incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

MTV asks Martin Freeman, Ian McKellan, and Andy Serkis, to play Fuck, Marry, Kill with Tolkien characters, and it is amazing: three-minute video.

(Nb.: not seeing The Hobbit until this weekend, no movie spoilers.)

The Gameological Society has an ode to Glitch, for those of you who played.

Tobias Buckell, "How I used Kickstarter to reboot a book series, and my career (and maybe my life?)".

Okay, I'm done now, honest.

• I have a Starveling Cat in Echo Bazaar now! Thank you again, yhlee. I can't express how much this amuses me. Anyone who's playing that I don't already know, leave your username in comments and I'll follow you under my game account.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (recorded off cable, half-watched while stitching) is not a very good movie. Granted, it wasn't a very good book. But I wouldn't have thought it possible to make the action sequences of the ending so boring on-screen.
• Reinventing the stitching wheel, part 25 in a series: linen turns out to not be a good fabric for blackwork.
• My car needs major repairs for the second time this year. I will not have put enough money into it to equal the payments I would have made on a new car this year, but I'm worried that I'm on the downward slide (it's a 2003 Prius with almost 94K miles). And I'm sad that I no longer love it. Any suggestions for feeling happy with one's older car again?
• The problem with Horton Hatches the Egg is that Horton is a Mary Sue, specifically the kind where the virtue of the protagonist is demonstrated by piling absurd pain and indignity on top of absurd pain and indignity. (Like an early Mercedes Lackey novel, or an SGA post-"Trinity" fic, except that Horton hasn't blown up a solar system.)
• I haven't done a SteelyKid post in ages, so those of you who don't follow Chad's blog won't have seen this recent picture. I have to point it out because it is so characteristic: open book, bare feet (she will not wear socks if she has a choice about it), random item of clothing she saw and insisted on wearing, stuffed animals, and big grin. That's our toddler.