I touch lightly on so many sites in the course of a day of web surfing and it all kind of blurs together.  Bear with me, won’t you, while I try and break it down a few distinct highlights.

First, a warning from me to you:

If the gate didn’t getcha, wonders await after the jump…

Mark Waid blogging at Kung Fu Monkey on the unexpected in writing:

That’s what you want as a writer. At least once in your story, maybe more, just when you think the readers might be getting a little too comfortable, you want a character to zig where they were expected to zag–to make a surprising, unexpected choice, the more out-of-the-blue the better. (See also The Frighteners, the most criminally underrated screenplay of all time, for a thousand other examples.) As long as it’s a choice that’s ultimately in character, then the more shocking, the more it works. I can think of no better way to maintain suspense and keep the story energized, and it’s one of my favorite tricks. Try it at least once per script. Make a point of having either your protagonist or your antagonist make a hard, hard left at some juncture where convention and tradition would dictate they turn right, and see where that takes you; you can always undo it. But in my experience, you probably won’t want to.

Whole post is here and worth reading.

Um, what’s next?  How about The fucking Hotelicopter?  Some people are worried about their carbon footprint, others are building a spa- and high-speed interenet-equipped luxury hotel in the sky. The one April Fool’s joke I got caught by this year.  I’m still ready to believe it; it’s a lot less strange than, say, grape-flavored apples, which are quite real. According to this guy, it basically tastes like an apple that’s been soaked in grape soda.

Bay Area technologist Barry Threw has a cool post about Onomy Labs and their experimental reading installations, including RED, the Reading Eye Dog:

When a manuscript is placed it front of the dog, he takes pictures of both pages, stitches them together, and reads them out loud. Recognition is very good, with some mistakes at the edges. One of the interesting things was that RED was originally humanoid, but the mistakes were more palatable when the installation was in dog form.

Via John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey, I stumbled on Cocktail Party Physics, a groupblog of women in science that on occasion includes actual science-themed cocktails.  This post is a good place to start – it celebrates Ada Lovelace day with a brief bio of the “Enchantress of Numbers”, then goes on to discuss Shirley Jackson, current president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the first black woman to receive a PhD in phsyics from MIT, in 1973. The post is written by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, whose book Black Bodies and Quantum Cats I highly recommend.

And finally, I leave you with this meditation on team spirit, courtesy of the webcomic Truth Serum.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.