Friday Link Dump

Welcome Back!

I finally feel recovered from holiday shenanigans and I have a big collection of links to share over the next few weeks! As always, let’s start with a cute:

More pictures of this baby as fairy-tale characters at the link.

Christmas Link Dump

Merry Christmas!!

Or if you celebrate something else:
Happy Holidays!!

Or of you don't find this season especially celebratory:

Happy Tuesday!!

Friday Link Dump

Yay! It's Friday!

This week's cute is a video. Embedding is disabled, sorry. Please click through to YouTube and enjoy:

Friday Link Dump

Hello. If you're looking for links, you're at the right dump. Here's a cute:

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Squee! A real blog post!

Do you like “Pride and Prejudice”? Yes? Then you’ll love this. No? Go read “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and get back to me. Or just keep reading. You might like this anyway.

Neil Gaiman's Commencement Speech

My favorite author is Neil Gaiman. I've twitter-stalked him for years. In case you're uninitiated, he has written lots of good books. Some of them were made into good movies (Stardust, Coraline, etc.). He’s still writing books (ostensibly good ones), and he looks sort of like this:

PostSecret

PostSecret is a continually growing collection of anonymous secrets. (Note: If the site were a movie, it’d be PG-13 at least, but I’ll keep this post G-rated.) It started out as a group art project in January of 2004. Artist Frank Warren distributed this post card and began collecting the responses:

Dear Photograph

Dear Photograph is a young website run by a young dude. Taylor Jones is only 22, and the site is only 8 months old. Already they’ve made a big mark on the internet. The idea is simple. You take an old photo which means something to you, and bring it back to the place where it was taken. Then you line up the old image with the location today as the background and take a new picture like this:

Wookiee the Chew

Today, I'd like to direct you to www.jameshance.com where James Hance showcases his "Relentlessly Cheerful Art".
His most important creation is probably "Wookiee the Chew": an adorable mash-up of Chewbacca, the Wookiee from Star Wars, and Winnie the Pooh.

Old Photos

Estimated Time Suck: 10 minutes each on 5 bold links

My brilliant husband suggested that I let you know about how much time you can expect to burn with my posts. I'd say each of the bold links will take about 10 minutes to peruse. I've included it at the top of the page and intend to go back and add similar estimates to my older posts.
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I love photos. In fact, in the last year or so I've been surprised to learn that I love photos more than most people. They feel like tiny time-machines. That said, I've come across a few repositories of interesting old photos today. I hope you like them at least a little bit, even if your enthusiasm doesn't match my own.

The star of today's post is Maria Popova who blogs at brainpickings.org and tweets as @brainpicker. Yesterday, she showcased an online archive called The Empire That Was Russia. 


Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Peasant Girls, 1909. 

Something about the girl in the middle makes me want to know her story. The "Ethinic Diversity" section of the site is where most of the images of people are, which I find most interesting; but the rest of the site is neat too. Especially neat is the page where they explain how they created color images from black and white negatives.