Bracket Madness

I’m not a basketball fan so I don’t follow March Madness. I do enjoy the ripoff brackets that pop up in every fandom. io9 has a sci fi movie bracket that forces you to choose between Jurassic Park and The Road Warrior among others. First round of voting is closed (Jurassic Park moves on), but join in the fun. For the record, my money’s on The Empire Strikes Back to go all the way.

I came across a muppet bracket as well. But my favorite may be the cage match over at Suvudu between characters from science fiction and fantasy.

Suvudu takes the bracket concept and creates stories for it. Visitors to the site still vote on the outcome but only after seeing a breakdown of the characters’ strengths and weaknesses and reading a short (very short) story about the fight might go. Some of the fights are written by the actual authors who birthed the characters.

The first round is over, but it’s worth going back a couple pages at the site to read the matches. Severus Snape vs. Lestat? How can you miss that?

June Is Bustin’ Out All Over

Or at least in terms of web links it is. Question: if blog is short for web log, can I use blinks for a collection of web links? Would it catch on? Can I be the next Al Gore?

Never mind.

Taking a break from cat posts and book reviews, here’s the sites and stories that have caught my eye in June.

Pop Culture Venn Diagram

Picking up on the earlier post of Star Trek Pez, here’s a link to what Wil Wheaton called the Venn overlap of Star Trek and Monty Python.

Enjoy!

Odds and Ends Part 2 (the picture edition)

My attention has been on the insanity of writing a novel in 30 days so I haven’t blogged lately. Word count updates for the novel can be seen in the widgets on the left of the main page, Facebook and Twitter (follow small_pond). The story of the novel won’t be wrapped up in 50,000 words so here’s hoping I churn out over 5K a day or keep writing through December and into the future.

In the meantime, here are some pics of what else has been going on. Notice no pictures of books appear. Despite my growing pile of review copies, the time isn’t there this month to read and review. Besides, one of them may require me to buy a fiddle

On to the photos …

Preventing Five Hours of Mind-Numbing Boredom

Last week I went to San Diego for work. The trip was nice, got some good work-type stuff accomplished in San Diego while in-the-office work stuff threatened to completely fall apart. Always fun to be out of the office when you’re really needed there. The weather was perfect as it tends to be in San Diego, and the company was delightful.

Still, I was ready to be back home on Friday afternoon when it came time to leave. My flight plan was a 5:45 p.m. from San Diego to San Francisco, a three-hour layover and then the red eye back home. Both planes looked incredibly packed when I checked in online, but I managed to get an economy-plus upgrade for the red eye. More about that later.