Randonymity

• This turned out pretty well – it’s a gift, for a late Christmas gathering later today:

• Wingspan, knitted from a red Zauerball. Ah, the magic of short rows and yarn with long colorways!

Bookity

• New releases: Fiction Vixen (UF/romance) and Tor.com (genre benders, scifi, fantasy, paranormal/UF/horror)
• Book and publishing news from Dear Author.
• Dear Author on making reading a safe place again.
• My local library system (Hennepin County) is one of 10 public library systems that have passed a million OverDrive digital checkouts.
• How having an ereader changed one reader’s reading habits.
• List of best of book lists from Largehearted Boy.
• “Filing off the serial numbers: Making the transition from fanfic to original fiction“.
• Neil Gaiman’s wishes for the new year.

Learn, Make, Do, Think

• What the heck are DDoS attacks?
• What If? tackles faery demographics.
• Weird things that were dropped at midnight on New Year’s.
• 2014 in a minute.
• 50 most embarrassing stories of 2014.
• The year in numbers from Consumerist.
• 86 fake viral images of 2014.
• “The state of the trans nation, 2014“.

Cookity

• 20 homemade snacks.
• 19 Asian recipes.
• 15 Italian vegetarian meals.
• Lemon sorbet cocktail.

Gluten Free

• New York Times-style sugar cookies.
• Rum balls.
• Hazelnut crackers with vegan herbed cream cheese.
• 2014’s best gf recipes.

Crafty

• Knit Andromeda Galaxy mittens. (via CRAFT)
• Knitting linkity from kmkat.

Cool

• Best space pictures of 2014. (via emmaseasall)
• Space at 17,150 mph.
• Wintery sunset over Lake Calhoun.
• The best NHL holiday videos.
• Linkity from kmkat.

Cool or Wha…?

• T-shirts and buttondowns with constellations printed on them.
• Spacesuit-inspired sweatsuits.
• TARDIS fold-down bed.
• 20-foot long triceratops for your garden.
• Animated latte art love story.

Wha…?

• Really, Play-Doh? None of you noticed how phallic those frosting extruders were? I am not sure the replacement is any better…
• Getting married in the Costco frozen food section.

LOL

• Looks like my New Year’s Eve (only there was less blood here, fortunately!).
• Best autocorrects of 2014.
• New Year’s in Cake Wrecks. And more!
• Fox News tried to start a Twitter trend and it didn’t go quite the way they wanted it to. (via tracykitn)
• Star Wars action figures being fabulous.
• Cat knot.

Teh Cute

• Baby cougar! Kitten! Cat! Black cats!

Reading Update
Down on the Farm (The Laundry Files 2.1) by Charles Stross. Good paranormal short in which Bob is sent to the Laundry’s psychiatric in-patient facility to investigate a patient complaint.
Equoid (The Laundry Files #2.9) by Charless Stross. Free online. Good paranormal horror short about Bob being sent forth to hunt for unicorns, which have rather more tentacles and carnivory than Bob (or the reader) expects. This won the Hugo for Best Novella this year.
Overtime (The Laundry Files #3.5) by Charles Stross. Good short paranormal holiday story about Bob working overnight in the office on Christmas Eve. Of course he doesn’t have a quiet night.
The Rhesus Chart (The Laundry Files #5) by Charles Stross. Good paranormal horror thriller in which computational demonologist Bob discovers what seems to be a nest of vampires, except everyone he works with is convinced that vampires can’t exist. While this didn’t end with a cliffhanger, it did end with me exclaiming, “Wait, what?!” and looking for additional pages…
Halting State (Halting State #1) by Charles Stross. Weird but good scifi novel about a crime (or not) that may (or not) have occurred inside a virtual reality game. It’s told in second person (to give you the feel of playing a game, I think) from the alternating perspectives of three people who are trying to figure out what happened (or didn’t). Definitely took me a bit to get used to the unusual storytelling mode.
Rule 34 (Halting State #2) by Charles Stross. Rule 34: “If it exists, there is p0rn of it. No exceptions.” Good scifi thriller about memes, spam, and life in the surveillance state, told in alternating second person (mostly) from three main points-of-view, although the POV number ratchets up toward the end. While there’s no POV character overlap with the first book, one of the main POV characters played a significant role in the first book. Again, it took me a while to get used to the storytelling mode, but once I did I was immersed.

---

“More socks! Are you feeling ok, Mom?” -Mayhem

And without Mayhem: