I’d like this video to have been a  bit more how-to and a bit less CV, but it still made me want to try harder to make awesome things.

This is a game I played somewhat obsessively around 2006 and then forgot about. This reddit thread prompted me to look it up, and it’s more fun to play than I remembered.

This isn’t a formal rule of the game, but as I play it if both options you get are garbage (something that happens pretty frequently) you have to put something awesome in the box. It makes you really think hard about all the awesome things you regularly look past.

In response to a spat of gay teen suicides, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage called for an “It Gets Better” campaign, to tell GLBTQ (and questioning) teens that life won’t always be so hard. The title link is to the overflowing YouTube group, though if you were to only do a few, I’d suggest those from Mr. Savage (and husband), Tim Gunn, and Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns.

(Last two links via Merlin Mann and Buzzfeed, respectively.)

Your absurd fact of the day: insider trading rules don’t apply to members of (and workers in) the United State Congress. The logic of the rule:

If a senator happens to personally benefit from legislation that has a broad, general impact on his or her state or the nation, that gain is assumed to be “incidentally related.”

That doesn’t sound wholly unreasonable, but the effect laid out in the article feels a bit like a mockery of the rule of law.

This isn’t intended as a political (or anti-political) point, I just really thought it was crazy.

(via Daily Intel)

Shortly after the St. Petersburg Times announced Mr. Smith’s death on its website, a reader posted a comment stating the following: A man who is working as a dishwasher at the Crab Shack at the age of 48 is surely better off dead.

Web editors removed the comment, deeming it offensive. Though hardly unusual, this [comment] spurred the Times to make Mr. Smith the subject of this story, as a reminder that every life matters.

(via Austin Kleon)

I really like this chart, which I completely decontextualized. I don’t think it needs context, but you can find some where I found it.

(via Yglesias)