Payday Yay!!!

Can you tell I'm a writer? Let's test your knowledge of the writer's life.

I come into some money and I Writer Writingimmediately go to:

A) the grocery store, for some much-needed foodstuffs

B) the bank machine, to pay off my bills

or

C) the bookstore for Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Masterpieces of Murder: The Best True Crime Writing from the Greatest Chroniclers of Murder, and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for an aggregate of 2104 pages; thence to the liquor store for a bottle of Jackson-Triggs 2004 Proprietor's Grand Reserve Sauvignon Blanc; and thence to a restaurant, albeit one where they ask if that's for here or to go. I'm feeling flush, so, throwing caution to the winds and carpeing diem for everything I'm worth, I ask for extra hot sauce and a beef, rather than vegetarian burrito.

La vie Boheme ain't what it used to be.

WolfenGitmo

WolfenGitmo 

From BoingBoing comes word of a new computer game. Based on the classic Wolfenstein, wherein you run around shooting Germans (who scream "Ach, mein leiben" as they collapse) in this one you are a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

Naturally you have no weapons. Naturally your hands are bound. Naturally at the unveiling…

most people were just mad that they weren't able to do much but get beat up.

That'd be what we 'round these parts call a "well duh."

Mars Pathfinder NIN Animation/Music Video

Yes, I know we've had a ton of videos today, but you MUST see this.

Awesome Daniel Maas NASA Mars Pathfinder Animation set to "Sunspots" by Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor) via Fark.

The Sultan’s Elephant: the Grand Finale

They’re Made out of Meat. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, meat…

Another from BoingBoing today. This is the single best thing I've ever seen on YouTube; this is Art. And this is the whole short story by Terry Bisson on which it is based.

“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?And by the way, unless my memory very much deceives me, which it does not in cases of esoteric trivia such as this, the diner is exactly the same one used for the Twilight Zone episode Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up, and the backup players correspond more or less directly with the bit players in that ep. Written, as all the best ones were, by Rod Serling.

Narrator: "Wintry February night, the present. Order of events: a phone call from a frightened woman notating the arrival of an unidentified flying object, and the check-out you've just witnessed with two state troopers verifying the event, but with nothing more enlightening to add beyond evidence of some tracks leading across the highway to a diner. You've heard of trying to find a needle in a haystack? Well, stay with us now and you'll be a part of an investigating team whose mission is not to find that proverbial needle, no, their task is even harder. They've got to find a Martian in a diner, and in just a moment you'll search with them, because you've just landed in the Twilight Zone."