I usually keep stuff like this in Delicious but I wanted to bring a few things to your attention.

Dreadwhimsy is incredibly short stories inspired by weird photos.

Flea of One Good Thing linked to her six-year-old son's blog, Shut Up I'm Six. What more do you need from, say, games journalism than the following?

hay guys type in wizard101 and you will git a cool game its about a life but in a computer and you have to fight bad guys its cool i like it do you?

Forever's Not So Long is a very short, poignant science fiction movie whose final shots will stay with me for a while.

Waiter Rant, in Las Vegas, shows a person having an inappropriate emotional reaction, then analyzing it. I love that. Dara discusses a dormant skill cropping up again.

...that poem, which I thought I had left composting in the backyard of my brain, to feed future poems but not ever to remerge. Surprise. It's back, shuffling its overwritten zombie stanzas up the stairs, dropping rhymes like clods of earth all over the kitchen floor.

Despite the abundance of exclamation marks, this fantastical history of Quizno's is worth reading till the end.

Firefox now has a Kannada release!

A hilarious Trader Joe's FAQ, and a beautiful song/ad for Trader Joe's (or, as my mother calls it, Trader's Joe).

I had no idea that this program existed to help me travel late Saturday nights!

Ganesha helps Alison Bechdel unclutter after decades of doing her monthly comic strip.

Susan Senator, dealing with her autistic son's move out of her house, writes about the changes that only experience and time bring:

We go into things seeing them only in two dimensions: what we've seen from the outside, and what we've heard/read. Those are the two dimensions. When we enter into the thing, the big thing like marriage or childbirth/adoption, we then experience the addition of the third dimension. We go deeper. We go through some kind of pocket of time and in-the-moment action, and then suddenly we are on the other side....

When it was over, it was over, and I was on the Inside.

So when you go through something as intense as childbirth/adoption and suddenly there is a baby where there wasn't one before, you are just pulled inside out and a whole new consciousness surrounds you.

Then you get used to it. Then you get good at it. Then you enjoy it. And then they are ready to go. And suddenly, there you are, in two dimensions again, looking outward at their leaving you, not knowing how it will feel, only guessing by what others say/do and what you have heard/read.

She strikes at a reason I read so avidly, and that I gain such comfort from reading memoirs of work and parenthood. I can only guess at what those other lives are like, seeing flattened perceptions of their experiences. But if I sort of go through time along with them, watching and listening to their observations over the weeks and years, then I get a little bit of that third dimension from Alyson and Kristen and Susie, Rivka and Rachel, Flea and Susan, and now Claudia .

So parents don't talk in high-pitched baby talk because they like to, but because it works. If I try to explain to the Peanut that I need to put his socks on before I feed him, "I need to put your socks on" doesn't work. Now if I say "I need to put on your little sockies on your little toesies that are soo cutie" in a high-pitched voice with lots of animation (think smiling like crazy, waving the socks around), then I'll get an extra few seconds to put the socks on before he starts screaming. The only problem is that after talking in such a manner for 10+ hours, it's hard to turn off when I talk to an adult (aka, the husband).

And tomorrow night I get to see another Paul, Storm, and Jonathan Coulton concert. Whooo!