Contests

• Over at DIK, Lea’s giving away your choice of The Perfect Play or a pre-order of Changing the Game (both by Jaci Burton). All you have to do is comment about which cover from Jaci’s Play by Play series is your favorite. Contest closes midnight July 23.

• Blodeuedd’s giving away two copies of A Gentleman Never Tells by Amelia Grey. Contest closes July 28. US & Canada only.

• Book Lovers Inc is giving away two Stephanie Tyler books (choice of ebook or paperback). Contest closes July 30.

Bookity

• New releases and more: Lily (m/m romance), Fiction Vixen (romance), and  Book Lovers Inc (various sorts of romance).

• A strange new book size discovered in the wild in Europe!

• Don’t blame ebooks for Borders going bankrupt.

• Sales of To Kill a Mockingbird have increased since the Beckhams named their baby.

• Jen of Cake Wrecks and EPBOT is posting about her favorite YA fantasy books.

• You can watch the C-SPAN documentary about the Library of Congress online.

• How to fill a bookstore in 90 seconds.

• KMont talks about books she’s wanted to drop-kick.

• Paperback Writer on dialogue tag fails.

• Carolyn Crane on the eye cheat.

• Luisa Prieto takes a humorous look at how research can turn into a time sink.

• Cut book video from the New Zealand Book Council.

• The Mary Sue explains why the term “bodice ripper” is so silly.

• Reading at every stage of (the straight male) life. (via The Mary Sue)

Ebookity

• An interview with Angela James of Carina Press.

• Ellora’s Cave is inexplicably planning to launch its own ereader.

• Japan has ebook vending machines.

• Kobo wants to make sure everyone knows that it isn’t part of Borders and isn’t closing.

• Why ebooks have so many typos.

• TeleRead has a post about using a $2 iPad app “to create semi-professional ebook covers”…

Learn, Make, Do, Think

• Some eloquent thoughts from Naomi Clark and Jennifer Armintrout on Laurell K. Hamilton‘s recent tweet that seems to trivialize mental illness and getting treated for such. (Thanks to Nicole for the initial link to Naomi Clark’s post!)

• Are you eligible to be part of the Verizon Wireless class action suit?

• TunnelBear might help you get around US and UK location-based website restrictions.

• Ten computer myths from movies and tv.

• Modify a gadget case with two buttons so you have a built-in headphone wrapper.

• Using the internet is making our memories worse. (And I’m probably the only one having a flashback to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word right now…)

• How air conditioning changed life in America. (via Gizmodo)

• “Ways to keep your house extra hot this summer“.

• Those cool photos a macaque monkey took of itself are in the public domain.

• Beer archeology. (via The Kitchn)

• Researchers have realized that there were more female Vikings than they’d thought.

• You don’t even have to leave your computer to check if you need glasses.

• More on the critical importance of Vitamin D.

Potterity

• Harry Potter cocktails.

• Gorgeous Harry Potter cakes.

• Harry Potter craft tutorials.

• KnittyBlog has some Harry Potter knitting-themed links.

• A better title for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

• io9 picks out the silliest bits from the Lifetime Original movie about J.K. Rowling. (via Wyrdsmiths)

• Harry Potter or Twilight…

• Voldemort baby doll – eeeeeeeeeek!

Cookity

• Make your own English muffins.

• Cherry almond muffins. (via The Kitchn) (Some of you may remember how much I love gf/df cherry almond muffins, psycho shoppers notwithstanding.)

• “Bacon jam hand pies“. (via The Kitchn)

• Ten poundcake recipes.

• Fried peanut butter and jelly poundcake sandwich?!

• Savory rhubarb recipes.

• Nectarine sherbet. (via The Kitchn)

Crafty

• Knit some TARDIS socks!

• “Plot driven steampunk knitting book“… (Thanks, Bron!)

• Make boxes from paint-chip samples.

• Does your dollhouse need a teeny tiny flyswatter?

• Recreate Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting in fabric.

• Tiny knitted penguin!

• Find out more about Anna of Mochimochiland.

• Large-scale knitting as upholstery.

Cool

• Fiery shot of the shuttle Atlantis reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.

• A chess game between Nikon and Canon camera lenses.

• Where neon signs go to die.

• Daleks in London! (via The Mary Sue)

• Dr. Who Vans.

• Darth Vader hot air balloon. (via The Mary Sue)

• Firefly art nouveau.

• Typography string art.

• Make your own gnome lawn bowling game!

• Fiction Vixen shared some of her favorite WordPress plugins – you will not be surprised to discover that I love the Pick Giveaway Winner plugin. 🙂

• Stumbling Over Chaos was featured on the Coffee and Porn in the Morning blog! Stumbling Over Chaos: The strange intersection of m/m romance and cute cat photos. 🙂

Cool or Wha…?

• LEGO-patterned dress and bag.

• LEGO-covered (functional) turntable.

• Sony is building a giant rainbow sculpture in LA.

• Cthulhu fez.

• There’s a guy dressed as a stormtrooper walking across Australia to raise money for charity.

• Jell-O art. (via Gizmodo)

• Urinals for women.

Wha…?

• Scent machines in grocery stores to entice people to spend more?!

• Contact lenses made from gold and diamonds.

