Here are some shiny things that caught my eye recently:
♦ In Wales, Simon Dale built his family a lovely Hobbit house into the side of a hill for only £3,000 (about $4,800 USD). Pretty impressive, considering the budget and the fact that Dale had no previous building experience. Via.
♦ Chet Phillips describes this cool, weird house thus: “Constructed from cardboard, papier mache, paints, glass and metal, this house sculpture by Russian artist EkaKaramelka had me doing a double take.” The link in the quotation will take you to EkaKaramelka’s Etsy site, where he sells his “decorative interior houses.”
♦ At The Guardian, Rachel Cooke offers a list of the ten best graphic novels. It’s a good list, and I’m happy to say I’ve read all of the books on it, but I’m not sure these books are the “best” graphic novels. Do you agree with Cooke’s list? What would you add or delete?
♦ Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton continues her reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series with Tales from Earthsea, a collection of short stories, in “What Everyone Knows is True Turns Out to Be What Some People Used to Think.“
♦ Also over at Tor.com, you can read Tim Hall and Dean Haspiel’s new webcomic, The Last Mortician, which is recommended. Here’s the official description:
Acclaimed writer Tim Hall and Eisner-nominated and Emmy-winning cartoonist Dean Haspiel bring us a stark vision of a future in which one of humanity’s oldest professions is no longer essential. What might bring about such a world, and what might happen to the practitioners of this ancient art?
What kind of world no longer needs someone to tend to their dead?
♦ Ann and Jeff VanderMeer launched Weird Fiction Review this week, described as
an ongoing exploration into all facets of the weird, from the classics to the next generation of weird writers and international weird. Reviews, interviews, short essays, comics, and occasional fiction.
I’m pretty happy about the site, not least of which is because two of my favorite writers—Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link—were interviewed this week. Also, my friend Adam compiled a list of first lines of the stories collected in The Weird, which certainly made me want to read the compendium (on its way to me now, I hope). Adam wrote a post about collecting those lines on his own blog; I enjoyed his list of his favorites among those first lines and why he thought they were effective.
♦ io9 wants you to know things, like a simple test to determine if someone’s been dead for more than twelve hours. Useful information, people.
♦ For CBC: this Henry Rollins Tattoo Whiteboard cracked me up. Via.
♦ Running low on monster supplies post-Hallowe’en? Hoxton Street Monster Supplies now has an online store for your convenience. Via.
♦ My friend Andy sent me the link to this spectacular video by Sophie Windsor Clive of a murmuration of starlings:
