EA takes games from Steam – Hilariously written, and found because I was eyeballing Dragon Age 2 to see if it still comes with Mass Effect, as it did once. …Not that I want DA2. I haven't finished the first one yet.
I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in some disorderly eating to lose weight. It'll be great!"
I totally hadn’t realized that tiny houses are illegal/violate zoning. I knew they were tricky to place, but I figured if you buy a patch of land somewhere, you could put whatever kind of house on it you wanted. Continue reading Weekly Linkage: The Long Edition→
Amanda Hocking’s Blog: Some Things That Need to Be Said – From a successful self-published author: "This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn't writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me."
The Very Rich Indie Writer – Novelr – Making People Read – Looking at the example of Amanda Hocking's financial success, will authors of web fiction start to close off their free writings and move to self-publishing under the lure of it being "easy"?
For some reason, I felt like I didn’t have a lot of links this week for all the cruising I did, but I was wrong. I plowed through 280 Google Reader posts and was caught up as of yesterday afternoon. It may never happen again.
$72,000 in E-Books in a Week – 8 Lessons I Learned – Since Greg is considering releasing LORE as a physical book (and e-book/book self-publishing is of great interest to me as well), I've been reading up on book marketing and revenue numbers and what type of experience to expect. It's good reading.
Union of mothers create anti-gay ad because of drama “Life Is Beautiful” – This ridiculous ad stating, “If my son becomes gay and dies from AIDs after watching ‘Life Is Beautiful’, SBS [the broadcasting company] must take responsibility!” A gay Korean actor posted a nicely-written series of Twitter posts lambasting them. Go read.
Do not use Bible to attack homosexuality – A well-written opinion piece. I struggle with the idea of taking any holy text wholesale–so why not pick your passages?–but if you take as a premise that the whole thing is true, then this guy's got a point. I wish they allowed commenting; I'd love to see the discussion that article.
Could ‘Goldilocks’ planet be just right for life? – Yahoo! News – Look at this: "It's unknown whether water actually exists on the planet, and what kind of atmosphere it has. But because conditions are ideal for liquid water, and because there always seems to be life on Earth where there is water, Vogt believes 'that chances for life on this planet are 100 percent.'" …What? Water hasn't been seen yet, but there's a 100% chance of it being there and there being life? Erm.
Bollywood Gay film faces Censors – I very much want to see this film. "Kapil commented on the action taken for the submission and said: 'The Censor Board objected to the kissing and lovemaking. They asked us to delete those scenes. We refused. We aren’t trying to do any kind of sleazy stuff here. Ours is the first ever serious gay love story. The intimacy is essential. Our film is now with the revising committee.'"
The legend of the superprogrammer – "Caper Jones, in an unpublished 1977 study for IBM, found that the very best developers are much more productive than the worst programmer — when working on small projects. The best developer will complete a 1k line of code (LOC) effort 6 times faster than the lousiest. The productivity delta falls to 2x on a 64k LOC project. Beyond a few hundred thousand LOC both sorts of people perform equally well. Or equally poorly."
Skepticblog » The Reasonableness of Weird Things – "Many people have quite good reasons for believing in the paranormal. […] In my experience, the top reasons people believe weird things are not only understandable, but identical to the reasons most skeptics believe things: they are persuaded by personal experiences (or by the experiences of a loved one); or, they are persuaded by the sources they have consulted."
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I get so sick of elitist, skeptic douchebags with their holier-than-thou lock on critical thinking that I — despite having the same desires to protect people against fraudulent untruths — won't put the label of "skeptic" on myself. It's a movement that has a rude, pushy face in far too many of the cases I've seen. I hope more folks take articles like this to heart.
10 New High-Quality Fonts for Your Designs | Freebies – I always love things like this, even if — for the web — it means slicing and dicing text as images. To that end, if sites could consistently and easily push fonts out to users, would that be a good thing?
Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew | World news | The Guardian – Leaving aside the crazy Israeli politics and the legal side — is deliberately lying about something to get sex with someone rape if you know the thing you're lying about would make the other person say "no"? As of this moment, I think so.
