I’m not generally inclined to encourage people to buy stuff, but since By The Sword is having a holiday sale this week, I thought this might be an appropriate moment to mention that it’s a really fun site for those of us whose aesthetics are grounded in another century. It mostly sells anachronistic clothes and

I heard about this just last night: Reapo! The Genetic Opera. Amidst a 2067 epidemic of organ failure,  the MegaCorp GeneCo can sell you replacement organs…but if you don’t keep up on your payments, Repo Man will be dispatched to “repossess” them. Meanwhile, the show features Sarah Brightman, Paris Hilton, and no fewer than 61

Probably by now you’ve seen DC’s new gambit to make you care about buying comics: Neil Gaiman is going to write a Batman story called “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” (Eagle-eyed comics fans will spot the reference to the titularly similar Alan Moore comic, which, yes, is intentional.) This story is set to pub as

Carl Warner’s art gallery is quite entertaining to peruse. His work is fairly wide-ranging, but the common theme seems to be the idea that ordinary things, once removed from the contexts in which we’re accustomed to seeing them, can surprise us: by their beauty, their hilarity, and their resemblance to other things with which we

I’m not much of a videogamer, but I’m intrigued by what I’ve read about the new video game Mirror’s Edge. The game is a “first person runner” based on parkour, the art of running, jumping, climbing, and otherwise moving quickly through urban environments. Amusingly, the game’s main selling point seems to be that playing it

Google has a new service which reports U.S. influenza activity by state using aggregated data of how often people in an area search on flu symptoms. Here’s how it works. Note how ridiculously well its curves overlap the CDC (Center for Disease Control) curves. Quoth Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC:

HRSFANS has decided on an official motto: “Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem” (“Mingle a little folly with your wisdom” from Horace’s Odes) Thank you to everyone who participated in selecting the motto, and particularly to Alexa F. and Kartik V. for suggesting the winning motto!

This week, I was cooking a Halloween-themed meal, and so was looking for dishes I could make.  The best example I found was from I Make Projects. He has some really impressive-looking and disturbing foods, including a very realistic bleeding heart. The other reason I’m posting this is the larger site, imakeprojects.com–it’s a collection of

The first blog post! Eventually, I hope this blog will introduce you to lots of neat things you didn’t know of before. But for the first post, I thought I’d begin with a classic: one of my favorite xkcd comics. In case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t yet discovered xkcd, let this be a

HRSFANS is starting a blog! This blog was jointly inspired by the HRSFANS Index to the Awesome on the Internet and Boing Boing. The idea is to post links and short discussions of things that we like, with the goal of sharing these things both within HRSFANS and with the fan community at large. You