Art

ConceptArt.org. Exactly what it sounds like.

Steampunk Contest:

Books

Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky. Free short story on Tor.

Suvudu – Random House’s SFF section – opened its first free ebook library.

65% of British people lie about having read the classics.

Movies

Zhang Yimou to direct film celebrating the People’s Republic.

Leonardo DiCaprio to star in Christopher Nolan’s Inception?

Sita Sings the Blues wins the copyright fight and is now CC licensed.

Favourite lines of movie reviews.

People laugh during rape scenes? I thought I already had a low view of humanity, but it just got worse.

Politics

Carnival Against Sexual Violence. I especially recommend this and this and this. But you should read it all.

This makes me gag. And some more. And even more. Oh and yet more. Will it never stop?

Science

This is AWESOME!

Completely Different Things

Article on parents who forget their children in cars and how this could happen to anyone.

In Iceland, people have to prove that the country is elf-free before building a plant there:

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

Don’t people have anything better to do? I can’t even manage to update my own twitter profile, never mind somebody else’s…