Link-O-Matic #5

The 2013 Hugo Voter’s Packet has been released by Lone Star Con 3!

Mark Twain filmed by Thomas Edison

The origins of 12 famous Star Trek lines

The Beatles unplugged

The “Ferrari” of desktop computers, the NeXT Computer

Every Noise at Once, a clickable musical genre map

PBS: The Movie, starring Carl Sagan, Fred Rogers, Bob Ross, and Bill Nye

My April Reads, 2013

Book StackMay has arrived, and that means a quick look back at all the short fiction I read in April. It was a slow month for me, but I managed to get some reading done. Clarkesworld Magazine continues to bring it,  and the enjoyable The Human Division finally wrapped up its serialized run. I also got a head start on the Hugo ballot by reading some of the nominated short stories.

Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 79 contained six fiction pieces in this issue, double the usual number!

  • Annex by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (4/2/13)
  • No Portraits on the Sky by Kali Wallace (4/2/13)
  • Melt With You by Emily C. Skaftun (4/2/13)
  • Spar (Making Bacon Version) by Kij Johnson (4/1/13)
  • Guest of Honor by Robert Reed (4/3/13)
  • Finisterra by David Moles (4/4/13)

The last two episodes of John Scalzi’s experiment in serialization, The Human Division, were published last month.

  • The Gentle Art Of Cracking Heads (4/2/13)
  • Earth Below, Sky Above (4/9/13)

The Hugo Award nominations were announced on March 30. I started tracking down the short fiction even before the Hugo Voter’s Packet was released so that I could finish my Hugo reading at a more leisurely pace than last year.

Short Story:

  • Immersion by Aliette de Bodard (4/29/13)
  • Mantis Wives by Kij Johnson (4/30/13)

First of May [NSFW]

Internet bard Jonathan Coulton has had this tribute to Spring in his repertoire for about a decade now. The history of this very Not Safe For Work ditty can be found on the “JoCopedia,” a wiki of all things Jonathan Coulton. In fact, you can even download the song for free at Jonathan Coulton’s music store.

I found the following performance of First of May on YouTube. It was taped in 2006, and I first linked to it on my Posterous site on May 1, 2011. Enjoy!

(Shout out to Andrew!)

R.I.P. Posterous (2008-2013)

Posterous was a 2Katerine Hepburn skateboarding008 start-up that attempted to make it easier to share photos and other media with your social networks. I signed on in 2010 and used it to save pictures and YouTube videos that I encountered in my travels around the web. It was a nice little service, but I stopped being an active user after about a year.

The site was bought by Twitter just over a year ago, and is shuttering the site as of today, April 30th, “in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter.” Former users have until May 31st to download their content from Posterous. I’ve taken care of that, so expect some of that older content to work its way onto these pages soon.

As an example of some of the things I posted on my Posterous site, please enjoy this picture of Katherine Hepburn on a skateboard. I originally found this on The Mary Sue, and I’m led to believe the original photo came from Hepburn’s autobiography, Me : Stories of My Life.