A Varied Miscellany

I am going to Italy tomorrow! It'll be my first holiday with my new camera, so I can take even more weird pictures of windows than I usually do. It's funny, when I was younger I used to make fun of my dad for his desire to take artistic photos, usually of doors or other architectural features, when we went on holiday, while I and the rest of my family was happy to take the usual touristy snapshots. Now, in the last couple of years, I too have gone over to the "artistic photos of doors" side...

Anyway, this seems like a good excuse to offload some interesting articles/sites I've had open in my tabs. I hope they're interesting.

• Polygon Map Generation demo - create maps (2D and 3D) of imaginary islands with this generator. Great for fantasy writers, or just people who like looking at maps and random islands, like me.
• Scars of Sarajevo - photoessay on Sarajevo 20 years after the end of the war, focusing on the physical damage like the bullet holes, Sarajevo Roses, etc. Some really good photographs here.
• Pictures of Kyrgyzstan - exactly what it says! I've become more interested in Central Asia and its history recently, and this tumblr is full of gorgeous photos. I seriously want to go to Kyrgyzstan some day!
• An Ancient Babylonian Customer Service Complain Inscribed on a Clay Tablet Around 1750 BC - this has made its rounds up and down the internet, but I still love it so much. Nothing more remains of Ozymandias, but we still know that Ea-nasir is a shitty merchant.
• Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - I've never played the game, but this review is hilarious. Choice quote: "S: I don't know any ex-yakuza running orphanages.
  K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy.
  M: You sure it wasn't just a tax shelter?
  K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know."
• Books Set In ...  - find books set in any continent, country, or city you want. Very useful database.
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: the danger of a single story - I'm just putting this here in the hope that it'll remind me to actually watch this talk.
• Proportional Pie Chart of the World's Most Spoken Languages - who doesn't love pie charts? There are some interesting surprises there; the huge size of Chinese is obvious, but I had no idea about languages like Malay and Tagalog having so many speakers.
• Owls with Stupid Expressions on their Faces - :')