The Great Geek Manual

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “The Clapping Hands Of God” by Michael F. Flynn at Starship Sofa.
• Listen to “Down on the Farm” by Charles Stross at Tor.com.
• Listen to “Learning to Fly” by Garth Upshaw at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Metal Dragon Year” by Chris Roberson at Transmissions From Beyond.
• Listen to “Not My Slave” by Derek Palmer at Dunesteef.

Flash and Micro Fiction

• Read the flash fiction “Away In An Incubator” by Duncan Shields at 365 Tomorrows.
• Read the flash fiction “Vindication” by Patricia Stewart at 365 Tomorrows.

Novels and Preview Chapters

• Harper Teen is offering a preview of The Summoning by Kelley Armstrong, as well as the next two books in the series, The Awakening and The Reckoning.
• Jim Butcher has finally released a preview of Changes, the next book in The Dresden Files. The man knows how to jump to the point.
• Listen to an audio sample of Blake Charlton’s novel “Spellwright” read by Mark D. Hines over at Vimeo. Includes four chapters.

Poetry

• Cultural Climate by F.J. Bergmann at Strange Horizons.

Short Stories

• Read “Alone With Gandhari” by Gord Sellar at Clarkesworld.
• Read “The History Within Us” by Matthew Kressel at Clarkesworld.
• Read “The House and the Baboon” by Bill Ectric at Candlelight Stories.
• Read the Nekropolis short story “The Midnight Watch” by Tim Waggoner.
• Read “Small Burdens” by Paul M. Berger at Strange Horizons.

Here’s a clip from the British sitcom Extras. In it, McKellen explains that he’s not really a wizard.

1908
Gabriel Lippman introduces the new three-dimensional color photography to the Academy of Sciences.

1933
RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. premieres the great-granddaddy of all monster movies, King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The film was produced on a budget of US$650,000. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins

1948
William “Willy” A. Higinbotham is issued a patent for an “An Electronic Circuit for Differentiating Voltage Waveforms.” (US No. 2,436,891) The invention was originally developed in 1942 for a radar bombsight, but the circuit will eventually come to be used in all analog computers.
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…media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

- “Is Google Making us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr.
First published in The Atlantic, July 2008.

Art

• Interview: Dark Wolf talks with American freelance illustrator Dave Rapoza.
• CreativeFan has picked out a gallery of 30 Breathtaking Space Artworks.
• Gallery Nucleus is offering a gallery of artwork inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
• Newz on Fire has posted a gallery of the 12 Most Awesome Cosplay Costumes.
• Star Wars never looked so real.

Film

• News: “Evil Dead” is Dead, Says Bruce Campbell. Translation: I wish fanboys would leave me the hell alone.
• Dark Matters discusses Bad Science Fiction films.
• SlashFilm has an illuminating Oscar infographic.

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1692
Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, Reverend Parris’ Caribbean slave, are accused of using witchcraft, marking the beginning of the Salem witch trials.

1872
Edward Drinker Cope reads his paper to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in which he gives the name Ornithochirus to the remains of an creature with large wings. However, Cope’s rival Othniel Charles Marsh beats him to print by publishing a paper in the American Journal of Science a few days earlier, using the alternative name Pterodactylis.

1873
E. Remington and Sons in Ilion, New York begin production of the first practical typewriter.

1896
Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity when he develops the photographic plate he had left in a desk drawer and finds that it has fogged with the image of the uranium compound crystals resting on it. Thus, the discovery is the result of a chance occurrence. He had originally stored objects together on February 26, after postponing his intended experiment on phosphorescent emissions stimulated by the sun. Instead, he found spontaneous and penetrating rays, independent of any input of energy. He will share the 1903 Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie for his work on radioactivity.
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The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

- “Is Google Making us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr.
First published in The Atlantic, July 2008.