Oakfairy

"The moment my dog (and husband) realized I was in the car beside him" [reddit]

[Via PJ]

Council members in the Polish town of Tuszyn have deemed Winnie the Pooh too depraved to feature as the public face of a local playground, on account of the honey-fetishizing cubby's "dubious sexuality," "inappropriate dress," and lack of genitals due to castration by razor.

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[reddit]

Nathan Fillion will always be best-loved by nerds for his role as Captain Mal Reynolds on Firefly, but did you know he's also starred in another major scifi franchise? It's called Castle — yes, the show where he's a mystery writer solving crimes with police detective (and love interest) Kate Beckett. Don't believe me? The truth is right here.

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A massive Doctor Who fan who posts at Tumblr under the name TheTraciWho recently took her car in for servicing. It’s covered in decals, lanyards and even a mini-figure celebrating the show, so the mechanic will have been able to spot her fandom. They left a note that made clear that appreciation is shared:

(Spotted by: Tor.com)

All About That Ace: A League of Legends-themed “All About That Base” parody by the folks over at The Warp Zone.

Starring:

-Katie Wilson – Ashe
-Missyeru – Sona
-Vensy – MissFortune
-Shimezu – Riven
-Meisha Mock – Nidalee

[The Warp Zone]

Some of you may wait until your towels smell funky to wash them. As it turns out, it's better to launder towels pretty frequently—ideally, after every 3-5 uses.

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Watch as Luke Skywalker the great dane gets scared when he see his mistress coming down the stairs dressed as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.

[LayaLukeTV]

womaninterrupted:

micdotcom:

Staggering photos show the Buffalo snowstorm that has already claimed 5 lives

wild and merciless snowstorm swept over parts of western New York Tuesday, bringing with it chaos, freezing temperatures and over 5 feet of lake-effect snow. 

The massive storm has already claimed the lives of five people and left residents trapped indoors and motorists stranded in their cars; the Buffalo News reported that 100 vehicles are still stuck on the New York State Thruway. 

"In Buffalo, you’re used to driving in the snow, but this is just something else." 

Sometimes I miss Buffalo and sometimes I don’t.

Climate change deniers citing this as supporting evidence that everything is totally normal in 3 … 2 …

Our cell phones and tablets have transformed the way we hold our bodies—and not for the better. Looking down at your device is like having a 60-pound weight on your neck, according to a spine surgeon.

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About 2, maybe 3pm every day, I hit a wall. Hell, it’s not just a wall. It’s a mountain. NAP MOUNTAIN. With craggy peaks of sweet torpidity, with mighty spires of somnolence. I hit the mountain, and find a small mountain town called Sleepysburg, and there my body is just like, “Fuck this, fuck all of it, fuck you, just — just give into the glorious miasma of lethargy.” And then I lay in the marshmallow streets and stick to the taffy-molasses puddles and –

Well, you get the metaphor. I nap. I fucking nap hard.

Sometimes it’s a 15 minute power nap. That’s usually all I can manage with a toddler running around. Once in a blue moon I manage a deeper dive, and I fall into what could only be described as a nap chasm — me falling into a crater of pure unconsciousness. I can fall into this crater for two hours. I can lose part of my life in this thing. I wake up and forget my name for 15 minutes.

This desire to nap — it times out with the weather.

I look outside, I see gray blah. Like a choir of ashen ghosts joined hands and filled the sky. Everything bleak and blasted and wet and cold. When that happens, my body is all mm blankey and pillow so warm and just shut the crap up and nap already you foolish mortal.

See, but –

When the weather was warm, I’d sometimes use that time to run.

And I remind myself, you should do that now.

And my brain is like BUT BLANKEY

And my brain is also like hey, you should run

And my brain is then like PILLOWS SWEET PILLOWS

And my brain is back to no, but what about running

And my brain screams JESUS CHARLESWORTH CHRIST RUNNING IS TIRING AND YOU’RE ALREADY TIRED SO WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN IF YOU RUN, DINGWHISTLE, YOU’RE JUST GONNA GET MORE TIRED SO STICK WITH THE PLAN ALREADY

And today, I was like, yeah, whatever, you might be right but I’m gonna go get on the dumb elliptical anyway, and then I sashayed my grumpy bear body over to the elliptical and clambered onto it, and before I knew it I did a good three miles while I watched a back episode of Gotham. (Which, incidentally, I think is getting better with every episode. Still have a couple to go, though. No spoilers, or I spray you with hot cat urine.)

I did it.

And I wasn’t tired anymore.

I was actually feeling pretty energized.

I took a quick shower and I was ready to conquer the world.

I made a bad-ass dinner and ran around with the toddler and here I am, writing this blog. And now I’m reminded that every day, when I hit that wall, I’m making a choice. I’m deciding whether or not I’m going to take the easy way or the hard way. Am I going to give in, or push back?

