Thursday Linkfest

Yesterday was busy and thus thesis-less, plus I got very little sleep thanks to some very unfomfortable shoulder pain, so odds are I’ll be saying little of interest today. Instead, I’ll entertain you with links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the last week (or so):

• My good friend Chris Slee reflects on the Edisonade (aka the pre-history of Science Fiction) and what was the best thing *before* sliced bread.
• The ever-stylish Ben Francisco cherry-picks the SFnal highlights of the authors@google youtube series and gathers them together in a single handy post (although he’s missing Neil Gaiman in the line-up). If you’ve not seen these, particularly the John Scalzi, I recommend going and taking a look.
• The Aurealis Awards are announced and the results posted on their website. Cat Sparks has posted photographs of the night, in which a bunch of writer-types have scrubbed up pretty well (and I show up looking marginally less shabby than usual in the vast flicker list of the night.).
• Mick Foley (aka Cactus Jack, Mankind, Dude Love) reviews Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.
• Steve Kenson on the lack of randomness in contemporary RPG character creation. (My first reaction to this post? To go roll up a Marvel Superheroe’s Character and convert it over to the point-by driven system of Kenson’s near-perfect supers RPG Mutants & Masterminds)
• And, as if there’s not enough of me on the internets already, I sneak on over to Lee Battersby’s blog and guest-post my memories of the first week of Clarion South 2007.
• John Klima bids farewell to the recently shut down Realms of Fantasy over at Tor.com, but also wonders where all those stories that used to go RoF’s way will end up (For my money, you can’t go past Fantasy magazine if you’re looking for fiction with an RoF-like feel)
• Scientists discover that fiction can drive social evolution – which seems a little like overcomplicated the obvious, to me, but there you go.