Phil Are Go has done the world the kind service of posting a hi-rez scan of a gorgeous, vintage souvenir of Wisconsin postcard, lavishly and wonderfully illustrated with everything the… Read the rest of the article: Beautiful, illustrated vintage Wisconsin postcard

Urban Jungle Street View is a Google Street View mashup that pulls out the 3D information latent in the Streetview database and uses it to map lush, ecotopian foliage over… Read the rest of the article: Mapping ecotpian jungles onto Google Streetview

As noted, the new Humble Ebook Bundle is live, and Publishers Weekly has a great writeup on it, including my decision to independently produce an audiobook of my novel Homeland.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick has a gift for catchy, acerbic shorthand terms to describe shenanigans. He coined the term "Streisand Effect" to describe any situation in which a relatively obscure piece… Read the rest of the article: "Fiber to the press release"

David "Davidope" Szakaly is a talented Hungarian animator who specializes in trippy, freaky GIFs that pulse and twist and melt your brain.

Writing under the rallying cry "Gender-specific books demean all our children," Katy Guest announces that the Independent on Sunday — one of the UK's great weekend papers — will no… Read the rest of the article: UK Sunday paper won't review books marketed "to exclude either sex"

On Instructables, Klee67 has remade the chocolate chip cookie shot glass recipe in a home version that anyone can bake. Her tutorial starts with a modified version of the Serious… Read the rest of the article: HOWTO make your own chocolate chip cookie milk-cups

This great 2011 post by Roy Rapoport tells the story of how a software company created and incrementally improved a chat-bot that collected and organized the team's coffee orders —… Read the rest of the article: How a coffee-order chatbot turned into a bank

For the past two months, I've been working on a secret project to produce an independent audiobook adaptation of my bestselling novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton, one of my… Read the rest of the article: HOMELAND audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton, DRM-free, in the new Humble Bundle!

A new Snowden leak reveals that all the voice calls in an unnamed country are recorded and saved for 30 days on a rolling basis, with millions of voice "cuts"… Read the rest of the article: NSA recording all the voice calls in one country; 5-6 more countries in the pipeline

Matt sez, "The Danny Devito-like schlub in this ad feigning excitement for 'Stah Woiz' and its 'layzah swoids' in order to pawn off some collectible cups has had me laughing… Read the rest of the article: Star Wars cup ad, 1977: you like laser swords, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqno8WdjMF0 A new video has surfaced of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford swearing, stumbling and cursing in front of City Hall after having his picture taken with a young boy whose… Read the rest of the article: Drunken, swearing Rob Ford lurches around after photo-op with child

One year ago today Literature's business model explained, with special reference to the age of the Internet: Richard Nash's essay "On the business of literature" is one of the best,… Read the rest of the article: This Day in Blogging History: Literature's business model; Leaking the Great Firewall of Australia; Bloggie victory photo

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Engine have submitted comments [PDF] to the US Patent and Trademark Office explaining how examiners could improve the quality of patents that the… Read the rest of the article: EFF, Public Knowledge and Engine tell the USPTO how to improve patent quality

Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam, the 40th Discworld novel, comes out in the US today. I reviewed it back in November for the UK release; here's what I had to say… Read the rest of the article: Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam, out in the USA today

In honour of the 30th anniversary of the brilliant (and incredibly frustrating) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game, BBC Radio 4 Extra have recreated the game in an… Read the rest of the article: Play the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure online

In this video, Australian Voices, a choral group, sets former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's epic anti-misogynist Parliamentary speech to music, doing a rather beautiful job of it. "Not Now,… Read the rest of the article: Julia Gillard's epic anti-sexist Parliamentary speech set to music

コープのちらしに載ってたんだけど、ガリガリ君のナポリタン味なんてあるんだね…(||゜Д゜) pic.twitter.com/3jHkKYuKhd — けんたママ (@jun_127) March 11, 2014 Japan's Gari-Gari Kun ("Crunchy Crunchy Boy") popsicles now come in spaghetti flavor with tomato jelly — they also do rice cake and… Read the rest of the article: Spaghetti flavored popsicles

In 1990, in the middle of the moral panic over Satanic ritual abuse (an almost entirely imaginary phenomenon), Doris Sanford published "Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy," which was "based… Read the rest of the article: Child's illustrated garden of Satanic ritual abuse

The UK tabloid press spent a decade drumming up hysteria about teenage knife-crime, and MPs responded on cue, passing a series of meaningless, overbearing feel-good measures that require shops to… Read the rest of the article: On knife-crime island, teens are not allowed to buy spoons