Having run through all of his own work, Cory Doctorow has started podcasting others’. He’s starting with Bruce Sterling’s seminal The Hacker Crackdown, which inspired any number of us little proto-geeks.
I don’t pay much attention to podcasts, but I’ve heard Doctorow read at the occasional Worldcon panel and he does a pretty good job.
ThinkGeek, whom I love to the point of inappropriateness anyway, has fulfilled a long-standing dream of mine: To have a doorbell that screams like the one in Murder By Death. Connect the USB Doorbell to your computer and upload up to 30 seconds of your favorite sound effect, song, or movie clip. Change it as often as you like. (Y’know, a clip of Lurch saying, “You rang?” would be entertaining, too.)
Here’s a neat blog I just stumbled across, devoted to AI, robotics, and “exciting technologies.”
Game company Three Rings Design commissioned Jillian Northrup and Jeffrey “Toast” McGrew of Because We Can to convert some open office space into an environment modeled on Captain Nemo’s Victorian submarine.
This is now at the top of my list of frivolous things to do when I get rich, supplanting my previous intention of endowing a Wile E. Coyote Chair of Applied Engineering at a university somewhere.
I’d post one of the pictures here, but a thumbnail wouldn’t do it justice. Go see the whole batch here.
(via BoingBoing)
Joy/Pagadan mentioned this on her blog, and was kind enough to send it along to me:
In case you’re interested, the anthology, Year’s Best SF 12, is out now; it has a good selection of stories, including Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth by Michael Flynn. A section of this story uses online posts, some of which are from Flynn’s AOL SF Author’s folder, when he asked for contributions from folder regulars for the story.
I read the story when it came out in the magazine, and it’s neat the way he integrated the posts. (One of Shadow’s contributions was included, although not under that name.)
The story has been nominated for the Hugo and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
I love blogs that are dementedly devoted to a particular, obscure subject. They’re the Internet equivalent of a museum dedicated entirely to shrimp forks.
Bad Spock Drawings is just such a blog, and it’s devoted to just exactly what it says it is. I particularly like the first in their list of inclusion criteria:
When some else looks at it they should ask you “is that meant to be Spock?!” with an Interbang at the end!?
Link (via BoingBoing)
I made the happy discovery when I received the first newsletter from Denvention in the mail that, since I voted for site selection at LaConIV, I have a free supporting membership! I checked out the attending membership and it was only $80 (that was before June 1/07). After consultation with Starmom (who was griping about her non-attendance at LaConIV and yelled the desire to go to Denver next year), we decided we should get an attending membership. So we went ahead and got it! We will deal with family problems when they pop up. Meanwhile — Denvention 2008, here we come! Anybody there who wants to join me and Starmom kicking up a party storm in Denver??
Artist Le Gentil Garçon collaborated with a paleontologist to blend human and predatory animal skulls into this Pac-Man “skull.” (It’d actually be its entire skeleton, I believe.) Maybe he’ll do Frogger next.
Link (via BoingBoing)
Any comment I could make would be entirely superfluous.
(via Slumbering Lungfish)
Defective Yeti has the right idea.
1. A cat may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This includes transmogrifying from “adorable kitty enjoying a tummy rub” to “bandsaw” without warning.