The Burntwire Brothers spent two years customizing a room in their house just for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Decor includes iron-bound doors, sconces, swords, horned skulls, medieval-looking chandeliers (with dimmers that the DM can control), hidden strobes, fog machines, and a simply ridiculous number of books and modules. You can see more photos and a few design notes here.
Even if you’re tepid about D&D, the decor is great inspiration for adding a dungeon-esque element to any room in the house. I would absolutely love a library decorated like this.
Xandra of EvaDress is a professional pattern maker who has a great fondness for “retro sews.” Her blog is full of vintagey goodness, and right now she’s working on replicating a bat costume she found in an 1887 French publication.
She doesn’t have a pattern, just this picture, so she’s doing it all from scratch and occasionally posting about her progress: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
There’s not a lot of detail on her process, but I’ll definitely be interested in seeing the finished product. The dress is gorgeous, but I’d love just the bat-wing cape as a separate piece. With luck, maybe she’ll sell the pattern in her store.
Tiny Dragon Lizard – These adorable Indonesian lizards look like itty-bitty dragons. (Hat tip to poopisan, who sent the link along with the comment, “I want a whole flock of them to do my bidding!” Me too.)
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – About two seconds after I posted the link above, it was announced that Tim Burton is going to adapt it as a movie.
Poe Wedding Invitations – Although I question using “Nevermore” as a thematic element in a wedding invitation, these are certainly elegant and unusual.
Hayden Peters is one of the world’s foremost collectors of “mourning jewelry,” and he showcases “memorial, mourning, sentimental jewellery (sic) and art” on the wonderful Art of Mourning site. There are photos and descriptions of art, jewelry, accessories, textiles, and ephemera from many different periods and cultures. The site also has a nice resource section, including a discussion of common symbolism, a list of books on “funeralia,” and contact information for several vendors who handle such items.
This is a fantastic resource for funeral artwork and mementos mori, and it makes me wish I had the kind of disposable income that would let me collect this stuff. It’s just gorgeous.
Bonus Link: Collectors Weekly recently did an interview with Peters, discussing the history of mourning jewelry and how he got started collecting it.
The Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently acquired a baby Giant Pacific Octopus and touted its OctopusCam in press releases. It turns out that the zoo has a whole load of live animal cams, including ferrets, gharials, and Naked Freakin’ Mole Rats.
Many of the other cams look out onto empty space much of the time when the animal is elsewhere in its enclosure, but the NMR cam seems to nearly always be aswarm with the squirmy critters. If you need a little lift during the day, go take a peek at ‘em.
Now we just need to figure out whom to lobby to get a webcam in the bat enclosure.
(Title shamelessly stolen from this Pharyngula post, where the comments are also highly entertaining.)
Letters to Dead People is exactly what it says it is: Celine Song writes short, sometimes puzzling, letters to famous dead people. They have to be, in her words, actually dead:
No physical heartbeat. Emptied bladder. Dilated pupils. No consumption of air. Even if their metaphorical hearts have stopped and their metaphorical bladders are emptied, if they are physically breathing, no letter for them. Sorry!
Some of the letters are funny, some are rather moving. She accepts letter submissions (with a coupleof caveats), so if there’s something you’d like to tell a dead person, this might be an excellent forum. The “morbid little project” is a lot of fun!
UK-based company Natural Legacy is taking green burials to a whole ‘nother level, with sustainable coffins made of wool. What makes it even more wonderful is that this site was sent to me by alert reader Linda, who found it in one of her knitting magazines. As she put it, the coffins were featured in a “‘now you CAN take your stash with you!’ kind of way.” I sort of love the idea of knitting your final resting place.
The site also offers woollen cremation urns, organic cotton shrouds, and coffin handles made of jute. The handles in particular amuse me more than they probably should.
But anyway.
The coffin and urn exteriors appear to be felted wool, and the site says that the frame is recycled cardboard. If you’re a fiber artist and like to do felting, a DIY urn might not be out of the question.
I have a tendency–certain members of my family that I happen to be married to would call it “an unfortunate tendency”–when encountering any large quantity of really cheap produce, to buy it and figure out what to do with it later. Not infrequently that seems to involve a good soaking in alcohol. Thus, when I scored a giant bag of lemons a few months ago, I decided to try my hand at limoncello.
There are a number of recipes floating around, including several variations obsessively documented at Limoncello Quest. My approach to the whole undertaking was somewhat more relaxed but it turned out splendidly. It’s pretty hard to truly screw up homemade liqueur, so don’t be afraid to experiment.
Ingredients:
One 750ml bottle of high-proof grain alcohol, such as Everclear (which is 151 proof). I’ve seen recipes that call for vodka instead, but the much lower alcohol content means that it’ll be pretty low-octane once you dilute it with sugar syrup.
A buncha lemons. You can decide how many this is; recipes vary wildly. You should probably use at least 10. In the end, I used about 30 (but not all at once).
1-3/4 cups sugar
2-1/2 cups water
Equipment:
A glass jar large enough to hold about six cups of liquid (a bit larger is better), with a tight-fitting lid. I used a big canning jar.
Something to remove the peel: A microplane grater is best; I used a regular kitchen grater. You could probably use a vegetable peeler or paring knife in a pinch.
A strainer for removing the peel; you could use a slotted spoon in a real pinch, but strainers are cheap.
A filter: Coffee filters will remove pretty much all particulate matter; a few layers of cheesecloth is fine.
YouTube member TheFakingHoaxer specializes in realistic-looking hoax videos of events like the space shuttle encountering UFOs or ghost sightings in the woods. You can see the whole collection of videos on his YouTube channel.
I expect to see some of these making the rounds via e-mail in the next few months, “proving” that aliens and demons exist.
The Burntwire Brothers spent two years customizing a room in their house just for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Decor includes iron-bound doors, sconces, swords, horned skulls, medieval-looking chandeliers (with dimmers that the DM can control), hidden strobes, fog machines, and a simply ridiculous number of books and modules. You can see more photos and a few design notes here.
Xandra of 
Hayden Peters is one of the world’s foremost collectors of “mourning jewelry,” and he showcases “memorial, mourning, sentimental jewellery (sic) and art” on the wonderful 
UK-based company 
I have a tendency–certain members of my family that I happen to be married to would call it “an unfortunate tendency”–when encountering any large quantity of really cheap produce, to buy it and figure out what to do with it later. Not infrequently that seems to involve a good soaking in alcohol. Thus, when I scored a giant bag of lemons a few months ago, I decided to try my hand at limoncello.