Link roundup

1. Hugo Awards 2011 nominees. Via.

2. Classy collection of animated gifs.

3. Chris Battle is auctioning off two Quorra prints at eBay to benefit Japan.

Link roundup

1. LA Times:

Gang tattoo leads to a murder conviction
Inked on the chest of a Pico Rivera gang member was the detailed scene of a liquor store slaying that had stumped an L.A. County sheriff's investigator for more than four years. It leads to a jailhouse confession from Anthony Garcia — and a first-degree murder conviction.

Via.

2. Animated gif featuring Jesse Venture and Old Painless from Predator.

3. A claim that Jim Shooter's blog is filled with lies.

*Buy Tattoo of Death (Choose Your Own Adventure #22) at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Exactly which career path is a good choice?

Since 2000, there have apparently been about 300,000 layoffs in the drug industry. It's important to remember that a good number of those people have found other jobs in the business - I'm one of them. But there are a lot of people who haven't.

2. Why Walmart is a case study for mishandling customer surveys.

3. Paul Robertson posted some new animated gifs.

Link roundup

1. Fashion photographs as animated gifs. (These are incredible.)

2. An assertion that Google could simply buy the entire music industry.

3. "Downward Spiral of Whole Foods House Brand."

Link roundup

1. Gumby animated gif. Via Reddit.

2. Roger Ebert discovered that filling his Twitter stream with Amazon spam in an effort to make affiliate money mostly just irritated his readers. (Have you visited Amazon lately? Great store.)

3. Cory Doctorow's doing a booksigning this afternoon in Burbank.

Link roundup

1. Japanese-themed custom items for a Team Fortress 2/Total War: Shogun 2 cross-promotion.

2. Reports that the Nissan Leaf gets a lot less mileage than advertised, and worse, misrepresents how much charge is left, leaving drivers stranded.

3. Animated gif is close to the real life version of Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown.

*Buy Peanuts toys at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Camouflaged cat animated gif. Via.

2. Alice in Wonderland painting by N.C. Winters.

3. Is exposure to radiation actually good for you?

*Buy Alice in Wonderland toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Cthulhu idol.

2. Animated gifs celebrating the drug culture in Disney's Alice in Wonderland. Via.

3. Hip version of Big Barda.

*Buy Alice in Wonderland blacklight posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Gloomy Bear animated gifs.

2. Comment and win art from May Ann Licudine.

3. The BBTS has the latest Marvel Universe figures available for preorder (Doctor Strange, Doctor Doom, etc.)

*Buy Gloomy Bear toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Paul Robertson posted some new animated gifs.

2. And speaking of games, try the new Adult Swim game, Hipster Kickball.

3. Silly comic about George Washington.

Link roundup

1. From a long and fascinating article about a group of Serbs that trains revolutionaries to take on despots:

When the next group came to the front of the room, its members were smiling and, oddly, taking off their shoes. Their spokeswoman, a young woman in a pink shirt who was wriggling with excitement, proposed a "Barefoot Campaign," to commemorate the monks of the Saffron Revolution, who do not wear shoes. The idea was to start with 100 young people, contacted by email and social networks. They would do something simple: go barefoot in public spaces. "We can start with the pagodas," said Pink Shirt -- no one wears shoes in a pagoda anyway. And people could walk through paint, Pink Shirt said. "We can easily measure success -- if we see barefoot people and footprints everywhere."

"When the authorities respond with arrests, how will you respond?" Auntie asked. The group had thought through this. "For safety, people can carry a pair of broken sandals in their pocket to show the police," said a cherubic-faced young man. "Or you can say, 'I'm getting ready to go running.'"

The tall man halted their excitement. "If the authorities see you leaving footprints, they will know and arrest you."

"They won't know who it was if we do it at night," said the Cherub. "Let's do it!" He pumped his fist in the air. Everyone laughed.

But the footprints were a problem -- they could quite literally lead the police to their prey. Then a soft-spoken young woman in a gauze shirt spoke up. "There are lots of stray dogs and cats," she said. "We can put a dish of paint in front of where they live so they will walk through it." Cats and dogs as the foot soldiers of democracy! They looked at each other, awed by their own brilliance, and slapped hands all around.

Via.

2. This would be a good start for a Stanley Kubrick activity book - - Overlook Restaurant children's menu.

3. Sad animated gif reveals the extended ending of Wizard of Oz.

*Buy Wizard of Oz posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Animated gif of Leia/Carrie Fisher handing a beer to Luke/Mark Hamill sitting in an X-Wing.

