Normally I tweet all these links, but I’ve been thinking that I waste too much time on social networks. So, collecting and collating instead.

Matt Langer · The 7 Stages of Internet Grief

1. people tweet about dead celebrity
2. people tweet about what dead celebrity meant to them
3. people tweet insensitive jokes about dead celebrity
4. people tweet about how it’s too soon to be tweeting insensitive jokes about dead celebrity
5. …

the art of creative destruction | Justine Musk: “Too many of us die with our novels unwritten, our songs unsung, our talents undeveloped, our creative work left buried inside us. “

For Amy « Russell Brand: “She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius”

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: List: What to Say When Friends are Discussing Video Games That You Have Not Played.: “Duke Nukem Forever: ‘How ironically are you playing it?’”

July 26, 2011 | Rhymes With Orange: “Are you sure you want to shut down now?”

Why Don’t They Just Drop Dead, : a poem by Barbara Louise Ungar

“all these ex-husbands
of mine, instead of dogging me
like old tattoos, distorted

by wrinkles, faded & stretched by obscene
middle-age, humiliating me with my
unfortunate past lapses in taste.”

KMFDM – Dogma (lyrics): In the tradition of really bitter spoken word semi-poetry over noodly music. See also Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” and much of the oevre of Jello Biafra.

“We fear that pop-culture is the only culture we’re ever going to have
We want to stop reading magazines
Stop watching T.V.
Stop caring about Hollywood
But we’re addicted to the things we hate
We don’t run Washington and no one really does
Ask not what you can do for your country
Ask what your country did to you”

An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece – NYTimes.com (obnoxious NYT reading limits apply): Geoff Dyer’s new column in the NYT book review is about reading. This column is a complicated joke pretending to be a review, and its so wonderful I keep reading it over and over again.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Elizabeth Taylor, Black Widow | The Hairpin: “Taylor’s life was much juicier and more scandalous before Sir Burton, when Taylor wrote the book on gossip in the post-studio system Hollywood, and that book is, at least by members of our (approximate) generation, relatively unread. And it’s even more of a page-turner than Twilight the first time around, before you realized that [SPOILER!] Stephenie Meyer was going to have the baby eat its gross-disgusting-anti-choice way out of the heroine. “

I’ve been posting links to twitter, but I’m also going to repost and summarize them here once in a while. Current topics of interest are food, books and writing, the creative process, women in science and tech, and any good stories on any subject.

You can send me links here, on twitter, or via delicious.

Lemony Snicket’s NaNoWriMo pep talk, for all the doom-filled joy.

Dave Eggers’s NaNoWriMo pep talk, on procrastination, posted two days before the end of the event.

A heartbreaking interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of “Seabiscuit,” and just recently, “Unbroken.” She is an absolutely terrific writer. She also has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which makes her so ill it confines her to her house and limits her to only a handful of small activities per day.

The lost women scientists of Britian’s Royal Society. Despite being banned entry from the Society, women have been doing important science for hundreds of years and getting no credit for it at all.

GrowVeg Garden Planner. An online, Flash-based garden planner, primarily for vegetable gardens. I’ve been doing my garden planning in a spreadsheet and on paper for years and within a week this site was utterly indispensable to me. You can make it as simple or a obsessive-compulsive as you want it to be.

Manual Coffee How-to Videos from Barefoot Coffee. Barefoot is my local third-wave espresso cafe and coffee roaster. (They make a seriously mean cappuccino.) These videos for making coffee without a machine are wordless and beautifully filmed from the MakeSHIFT collective. Videos for French Press, Chemex, and Hario.

There’s a lot of strength in a loaf of bread: An absolutely terrific video for a small Brooklyn bread bakery. Liza de Guia at Food, Curated does great video all the time but this one is especially wonderful. I can smell the bread in this video.

And while I’m on the subject of documentation, here’s a great story from the former The Daily WTF.com, now known (sadly) as WorseThanFailure.com, called Very, Very Well Documented.

George’s contact at the Air Force was a gruff, old general with a vast knowledge of aerial warfare and forty years experience in the service. Naturally, he was very skeptical of the new guys’ ability to develop a ‘military grade’ product.’ After all, they hadn’t spent a single day in uniform. But George’s team quickly won him with a demonstration: one month after being awarded the contract, they had fully replicated the prototype plane’s specifications in their software. [..]

‘Gentlemen,’ the general started during one of their wrap-up meetings, ‘you have done very well. I am very impressed. There is, however, one problem. You did not provide nearly enough documentation.’ [...]

‘You see gentlemen,’ the general continued, ‘for such expensive program, we require at least eight meters of documentation.’ He stretched his arms as far as he could to illustrate. Clearly, he was not joking.

(read the rest of the story)

(I got it from The Daily WTF.)

A long time ago here I posted about the manual for the MN-156 Reciprocating Emu Press, which was mysteriously stored on Amazon’s media servers. I ended that post wondering what the real story was behind this amusing parady of a user manual.

