Great games

From Tycho over at Penny Arcade I learned about ABA Games. If you like rail shooters, you really need to give this guy's games a try. I've downloaded three of these games and they're great, with captivating but simple graphics. And really, you're just shooting things (sometimes collecting rubble, as in Tumiki Fighters, my favorite), so it's all pretty basic to grasp. The largest file was less then seven megabytes, so no worries, even dial-up people like me can get these. There are more games in there, but I've yet to grab them all.

Here's an interesting Lovecraft comic, called "Return to Arkham." Very nice art.

More links

According to Neko4 she missed my link posts, so here's another (really I just found these after the last post, and I want to close some tabs, but that sounds much nicer).

Neil Gaiman has a very large media shadow, it seems. He's a planet in Star Wars and a race in Babylon 5.

Here are the nominees for the 2005 Locus awards. I'm pleased to see Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is up for a prize, as well as two Terry Pratchett novels and a Gaiman short story. I'm also tempted by the interestingly titled The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. Kelly Link's also up for something - I read one of her stories in the new issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, which has rejected me twice, by the way. That's all right - they don't have much of a history publishing what I'm writing. I still haven't heard back from Realms of Fantasy, and I sent them my manuscript in late March or early April. So either they're taking a long time to consider it (good!) or they never got my submission (bad!). I'm giving them at least another month before I bug them about which it is.

Not exactly practical for me, but I love that it exists: Black Socks.com. You can buy a subscription - pardon, a "sockscription" so you never have to worry about getting black socks again. They come in lots of cuts, amounts, and deliveries. It amounts to about ten dollars a pair, which, given they're Italian, might possibly be good. As I'm a "cheap as hell white sock" person most of the time, I'll forego. The animation on the front page is good, though.

I think I got this from Gaiman's site: a list of differing terms between England and America. I knew many of these already, but it's nice to have a reference. What always surprises me, when I see these lists (online, or somewhere else, like my History of the English Language class) is how many I already either use regularly, or just think of as synonyms for the American version. Like "camper." It's supposedly British for "motor home," but I use them both. Possibly lots of other people do too, but then one has to question the need or demand for lists such as this. Hm.

Here's a page with some pictures of an abandoned amusement park. They're creepy as hell.

Here's a little news article from May: School suspends boy for wearing dress to prom. This is just ridiculous - as long as he's not naked (or illegally baring bits of his body) there's no call for anything like this.

I'd never heard of Robert Sheckley before today, but he's a very good writer. A Gaiman post (I've been trying to catch up today) clued me in - here's a Sheckley story on scifiction.com: Protection. He's right, too - I must not lesnerize.

Over on LiveJournal Harry Potter fans will find something interesting: Potterpuffs. A British woman is busily drawing Harry Potter characters (mostly illustrating either requests or sections of the books) in the Powerpuff Girls style. They're incredibly funny.

A few articles

For the few of you (possibly only the one of you) that might have missed my article-compiling posts of yesteryear - they're back!

First, a note to all of you still using Internet Explorer: Stop it. Pulled from Slashdot, this article on Windows IT Pro calls for the boycott of IE7. Paul Thurrot cites a refusal on Microsoft's part to give in and support standards of HTML and other net-authoring that have become commonplace. He recommends Firefox, but also has good things to say about Opera and Safari (of course, you need a Mac to use Safari).

From BoingBoing I learned about Hel Looks, a web site that chronicles street fashions in Helsinki. Personally, I noticed that women (I wasn't spending much time looking at the men) in Britain were more attractive, and cobbled together a few theories - accent might play a part, but mostly I think it was, as the BoingBoing article puts it for the Helsinki folks, the lack of a tendency to "dress in highly stylized flocks." Also, it seemed there was less emphasis on make-up, but maybe they were just better at it. I'll finish up with ranting about cultural differences now.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an article from Making Light on acquiring literary agents. A few of you might be interested in such an article, so there you are.

Fiction

I used to post bits of my fiction, once in a while, on my journal at the time. I stopped because too few people ever bothered to say anything. But I'm finally really working again, and I thought I'd tack up the very beginning of my current piece, just to see if I could bait anyone into saying boo. So, the first bit of "Brainstorming."

~~~

Taliesin wasn't having a good day – some mad warlock had unleashed another numberless horde of demons on the commercial district, effectively stoppering anything but foot traffic for hours. He had some sort of lecture to do, for a bit of money that was desperately needed, and he didn't want to be late – just bad luck he was in a friend's carriage at the time.

A wandering mob, always desperate for any cause to throw something, decided the rich were oppressing the poor again, and Taliesin still smelt a bit of rotten tomatoes. It wasn't all that bad, he thought, but it was a bit unfair to use food still edible – the potatoes hadn't been rotten at all, and were very hard. It wasn't as if Taliesin was even rich, he just had a well-to-do friend that managed to connive carriage rides a lot. If you had to get anywhere in Floren, it usually didn't do to walk. Putting aside the threats of mugging, kidnapping, and mad experiments in occult circles, the city was just too big.

Floren was a rather large city. Larger than the capital of the country, in fact, due mostly to the excessive money washing about the street corners like a clinking, lucre tide. These street corners themselves weren't too clean, awash as they were in money, and not water, with rubbish sometimes piled into drifts and toppling onto unsuspecting pedestrians. People filled the streets and walks, wandering with vacant eyes or striding about madly like a military commander with great purpose and little direction.

Well, I did buy stock in Martin Freeman...

the Wit (73% dark, 30% spontaneous, 0% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 96% on dark You scored higher than 7% on spontaneous You scored higher than 0% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on OkCupid Free Online Dating