Link roundup

1. Cory Doctorow:

I believe that Google has created an enormous internal urgency about Google Plus integration, and that this pressure is leading the company to take steps to integrate G+ at the expense of the quality of its other services. Consider the Focus on the User critique of Google's "social ranking" in search results, for example. In my own life, I've been immensely frustrated that my unpublished Gmail account (which I only use to anchor my Android Marketplace purchases for my phone and tablets, and to receive a daily schedule email while I'm travelling) has somehow become visible to G+ users, so that I get many, many G+ updates and invites to this theoretically private address, every day, despite never having opted into a directory and never having joined G+.

2. Warren Ellis on what would get him writing more comics:

Loads and loads of money would be nice. Access to trusted collaborators would be a bigger part of it. Without going into details, I’ve had some fairly bad luck with artists over the last several years, and it gets dispiriting! There are other factors that tend to discourage me from developing new comics work right now, but that’s one of the main ones — I ran out of people to work with.

3. I love Max Silvestri's bad movie reviews.

4. Million dollar jewelry heist at my local mall.

5. My thanks to current sponsor Alien Vault. The book's terrific - - I posted several photos of its contents in November.

Link roundup

1. The River is terrible. Far from being scary or stylish, it's like watching an episode of Gilligan's Island.

2. An architect was charged with involuntary manslaughter in Los Angeles after a firefighter died fighting a fire in a home the architect built.

3. RL Stine posted a pretty great short horror story at Twitter.

4. Recruiting scandal in the world of college chess. The coach's program is called the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (Spice).

Link roundup

1. "An undercover police officer 'chased himself round the streets' for 20 minutes after a CCTV operator mistook him for suspect." Via.

2. Mark Cuban's always a great interview. Some advice:

Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort. It’s not about what you can dream of. That’s easy. It’s about whether or not it’s important enough to you to do the work to be ready to be successful in that business.

3. Gawker on news of big government resignations in Romania:

The resignations come after some very unpopular budget cuts that were made to comply with IMF demands so that Romania could secure a loan and continue to pay government workers. The IMF is, of course, the International Monetary Fund, which is a fund with international money in it.

4. New Spider-Man promotional site. Via.

Link roundup

1. Links to the personal websites of the Tron Uprising art team.

2. Astonishing data on the number of politicians in India also facing criminal charges.

3. "'Huffington Post' Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine
Horrified Workers Watch As Colleague Torn Apart By Powerful Content-Gathering Engine"

4. Are we headed to a future where our wars will be entirely fought by robots and the only people at risk are contractors?

5. Oops:

An advertising agency for BMW has paid to name a cold weather front sweeping Europe "Cooper" in Germany, after the carmaker's Mini Cooper.

But the public-relations stunt by the agency went wrong after the freezing conditions led to dozens of deaths.

*Buy Tron Legacy posters at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Like the Prisoner, but with good intentions:

Its detractors may end up dubbing it "Dementiaville", but Switzerland is brushing aside a debate raging among geriatric-care experts with plans to build a mock-1950s village catering exclusively for elderly sufferers of Alzheimer's and other debilitating mental illnesses.

Via.

2. "What do Army junior officers actually recommend reading?: Their own top 10."

3. A hobbyist piloting a drone spotted a river of blood - - a meatpacking plant in Dallas was simply ejecting blood into the river. Via.

4. Sam Wolfe Connelly has a new shop featuring some illustrations I've featured.

5. Paul Pape's having a sale on his custom made stuck in carbonite sculptures.

Link roundup

1. Cory Doctorow posted links to his novels/short stories from 2012. Clockwork Fagin and Shanon's Law were both very good.

2. Long article by Will Leitch on the evolution of blogging.

3. William Gibson retweeted this:

did you know the best cd-player ever made sits in old PS1 consoles? HiFi nerds in sweden are stockpiling them.

4. "High school students who don't feel like walking to school in the cold are causing a spike in car thefts on the north side of Milwaukee." They steal cars left running, and then leave them close to school.

Link roundup

1. 13 sno-cone machines bought by the Department of Homeland Security.

2. Vandal captured because he thought "slut" was spelled "sult."

3. Grantland predicts which team will acquire Peyton Manning.

Link roundup

1. Two great articles about baseball (I like reading about baseball infinitely much more than actually watching it) - - what its like to be a Milwaukee Brewers fan; the sad state of the Baltimore Orioles.

2. I think I posted about this guy before - - he forges famous paintings, poses as a Jesuit priest, and then donates them to various art galleries. Well, the Financial Times tracked him down and interviewed him. Via.

3. An assertion that Olympus lost a huge amount of money and tried to hide the losses with help of the Yakuza.

Link roundup

1. The fake Jack & Jill Twitter account was almost certainly funnier than the film.

2. Rats enjoy being tickled and laugh.

3. Seems a little too cinematic to be a faithful report - - but this article about a death on Disney cruise ship is certainly interesting. And don't miss this article about what life is like for Disney cruise ship workers. Via.

