Some of these sites showcase my interests, friends, esteemed acquaintances, or publishers. Others I just found diverting.

• Pencil carving by crazed Japanese guys
• UK programmer, maintainer of perl.com, and Anglican missionary Simon Cozens has re-rendered the 10th-century Japanese classic Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon as a blog. It works waaay too well.
• In the 1980s Tehching Hsieh erased the boundary between performance art and lunacy with his "one year performances." He spent a year in a cage. He spent a year punching a time clock every hour (think about it). He spent a year outdoors, never entering any structure. He spent a year roped to a woman without touching her. Now he's selling a DVD-ROM chronicling these, uh, performances.
• Progaganda Critic
• You know the science fiction writer Wil McCarthy? Aerospace engineer, Wired contributing editor, Sci-Fi Channel Web columnist? He's got a mind-blowing programmable matter FAQ on his site that describes the forthcoming "new alchemy" of quantum dots. Yet another existence-disrupting technology on the horizon.
• The Memory Hole -- "rescuing knowledge, freeing information"
• Names names my god names
• Police log from the weekly Arcata Eye (Humboldt county, northern California) -- you will thank me for this
• Mirrorshades and the Viridian design movement
• Boing Boing and Memepool -- why surf when they'll do it for you?
• Intriguing Web toys: sodaconstructor, Lost in Translation, Hyperspace Polytope Slicer, Through the Center of the Earth
• Flash amusements: an engaging build-your-own kaleidoscope and Hero Machine


• My tribe, the Texas Juggling Society
• Internet Juggling Database


• My sometime collaborator, Aaron Allston. Aaron is making his first movie, Deadbacks, a low-budget "zombie chick flick" in which I myself was a nonspeaking backround zombie.
• Some of my favorite writers: Alan Moore, Jack Vance, Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, and Rudy Rucker
• Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, always a voice of sanity
• FredAstaire.net
• Danny Kaye patter song lyrics
• The amazing composer Raymond Scott, whose music powered many Warner Brothers cartoons
• The Harry Stephen Keeler Society, honoring "the Ed Wood of American mystery novels"
• More brilliant badness from two defenestrators of the poetic muse: Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan and Scottish poet William McGonagall, "Dundee's best-remembered nobody"
• In the same vein, if you're not familiar with the unique science fiction of R. Lionel Fanthorpe, most prolific author in the history of SF -- well, read excerpts and "stand trembling, like a bladder of lard."
• The German film director Lotte Reiniger made remarkable "silhouette films" in the days before sound. Her Adventures of Prince Ahmed (1926) is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film -- though not, as is frequently stated, the first ever made (that is apparently "El Apostol," a 1917 Argentine feature, now lost, by Quirino Cristiani)


• Pelgrane Press, publisher of the Dying Earth roleplaying game; I laid out the rulebook and the first supplement
• The Forge is a Burgess Shale of independent roleplaying innovation, well worth a long look around. Forge designers are taking small-press RPGs in fascinating new directions. See, for example, the much-praised My Life With Master (and check Steve Darlington's informative MLWM review on RPGNet), Little Fears, Universalis, The Riddle of Steel, and Sorcerer, as well as curiosities like Bedlam, Courts & Corsets, octaNe, and Nicotine Girls.
• The RussCon gaming group, which meets each Wednesday night here in Austin, TX to play great German board and card games (and if you don't know "German games," check About.com's Designer Games 101)
• Tribute pages honoring the great game designers Sid Sackson (R.I.P.) and Reiner Knizia. Knizia's excellent tabletop boardgame Samurai has been literally translated into a fine shareware computer game from Klear Games LLC; check this Game Tunnel review.