Categories
Resources

Hurricane Pictures

The short – but eventful – life of Ike – The Big Picture – Boston.com

[via John Rogers]

Categories
Oddities Resources

Name toys

via Richelle Mead‘s blog, two cool toys for playing with names. Most awesome is the NameVoyager, which lets you query a name’s popularity over the decades. It’s cool how my mother’s name peaked in popularity in the 1940s while my sister’s name peaked in popularity in the 1970s. The popularity of my brother’s name has been dropping since the 1880s, with an occassional smaller rise in the 1950s. Our statistics are more complicated than that because we’re Israelis, and I think my brother’s bilingual name had some more popularity here.

There’s also nymbler, which recommends names based on “inspirations”.Plug in my name (which is too obscure for any name database), and it will recommend assorted rare and special names, mostly starting with “D”. Plug in common names, and you’ll get common names as recommendations.

Also, here’s something that shows you how common surnames are in various countries, the worldnames public profiler (not that great a name for an app; barefoot shoemaker and all). Using this, I learned that Dimet is most frequent in France and Sweden. Go figure.

Categories
Oddities Roleplaying

Load Bearing Boss

A boss-type monster whose destruction causes the location to self-destruct (see Collapsing Lair). Usually results in a scene after the final battle wherein the player must make a hasty escape before the clock runs out.

Load Bearing Boss – Television Tropes & Idioms

Spotted in use by Rob Donoghue.

Categories
Blather

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

A web cartoon I found again while digging up again Matt Rossi’s golden-age Superman posts.

Two cartoons I liked – one for him:

superman failed to defeat the enrgy crisis

And one for the alter ego:

let me fix the list

Categories
Oddities

Goon City

Goon City, via [Simon Willison]. He claims it contains every internet meme ever, done in pixel art.

It’s… big.