• A woman grew a full size nipple on the sole of her foot. (NSFW)

• This hydrothermal worm is terrifying, evening knowing that it’s microscopic.

• In the future, replacement penises will be created from other parts of your body…

• The US government’s getting grief over a study connecting penis size to gay men’s preferred sexual position… (Thanks, Jase!)

• I got nothin’…

LOL

• On the proliferation of standards.

• Darth whoops! (Thanks, Bron!)

• Drunk online shopping whoops! (Thanks, Bron!)

• Top 15 most-viewed posts at Damn You Autocorrect.

• Autocorrect sign.

• Acceptable tissue price vs. pollen count…

• Some Netflix humor.

• Pet Doctor Barbie!

• The Bloggess isn’t going to let her cat watch True Blood anymore.

• Basement Cat as diet aid.

Teh Cute

• Chaos and Mayhem flashback: Attack on the Fortress of Solitude.

• Kittens! Baby jaguar! Baby jaguar! Baby jaguars! Baby jaguar and baby leopard! Kitten! Baby snow leopards! Snow leopard and baby! Kitten! Baby buns! Kitten! Black panther! Lion cub! Lion cubs! Kitten! Tiger! Black kitten! Giraffe family! Otters! Swan! Baby skunk! Baby koala!

Reading Update
Zero Hour by Jordan Castillo Price. ebook. Very good m/m cyberpunk/dystopian scifi with a dash of romance. I think, with the very best scifi, you can see how things got from here to there without much trouble… and that is definitely the case with this story. Ernest is 30 and his one-month long retirement has started, at the end of which he’ll be demagnetized and reclaimed. His very first stop is an actual coffee house (nearly unimaginable in a world where nutrients are provided intravenously via permanent shunt), where he meets Will, who is very unlike anyone else…
Lines in the Sand by Lyn Gala. ebook. Very good m/m romantic suspense about a driver for the mob who turned informant. He removed himself from witness protection and is back in his home town, working, when the former mob enforcer (and former friend) shows up…
Moving Miss Probert by Kim Dare. free ebook short. Cute free short m/m romance (inspired by a photo I took in San Francisco) about two guys with a moving van.
Muscling Through by J.L. Merrow. ebook. Very good m/m romance about a big, muscular, tattooed guy who’s very sweet, if not very bright, and how he met his boyfriend, who’s the complete opposite. It shouldn’t work…
Red Velvet by Angelia Sparrow. free ebook short. Very fun free short scifi m/m story about an amnesiac alien leading an anger management retreat.
Ranger’s Folly (Lost Shifters #12) by Stephani Hecht. ebook. Good paranormal m/m romance about a Wolf shifter who can’t stop thinking about the elusive long lost Eagle shifter twin after meeting him for only a few minutes.
Sockeye Love by Sarah Black. ebook. Good m/m romance about a photographer who usually avoids attachments, but becomes involved with young law student he met while photographing salmon in Alaska. This is told as a series of scenes several months apart and, as a result, felt choppy, making it hard for me to connect with the characters.
For One Night Only by Anne Brooke. ebook short. Good kinky short m/m story that consists of a flashback, then a single bdsm scene. Things are left very open at the end. While this was very well written, I felt distanced from the characters and story.
The 51st Thursday by Mercy Celeste. ebook. Good m/m romance about a bartender/bar owner who’s been watching a guy come in every Thursday evening for the past 50 weeks. On the 51st Thursday, when the guy shows up late, he gets stranded at the bar with the bar owner because of a hurricane… My major complaint with this book was pronoun confusion.
Jaynell’s Wolf (A Wizard’s Touch #1) by Amber Kell. ebook. Ok m/m paranormal romance about a wizard arriving at wizard college after the death of his father and meeting a very forceful werewolf… This definitely drew a lot of inspiration from Harry Potter.
Kevin’s Alpha (A Wizard’s Touch #2) by Amber Kell. ebook. Ok m/m paranormal romance about a student wizard, terrified of commitment, who finds himself strangely drawn to the alpha werewolf.
Dylan’s Dilemma (Kindred Spirits #5) by Jude Mason & Jenna Byrnes. ebook. Ok m/m paranormal romance about Cade’s brother, Dylan, who’s taking care of the inn while Cade and Ethan are on their honeymoon. Dylan doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he’d sure like to figure out where that little girl in the nightgown lives so he can talk to her parents about her showing up at the inn in the middle of the night, causing a disturbance…
The Surveillance Detail by Derek Adams. ebook short. Ok short gay fiction about a cop who’s sent undercover to get close to a crime lord’s younger brother, even though the younger brother has no ties to the crime lord. This was basically just stroke fiction.
Witches (The Written Word #1) by Jamieson Wolf. ebook. So-so m/m paranormal romance about a man who can see beings that no one else can see. Because of this, he must protect those beings from an evil man. This didn’t draw me in at all… and every time I hit a pronoun tangle, I amused myself by picturing things happening exactly as they were being described. O.O

Thanks to Eyre for pointing out the stats function on Goodreads (it’s in the “My Books” dropdown)! I’ve read 415 books in 2011, and here’s how they’re distributed (click to embiggen):

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“Is it time for dinner yet? No? How about now? No? How about now?” -Chaos