Tag Archives: Friday Links

SMBC Comics is frequently silly or bizarre, but cartoonist Zach Weiner also captures a lot of profound ideas in his art. This comic is the most simple and elegant illustration I’ve ever seen of the Technological Singularity and the rise of artificial intelligence. (Or at least, that’s how I interpret it, and this is my blog, so clearly I’m right.) The last panel has stuck in my brain for days.

How do you get into space? Why, strap two 747s together to make the biggest wingspan in human history, then launch a rocket from its back! So says billionaire Paul Allen, who recently founded Stratolaunch, a new competitor of Virgin Galactic that hopes to put humans in orbit by 2020.

Rats show a lot more empathy than you might expect, says NPR.

Richard Burton wasn’t the only professional badass. Here’s a video of Bruce Lee with an…inventive…new way to light matches.

Felicity Aston is now just days (hours?) from becoming the first woman to reach the South Pole alone. And she’s tweeting her expedition! Normally I’m not a huge fan of Twitter, but that is cool. Recent message from Antarctica:

The sastrugi have gone and the snow was covered in bobbles of frost today that sparkled like a carpet of diamonds.

Got any links of your own to share? Put ’em in the comments! Self-pimpage is allowed.

Happy Friday, everyone, and have a phenomenal weekend. See you on Monday!

Yesterday morning, at the same time I posted about the Black Swallower, a comic went up on Dinosaur Comics about the very same thing. Ryan North must be reading the same sites I am. He also mentions the “sea squirt,” an animal that – I can’t make this up – eats its own brain. The relevant question, as he so neatly puts it: WHY IS THE SEA A NIGHTMARE WITHOUT END?

As a complement to my State of the Revolution post earlier this week, here’s the State of Internet Censorship around the world. Highlights include Thailand, where clicking “Like” on Facebook can land you in prison, and the UK, which is working on a system to monitor and report when people access Facebook and Twitter. (Don’t worry, they’re only going to use it against Bad People! Yeah.)

One of the cooler things I’ve seen this week: Star Wars Dueling Cellos. It cannot be explained; it merely is.

xkcd has been hit-or-miss lately, but this comic is a definite hit.

Finally, I’ve decided to open up the “Friday Links” concept a little. Instead of me just throwing websites at you, I think it’d be cool to hear what sites caught your attention this week, too. If you have any links to share, please post them in the comments! (Linking to your own site is fine if you want to share something cool. I’m confident y’all are too classy to turn this into a spam-fest.)

Have a great weekend!

People are afraid of all kinds of things, but what are books afraid of? This comic has the answer.

Now a device called Body Wave can supposedly measure your level of mental concentration based on physiological signs, and tell you when you’re at peak focus. I read about this in TIME and they made it sound like a big new thing, but there’s surprisingly little about it online so far. Still, I’m fascinated by any technology that could potentially let you control things with your mind.

The new Zelda, Skyward Sword, is looking pretty good, and it’s getting stellar reviews. Anyone had a chance to play it yet?

Have a good weekend!

I’m still on vacation with my family, so I’ll keep it short today. This Thanksgiving comic made me laugh. If you like it too, it means your sense of humor is as ridiculous as mine.

See you Monday!

I came across a blog by a Canadian woman living and working in Mozambique. In her latest post she talks about some Mozambican school kids, and how excited they were to receive pictures of…well, I’ll let you see for yourself.

This comic summarizes my feelings on every economic issue in this country.

And this one pretty much sums up my thoughts on the First Amendment.

And finally…there are a lot of reasons to be recommend a book. Maybe it gave you some practical advice. Maybe it touched you spiritually. Maybe you liked the writing style. Or maybe…it just has the greatest book title ever created.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

Writing Links

Did you know? God has a memoir. And Walmart isn’t interested.

One author loves Moby-Dick so much he wrote an entire book just trying to convince you to read it. In his words: “it’s as close to being our American Bible as we have.” Melville’s masterpiece is still languishing unread on my shelf at the moment, but I’ll get to it eventually.

English: we need some gender-neutral pronouns already. Let’s get on that. Dinosaur Comics is totally calling you out.

Non-Writing Links

In case you haven’t heard: Jimmy Kimmel asked parents to tell their kids they had eaten all their Halloween candy, and videotape the responses. You’ve never seen so much crying. It’s schadenfreuderrific!

