Linkety-pop!

Some of you know this and some of you don't, but I had a hard drive malfunction last week, a pretty serious one, and I had to take the computer in to the Apple store for a few days to have it "resolved". Those little ""s there should tell you all you need to know, but in the interest of full disclosure, "resolved" means my hard drive died a horrible death and nothing could be saved from it. So all my old writing, all my pictures and music, all my videos that I'd ripped (legally, off DVD's I own, mind you) are all gone, gone, gone.

I was a sad clown for a little while, but now I'm back in business, I've decided to write the whole thing off as a learning experience and I'm back to writing full bore with a blank slate and none of those pesky "Stories that I started and didn't finish, and now I don't know what to do with them"'s hanging over my head.

But it's Monday, and as promised Monday is link day. I'm going to go behind the curtain and show you where a lot of the links you see here magically appear from. This is kind of like Houdini explaining to the audience exactly where he hides the key before they drop him in the tank of water covered in chains, so you now have the power to stop reading my blog by just checking all the sites I check on the regular and reading all those for yourself.

Some of you won't do that, because sometimes I tell funny stories about snakes, and others are too busy to read all the things that happen on all those blogs, and sometimes, you just don't care that much anyway. So, keep coming back to see what I thought was cool, but here's where about 80% of the links on my blog come from.

Actually, I'm not going to give you ALL my secret sites. Just the ones I think are cool, and don't have naked people in them (usually).

Topless Robot - I'm not sure what a topless robot is, but rest assured, there aren't naked pictures of circuit boards or anything on here. This is just a geek compilation blog, lots of stuff about nerdy movies, video games, tv shows, and toys.

I09 - You may have heard of Gawker, which owns a lot of blogs that have to do with celebrities and whatnot. They also run Deadspin (another great site) that's all about sports. (You'll note that almost all their sites have the same layout.) I09 is their sci-fi/fantasy blog. Lots of stuff here about science, science fiction, sci-fi movies, and sci-fi entertainment in general (books, tv, comics, etc.). They update a lot more than Topless Robot, but they also tend to be broader about categories.

Robot Viking - Lots of robots, huh? Robot Viking is mostly about tabletop games, collectible card games, board games, etc. There's lots of D&D stuff there, which is usually about all I care about.

Chris's Invincible Super Blog - This one's just about comic books. Most of you probably don't care, but I find the guy to be very funny. Though sometimes not safe for work.

In4mador - This is just random stuff, but a lot of games, sometimes some cool videos, sometimes just cool websites. It doesn't update nearly as often as it should, but it's almost always high quality.

Metafilter - This is a high traffic site, probably 20 or so posts a day, but a lot of very interesting stuff shows up here. Unlike the sites above that are mostly run by a single person or group of people, anybody who signs up can post to Metafilter (it's kind of like Fark, but a little more grown up).

Icanhascheezburger - Funny cats. Nuff said.

Stay tuned for Wednesday, and if the computer doesn't die between now and then (fingers crossed) I'll see if I can find you some games.

Ciao.