Tempered Thoughts

I have too many tabs open. Most of them were things I intended to post here.

On your mark, get set, go!

Videos:
• The trailer for the gorgeous, wonderful "Surreal Guide to Botany"
• The awesome Amanda Palmer, giving us all a Christmas gift: "What's the Use Of Wond'rin'?"
• Ok, so who am I kidding. There's no way one Amanda Palmer video is enough, so here's "Leeds United" aka the Belly Incident Video.
• An insightful interview of Derren Brown conducted by Richard Dawkins (link is to part 1 of 6. They're all worth watching, though.)
• Hilarious post-election Get Your War On video. Yeah, I know, it's been a while. But you know what? Still funny. "America's new flag is just a white flag, but there's a picture of a burning American flag on it." and "Dude, he's Muslim, that's how we do!"
• Coolest Theremin EVER. I hope I can get my husband to make one of these.
• New Coraline trailer! New Coraline trailer! New Coraline trailer! Man, I totally need to get on the ball if I'm going to read Sophia the book before the movie comes out.

Miscellaneous:
• Interesting word test. Fun to take, though it does require some endurance and even my prodigious attention span flagged a bit about 170 words in or so. I did ok, though I don't trust the claimed score percentile to IQ correspondence.
• The Graveyard Book won the Newbery! Neil Gaiman didn't swear! (like he did when he got the Hugo).

Stories I kept planning to recommend in my story recommendation posts and never got around to. But I want a clean slate, so here they are in a glut:
• In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection by Caitlín R. Kiernan. This is a gorgeous, wonderful story. It's everything I love about Kiernan. I can't quite understand why her King Kong story won year's best in Clarkesworld's reader poll instead of this one, which I think is so much better.
• Rampion in the Belltower by Merrie Haskell. Because happy ever after fairytales are better with zombies.
• Watermark by Michael Greenhut. My favorite thing out of Fantasy magazine in ages and ages. I always read, but I'm usually disillusioned. This one works for me.