How to make a stuffed Hobbes

Instructions for making a stuffed Hobbes. Via.

Link roundup

1. "So you wake up tomorrow morning to find almost everyone on Earth missing. The Internet will continue to work for a few hours: what information could you download to ensure your survival and rebuild civilization? A few suggestions:".

2. Donate to the Red Cross and get free original art from Caldwell Tanner.

3. Another horror story about Dell.

4. "How to Find Out if Someone's Secretly Been Using Your Computer."

5. A photo gallery featuring the bright side of living in the country's cheapest zip code. Via.

Link roundup

1. How to create a digital comic for iTunes for less than $200.

2. George Martin posted a lengthy, excellent excerpt from the upcoming The Winds of Winter. It fills in some of the holes from A Dance With Dragons. Via.

3. Ann Althouse: "I feel sorry for all the journalists assigned to the 2012 campaign who've got so little to write about now and in the next few months. They need to act like something is happening, and after the Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and Paul surges, it must be time for a Santorum surge."

4. Noelle Stevenson's illustrated (personal) year in review.

5. Today's Tee Fury t-shirt is a Conan O'Brien/Peanuts mashup.

6. Just a reminder, I post regularly at Tumblr.

Link roundup

1. Jason Chalker is looking for commissions.

2. Boing Boing has details and more photos of the Portal Christmas tree.

3. Serious Eats says don't buy Costco's $20 champagne. Buy $15 Domaine J. Laurens Cremant de Limoux Brut.

4. Brief summary of all 30 NBA teams.

5. I love Nike product descriptions:

Nike’s Proprietary Flywire Technology Offers Great Fit Support: the outsole of the Nike Fly Leather J Elite SHA|DO uses the leather sole, the most trusted sole among bukatsu players, and Nike’s proprietary traction system that maximizes a player’s potential at base running.

6. Dave MacDowell posted a bunch of recent paintings (NSFW).

7. How one person achieved 1 million karma points at Reddit. (Short answer: "I spend about 3-4 hours a day on Reddit.")

Link roundup

1. Lifehacker says Waze is the best turn by turn navigator for Android and iOS (and free).

2. The new media tools that allowed Martin Luther's message to spread virally. Via.

3. Tips for hacking Scrabble.

4. The beginning of a terrific, long article about a very small town pharmacist:

In the southwestern corner of Colorado, where the Uncompahgre Plateau descends through spruce forest and scrubland toward the Utah border, there is a region of more than four thousand square miles which has no hospitals, no department stores, and only one pharmacy. The pharmacist is Don Colcord, who lives in the town of Nucla. More than a century ago, Nucla was founded by idealists who hoped their community would become the “center of Socialistic government for the world.” But these days it feels like the edge of the earth. Highway 97 dead-ends at the top of Main Street; the population is around seven hundred and falling. The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pickups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It’s as if something about the landscape—those endless hills, that vacant sky—makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.

5. How to turn Christmas ornaments into hot air balloons.

6. I haven't watched it yet, but Mr. Plinkett reviewed Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (Presumably filled with very dark humor.)

Hot air balloon ornaments

How to make hot air balloon ornaments. Via.

*Buy Hallmark Christmas Ornaments at Amazon.

Interview with Paolo Rivera

Maybe it's all standard stuff to you artists, but I find this detailed look at Paolo Rivera's tools fascinating.

*Buy sketch cards at eBay.

How the fight scenes in Real Steel were filmed

Real Steel has outstanding fight sequences with convincingly real robots. This video shows how the scenes were created. Via.

*Buy Real Steel toys at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Beer bottles are irresistibly sexy to Australian beetles. Yes, there's a picture.

2. What to order at a bad restaurant. (Although I disagree that ribs are a good bet.)

3. Carving pumpkins with cookie cutters and a mallet. Via.

Strength training for parkour

How to get in shape for parkour.

How to draw Roger Hargreaves's Mr. Men characters

Roger Hargreaves's son Adam shows how to draw Mr Men characters. Via.

Link roundup

1. Check out Stephen Gammell's creepy illustrations from the three Scary Stories books. Here's an animated gif of one. Via.



2. How to create a 404 error page for Wordpress (designing the page, modifying the code).



3. "Corey Helford Gallery will be offering complimentary mini-giclees of Korin Faught's new painting 'Lovelorn' to the first 400 guests who arrive at the opening this Saturday, September 3rd (doors open at 7PM)."

Video roundup

Ken Block's latest insane driving video is a tour through Universal Studios. (I posted a few of his older videos here.)









Video shows how recycled paper is turned into toilet paper. Via.













The latest advertisement for Rock of Ages takes a tour through video game history.









Face forms in the clouds (starting at 57 seconds). Via these sites.









Baseball player collapses/slides into home. Via.

