The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Doctor Who art shows how much better Gaiman’s episode could have been
• Dragon Skeleton of chicken bones
• Mad scientist’s schematics for imaginary weapons of mass destruction
• Sweets: Millennium Falcon Cake

Comics

• Comic Book Resources asks What’s More Important: Story or Art?
• Dan DiDio signals the end of the Clark Kent/Lois Lane marriage
• George R.R. Martin’s 1963 Fantastic Four fan letter
• Ten crazy uses of the Green Lantern ring
• Top 10 comic book characters that should make their screen debuts soon

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We will have to evolve a better world order than the one we have now, which I like to call our “Star Wars” civilization. We have stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

- E.O. Wilson in a commencement address at the University of North Carolina, May 8, 2011.
Quoted from “Oh, the Places You’ll Go: E. O. Wilson at Chapel Hill” by Ian Crouch, June 8, 2011.

Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before — a “vast virtual gallery,” as Rosen has written, whose self-portraits mainly testify to “the timeless human desire for attention.

- “The Online Looking Glass” by Ross Douthat, June 12, 2011.
Originally posted on The New York Times.

Art

• DIY Magnetic Silly Putty Is Black Magic
• Golum as the Green Lantern in “Ring Bearer” by Adam Koford aka Ape Lad
• Thai Sculptor Anchalee Saengtai poses with one of her massive Transformers sculptures, which she made from spare truck parts.
• “Virtual magician” Marco Tempest uses some sleight of hand and some perfectly synchronized iPod Touches to perform a pretty entertaining iPod Magic.

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there is a very big difference between a statement occurring in a database and someone having, or learning, a piece of knowledge. If all human beings died out, there would be no knowledge left even if all libraries and the whole Internet survived. Knowledge exists only inside people’s heads. It is propagated not by being accessed in a database search, but by being learned and mastered. A collection of Wikipedia articles about physics contains text; the mind of a physicist contains knowledge.

- “Larry Sanger Blog » Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?” by Larry Sanger, June 6, 2011.

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Download the hilarious children’s book “Go the F**k to Sleep” by Adam Mansbach as read by Samuel L. Jackson for free from Audible.
• Listen to “Association” by Eddie Borey at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Blue and Gray & Black and Green” by Alethea Kontis at Cast Macabre.
• Listen to “The Facts Concerning…” by H.P. Lovecraft at 19 Nocturne Boulevard.
• Listen to “Fertilizer” by Duncan Shields at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “The Giant of Malheur Park” by Maria Deira at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Hanuman’s Gift” by Helen E. H. Madden from Peculiar Occurrences.
• Listen to “The Immortality Game” by Cat Rambo at Fantasy Magazine.
• Listen to “Just North of Nowhere” by Larry Santoro at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “Memory con.” by Michael Merriam at Beam Me Up!.
• Listen to “Pinion” by Stellan Thorne at Drabblecast.
• Listen to “A Ruby in Rain” by Grant Stone at The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences.
• Listen to “Whelp” by Damon Shaw at Dunesteef.

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Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts that we find useful, comforting, or amusing.

- Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle, 2011.