This was a really fun entry by
mrissa in which people gave her titles of books she had not written, and she replied with the first and last lines of the book and a brief anecdote about the most difficult or interesting piece of writing it.Locals: this designer-fabric reclaimation-and-redistribution organization looks like a nifty source of interesting fabrics to play with.
For those who missed the news, Sarah Monette is now going to be published as "Katherine Addison". The book-distribution-and-sales industry is sometimes dumb, and this is a flanking maneuver around one of the common cases of that.
A rather intriguing photo (also this companion piece, though I like the first one better).
This is a rather interesting-looking (and different!) design for a backpack, with a bit of an "armored" look -- or possibly a "pillbug" look -- but it doesn't really look very practical.
Reclaimed drawers, chosen randomly and made into new furniture. I quite like how the juxtaposition of the worn wooden antique drawers with new simple white cases makes them into art, or at least puts them in a new context where the wear has a very different sense than it would in the whole piece. (more.)
Speaking of things that may or may not be art, this is also an interesting contribution to that conversation. The reaction to it -- and the fact that the relevant bureaucracy actually chose to respond to it as they did despite giving up authority in doing so -- is neat, too.
This is a great picture of Spock. I want it to be a usericon, but it's not me, so I don't know what I'd do with it as a usericon. So someone else should have it, and use it.
A while back, someone (
rosefox, I think? Maybe?) posted a link to these early official photos from the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie, with a comment along the lines of how they were horribly wrong. It's been a while since I've read the book, and so I don't actually recall it well enough to see why these are wrong (though I cannot imagine Hollywood getting Narnia right in any case), and would be interested in comment. My main reaction is that that's a gorgeously pretty set, especially the stern of the ship in the first photo, regardless of whether it's wrong for the movie.Also, on bad movies: A rather pointed commentary on the originality of the plot of Avatar, or the lack thereof.
This comment in a Making Light thread seemed an interesting perspective on privilege. I'm not entirely sure how much I agree or disagree, but it was a thought-provoking point.
My favorite mad scientist (who is mad in all of the best ways, and none of the worrisome ones) posts about building a white-light laser from combined red, green, and blue light -- but, in a really tricky trick, all three wavelengths are coming from the same lasing material; this is not three separate lasers being combined.
I find this to be a remarkably captivating image, because of who the people are. That's the sheriff on the left, the prosecuting attorney on the right, and four men in handcuffs that they've just arraigned for high bank robbery -- all congenially posing on the courthouse steps for a formal photo. It just seems so incongrously collegial.
tiger_spot, here's the pine-nut cookie recipe from jonsinger that I was telling you about.The existence of mathoverflow.net -- a math-based Q/A website along the lines of stackoverflow.net -- deeply amused one of my coworkers (
falsedrow), who commented that he found this post disturbing on grounds that "the Lazyweb is not that smart". The question about whether good math jokes exist has some quite good existence proofs in the answers. (I am quite fond of "a comathematician is a device for turning cotheorems into ffee", because I like metajokes. I also expect that whether one finds "let epsilon be less than zero", presented as a joke, to be funny, is a measure of something about character but I shall not speculate as to what.)The chapter on recursive functions from Kernighan and Ritchie and Lovecraft, with exercises. That's all you need to know.
Some of my friends have been doing a World-of-Warcraft forum-based roleplaying storytelling game; this is an entertaining example thread. Much as with the metajokes, I'm entertained by the idea of taking a thing that's already a game, and twisting it (in both setting ways and gameplay ways) into something entirely different and rather a bit off-kilter.
Sun-glint off a Titan lake. It brings to mind many times flying over Minnesota or other lake-laden (or even puddle-laden) terrain and watching the reflection of the sun on the ground trace out all the spots with water in them in a chain of bright flashes.
A 175-square-foot studio apartment in New York, and its two happy inhabitants. I've lived in smaller places, but by myself, and they came with kitchen and dining-room privileges as extra.
The cutest little gingerbread houses ever, which perch on the rim of a mug of hot cider (or hot chocolate).
A link to a Jo Walton short story in the Small Change series universe. I haven't actually read it -- the comments described it as excellent but rather bleak, and I'm not really very much for bleak things at the moment -- but I have no doubt that it is indeed excellent.
artan_eter reminds you that Ceylon cinnamon and Cylon cinnamon are not the same thing. (That's pretty much the entire content of the post, so the link's mostly for attribution. And the comment thread, which is worth looking at for ibnfirnas's comment.)Some very pretty pictures of Christmas lights from
kightp.Finally, Patricia Wrede has the bestest closets ever. We'd heard rumors and stories of them back in the days of rec.arts.sf.composition, but now there are actual photos!
