Short stories are good when you don’t have much time but want to read something (why welcome, Captain Obvious).
Here are few that I really liked:
Isaac Asimov: The Last Question
Terry Bisson: They’re Made out of Meat
Ambrose Bierce: Moxon’s Master
Edgar Allan Poe: The Pit and the Pendulum
I strongly advise you to read at least the first two.
Somehow, I wasn’t that impressed by other short stories such as Nightfall (it wasn’t that bad, but somehow I expected the generally accepted best short story to be better, it was also longer than needed—the shorter the better) or An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge.
And finally, I would like to ask for your advice. Do you know any really good (and possibly short) short stories?
Reading comics is a very pleasent way of wasting one’s time, therefore, I’d suggest you a few time-wasters that I really enjoy:
Nerd boy is a very geek ascii-art comics created by Joaquim Gandara. It has about 600 strips and is currently stalling. I suggest you to read the strips in order, as they don’t make much sense otherwise (you can also view all nerd-boy comics on one page (warning: it is rather big, about 1mb)). Also, it would probably be a good idea to use “courier” (new) for viewing it, nerd-boy looks kinda weird using my favorite fixed-width font “terminus”.
Questionable content is a comics I stumbled upon just recently. The creator has some seriously interesting ideas, good points and the comics is quite funny. You can also see the art getting better and better all the time, I find it kind of funny to watch.
Garfield is the comics of choice when you don’t want to think too much. I think everyone knows Garfield and there’s not much to say about it. Maybe just… if you don’t enjoy all the flash shit^H^H^H^H ads and stuff, you can use my excellent bash scripts that will download all the Garfield comic strips for you and create html pages for more comfortable viewing. The script puts all 365 strips from one year to one html page, while you might think it’s weird and it takes too long to load etc, I assure you that scrolling is way more faster than clicking “next” or something. I always prefer to have real long pages and not to have to click at all, just scroll. Scrolling heaven.
Next time you get stuck in a traffic jam, please realize that it could have been much worse.
Yeah, I know that this is what most of blogs look like: “hey look I found a link”, but I promise you are going to get a full post tomorrow (no promises about its quality though).
Good Day,
My name is Madam Beverly Murray. I am deaf and dumb and I am a complete citizen of the United State of America, widow to the late former minister of finance in Philippine who was a victim of the terrorist attack against the United State of America on the 11th September 2001 that crashed at the World Trade Centre in New York . I inherited a total sum of $20 million dollars…
[continues as usual]
Usually I send these emails to spam after two seconds, but here the two seconds were enough for me to spot the “I am deaf and dumb” part, which made me read the whole email (nothing else interesting there). How could anyone even write this?
I never really liked videos or movies, for some reason I always prefered still images.
I began to slowly change my point of view after spending some time looking around youtube. There are many interesting things, such as the story of gamer granny, interview with extreme skier Jamie Pierre, kabaret dno’s freestyler mixing pop songs into a story, karaoke for the deaf with a wonderful mime, all crazy videos of Brookers, or highly educational powers of ten (which displays someone having a lunch on a grass and zooms out to galaxies and then zooms in to quarks).
Feel free to post links to interesting videos in the comments. 
Chile is a country in South America and England is in Europe, but the problem is that except of it being very far there is an ocean between (in case you don’t know), so it’s probably quite a problem to get from Chile to England on foot.
Yet Karl Bushby decided to try it. He started in 1998 and now he’s somewhere in Russia, having crossed the dangerous Bering Strait. Karl plans on finishing his more than 50 000 km journey in 2009. It’s almost unbelievable that someone is willing to spend more than 10 years of his life just walking around the world…
You can find much more info (photos, journal, etc.) on official pages of the Goliath expedition.
I like the good old dynamic serif typefaces (from 15th-17th century). The most well known is Garamond, which is also my favourite one, together with Pastonchi (which is so unknown it doesn’t even have its wikipedia page, although it’s a very sexy typeface (I especially love opennes of the small letter ‘f’ (see the pic on the right side), and letter ‘k’ is rather cute), so the link points to google). Then there’s Bembo, which isn’t quite as great as Garamond (let alone Pastonchi), but it’s still a fair one.
Someone thought it would be a funny idea to make animals of the Bembo letters, and so they did. It’s a stragne idea, but I quite like it. The only problem is that it’s waaay too fast. Show me the word and then let me watch it for at least five seconds (no, half a second is not enough, really).
Humm, yet another confused post. The headline says Bembo, then I get all excited about Pastonchi (and even include a picture (which has nothing to do with the headline, btw)) and then finish with Bembo again. Well, whatever, I’m not gonna rewrite it anyway…
I had to solve another issue at KGS today. Someone was swearing in hebrew (using word benzona) and one user pointed me to Urban dictionary. Well, I searched around a bit (of course) and the one I liked the most is the word fuck. The best description is probably the second one – from Monty Python (anyone knows where from exactly?), so go and vote for it so that it gets to the first place (community driven websites just rock (please remember this, in a few posts I will remind you))
Getting them too?
It’s usually someone whose whole family was brutally killed and left several millions (or milliards) dollars. The person is in danger and has to transfer money to a safe place, you are the one to help him – you just have to send some kind of small fee like $80, well, who cares when you are to recieve several millions soon? 
I stumbled upon a story of a psychotherapist who fell for the nigerian scam. Well, simply put, he’s an idiot and I think he deserves what he got (now you might find this a bit harsh, but sending money to someone repeatedly without ever getting anything back seems pretty stupid to me).
There are actually quite a lot of people who enjoy pretending they are stupid and playing around with the scammers, some of them are pretty succesful in ridiculing the scammers and few even managed to get money from them (duh, some of the scammers must be real dumb if they let others scam ‘em too). The 419 eater site collects the letters and various stuff, some of which is pretty funny (such as the guy who posed with a loaf of bread on his head and bottle of wine in his mouth (you can read the whole story too)).
Well, there is a lot of funny reading for long winter nights, scammers seem pretty active but so do scambaiters…
This is by no means my original post, I’d link to the original if only I could find it (which seems almost impossible).
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