#from io9

[arkadion-of-sages]

One of Brandon Sanderson's Unreleased Fantasy Novels Is Becoming a Graphic Novel

Over the past decade, Brandon Sanderson has crafted amazing fantastical worlds in his Mistborn and Reckoner novels, and even contributed to another in the form of finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga after Jordan’s death. But one book of Sanderson’s, White Sand, has never been released... until now.

More White Sand preview pages! (Should be Kenton fighting a deep sandling when he was running the Mastrell’s Path.)

Set on a bizarre planet called Taldain, which has no rotation—so one side is basked in perpetual day, the other in perpetual night—White Sand follows Kenton, the seemingly sole survivor of an order of magic users called Sand Masters, as he tries to uncover the truth behind the slaughter of his fellow magical students and masters.

[v-lagopus]

From io9:

Remember Game of Thrones Season One, when all the major characters were still alive? The ladies of Not Literally are back with another pop culture-parodying video, this time using Gotye to pay tribute to "A Character I Used to Know." Spoilers for Season One.

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I know we're all excited for the first installment of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to come out in a few weeks, and we're all bouncing up and down in gleeful anticipation at the thought of getting to see Gandalf saunter into the Shire again, or to see Martin Freeman run around on hairy prsosethic feet. But I have the firm suspicion that there's no way The Hobbit, as good as it may be, could possibly live up to the epic adventure chronicled above in "The Fellowship of the Ringwraiths." Honestly, if the Ringwraiths didn't have this conversation after the Prancing Pony Inn incident, they certainly should have.

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We've featured some of NASA's images of Earth from space before, in all their "mad painter" glory. But now the "Earth As Art" galleries, which have appeared in museums all over the place, have been culled into a truly extraordinary 75-page book. And you can download it as a free PDF. Get to know our planet a whole new way.

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Let's say that in your post-apocalyptic wanderings, you stumble across a home or restaurant with a particularly sturdy—and well stocked—wine cellar. Suddenly you have a plethora of varietals at your fingertips, but your daily diet still consists of SPAM, small rodents, and MREs. How do you know which wines will best bring out the flavor of your post-apocalyptic cuisine?

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The first nine Superman cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios from 1941 to 1942 are a wonder of animated retrofuturism, giving us a peek into a world that not only had a flying superstrong protector, but also filled viewers' heads with dreams of autonomous robots, comet-controlling telescopes, and machines that could shake the Earth. These films are in the public domain and have been available on the Internet Archive, but now Warner Bros. has released the remastered initial nine from its DVD collection on YouTube.

Very cool - I loved seeing these cartoons as a kid, when the local UHF station would run (very bad copies) very late at night...

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Back in the late 1990s, NOAA's Acoustic Monitoring Project recorded a series of haunting, creepy noises from deep beneath the ocean's surface (you can hear it in the audio above). When this recording began to circulate in the media, people went crazy speculating about the sea monsters, secret government experiments, or alien installations that might have generated it. The mystery sound was nicknamed the "bloop," and nobody could figure out a good explanation for it. Until now.

Aw man, it wasn't the Elder Gods after all... So disappointed!

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From io9:

This Sunday, the Science Channel celebrates the unstoppable power of Firefly, on its tenth anniversary, with Firefly: Browncoats Unite. And here's an early taste of the festivities: hey've given us this exclusive music video, full of autotuned goodness, called "No Power in the 'Verse Can Stop Me." Warning: This could be a major earworm. But if you happen to be celebrating something today, it seems oddly appropriate.

I love this video... I want this song!