Some links of a questionable nature:
:: I had to check to see if this is a real thing, and apparently it is.
Yes, that is a Christmas ornament, by Hallmark, depicting Kirk and Spock bidding farewell as Spock dies at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kind of amazing that someone thought this scene, iconic as it may be, needed to be styled as a Christmas ornament.
Hey, why stop there, Hallmark? Why not an entire line of such things, so we can have an entire tree of depressing scenes from movies and pop culture? We can have the kid shooting Old Yeller! Spider Man cradling Gwen Stacy’s dead body! The little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List! Brooks’s suicide from The Shawshank Redemption! Merlin Olsen’s wife shrieking helplessly with Mary Ingalls’s baby in her arms as the flames engulf her in Little House on the Prairie! The Red Wedding from Game of Thrones! Come on, Hallmark! Let’s have the Depressingest Little Christmas Tree ever!
:: Here’s a fascinating article about how the maps in fantasy novels get made. I tend to be really militant about this: If you give me a fictional world, then you’d better give me a map.
:: Take this with a really big grain of salt, but I love stuff like this anyway: an underwater “Stonehenge” that may point to a civilization ten thousand years gone. I have big doubts on this, but the notion of a massive society flourishing that long ago, and having fallen so long ago that virtually all evidence is gone, is an idea that really appeals to me. Among other things, I could use it as part of my backstory for a future series of space opera novels! There would be this ancient Galactic empire that…oh wait. Did that already.
More next week, maybe! Or maybe not. I’m capricious.
