Men died on that boardwalk all wooden and wobbly, knobbed and wind-smacked, wormy and walked-upon, hit with rain, sand, scum. I won’t tell you about those men because I don’t know that story. Mal tells me there’s a story, there. Maybe it’s just the kind of place, seems like it oughta have a story, dark and gloomy and underhanded.

Bank robbers came and went, but didn’t rob the banks here. They came here on vacation like the rest of us, civilized folks. Only stole a little, maybe. Paid for food and fare and accoutrement. Dolled it up, resplendent.

You’re following, cause you want to see what I see. Well, you don’t want to see what I’ve seen. Rot and slime and ruin. Up here it’s all neat and ordered, shiny. Things what break can be fixed. Splinters cut your skin and you bandage them; scum dirties your boot and you wash it, the shoe. Boardwalk over a lumpy, smelly place, smells bolted down under four thousand tons of concrete, buried.

The songs we sing, you like what you don’t understand. You think you understand, but you don’t. Our faces are shadowed while our voices — robust and smooth, fantastical, wild — tickle your ears. It sounds like childish bunkum and nonsense to you. Our tongues are wet and tired. Imagine these tables in a smokier time. Foghorn listing in through the murky air when the door swings open, admitting or depositing new blood. Our feet shuffled more, then. We were tireder. We were animals, then.

You don’t come here with anyplace left to go. It’s not the worst life, now, but it’s not easy nights, dreaming the things you sing. And, where else would you go? Working, in a job. Walking on that boardwalk like it’s a thing of pleasure and ease.

• Timewaster: Typewar.  Think you know fonts?  Try this game, which you’ll either find completely boring or riveting.
• Best aggregated reference word site: Wordnik.  My favorite reference site right now.  All about words.
• Maps of Disaster: Informative, curious, unnerving.  View map (or maps) of the world, with icons of disaster superimposed.  For added effect, project image onto your office wall.  You’ve got things under control. (This is: a service of the Hungarian Emergency and Disaster Information Service)
• Best specialty science-writing blog: Tetrapod Zoology.  Fascinating, curious, informative, and detailed without alienating those not totally familiar with the science at hand.  Aside: I want this book.
• Best easily digestible good news story: “Feeling grumpy is ‘good for you’” (via BoingBoing).  Bonus: “File photo” used for BBC article appears to have been taken from One Foot in the Grave.

• It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you.  In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway.  (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
• “Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
• If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome.  It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
• And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
• This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis.  The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:
  

  I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

  Read on.

• I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real.  (No, not like that.)
• Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration).  (via SimpleSpark)

A sort of extraordinary exercise in control of voice and facial expressions, in the form of a Judy Garland impression, of all things. From the ever-impressive Amy Walker:

Related to something I could have sworn I’d posted previously, but apparently haven’t: 21 accents in 2 1/2 minutes.

(via BoingBoing)

The most beautiful words.  The most endangered words.  The most policed words.

(via Bookninja, Lifehacker, and BoingBoing, respectively)

Although, really, it’s not a contest.  Collaboration, maybe.  Curious, definitely:

The thesis pursued in this article is that this strong thematic aspect of The Dark Knight finds its roots in a short story by the labyrinthine Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

(via monochrom)

Tell you like this.  Play a card.  Write you home on the car.  Coin for your hearts.  I was once you.  At a different dinner.  Where you went.  I remember Yui.  We played horses.  You will die.

(more…)

Everyone wanted to watch through hushed windows, through closed blinds; wanted a glance at that thing rolling down the street before it was dusty artefact of history and importance – but not too much of a look. The future of the parade. And the last one, probably. Millions of people watching, cheering, drinking. More, less. Both. None of it on the television. The thing you couldn’t see, but had to. The end.

Nothing changed, but everything was different.

There Was No News. There was no word on the television, or in newspapers and magazines. Nothing on the internet. Not a word. Political figures did not calm the populace; they did not even mention the invasion. It was as if everything were completely ordinary, as ordinary strange as it ever was.

If not for Amaia, come to me in a dream, I wouldn’t have known.

What does the end of written history look like?

I went in to work, the last day. I didn’t have to, but there was no reason to do anything different. It could have been different, but it wasn’t.

The horses rode down the streets.

From the bottom of the ocean, they weren’t horses, but what could you call them? They were things we didn’t have a word for, because no one talked about them. They were giant, hulking things, wretched and stinking, gray, coarse. That day you could feel the monotonous pounding of their hooves on the streets. A noise you knew would never end.

I made it to work because I saw none.

Looking up and out, we’d either expected invasions from the stars, or not at all. Mostly, not at all. But “invasion” gives the wrong connotation. Friend, this is the beginning.

Amaia told me. She told everyone.