The easy way would’ve been to nap. The easy way would’ve been to exude all my willpower from every pore in my body in an aerosolized mist and then just flump down on the bed and that’s that.

The hard way was to admittedly do something not that hard — it’s not like I had to go fight in a war or wait tables at a busy Manhattan restaurant — but it was still a lot harder than napping.

The easy way would’ve paid off in the short term. Immediate pleasure-spike.

The hard way paid off bigger in the end.

The easy way is the short con. The hard way is the long con.

The long con almost always pays out better.

I mean, okay, this isn’t universally true. If one choice is, “Walk over to that picnic table and eat a delicious slice of pie,” and the other harder choice is, “Enter that bouncy castle over there, the one full of hunger-mad raccoons,” yes, granted, the easier choice is truly the wiser one. Picnic Pie over Raccoon Injury any day of the week.

Certainly it’s worth looking at if the harder choice is also the smarter choice.

But in general, y’know, it’s always worth taking the time to make that assessment.

Sometimes the short walk will get you there faster. But sometimes the longer walk is the prettier, more interesting walk — and it’s the one where you have more time to think, get more exercise, see new things. Like two Yetis making love on a hammock made of human skin.

Park close to a store — easy to head inside. Park far away — longer walk. Seems dumb. Isn’t dumb. Again: more exercise. More blood flow. Better chance of seeing something funny happen in the lot, too, like a couple seagulls fighting a preschooler over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve never seen that. But I want to see that. I bet that’s amazing.

Fast food is easy. Home cooking is hard. But, y’know, about a thousand bazillionty times better. For you, for your family, for the Pink Slimecubes that must be destroyed in the dungeons beneath Ronald McDonald’s clown-vomit murder factory.

Art is like this, too.

It’s harder just not to create art than it is to actually sit down or stand there and commit. It’s easier to think about creating something, or to talk about creating something, than it is to actually will yourself to that act — a very difficult, transitional, sacrificial act. It’s easier to think about stories or dream stories or imagine your published stories than it is to actually carve them letter by letter across a piece of paper. The thing about the easy way, though — the thing that’s seductive — is that it’s a known quantity. We know what we get out of it. We’ll get it quickly and without complication and likely with great (if momentary) pleasure. The hard way is a question mark bolted to an iron door. The door will be hard to open and the path beyond it, potentially treacherous. Its reward is unknown, uncertain, and seems counter to what we really want in the first place. You’re tired? Nap! Ta-da! Why would you run when you’re tired? How dumb are you?

Except, it’s not dumb. It pays off.

Sometimes, you do have to take the easy way. Sometimes, you really need a nap, or a cookie, or a day off from whatever it is you’re doing. That’s okay. You can push too hard. Bend too far and you can break. But just the same — sometimes you really have to push.

So, push.

Stretch.

Run.

Create.

Fuck it.

Hell with the easy way. Dying is the easy way. Living is the hard way.

So keep going.

Keep running.

Keep living.

Keep making cool stuff.

[insert NIKE swoosh logo here]

[video] [h/t: sizvideos]

A die-cast metal replica of the Firefly-class Serenity cargo ship that also acts as a flash drive? Now how AWESOME is that? It even features light-up engine lights (when plugged into a USB port).

[Firefly Serenity Flash Drive]

[reddit]

Jacksonville, Florida-based artist James Hance is truly the master of geektastic mashups. I’ve been featuring his work on GAS since 2010, and the man never ceases to amaze me with his art. Keep on being awesome, James!

[Relentlessly Cheerful Art By James Hance]

Lt. Geordi La Corgi [tumblr]

We tend to look at willpower as this magical force inside of us that we either have or we don't. In a recent interview, Scott Adams—Dilbert creator and frequent advice giver —explains that willpower is actually a finite resource, and there's a way to get what you need done without draining it all.

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He is in denial about no longer fitting in his favorite puppy napping spots [reddit]

Each day, Christy Kilgore likes to bring a little sunlight in her children’s life by drawing pop culture artwork on the lunch bags they bring to school. She’s been doing this for about a year now and uses regular colored pencils, sharpies, and crayola markers to create her art.

If you want to check out more of Christy’s work, you can follow her on twitter or instagram where she posts her new chef d’oeuvres regularly.

[Christy Kilgore on Twitter | Christy Kilgore on Instagram]

[reddit]

It turns out that my 24 hour trip to New York, followed by a full day of intense creative work, pretty much kicked my ass. I’m so tired, I don’t even have the energy to go to Staples Center to watch my beloved Los Angeles Kings take on our crosstown rivals, the hated Ducks. I thought about maybe homebrewing some wootstout today, but I don’t think I can even do that. It looks like I’ll spend most of today — and maybe all of tomorrow — watching movies and catching up on TV shows, so I can regenerate HP and Mana, but holy mother of balls am I tired.

