Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Diversions: Autumn 2010

Summer has circled to a close, and as the year slides closer to another ending, what better way to enjoy it than with a few worthy diversions?
• Reading is as important a discipline to writers as writing itself, but sometimes the push and pull of everyday life gets in the way of uninterrupted time with one's favorite fiction. But even if you only have a few minutes here or there, you can still get your short story fix from 365 Tomorrows, a blog dedicated to releasing original, speculative micro-narratives each and every day. (Hat Tip: Pseudopod)

• This one's for all you The Lord of the Rings fanatics out there. Some brave soul has created
a fully scalable map of Middle Earth on a faux-parchment background with beautiful calligraphy reminiscent of those early editions of The Hobbit. (Hat Tip: The Daily Wh.at)

• What good are diversions if they don't include an online video or, er, five? Watch a
valley-girl-narrated, Cliffs-Notes-style summary of "The Call of Cthulhu"; minimalist allusions to 35 famous films packed into a two minute period; a circa-1970 Rod Sterling of The Twilight Zone fame discussing science fiction in literature; the beauty of the created order as seen when smashing and shooting stuff in super slow motion; and the most mind-bending pranking involving two sets of identical twins that you can possibly imagine. (Hat Tips: The Daily Wh.at)

• During my youth, I wasted many an hour tooling around a virtual American frontier with the Apple II version of The Oregon Trail and later pretending to be a motorcross champ on Nintendo's Excitebike. But despite all that time, never would I have thought of
mashing the two games together. Why, that would be videogaming crack! No sir, I'm not going to touch it, not at all. Well, maybe just once ... (Hat Tip: The Daily Wh.at)
Go to Diversions: Summer 2010 ...

(Picture: CC 2010 by
kirainet)

4 comments:

Chestertonian Rambler said...

The valley-girl Call of C is awesome. It may be my favorite YouTube clip of the next two weeks or so.

Loren Eaton said...

Yeah, the squiggly, Hello Kitty-esque Cthulhu is hilarious in the animations, isn't it?

Ben Mann said...

The slo-mo video certainly pushed my buttons. It's also reassuring to see I'm not the only one who gets distracted by the interwebs.

Loren Eaton said...

The Internet is a disease, and I am spreading it.

That slo-mo is pretty awesome, though.