Category: Resources

Amazon Light is an interface to Amazon.com’s search engine with a Googlish-UI (in fact, the original UI was so Google-like, the designer got a letter from Google’s lawyers…)

It’s all done with Amazon’s web services API, and shows why that’s a cool thing – in fact, I guess it’s a better demonstration than the Google API of why web service APIs are useful – Google was so spartan that people argued you could just as well use CGI and screen-scraping (parsing what you want out of the HTML Google returned).

symbols.com is an online encyclopedia of Western signs and ideograms, searchable by graphic shape (closed or open, crossing or non-crossing lines) or words associated with the symbol. Very cool. Lots of alchemical and Christian symbols, obviously, but plenty of other stuff as well.
[ via bOING bOING ]

An intriguing headshot of Rebecca Blood showed up in a Scripting News post about Dave receiving her book for review. The image, apparently found via Google (I assume from the link), tells us that Blood was
Gothic Babe of the Week on 15th of April 2001.

GBOTW gave me an interesting idea: I wanted photos to use as character images / “trumps” in my campaign (particularly, I tried to cast Pauline, my head NPC), and when I looked to celebrity look-alikes I found slim pickings (I made something with Lara Flynn Boyle, but the image selection sucks, and anyway she’s not exactly the type).

But goth models look promising. Here’s a site with lots of wonderful Goth photos (look at his previous galleries), and he’s also the guy who took all those photos of Rebecca Blood, who actually has a strong Pauline vibe to her, but doesn’t quite look the part – and the haircut is naff (although I had a character with a haircut like that in a Shadowrun game once).

I also found this Goth model directory while looking for more pictures of one of his models (who would be perfect except she’s dressed fancier than Pauline would be). It’s very hit and miss, but some nice images there. Also, there’s this photographer’s gallery.

Anyway, all those fetish clothing pictures …. to think I downloaded all the photos and screen-savers for “The Cell” and didn’t find a decent image for the wicked Buro scientist for 10,000 Bastards, because I stupidly fixated on a publicity shot of Jennifer Lopez in that film for the role.

An off-hand link here, where the author describes the shareware attitude prevalent in the Macintosh world as “a bit spiv-like“, pointed me to this explanation of What a spiv is, and as a bonus also explains what a wide boy is (a term I recall from Marillion lyrics – although I thought David Bowie and Toyah used it too):

“A spiv was typically a flashily dressed man (velvet collars and lurid kipper ties) who made a living by various disreputable dealings, existing by his wits rather than holding down any job. (Another name was wide boy, with wide having the old slang sense of sharp-witted, or skilled in sharp practice.)”

The above is part of a big site called World Wide Words, which adresses such issues as what all those curious slang terms mean and where on earth did they come from.