Underwater Invasion – Snake Eel, by Jason Isley

• Your Feels As Free Labor: Emoticons, Emotional Cultures, and Facebook
• Polenth’s Quill: Women and Others in Genre
• I’d like to belong here. Do you think that I could?
• An Open Letter To Lindsay Lohan Because I Have Hope For You And I Want You To Have Hope For You, Too
• How the Dino Sounds in Jurassic Park Were Made
• Do e-readers inhibit reading comprehension? While I’m not completely sure I agree with this, I have noticed that I read differently on my Kindle than I do with a physical book. It’s harder to flip back to a particular section unless I highlight as I go and I often feel as if I’m reading works of indeterminate length–while the percentages and whatnot help me orient myself in the text, it’s not the same as physically feeling that I’m almost done.
• My Deal With Readers (via lots of people on Twitter)
• This is horrifying and possibly triggering. Orphan Fever: The Evangelical Movement’s Adoption Obsession (via)
• Nudity, profanity, and music energize Roger Ebert’s raucous Chicago memorial
• Small Time Literary Ambition Doesn’t Come Cheap
• April edition of Asymptote, an online magazine devoted to world literature, includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, criticism, and interviews among other cool stuff. Donna especially recommends this interview with Olena Bormashenko about translating Soviet era Russian science fiction and this translation of an open letter to Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask by author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, who is of Swedish/Tunisian descent, asking her to switch skins with him.
• When Dickens met Dostoevsky Fascinating! (via)
• Who Can Save the ‘Today’ Show?
• A Girl’s Gotta Eat I can personally attest to the deliciousness of Hanne’s cooking.
• A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip Gabby Giffords is righteously and eloquently furious about the Senate’s inability to pass a background check requirement for gun sales. The Onion weighs in as well: Next Week’s School Shooting Victims Thank Senate for Failing to Pass Gun Bill
• The Ramones tread very, very softly when talking about working with Phil Spector, 1982
• Self-Publishing and Webcomics, or “Haven’t We Been Here Before?”
• And just a couple of links about the bombs that went off earlier this week at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. As many of you know, Boston is my very favorite city–I have family there and I’ve visited it a lot. If I were independently wealthy, I would live there.  Alas, I am not, so I have to be content with annual visits.
  • Twitter and news: The canary down the mine
  • Dear Terrorist: An Open Letter To The Person Who Bombed My City
  • Boston, Trauma, and the Closed Loop “A vine has no past, no future. A vine is a moment without a memory.”
  • The Saudi Marathon Man

Here’s a couple of excellent things to help you get your weekend started:

Starships! from bironic on Vimeo.

(comes at us by way of Liz Bourke)

And this is the pure distilled essence of the internet. I don’t know about anyone else, but my life is now complete.