Link roundup

1. New holiday-themed Sword and Sworcery desktop wallpaper. (I don't think I ever reviewed this game. I love the art and music, but the gameplay gets very tedious after the first delightful 30 minutes or so).

2. Can you guess why death rates rise in good economic times?

3. A look at how an acrylic storefront sign is made. Via.

4. Penelope Trunk's advice on achieving New Year's resolutions.

5. Nightmare fuel - - the wolf spider and its babies.

6. Madeline Flores remembers cassette tapes.

7. Koren Shadmi on the prices freelance illustrators should expect for their work.

Link roundup

1. Abandoned Chinese Disneyworld.

2. If you want to feel nauseous about the economy...

3. Great article about the search for rare earth elements in Alaska (add some super-smart bears and you have a Michael Crichton novel). A taste:

Dotson explained how he’d joined the first landing party as a surveyor to stake the mineral claims on Bokan in 1955. One of the geologists, Don Ross, of the Ross-Adams mine, had found the deposit by dangling a radiation detector outside the window of a tiny Piper Cub propeller plane while he skimmed the peaks of Prince of Wales Island.

4. And from the same issue of Businessweek, read about Amy Jo Martin, the woman behind Shaq's (and other athletes) success on Twitter:

At one point, in October of last year, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter were related to her clients. The two-year-old company does in the “mid-seven figures” in annual billings, which are up 525 percent in 2011. Martin has done so well with teams and athletes that Digital Royalty picked up companies such as DoubleTree and Discount Tire Centers; non-sport clients now make up 70 percent of the business. She employs 15 people (mostly young, mostly women, mostly pretty) and is looking to hire at least five more.