Sillybean

Talking Points Caribou Barbie — rape kit sold separately.

Being the Book Lady — this made my day.

A fanfic writer goes to Clarion. “...all the sandcastle skills you learned over in Sandbox Someone Else’s Canon are a lot harder to use when you’re not given sand to start with.” Great post.

Tina Fey and Sarah Palin Side by Side on CNN. “That was the first time I’ve ever heard the parody on SNL actually use exactly what was said…”

‘…and to anyone who thinks differently, I say please do not reject John McCain just because he’s white. I think the recent news from Wall Street has made us all less tolerant and only reinforce the stereotype that white people are shiftless, thieving welfare queens.’ (via The Weasel King)

The Texas voter registration deadline is October 6. See if you’re registered. If not, find your county registrar to fix it.

Have you created your 5 Second Test? — a nifty little test for web designers.

Economics roundup: the subprime primer, the end of the bubble, a mathematician’s summary, and how demographic shifts have contributed to the problem.

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet — How much do I love Maureen Dowd right now? LOTS and LOTS.

How books were made in 1947

Download ‘Boojum,’ by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette — in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

TwitterKeys — “TwitterKeys is a browser bookmarket that pulls up expressive characters for easy copy & paste of all those crazy unicode symbols that people love to include in their emails and blog posts.” Very handy. See also: ⌘C ⌘V Character.

The great Before & After Magazine talks about designing business cards for arts and crafts sales, including tips on photographing the items.

If you have not yet seen Firefly (infidel!), it’s now streaming for free on IMDB, via Hulu. The episodes are out of order, though, so you might want to refer to the Firefly wiki’s episode list rather than IMDB or TV.com, both of which list the massively incorrect original airing order.

Is HTML5 Ready Yet? (Context.)