This week I start my next Future Learn course – Shakespeare and His World.
I’m starting to quite look forward to Evolve (the new game from the guys who did the original L4D) … hopefully it doesn’t disappoint when it finally gets here 🙂
The Writ of Years is a delightfully creepy fairytale-esque short story.
I’m catching up (slowly, slowly) with reading at tor.com – Jo Walton’s post on if there’s a right age to read particular books caught my eye. I’m in agreement with Walton, I think. Even though I re-read less these days than I did as a kid, it’s odd to think that reading a book “too early” would do anything but mean you missed a bunch of stuff that you’d notice on a future read through (or fail to comprehend it entirely but understand it later).
More book stuff: I’ve set myself up an account on WWEnd which curates a list of authors & books who’ve won SFF awards or been on “must read” type lists. You can set what you’ve read and it gives you stats (like I’ve read 47% of all Hugo award winning books), they also encourage people to rate & review books. I’m about halfway through their list of authors marking what I’ve read that I remember (although only rating stuff I’ve read recently). (I was going to link to my account, but I can’t seem to find a way to directly link to it, oh well.)
Mass groups of whale fossils found in Chile – probably the result of at least four different mass strandings caused by a group of whales eating toxic algae then their dead bodies being washed up on shore.
10 Facts about Ichneumonidae describes these parasitic wasps near the start of the article as “think chestburster from Alien, but for insects.”.
Less creepily here’s 37 photos from history ranging from the moving to the “wtf?” (particularly the baby cage for ensuring your infant offspring get sufficient sunlight and fresh air if you live in an apartment block). Thanks to J for that link 🙂
I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s pretty striking – due to different streetlight lightbulbs you can still see the East/West divide in Berlin.
The only new TV programme I’m setting to record this week is When Albums Ruled the World next Monday – but the BBC’s schedule page was a little broken this morning and I’ve not been able to look at what’s showing on Saturday & Sunday.