I have no idea if FDRL's "Maple Set" knives are practical or even useful, but they are extremely beautiful.

With this project we wanted to explore an alternative emotion to the standard kitchen knives you see every day. The focus is drawn to the high polished blade, while the rest of the knife's Maple wood body sits warmly in the hand and blends in to its surroundings. The wood is sealed and food safe to allow for easy cleanup. The knife gives the appearance of being lightweight; however their weight is balanced to ensure that they can be used by any level of chef.

Maple Set (via Core77)

YOU is the second novel from Austin Grossman, whose 2008 debut Soon I Will be Invincible marked him out as a talent to watch. Now, with his second novel, he confirms his status as a major talent.

You is the story of Russell, who tries to leave behind his nerdy, computer-game-programming high-school life to get a law degree, but by the end of the 90s, he's dropped out and come to work at Black Arts, a game studio founded by three of his school buddies -- the three who stayed true to their nerdy roots. Black Arts is famous for its brilliant simulation engine, which was written by Simon, Russell's old school buddy, who has just died under mysterious circumstances, leaving the company he founded in uncertain shape.

Russell's story weaves in the fascinating fictional canon of the Black Arts games, his history as a teenager encountering the first generation of PCs, and the white-hot fever of a game studio whose existence depends on shipping a game to beat all the other games ever made. As a piece of fiction about life in a high-tech company, You ranks with Microserfs for its portrayal of the romance and heroism of wresting life from endless lines of code, and with JPOD for its pitiless depiction of the alienation and loneliness of a life inside a machine.

But Grossman isn't just chronicling the rise and fall of a company, or of a character, or even an industry. Rather, he uses YOU as a tool to prise open the mystical center of what art is, what games are, what fun is, and how they all mix together. Some of YOU reads as pure poetry, others like a fascinating treatise on the unplumbed depths of the ludic urge, and taken as a whole, it is a novel that both uplifts and entertains, and reframes the world we live in and the things we do in it. It is easily one of the best books I've read this year.

Incidentally, Austin Grossman comes from quite an exceptional family. His identical twin brother is Lev Grossman (author of the fantastic novel The Magicians), while his sister, Bathsheba Grossman, is a justly renowned sculptor who produces 3D printed mathematical solids. I am pleased to say I have many works from all three siblings in my office.

YOU

Jordan sez, "Our t-shirt company was just successfully funded through Kickstarter, now at $46,000+ with 4 days to go. We take insane art from independent artists and throw them on shirts using a new type of printing called Sublimation. It allows us to print ALL OVER the shirt in extremely vibrant colors."

Not all this stuff is up my street, but some of it is pretty fawesome.

RaveNectar: This isn't clothing - it's an EXPERIENCE. (Thanks, Jordan)

This spectacular C3PO junkbot assemblage was made by junk artist Gabriel Dishaw, and sells for $800. Worth every penny, too. Mr Dishaw's got plenty of other wonderful pieces for sale, too.

C3PO "Woody" (via Neatorama)

Sean Murphy's Punk Rock Jesus is a rockin' comic about the Second Coming. It opens with a psychotically ruthless show-runner arranging to clone Jesus from DNA salvaged from the Shroud of Turin, implanting a foetus in the womb of a teenaged virgin, all for a reality TV show that starts with auditions for the part of Christ's mother. Gwen, the desperate teen who gets the part, is only one of the many memorable characters who make up the resulting set piece: there's Dr Sarah Epstein, a brilliant geneticist who's been promised funding for a carbon-fixing superalgae if she helps create the clonal Christ; there's Thomas McKael, an IRA soldier turned supergrass turned super-security director, and several others who come to prominence as the story unfolds (including Cola, a genetically engineered tame polar bear).

The story perks along for the first third, as the dismal life of Chris -- as the clone is called -- is run out on the screens of America, and in the high-security compound on an offshore island under constant siege from militant Christian fundamentalists who are torn on the question of whether Chris is the second coming or a mocker. Then there's a turning point where Chris becomes and adolescent and discovers some of the seedier truths about his life and the miserable existence his mother has been forced into all through it.

That's when Punk Rock Jesus is born. To a thudding soundtrack of vintage punk smuggled in on vinyl (CDs would set off the metal detector) Chris gives himself a mohawk, tears his clothes to rags, and surprises his minders by stepping out on stage and declaring himself to be an atheist. In the ensuing chaos, Chris escapes from the network and its evil representatives and makes his way to the drowned TAZ of lower Manhattan where he becomes the front-man for a "the last punk band in the world," the Flak Jackets.

And that's when the story really roars to life, becoming at once sillier and more serious, but avoiding some of the ponderousness of the setup. Serious questions of religion's role in society are raised; rock is bepunkéd; dressing rooms are trashed; the media is expertly dissected. It's a near-perfect rocket-ship ride through some of the best material from comics like DMZ and Transmetropolitan, with a healthy dose of radical atheism and geopolitics thrown in.

It's got pathos, laughs, rage and comeuppances, and awesome punk rock not-giving-a-fuck. What more could you ask for?

Punk Rock Jesus

Polish leatherworker MK makes some very nice wrist-straps for pocket-watches and car-watches. He's not the only one making these, but I find them particularly handsome, and rather nice retro-modern take on the massive wristwatch phenomenon.

Wristbands for pocket watches. (Thanks, Nic!)

The "Polar Bear Ice Tray" is a sealed bottle that makes icecubes and then facilitates their easy removal. The sealed container keeps freezer flavors away, and once it's all frozen, you can dislodge the ice by giving the bottle a whack on a countertop and then pour it out of the mouth. Looks like a clever way of solving an old problem, though I haven't tried it myself.

polar bear ice tray (via Red Ferret)

Last summer, Zach Weiner (creator the most excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic) ran a monumentally successful Kickstarter for a CC-licensed Choose-Your-Own-Adventure title called Trial of the Clone: An Interactive Adventure!.

I've finally gotten around to reading my copy and it's an absolute delight. Not only is it witty and often laugh-aloud funny -- it's also got a novel and well-thought-through game mechanic that introduces an element of tabletop RPG-playing to the system (instead of rolling dice, you flip randomly through the book and get your roll-value from the number at the bottom corner of the page).

The premise is a fun spoof of the Star Wars trilogy. You're an orphaned clone (they decanted you in order to fill a hot market wherein rich people competed to adopt orphans, quickly exhausting the existing pool of orphans and giving rise to the practice of cloning; alas you were decanted just as the market crashed) and you're sent to live with a mystic cult of warriors who train you and enlist you in an intergalactic war. The humor is trenchant, never too on-the-nose, and never gets in the way of what turns out to be rather a good story. As an added bonus, "nearly all the proper names in the book are dirty words in Czech."

Profits from this book are donated to Fight for the Future, one of the activist groups that led the charge that killed SOPA last year.

Trial of the Clone [Amazon]

Trial of the Clone [SMBC]

If you love Sharpies (as I do), but actually manage to hold onto them until they run out, rather than losing them at the rate of several a week (as I do), then you might benefit from the refillable, stainless steel Sharpie ($5.78), which would spare you the sad sensation you get when you drop your dead Sharpie into the trash.

There's only one time in my life that I actually used up a Sharpie: when I was signing the title-pages for something like 5,000 hardcovers of this graphic novel, and I had the curious sensation of uncapping a fresh Sharpie and signing until it ran dry -- it was something like using up an entire chapstick, a weird kind of accomplishment.

Sharpie Stainless Steel Fine Point Permanent Marker (via Core 77)