When you were here before, I couldn't look you in the eye

I am having second thoughts about this blog. I mean, its raison d'être is "telling people about things that are cool," and while I have excellent taste in things that are cool, it occurs to me that this is not exactly a unique service I am offering here.
Indeed, there are about nine hundred billion websites that do just that, and there are probably even sites out there to tell you which of these sites are cooler than others. So what am I doing exactly?

Well, today I am celebrating Morbid Fascination Day
yay!

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice used to list the last meals ordered by its death row inmates. Crazily enough, somebody thought this was in poor taste, so they took it down. However, this site archives them. The choices are interesting, and sometimes revealing.

And here is a community art project, in which people write down their secrets anonymously on a postcard and mail them in. Pretty intense stuff.

brrr.
A Softer World is fiction, happily, but is frequently similar in spirit. It falls somewhere between childlike innocence and serious creepiness,
and if you're totally appalled by everything I've linked to so far, Making Fiends is very cute, and should offer a slight reprieve.

holy dang, has it really been a month?

Okay, yeah. Things have been Happening that have made me neglect you, blog. But today I'll be telling actual readers about you; won't that be exciting? And maybe I'll momentarily stop forgetting about you.

Prediction markets are way cool. The idea is that certain kinds of markets have been found to be unusually good at predicting events, given the way they aggregate information. For instance, orange juice futures predict the weather in Florida more accurately than does meteorology. Tradesports is one such market. In my experience, it hasn't been all that accurate, but it's fun to look at as one measure of the likelihood of a given outcome. Or you can just use it to bet on crazy things instead. I did well last election ("doing well" being relative to one's interests, I suppose), and luckily decided not to invest in papal forecasts this week.

On a totally unrelated note, Maywa Denki are also pretty nifty.

Lastly, a very brief shout-out to Katamari Damacy and Flight vol. 2. If you are reading my blog, you probably already know about these, so why am I mentioning them? It is a mystery!