4. The college football all-name team, including Yourhighness Morgan and Mister Cobble.

5. My 4 and 6 year-olds love Scribblenauts. Do you recommend any other educational iOS apps? (Math, science, reading, history, whatever).

Link roundup

1. Watch a player on the Buffalo Bills score a touchdown in Dallas, and then give the ball to his girlfriend, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

2. And more on football and "romance" - - Bart Scott of the Jets:

Do you sense a rivalry between the Jets and Giants?

"Not at all. Like I said when I was in Baltimore I could remember with the Redskins you had guys fighting over strippers and all kind of stuff. I don't sense that here. I think it is a mutual respect. I think the town is big enough for both of us. I think we were just trying to make a statement that hey we wanted a little bit bigger piece of the spotlight because when I got here my sense was pretty much all Giants type of town. We played in Giants Stadium. We just want to get our piece of the pie. We respect them, but we would definitely love – we look forward to that game. I believe it is the 24th of December for bragging rights and hoping that's the game that could help us win this division."

Bart you gotta help me out. You guys fought for strippers? What does that mean?

"When you are in a small place like Baltimore and the temperature is relatively cold – hey you compete over the same chicks. That's a football players favorite spot. Especially young football players. It was always a rivalry. Guys fight about hey that is my girlfriend and that's my girlfriend, but here? Five million people, maybe more. There is plenty for everybody."

3. Prison in Acapulco:

Authorities say a surprise search at an Acapulco prison has netted two peacocks, 100 fighting cocks, 19 prostitutes and two sacks filled with marijuana.

4. Finally, taking a break from the sex and sports talk - - Joe Ledbetter's excellent Zodiac toys are finally in stock at Tenacious Toys. These are about twice the size of typical blind box toys, and slightly poseable (heads and/or limbs that turn). Probably my favorite designer toy set of the year (I'll be giving out some as gifts over the holidays). They're not blind box, so you can pick the one(s) you want.

Link roundup

1. Play Duck Hunt in your browser.

2. How the Mexican Mafia works.

3. The secret origin of Tori Amos's Cornflake Girl.

Link roundup

1. Vexin Classics: classic books like Huck Finn and Frankenstein, but with naked women on their covers? Via.

2. A look at The Pie Hole, a new restaurant in downtown LA.

3. A new law in Louisiana makes buying used goods with cash (at certain locations) illegal.

4. Brothers.

Link roundup

1. Lord of the Flies book cover design competition.

2. NY Times:

For some 15 years, Mr. Weston has been providing the New York Police Department with “fillers” — the five decoys who accompany the suspect in police lineups.

Detectives often find fillers on their own, combing homeless shelters and street corners for willing participants. In a pinch, police officers can shed their uniforms and fill in. But in the Bronx, detectives often pay Mr. Weston $10 to find fillers for them.

Via.

3. Frankenstein/Dracula/Mummy paper toys.

Link roundup

1. Best adventure gear of 2011.

2. Jess Nevins offers several suggestions for Asian steampunk novels. For example:

One of the archetypal steampunk figures is Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. While there was no real-life analogue for Nemo, one fictional figure who was similarly archetypal in Japanese popular literature during the early 1900s was Oshikawa Shunro’s Captain Sakuragi, who appeared in six novels from 1900 to 1907. Sakuragi is a Japanese naval officer who grows disgusted with the Japanese government’s inability to do anything to resist the imperialism of Western governments in Asia and Japan. Sakuragi quits the Navy and on an isolated island somewhere in the Indian Ocean builds the Denkotei, an “undersea battleship” armed with futuristic weapons, including torpedoes and high explosive shells. In the novels the Denk0tei demolishes white pirates, the Russian, British, and French fleets, and Sakuragi and his crew go ashore to help Filipino “freedom fighters” against the imperialistic American occupiers.

3. "Men and sometimes women from a group of families disavowed by mainstream Amish have terrorized a half-dozen or more fellow Amish." Via.

New law in Japan criminalizes paying blackmail to the Yakuza

A new law criminalizes paying blackmail to the Yakuza. You can read all about it here (and it's explained in the comic above).

L.A. Noire, 51 Screenshots

L.A. Noire is coming very soon, May 17, and here are a ton of screenshots from the awesome game! This game uses a new type of facial technology that captures the motion of every muscle on a real human's face and then they transfer those motions into the game for the character facial movements.

This makes everything look incredibly realistic on the faces of people, even if they don't completely look real in the end. However, I'm sure that within the next few years (the next gen of consoles and slightly better computers), video games will become incredibly realistic, no longer able to be restricted by the limitations of terrible hardware.

Anyway, here are the amazing and... huge lot of screenshots!

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/adventure/lanoire/index.html