Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

Ten great games from TSR that weren't D&D
A trip down nostalgia lane for all of us '80s non-fantasy roleplaying gamers, who turned instead to such RPGs as Top Secret, Gangbusters, Gamma World and Star Frontiers. (Yes, I used to play ALL of these.)

Cairo nominee for Unesco is mired in controversy
Interesting article from the always great GlobalPost.com on Farouk Hosni, Egypt's current Minister of Culture and their nominee for the next head of Unesco; some say that he'll bring a fresh new attitude to the world's largest cultural organization, while others point to his longstanding history of banning and censoring works in his native country.

Holy f-ck, Pavement is reuniting
But of course, you already knew this, didn't you, you hipster douchebag?

Seven-foot-tall marijuana plant discovered in Chicago public park
Niiice. Oops, I mean, kiiiind.

A handy guide to the works of Robert Bolano
One of the only literary websites I actually read, The Millions, recently published a very useful guide to the works of challenging South American author Robert Bolano (who actually died a number of years ago, but whose work is just now getting translated these days into English for the first time), listed in order of difficulty for those finding it hard to just jump right into his most obtuse but most famous novels.

Regarding the irony of liberal Jews actually being the founders of neoconservatism
The recent passing of Irving Kristol, called by many the "godfather of neoconservatism," has prompted this excellent overview of the movement from Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, heavily emphasizing the biggest irony of all: that the political stance now most associated with mouth-breathing backwards 'Christian Taliban' white trash was actually started by a group of liberal intellectual Jews, former Trotskyists forced in the 1930s and '40s to flee both Russia (because of Stalinism) and Europe (because of the Nazis), who became hardcore supporters in the '50s and '60s of a ridiculously strong US military, precisely as a way to fight fascism and communism abroad. (It's no coincidence, after all, that Henry Kissinger has been such an important player in nearly every Republican administration since Nixon; he's exactly one of these former liberal European intellectual Jews that I'm talking about.) What irony, then, that the political movement they founded has by the 2000s turned exactly into the kind of racist, fascist, mob-mentality organization that they abhorred.

Netflix finally awards their million-dollar "fix our recommendation system" prize
For the last three years now, DVD distributor Netflix has offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who could demonstrably improve their movie recommendation system by ten percent (this number I think determined by customer questionnaires and polls); and this week a group of engineers finally did so. Believe it or not, over 51,000 people ended up entering the contest; and in fact, there was another team the same week that beat the ten-percent margin as well, just that they turned in their system just a little later than the first group. Too bad for them! Coming next, yet another contest, this time targeting people who rarely rate the movies they watch, versus this first contest designed specifically for people like me who rate every movie they rent.

The Sun-Times looks at Chicago's Muslim punk-music community
Fascinating.