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Ficlets – Collaborative Short Fiction
I’m not entirely sure why, but “Ficlet” looks vaguely pornographic.Anyway, this site strikes me as sort of similar to the “SF Story Tag” chats that Gedi hosts sometimes. You publish a short (no more than 1,024 characters) fragment of fiction on the site, then other users can expand on that with a prequel or sequel,…
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Immense Ice Deposits Found on Mars
The European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft has found a deposit of water ice at Mars’ southern pole which is sufficiently large to cover the the entire planet in water 36 feet deep. Looks like we might not need to import water when we start terraforming.Link
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Suddenly, the Cargo Cult Sounds Reasonable
There was a recent news article about a woman who murdered her young daughter. The crime itself is horrific, but this quote simply boggled me: Spann’s father, Gary Spann, told The Sacramento Bee in 2005 his daughter… belonged to a cult that worshipped the late rapper Tupac Shakur as the reincarnation of the 16th century…
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The Brave Little Mailbox
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars, LucasFilm is working with the USPS to temporarily turn mailboxes in 200 cities into R2D2. (Me, I’m just verklempt that it’s been thirty years. Egad.) Link
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Funny, But…
Lore Sjöberg’s Alt Text column this week is a reductio ad absurdum about easy-to-use technology. Even though he’s being humorous, this line kind of struck me: Did you know that it’s possible to calculate a cosine even if you think “cosine” is a brand of nasal decongestant? We don’t allow people to walk around with…
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HowTo: Make an Office-Supply Enterprise
With removable saucer section, no less. Link (via BoingBoing)
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Kitten Cannon
Chip always said she liked cats … with mustard. Well, I found kittens that go BOOM! http://www.addictinggames.com/kittencannon.html
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Clockpunk: Serious Hair-Splitting in the Subgenera
I found this on BoingBoing, and like Cory Doctorow’s comment about it: “Clockpunk” — a sub-genre of science fiction — appears to have been created while I wasn’t looking Essentially, it’s a subset of Steampunk, but it pushes the time period back to the Renaissance instead of the Victorian era.The link goes to a new…
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“Most Significant” SF/Fantasy of the Past 50 Years
I found this list of “The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002” on Movin’ Meat, who found it on Pharyngula, who was just linking to Tikistitch, who found it on the The News Blog, where the link trail ran cold and I finally wound up searching for the phrase.…
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Banryu – Robot Guard Dragon
The Banryu (which literally means “guard dragon”) from tmsuk and Sanyo Electric wanders through your home, keeping an eye on things. It can detect motion or the smell of burning objects, and send pictures to your cell phone to show you the problem. It can negotiate cluttered environments and climb over gaps of up to…