Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Portia wrote:Wait, why wouldn't you pay 1 cent?

Personally, it's mostly to compensate creators. I understand what it's like to create wonderful things that take time and talent and money and then have people be unwilling to spend much money on them, and the more we negotiate creators down the fewer creators there will eventually be. There's even a little bit of guilt sometimes - surely if I expect someone to pay $50 for a friendship bracelet I can go ahead and throw a few dollars at a video game/book/what have you.

Humble Bundle also donates to charity (you can choose how much goes where when you buy) plus they have items in the packs that can only be unlocked by donating more than the average donation.

Yes to all that from bob. If I pay 1 cent, then maybe they won't get enough money to keep doing cool things like this. I usually spend 10$ on one book anyway. Also, I wanted the books that you get by "unlocking" them, such as the one with Buzz Aldrin as a co-author (Buzz Aldrin! He went to space! Now he is writing about aliens! I love that).

I haven't heard of any of the SF books in the bundle--have you read/liked any of them?

Word Crimes. Weird Al's music video about horrible grammar used on the Internet, set to the tune of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.

I just bought it today, so no I haven't. I hadn't heard of any of them either, though I did read one Timothy Zahn book before and it was pretty good. I just read the summaries on the site, though, and a few of them piqued my interest.

Digit wrote:Word Crimes. Weird Al's music video about horrible grammar used on the Internet, set to the tune of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.

Yesssssss! So much better and less rape-culture-y than the original!

I've been watching a bunch of hour-long PBS documentaries on Netflix about British buildings. I've seen Secrets of the Tower of London, Secrets of Highclere Castle, Secrets of Henry VIII's Palace: Hampton Court, and Secrets of Selfridges so far. They've all been really fun to watch, and now I feel so educated because I didn't know anything about any of them before. Did you know that Tower Bridge operates using giant counterweights, so the arms of the bridge essentially work like see-saws?

Wondering why people called John F. Kennedy Jack, I came across Origins of 10 Nicknames. I never heard of Peggy for Margaret, though.

A piece from “Carnival of the Animals” that sounds a LOT like the Harry Potter theme.

Digit wrote:Wondering why people called John F. Kennedy Jack, I came across Origins of 10 Nicknames. I never heard of Peggy for Margaret, though.

They only briefly referenced it in the article, but "Daisy" is a nickname for "Margaret" because "Marguerite" means "Daisy" in French.

Portia wrote:A piece from “Carnival of the Animals” that sounds a LOT like the Harry Potter theme.

The Aquarium is by far my favorite piece from that suite.

Recently watched Us and Them: Religious Rivalry in America. It doesn't really tread new ground, but it does explore the topic very thoughtfully and it engages with people from so many different viewpoints that I think it would be hard to come away from it without learning something new.

Nice journal. Nice price too $285! I couldn't spend that much on a journal, because any time I thought of writing something down, the thought of the cost of that book would make me not want to spoil the page with whatever I was thinking to write at the moment.

ad copy wrote:Like an old volume discovered in a Medieval monastery, the leather is antiqued, with scuffs, scrapes, uneven patches and rough spots.

And inside is written in my shabby handwriting how my day went

Just finished Dragonsteel--obviously it wasn't as great as Brandon's later (i.e. actually published) stuff, but I enjoyed reading it for the Cosmere nonetheless.

Tally M. wrote:Idea Channel episode on internet dialects

Oooh, linguistics. I agreed with a lot of what he said, and I especially liked how he connected it to "speech communities."

As it happens, though, I kind of hate that style of video. It's too jumpy and plays too much into societal ADD.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/americ ... 169913/all

This article breaks my heart. A college friend of mine is one of the thirty-something people who's been arrested in the last two days during these protests.

Emiliana wrote:http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/americ ... 169913/all

This article breaks my heart. A college friend of mine is one of the thirty-something people who's been arrested in the last two days during these protests.

Ugh. So profoundly disturbing.

This kid is my brother's age. He was also unarmed. For ****'s sake. I feel like there's a damned lot of classism too. I can't imagine this happening to my blond, upper-middle-class brother on the "right" side of the tracks (or in this case I-15). ARGH.

And I thought the police officer shooting the Salt Lake guy's dog was bad. Do we really live in a police state where they can mow you down at will? Is being a poor male of any race a criminal offense now? The kid in Ferguson was about to start college; the one in Salt Lake was an orphan going to visit his parents' graves. It's almost Diceknsian or like something out of Les Misérables. What a society.

So these unarmed kids get murdered, and meanwhile, it often seems to be well-off young men who go mow down people in movie theaters. STOP THE MADNESS!

Jon Batiste and Stay Human -- fun jazz music I just discovered on the Colbert Report! http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/1 ... -yourself-