Randomness for 8/8

1) The alphabet, carved on the tips of pencils.

2) Kanye West Tweets combined with New Yorker cartoons. It’s not exactly Nietzsche Family Circus, but, um…

3) I don’t even know what to say about this news story. My initial shock at reading it has lessened as I realize this sort of thing isn’t unusual. It wouldn’t be newsworthy at all if not for the Facebook connection.

4) What a bestseller’s marketing push looks like. Someday, this will be me.

5) Amazing Lego Animation. Not for some technical razzle dazzle, but because it is so simply shot and effective. Video

6) It’s hard to believe this isn’t partly cgi in post, but this is a 3D projection onto a building, and it’s mindblowing. Video.

7) “But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.” A New York high school valedictorian delivers a controversial speech against the public school system in which she excelled.

Randomness for 8/3

1) Invisibility gets closer to reality.

2) The URL says it all: http://writershouses.com/

3) Thinking of becoming a literary agent?

4) Michelle Sagara on authors meeting readers who have not read the author’s work. I have never worked in a bookstore and have no idea how to rec books, but the rest matches my thoughts very closely.

5) Glory, Glory, Howl-le-lu-ya!. This is hilarious and weird. Do you love Jesus? Well that’s fine. Do you feel moved to do *this* and post it online? Dude. Seriously. via Robin Bailey

6) Don’t be that guy. For anyone who wonders why comics are so ridiculously sexist.

7) The Nietzsche Family Circus

Randomness for 7/31

1) First Pacey-Con squelched by private police force. SDCC just isn’t like it used to be, man.

2) Autoeroticism in America (in convenient graph form!)

3) Kermit Bale. Yes, poster, you do, in fact, have too much time on your hands.

4) What does Harvard have to teach YOU about vampires in film and literature? Take the online course and find out.

5) Captain Higgins, flatworm of power!

6) Photoshop Time portals. via Kurt Busiek

7) Job prospects for 2011 in the urban fantasy world. Pretty funny, and let’s just pretend she didn’t use the phrase “tramp stamp.”

Take the Test!

I knew what this test was about and I still failed it.

It’s only a minute long. Test your awareness.

How to marginalize yourself

I knew touring comedian Gallagher had did conservative schtick, but I never realized he’d become such a pathetic asshole. Sample quote: “If Obama was really black, he’d act like a black guy and get a white wife.” Jesus. James Nicoll would mark this with the “memetic prophylactic recommended” tag.

Randomness for 7/2

1) Wonder Woman trades in her star-spangled panties for actual pants (and a very ’90’s jacket).

2) “Officer, I recognize that woman! Her name is Selena Kyle!”

3) OMG. Promoted from a comment Rose Fox made: The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu. I love it!

4) Et Cetera and Otherwise: A Violent Book Trailer. That won a Moby Award for Best Foreign Book Trailer and I laughed my ass off.

5) The other Moby Award winning trailers are compiled here… except for the one named “Least Likely to Sell the Book”–aka: the worst book trailer of the year. The author pulled that one off of YouTube, and produced this new, “improved” version of the trailer. And I swear, if this is the good version, I can’t even imagine that bad one.

6) Batman’s Greatest Tweets. Sample: “We’ll miss you, Jack Bauer. If you ever come out of exile, I’ve got a pair of green ankle shoes and a yellow cape waiting.”

7) What sf ideas does Rudy Rucker wish you were writing about?

I know I’ve been posting a lot today. I know

This article has been open in my browser all day and I don’t know quite what to say about it. So I’m just going to talk.

Here’s the short version: Fundamentalist Christian minister blames a tornado on gays and months later is outed as gay himself.

I know what you’re thinking: “Harry, around here we call that ‘Tuesday.’ What’s the big deal?”

Here’s the thing: The guy wasn’t caught traveling through Europe with a rentboy.com guy, he wasn’t arrested with a gay sex worker, he wasn’t involved in a long-term relationship with another dude. He was in a 12-step group therapy program to deal with his sexuality, and the writer who outed him attended the therapy sessions under false pretenses.

Not that I have much faith in the “therapy” he’s undergoing. Using an addiction protocol [1] to manage your sexual desires? That makes me suck air through clenched teeth. It sure seems to me that it’s the wrong way to go. I wish the reverend could find a therapy that would help him make peace with who he is, not try to suppress it.

But that’s not really my call. He has to pursue the path that he thinks is best. And those private moments when he is in a supposedly-anonymous group, trying to work out his issues… well, they should have remained private.

Easy for me to say, right? I’m not gay and haven’t been villified the way gays have. I haven’t been blamed for everything from Katrina to 9/11 to pedophilia. I haven’t had to endure that bullshit. I recognize that the reverend’s words are hate speech and the people who outed him consider him an enemy.

I just wish they could have given him the space to work out his private demons in peace. I also wish he could have the public space to stand in front of his congregation and say: “I believe gay sex is a sin, and I believe in loving the sinner but hating the sin. But I know how difficult it is, because I struggle with these feelings myself.”

I don’t know. I don’t have any simple answer here. I just don’t like the whole situation.

This was no boating accident!

Quick question regarding a conversation going on elsewhere: Have you ever walked into the wrong theater at the multiplex (or put the wrong disk in the DVD player) and watched a whole movie that was different than what you thought you were seeing?

This question is prompted by a grandmother and 8yo who sat through the first 15 minutes of GET HIM TO THE GREEK before deciding that they weren’t seeing TOY STORY 3 and leaving the theater. Also by a group of older women who watched all of TRANSFORMERS unsure if it was the chick flick they’d been planning to see.

I’m trying to get a grasp on this. I know that sometimes people don’t see things they don’t expect to see. I know that people try very hard to make shoehorn things into their pre-existing mental models. I also know that people in a group are less likely to jump up and say “This is wrong!” that people who are alone.

Once, I sat through ten minutes of a history channel documentary wondering when they were going to tie the subject of strip mining to the show on ancient Rome I was expecting (wrong night and I’d missed the opening).

But GET HIM TO THE GREEK?? Once Russel Brand dropped his first f-bomb, wouldn’t you get it? I just don’t understand. Has anyone had this experience?

Randomness for 6/23

1) Carnage on Hoth, the cake.

2) The rule, usually, is “Don’t read the comments,” yes? But look at this post about a delicious salad sandwich and then scroll down to the fourth comment by “Brownhornet”. WTF? I don’t understand that at all.

3) A trailer for all Academy Award Winning Movies. This is funny.

4) So is this: The angry police captain. Seen via the-isb.

5) White guys for rent.

6) Want to have a good-looking kid? Talk to the sperm (and egg, supposedly) donors at beautifulpeople.com. Money quote: “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

7) “Do you think the author wanted you to learn something?”
“No screaming.”