A while ago mad_eponine, the author of the Reciprocating Emu Press manual, sent me email pointing me to this livejournal post with the real story, including how it ended up at Amazon. It is brilliant. I am happy to have played a small role in the saga.

I haven’t posted much extreme knitting recently. Here’s a low wheeled bench covered with 369 pink knitted weiners made from recycled wool sweaters. Its. Um. Unique.

Shane Glines is an illustrator and animator with an astonishingly fabulous retro style, simple and playful, with strong lines and color. Love love love his stuff. His web site is awesome; he has a couple books out (S Curves and The Lily and Flinch Sketchbook, and he runs a subscription site of his and others’ illustrations called Cartoon Retro. Warning: he draws naked girls a lot.

(I got it from Drawn! The Illustration Blog.)

All Hail the Mighty Coffee Bean! – Wired News

Another Lore Sjöberg essay. I might as well just set up a Lore Sjöberg reposter for this blog because every single thing the man writes is totally brill. All Hail the Mighty Lore Sjöberg.

Step Two: Storage
All coffee lovers know that coffee grounds turn into the very dandruff of the Dark Lord himself if you leave them out for more than 145 seconds. Clearly I’ll need a way to store the grounds while I’m having each bean individually ministered to. The CafeStore 4000x creates a vacuum environment for the storage of the ground beans. Not just a vacuum in the usual sense of having very little air, but an ideal vacuum with no air, no black-body radiation, no zero-point energy, nothing but beans. According to the laws of physics, this is impossible, and as such may cause the universe to cease to exist, but isn’t that worth it for the perfect cup?

I think I’ve watched this video of an octopus camouflaging itself against a coral twenty times or more and its still a Big Wow. From Nova sometime in the past year, apparently.

Hope is Emo

The podcast stories of an angsty teenager. “Gym class is SO STUPID. The running and the changing in the locker room and its all CRAP. How big is my cup size, does it matter? How big is my SOUL??”

These videos are done by the same people who do Ask A Ninja. You probably don’t want to watch all of them at once because they get kind of tedious, but they’re fun in short doses. I relate.

The iPhone, a User’s Guide (McSweeney’s)

I . Introduction
II. Turning on the iPhone
III. Making a call using the iPhone
…
XI. Using the iPhone to explain how the internal board committee of Apple Computer Inc. (before the name change) headed by Al Gore could exonerate Steve Jobs of any wrongdoing in the options-backdating scandal
…
XVII. Using the iPhone to assist Nicole Kidman in playing a frankly commercial Mrs. Coulter in the new adaptation of The Golden Compass without losing the anti-Miltonian vibe or the stuff about the Magisterium
…
XIX. Using the iPhone to learn whether Ehud Barak ever considered adopting Barack Obama and changing the Illinois junior senator’s name to Barack Barak

NameVoyager: a baby name wizard

This is a totally fascinating bit of information visualization, from iVillage. Enter letters and it shows you names starting with those letters, plus the popularity of those names in the US. from the 1880′s to 2005. I’ve been using it to come up with character names in short stories.

What to do in an emergency (safenow.org): Unique interpretations of Homeland Security warning signs.

Your respiratory and digestive systems are optional. Cast them aside if you feel you no longer need them.

This is old but still funny (click through for big version).

I of course like this part:

(I got it from Kottke.)

Man wins $85 million in lottery, buys used VW Jetta, Bicycles. (CNN Money)

You had to have treated yourself to something.

I bought bicycles. I’m probably own upward of 17 bikes. I also bought a 2002 Jetta. I gave my 2005 Jetta to my nephew. So it’s the exact same car except for his is white and mine is black.

You had a newer car that you gave to your nephew and you bought an older car?

That’s correct. I wanted a black VW Jetta with a black interior. Believe it or not, those are really hard to find. I went to the local dealership and had them track one down for me. They had to go to Texas to get it. It fit my bicycle rack really well.

I’m not currently looking for tech writing work, but I keep my eye on the job listings just to see what kind of jobs are out there. And this posting just appeared out on craigslist:

Technical Publications Manager – Automotive

Tesla Motors is currently seeking a Technical Publications Manager for our After Sales Operations division (ASO).

JOB DESCRIPTION:
The Technical Publications Manager is responsible for the creation, printing and distribution of all external technical documentation associated with Tesla cars. These include but are not limited to: Owners Manual, Service Manual, Flat Rate Manual, Parts Manual, Circuit Diagrams, and Technical Bulletins.

Tesla Motors is the company here in the bay area that is making high performance electric cars. Their first car is mighty darn pretty.

Writing manuals for an electric car would certainly be way more hella fun than writing the same old API documentation (setCommandOperation: set the operation for the command. zzzzz). Unfortunately, this is a job for a tech pubs manager. As a manager you get to make sure other people have all the fun while reserving the pain for yourself. I suck very badly at that.

Perhaps the future Tesla tech pubs manager will need a tech writer contractor. Hint hint.