2. Gizmodo:

Truth be told though, it's impossible to fully replicate Coke's recipe because there's one ingredient only Coca-Cola can get: fluid extract of coca (which is coca leaves stripped of cocaine). Only one factory can process those leaves and only Coca-Cola has a special deal with the DEA that allows them to use it.

3. This is an interesting read about how Ferrari sets extremely specific terms before allowing reporters to test drive its cars.

Link roundup

1. The BBTS has plush Angry Birds and Thundercats figures available for preorder.

2. Animated gif of a pillow taking out a cat.

3. Watch as a Deinopis/Gladiator Spider weaves a net, hovers over the ground, and then thrusts the net down to catch a cricket. (Whatever creature you've seen in horror movies, nature has created something worse.)

Link roundup

1. Metropolis animated gif.

2. New tiger painting by Kristin Tercek.

3. Aquaman redesign contest.

*Buy Metropolis posters at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "Boston emergency services debuted a specialized ambulance designed to carry obese patients on Tuesday, and the retrofitted vehicle was promptly needed on two calls, authorities said."

2. Dancing Pyro from Team Fortress 2 animated gif.

3. Adventure Time as an 8-Bit RPG.

*Previously: Printable Adventure Time Monopoly board.

*Buy Adventure Time Awesome Hats at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Fascinating look at the life of prowrestler Ravishing Rick Rude.

2. From a lengthy review of the game Darksiders, this meditation on the original Legend of Zelda game:

Zelda is not a game in the spirit of Adventure, even though it contains bats, swords, keys, castles, and, eventually, chickens. Its main deviation from Adventure is that the vast majority of the player participation part is in trying to discover what they are supposed to be doing, and where things are. Zelda, if anything, and possibly somewhat ironically, is the console’s best attempt at the Adventure genre, as beaten to death by Roberta Williams et al. You start on a screen, there is a hole. You navigate into the hole. You are given a thing. The thing is used to stab. Never are you given the kind of information you might logically need to progress, such as ‘someone sells a candle, it shoots the fire, senor leenk, perhaps some booshes will burn?’ No, that never happens. What you have, instead, is a world built with layer after layer of proudly standing contradictions. If a set of statues appear to be inert, then, eventually, on some screen, one of them will start to move if you stand near it. Presumably, when it moves, it reveals stairs, though, I can’t recall if every statue that came alive was guarding stairs or if it was just a couple of them, and therefore, the other stood as a kind of weak and ambiguous hint that, if you want a statue to move, it might. If, from that, you learn that, sometimes, stairs may be hiding under something that is not stairs, then you are smarter than me. The first time you had access to a bomb it seemed like an awkard weapon. How would you know that the 4th tile from the left on some clifface could be a door?

We now make assumptions about bombs and walls, and, granted, in those days, there was a lexicon of bizarre icons that we documented as we explored the NES. Balloons could be worth points, they could also be fragile. If you had a balloon, then you needed to protect it. If the enemy had a balloon, it was a weak point. If a balloon was unattended, you need to capture it. The entry for balloon in the encyclopedia of gaming was one of the easier, less obtuse examples, and it was still somewhat of a mystery. The entry for bomb took up page after page, and ranged from a specific key that opened a very particular place, to a dangerous thing not to be touched, to a tool that could backfire on you, to any number of other uses. In wrecking crew, bombs not only didn’t break anything, they interfered with your attempts to break things. Bombs could even be worth points and have no function at all. A bomb, really, could be anything. It’s not that the Zeldas bomb is internally inconsistent, just that, now, we know what bombs are for. They’re for feeding to triceratops, and widening cracks. A bomb, now, is defined to within an inch of its life in the mythology of the zelda context, which, as mentioned before, does not really exist.

3. Cool animated gif of the monolith from 2001.

*Buy 2001 posters at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "Quote MIDWINTER for 10% off all Last Exit to Nowhere items. Offer ends 30th January 2010."

2. "The Best Animated Sports GIFs Of 2010: A Year Of Faceplants, Miracles, And Absolute Silliness." This devastating MMA move is my favorite. Via.

3. I sure hope there's footage of this somewhere - - a Snow White-themed debutante celebration for a 21 year old woman in New Orleans:

As the guests arrived, and after they dispatched their cars to valet parkers who sported red bowties and beanies, they were greeted by little people dressed as the fairy tale's dwarfs, as well as artificial snow falling from the trees.

Via.

*Buy Williams-Sonoma Kid's Parties: Creative ideas and recipes for making celebrations special at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. The iPod Touch is $20-$30 off depending on the model at Amazon.

2. "How to Verify if an Email Address Is Real or Fake."

3. Creepy Blade Runner animated gif.

*Buy Blade Runner posters at eBay.