But it’s a good kind of tired. It’s the kind of tired that seems to start out in my bones. The kind of tired that I feel has been earned, by lots of hard work. Sure, it’s not the kind of hard work that people who actually work for a living would consider work, but since my job basically entails me creating things and then enthusiastically sharing those creations with an audience, the last week has been some of the hardest work I’ve done in a long time.

While I was in New York to promote the awesome videos I made with Newcastle, I did seventeen interviews in about eight hours. Seventeen times, I found new and interesting ways to answer the same fundamental questions, each time making sure that the person I was talking with got 100% of the energy I had to offer, so that each interview felt like it was the only interview I did.

I did that seventeen times, and by the end of the day, I was completely exhausted. In fact, I had a beer at the end of the day (which was funny, because drinking it was technically part of working), and I fell asleep in the car moments after it pulled away from the curb to take me to the airport.

So, about that … the car took me to the wrong airport. In the wrong state. And I found out when I was inside the airport, at the wrong ticket counter, 90 minutes before my flight was scheduled to depart.

I had the most panicked panic I’ve felt related to travel in a very, very long time, as I hoped against hope that the cab I got into at the wrong airport could take me all the way across Brooklyn and Manhattan and get me to the right airport. The entire way, I did math in my head every few minutes to update my anticipated arrival time, and each time it told me that I’d make it or miss it by about five minutes. I didn’t have any checked luggage, and I had my boarding pass already, but it was going to be incredibly close.

When I got to the right airport, I tipped the driver 100%, and ran as fast as I could to security. “I’m going to miss my flight,” I said, “if you delay me at all. Please help me.”

By the grace of the old gods and new, I encountered a string of very helpful and friendly TSA people who all assured me that I’d be fine, since I had nearly 20 minutes before departure (the airline says that if you get to the plane with less than fifteen minutes before the departure time, you’re screwed).

Here’s the thing about me and travel: I’m good at it. I’m efficient. I know how to get my belt off, and I kick of my slip-on Vans quickly and easily. I have the laptop pull and bin deposit down to a fluid move that is like a ballet.

Only this trip, I was wearing Fluevog boots that tied near my ankles, and when I tried to untie them, the laces knotted themselves tightly. This trip, when I tried to take my laptop out of my bag, I nearly dropped it, and then I fell over while I was removing the knot from my shoe. I nearly forgot to take my belt off. It wasn’t a ballet so much as it was the flailing of a crazy person that would have been a perfect visual for Yakkity Sax.

Somehow, I got through security, and when I slammed my feet back into my boots, I knew that I had to run as fast as I could to get to the gate on time. I didn’t even stop to tie them — which was a mistake, it turns out. If you ever have to run in boots, tie them — and I got to my gate with less than five minutes to spare. I was the second to last person to get on the plane, and thanks to the Lords of Light, I had checked in online and they hadn’t given my seat away. I fell into my seat, explained to the bewildered man next to me why I was sweating and gasping and shaking, and when the adrenaline finally wore off, slept for most of the trip.

Yesterday, I slept straight through my alarm and was fifteen minutes late for my meeting at Geek & Sundry, where I worked with a Top Secret Team of Creative People on the Tabletop RPG show.

Hey nerds, I thought you may like to know what I'm working on today. pic.twitter.com/yDJGuHZDpq

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 14, 2014

I spent the entire day building the world, figuring out what was important for the players, characters, and audience to know, and eventually ended the day with an outline for the adventure we’re going to run. I’ve never broken a season in a writer’s room before, but I imagine that the experience I had yesterday was similar: exhilarating, inspiring, challenging, incredibly fun, and exhausting.

There’s that word again: exhausting.

Exhausted.

Spent.

Drained.

Did you know that intense use of your brain for things burns a ton of calories? I didn’t, either, until recently. There’s no entry for “concentrated on storytelling and worldbuilding and character development for eight hours” in MyFitnessPal, but if there was, I would have checked it off, yesterday.

So here I am, so tired I could probably just go back to bed, but feeling compelled to write and share my experiences with the world, because that’s what writers do, and I’m spending the next six months being a capital-W Writer.

But more on that another time, because now I need to rest.

This just in! Jim has finished the first book in the Cinder Spires series, The Aeronaut’s Windlass! He’ll take some time for polishing and editorial, then he’ll start work on Dresden #16, Peace Talks!

We’ll let you know as soon as there’s a release date to announce. At present, no official date has been set.

In the meantime, don’t forget to vote in Round 2 of the Goodreads Choice Awards! Skin Game is one of many exceptional novels in the running for Best Fantasy. This round ends tomorrow, Saturday the 15th, so don’t delay! Participants get one vote per category per round, so check out all the nominees in all categories and choose your favorites, then come back Monday the 17th for the Final Round, to see if your picks made the cut!