Link roundup

1. Great writing about living in China at the time of the Beijing Olympics. Sample paragraph:

Our son had asthma. There was no use pretending it was the squeaky-clean, sensitive, upper-middle-class kind of asthma. He had the asthma that ghetto children come down with, because they live in the dirt. He was wheezing because at last, today, on the morning of the Olympics, the filth of the city where he was born had gotten into his tender lungs. He was sick because we had let him live in Beijing.

2. How to market to old people. For example:

Marketing to the elderly is tricky. The direct approach—say, calling your product “the soap for the over-70s”—does not work. And traditional advertising fails. “You can’t use TV adverts: they forget them,” groans the 30-something executive. “We show it again and again and again—and they still can’t recall it,” he sighs. Word-of-mouth is the only way.

3. "The governor of a prison near Moscow has lost his job after photographs emerged of his inmates holding a toga party complete with caviar and a McDonald's fast food delivery."



*Buy Olympics posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Free download of a 13-track tribute to Nirvana's Nevermind. (In Bloom by Butch Walker and the Black Widows is my favorite.)

2. Tips on making photos look better on Blogger.

3. "The lost wreckage of a ship belonging to 17th century pirate Captain Henry Morgan has been discovered in Panama, said a team of U.S. archaeologists." The expedition was funded by Captain Morgan rum.

4. Colleen Coover's looking for commissions.

Link roundup

1. How to remove yourself from various background check sites.

2. Good article about the history of DDT. For example:

The German army purposely triggered malaria epidemics, such as in Italy in 1944. Drainage pumps on the Roman marshes ordinarily pumped excess water out to sea, desiccating the land enough to make it malaria-free and thus habitable for thriving cities and towns. By stilling the pumps, the Germans could have flooded the region and effectively impeded the Allies' progress. But German malariologist Erich Martini had studied the habits of the local malaria vector, Anopheles labranchiae, in depth, and he knew that inundating the region with the Mediterranean's salty waters would allow A. labranchiae, which can thrive in brackish water, to flourish. And so rather than simply stopping the pumps, they reversed them, salinating some ninety-eight thousand acres. Then they confiscated local stockpiles of antimalarial drugs. As the German soldiers departed, they left behind "clever sketches," The New York Times reported in 1944, "of the plague of mosquitoes that would follow the flooding of the farmlands." More than 100,000 of the 245,000 locals sickened with malaria.

3. Today's economic news (aside from the stock market's freefall, and the continuing slow motion collapse of the Euro) was about protests in Israel. This was the most interesting analysis. (Hint, their economic problems don't really look anything like the USA's.)

Link roundup

1. How to make a Princess Leia cinnamon bun headband.

2. Gizmodo's latest must have iPhone and Android apps.

3. Want to tell if someone's lying? Skillfully question them (rather than looking for microexpressions).

Link roundup

1. How to use Amazon to self-publish.

2. FYI, it's free shipping plus 30% off everything at American Eagle this weekend.

3. Creepy tree wallpaper.

Illustration roundup

Roger and Tetsuo by Michael Dialynas.




How to make oatmeal wrong (i.e., the McDonald's way) by Ben Mullins.




Santánico Pandemónium (Salma Hayek in From Dusk Til Dawn) by Jason Levesque for an upcoming Tarantiono/Coen Bros-themed show. You can buy prints from the first show here.




Alice by Joseph Fox - - the winning entry in Dark Horse's Alice: Madness Returns art contest.




In this video tutorial, Todd McFarlane shows how to draw "dynamic hands."

*Buy Akira toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Todd McFarlane gives a video lesson on drawing hands and fingers.

2. Long article about the Portal 2 ARG. For example:

Even a player who chased after a red herring had a good story to tell. One guy got the idea in his head that he was supposed to find a clue at The Couch Potato, a furniture warehouse in Santa Cruz, California. Team Meat learned about this by monitoring the IRC channel, so Edmund McMillan of Super Meat Boy fame intercepted him at the warehouse and surprised him with a signed copy of Super Meat Boy.

And also:

The second big mistake we made was pulling the ARG champions away from their communities too early. Based on contributions in various games, on the fan wiki and in the IRC channels, we hand-selected a few individuals who had contributed disproportionately to the ARG and offered to fly them to Valve.

In order to give sufficient time to notify them and make travel arrangements, Valve contacted them a few days before the start of the crescendo. We didn't require them to sign any NDAs, but to maintain the fiction, we encouraged them to take a step back from the ARG and claim that they had been kidnapped by minions of GLaDOS.

We failed to realize just how influential these few individuals had been in keeping the ARG running like clockwork. The wiki stopped getting updated, leaving other players confused as to what was going on.

Via.

3. And speaking of ARGs, "Duff Goldman offers a lifetime of birthday cakes to anyone who finds his stolen Corvette." Via.