A flurry of recommendation emails from Amazon drove me to visit their site to unsubscribe from their promotional emails.
This is what I saw once I submitted the form:
Categories
Categories
Science Fiction Short Story Contests
If you write Hebrew, this year’s Einat Prize has extended it’s deadline to Thursday (24th of September): 1,500-5,000 words of speculative fiction on the topic of “Metropolis: City of the Future”.
If that’s too long a story or too short a deadline, there’s also a New Scientist flash fiction competition that’s running until the 15th of October: up to 350 words, stories set 100 years in the future. It’s part of their generally worthwhile Sci-Fi special.
Categories
Rorschach versus Alan Moore
Because we haven’t had a Watchmen movie related link in a bit…
Nobody Watches the Watchmen – watch more funny videos
Update: I sent feedback to reddit about this and someone nice created a bug report in response.
On the one hand, I admire the brave efforts of people who localize sites and applications to Hebrew and other non-ascii languages; on the other hand, (like most Israeli power users, I suspect), I hate using the Hebrew interfaces, especially when all the UI elements get flipped and moved around.
Recently, I started seeing ugly unstyled pages when visiting stories on reddit.com. Which makes it very hard to get the link to the actual posted story.
At first I thought the page hadn’t loaded properly, because of network issues, but it turns out the problem is that I was being served a Hebrew localized page, which was badly localized – the link to the CSS was 404 unavailable.
The key point in that thread is this:
how much traffic do you get in non english reddits
Well we won’t get any if we don’t show non-English speakers that it’s available.
Regardless of what’s causing this behavior, the real problem is that the resulting page is unusable and broken (unless you change your preferences – possible if you’re logged in as a reddit user), and I persume this is because of inadequate testing, which is no surprise considering the miniscule number of people who’d encounter this bug: reddit visitors that have Hebrew set as their preferred language but aren’t logged in – opinionated Israeli power users, in other words (or shlubs goofing around like me).
Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid…
Cave Complex Found Under Giza Pyramids (Discovery News):
An enormous system of caves, chambers and tunnels lies hidden beneath the Pyramids of Giza, according to a British explorer who claims to have found the lost underworld of the pharaohs.
Populated by bats and venomous spiders, the underground complex was found in the limestone bedrock beneath the pyramid field at Giza.
The details on that news item – the discoverer of the caves tracked down the entrance to the mysterious underworld after reading the forgotten memoirs of a 19th century diplomat and explorer
, the officials scoffing his finding, the citing of ancient funerary texts
– it’s all gravy. Or module.
This comes via BLDGBLOG, who in the same post also links to an article from the Smithsonian on Ancient Cities lost to the Seas which opens on Dunwich, England (he also visits a fungus farm in Australia. I skim only to keep my sanity).