Here’s a video of a moth beating its wings in slow motion. That is all.

Some science news: a few of those universal constants may not be as constant as we thought.

And finally today – it turns out there is something called “chap hop,” which is Victorian hip-hop. Steampunk rap, in other words. People. Why didn’t you tell me about this? Here’s Professor Elemental launching another salvo in his ongoing feud with Mr. B, The Gentleman Rhymer:

My plans for the weekend revolve around the mutually contradictory ideals of finally getting caught up on my To Do list, and chillaxing. What about you?

No word yet on my Machine of Death story, but we’ve got some good links for you. I’m short on time this morning so I’ll just throw ’em out there:

The Inkslinger’s Invocation. For those familiar with Chuck Wendig’s “Writer’s Prayer,” this is a sequel of sorts to that. It begins, “I am a writer, and I am done fucking around.” Amen, Chuck.

The 10 Oldest Books in the World. Hey look – my new friend Gilgamesh is on there!

Finally, for those doing NaNoWriMo, here’s one tip every day for all of November.

Now get out there and kick some ass today.

Writing Links

Okay, here’s a link I’m really excited about. You know Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” right? The one that goes:

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

But check this out: did you know that way back in 1890, Tennyson actually made a recording (on one of Edison’s phonograph cylinders) of himself reciting the poem, and that the audio from that recording still survives today? You can listen to it right here. The words are hard to make out in a few spots, so you may want to follow along with the text of the poem.

Besides that revelation, just one other writing link this week: Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series is coming to the screen, with an HBO series and three movies in the works.

Non-Writing Links

You may remember that earlier this year, Tunisia overthrew its dictator, launching the Arab Spring, and inspiring (so far) two more successful uprisings in Egypt and Libya. Well, just this past Sunday, Tunisians had their first free election after the revolution.

According to a BBC reporter:

“I asked [a voter] who he thought would win. ‘We are all going to win. This is a free election. It means we have already won.'”

Listen, world. You keep this up, it’s going to start chipping holes in my jaded, cynical mindset. You just watch yourself, y’hear?

On a lighter note (and totally unrelated), I thought this was pretty hilarious: a Tumblr of women looking dissatisfied in bed.

Nothing else this week. Have a groovy weekend, you crazy kids!

And, we’re back! After a perilous dip in green dots yesterday, our best agent made a daring run into the heavily-guarded Green Dot Factory and secured more than enough luminous orbs to get the cable modem back up and operational. Excelsior!

(That, or I came home and it was working again, without my doing anything. Whichever.)

Anyway! Today I have three fabulous links for you, and they are available…right…now!

First up is a post from Zen Habits called How I Changed My Life, In Four Lines. It starts with this:

Changing your life can seem an incredibly tough and complicated thing, especially if you’ve failed a great number of times (like I did), found it too hard, and resigned yourself to not changing. But I found a way to change.

I’m not sold on everything he recommends, but his basic four steps seem very sound.

Next, have you heard of Booktrack? They do soundtracks for books. What is this sorcery? Would you want a soundtrack for your book – and would you be willing to pay for a book-specific soundtrack like they offer, versus just jamming to your own mp3 collection?

Finally, Veronica Roth talks about how indecisiveness can hurt your revision. I’ve seen this happen in my own work, and Ms. Roth speaks the truth.

That’s a wrap. Have a stupendous weekend!

This week The Rumpus looks at what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are reading. You know, besides each other’s signs.

An author makes the difficult decision to stop working on a novel and start over with a new one. How do you know when it’s time?

So there is apparently an Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which is pretty cool. The current version seems fairly limited, however. The most obvious gap at the moment is that, while there are long, detailed entries on science fiction authors, there seems to be nothing about the books themselves. Searching on “Dune” returns entries for the film, at least three separate video games, and a board game, with no apparent notion that all these were based on something or other. There is also a category for comic books, in which a search for “Spider-Man” yields no results. The site is still in beta, so hopefully it’ll grow as time goes on.

Tuesday was the 50th anniversary of the novel Catch-22. NPR talks about why the novel still resonates today.

And finally, a video called A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work. Watch as a toddler flips through a magazine, tapping the pages, trying to figure out why the “touch screen” doesn’t respond. Readers, I think I’m getting old.

Have a great weekend!