Link roundup

1. How to use Amazon to self-publish.

2. FYI, it's free shipping plus 30% off everything at American Eagle this weekend.

3. Creepy tree wallpaper.

Illustration roundup

Roger and Tetsuo by Michael Dialynas.




How to make oatmeal wrong (i.e., the McDonald's way) by Ben Mullins.




Santánico Pandemónium (Salma Hayek in From Dusk Til Dawn) by Jason Levesque for an upcoming Tarantiono/Coen Bros-themed show. You can buy prints from the first show here.




Alice by Joseph Fox - - the winning entry in Dark Horse's Alice: Madness Returns art contest.




In this video tutorial, Todd McFarlane shows how to draw "dynamic hands."

*Buy Akira toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Todd McFarlane gives a video lesson on drawing hands and fingers.

2. Long article about the Portal 2 ARG. For example:

Even a player who chased after a red herring had a good story to tell. One guy got the idea in his head that he was supposed to find a clue at The Couch Potato, a furniture warehouse in Santa Cruz, California. Team Meat learned about this by monitoring the IRC channel, so Edmund McMillan of Super Meat Boy fame intercepted him at the warehouse and surprised him with a signed copy of Super Meat Boy.

And also:

The second big mistake we made was pulling the ARG champions away from their communities too early. Based on contributions in various games, on the fan wiki and in the IRC channels, we hand-selected a few individuals who had contributed disproportionately to the ARG and offered to fly them to Valve.

In order to give sufficient time to notify them and make travel arrangements, Valve contacted them a few days before the start of the crescendo. We didn't require them to sign any NDAs, but to maintain the fiction, we encouraged them to take a step back from the ARG and claim that they had been kidnapped by minions of GLaDOS.

We failed to realize just how influential these few individuals had been in keeping the ARG running like clockwork. The wiki stopped getting updated, leaving other players confused as to what was going on.

Via.

3. And speaking of ARGs, "Duff Goldman offers a lifetime of birthday cakes to anyone who finds his stolen Corvette." Via.

Link roundup

1. Instructions and template for making a paper bird mobile.

2. Instructions for turning off in-app purchases on your iPhone to prevent your child (or yourself) from racking up massive charges.

3. "Google's head of research, said the main reason they launched [Google Voice] was so they could better learn how to transcribe human voice to text."

How to make an optical illusion book cover

I previously posted the cool book covers for Simon Morden's Equations of Life series. The video above shows how to create book covers with similar optical illusions. Via.