News You Can Bruise for 2003 May 12 (entry 1)

Mon May 12 2003 19:17 It's Payback Time!: TEoM was linked to by a lot of weblogs. Here are some of the ones I liked, with links to the cool stuff I found via them that made me like them.

• Angels from Another Pin linked to a great site about medieval writing. Includes explanations of what the ancients thought they were doing when they went through all that trouble to put into manuscripts stuff that now seems like fancy superfluous junk. I'm talking to you, illumination!
• Stormcaller.net has occasional roundups in categories "Science/Tech", "Geek", and "Stuff", which is partly stuff you've seen on BoingBoing, and partly stuff that could go on BoingBoing but hasn't. Highlights include a one-man cruise missile project, a UK-based site for less destructive tech status symbols, and the awesome, already-linked-everywhere to-scale renditions of fictional spaceships (the cool thing is not just that they're to scale but that they're all drawn in the same sort of semitechnical style, so you could see them all engaged in one enormous, canon-shattering space battle).
• relicious linked to Blogmatcher, which is like an automatic version of The Blog Twinning Project which uses some weird algorithm to decide that your weblog is like other weblogs that link to the same thing. (Incidentally, TBTP now pairs Crummy with The Cynic's Tea Party) I think that Blogmatcher should not consider my links to things which are themselves weblogs, but other than that it's useful (but doomed to be assimilated into Technorati and forgotten about).

  Also from relicious I found an archive of Transformers. I'm not some kind of Transformers freak or anything, but I enjoyed the prototypes and the Transformers Knock-Offs page. The latter does not cover entire lines of Transformers knockoffs like the Gobots; it details actual copies of actual Transformers with pathetic filed-off serial numbers of names ("Ancient Animal?" Give me a break!). It also reminds me how pointless a lot of the later Transformers were. How was a Transformer that turned into a dinosaur supposed to fool anyone? "Oh, it's just an ordinary titanium Triceratops, nothing to worry--GAAH! IT TURNED INTO A ROBOT WITH A GUN!"

• I don't think 101-280 actually linked to TEoM, but they get an honorable mention for being named after the freeway junction I traverse every weekday going to work and back.