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ThinkGeek Knows What People Want
ThinkGeek (“Stuff for Smart Masses”) sends out periodic newsletters featuring new products. Every year on April 1 they also send out a similar newsletter featuring fake products…which are juuuust plausible enough to seem realistic. Last year one of their hoax products was the 8-bit tie, a necktie that looked like it was rendered in a…
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Tribble Craft
io9 recently mentioned a tribble sale, wherein props from the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” were being auctioned off. If you don’t have the wherewithal to purchase a real one, furry objects rather similar to tribbles (but only coincidentally, as I don’t need a visit from a ravening pack of Paramount lawyers) are…
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The Secret Life of AT-ATs
Nick Drummond got a new “pet” recently, and has been documenting its behavior as it settles in. He has a whole photoset devoted to its antics, and it’s a sweetly charming glimpse of what AT-ATs do when no one’s watching. I predict an upsurge in AT-AT popularity once people realize what wonderful pets they make.…
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The Strangest Thing You’ll See All Day
The Bangles’ “Going Down to Liverpool,” with an extended cameo by Leonard Nimoy. For no discernible reason. (via Francesco Explains it All)
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Link Dump
It’s been a busy week. I’ve got deadlines at work, unexpected travel, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped. So you guys get another link dump. Badger Cover Gallery – Great collection of campy-looking book covers for SF and fantasy novels. 12 Things the Latest Trailer Taught Me About the…
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Oh, Please Let This Be a Parody
There’s a concept known as Poe’s Law which posits that, unless you state specifically that you’re kidding, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing. I think that idea should be expanded beyond religious fundamentalism, because I’m still not sure whether the Stop Alien Abductions site…
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T-Shirts!
I have previously sung the praises of the fabulous Dot over at Dabbled, whose fixations include robots and cephalopods. At some point it occurred to me that she was uniquely suited to design a new logo for the O*W*C, and despite the fact that she is much too good for us, she agreed to do…
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Schroedinger’s Cross-Stitch
For the crafty amongst us, Etsy seller Larripin Labs (“Home of the Cross-Stitched Physicist”) sells, um, cross-stitched physicists. Patterns currently available are Richard Feynman, Erwin Schrodinger, and Michio Kaku. She says, “since cross stitch seems to be a mostly female pursuit, I hope to spark some interest in young women in math and science.” I…
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SF Trivia
So I ran across this “Are You a Science Fiction Scholar?” quiz in my archives, and think it’s a bit on the easy side (I got 11/11; how about you?). However, since we get a lot of readers who hit this blog and never explore further, it occurs to me that it might be worth…
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Movies as Dimestore Novels
Artist spacesick has created a whole set of wonderful “I Can Read Movies” book covers, giving classic movies the cheap paperback treatment. You can check the whole set out on his blog or Flickr Photostream. Note: Quite a bit of his other art is rather arrestingly NSFW, so poke around the rest of his work…