaiman Facts. Reader, I lolled.

Randomness for 9/5/09

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1) People, I ask you: if we’re going to promote AIDS prevention, should we really be turning to Adolf Hitler pron?

2) How content aggregation explains that the upside of contracting AIDS is “The Spanish Civil War.” seen via tnh’s Particles.

3) New Japanese prime minister’s wife once flew on a space ship to Venus. I’m just going to assume the sex is fantastic.