the night is my enemy, and you're the only reason why

Wait, there's more clip posts? Oh, darlings. There are always more clip posts.

First up, this is awesome. Though I'm slightly weirded out that it came up on a general Final Fantasy search (I wanted to know how much infringement of Square Enix' IP we were dealing with. I have no plans to email them, I was mostly just curious). Still pretty, though.

While we're on the topic of Final Fantasy, why do these exist?

And artist Russell Walks has designed an absolutely gorgeous Gallifreyan calendar. He's taking preorders now.

There's a steampunk section for craftster.org! Not all the tutorials are tutorials; some are just "my crafts, let me show you them". Still, there are some good tips here, and even the failures are interesting (like the belt pouch that didn't dye perfectly, because it's the first time she's tried to dye leather; but she wanted an aged look anyway, and I think the splotches actually give it character).

From Miss Malaprop comes news of a potential solution to the problem of oversized "smartphones" that won't make calls consistently--a Bluetooth-enabled mini-phone that takes over the actual call functions. So...let me get this straight--rather than make the candybar-styled touchscreen phones work as phones, they're just...including a miniature cell phone?

It does other things, of course--I like the fact that it can serve as a television remote and a photo shutter, thus enabling users to prop their smartphones up somewhere and snap a shot across the room--but to essentially just add on another device to the device one already has, in order to bring more functionality to the device one already has...I tend to agree with the reviewers: it shouldn't have come to this.

The Laughing Squid blog is pimping Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's "Cthulhu in Love" perfume, sold only through Thinkgeek. It's an intoxicating blend of ritual incense, sea kelp, ancient spice, and chocolate, and it's a wonderful tie-in and introduction to what Black Phoenix does as a parfumerie.

Other mentions leading up to Valentine's Day: a pair of hand-painted Sriracha heels, and the giftable 8-bit rose, forever blooming for your personal Player 2.

Back in 2012, graduate architect Jack Munro developed a new method of making bricks--with cow blood. They're not as strong as traditional clay bricks, but much of the construction in his test area (Egypt) features mud bricks, anyway, and he postulates they're just as strong as the mud versions, plus use less water to make.

From the same site comes interesting news on bricks made from wool, bricks made from fly ash (a by-product of coal power plants), bricks made from paper-making waste, and bricks made from steel mill slag.

There's other interesting tech being developed, though--for instance, an entirely new means of data storage: encoding it into DNA. If this catches on at a possible, forget Johnny Mnemonic's measly ten Gb capacity: about three zettabytes' worth can be encoded in around a cup of cloned DNA strands.

There's someone who goes only by "Major Scaled", who's slowly uploading pop songs originally written in minor keys, that have been digitally re-scaled to feature major key blends. They're odd but definitely informative, to the difference between minor and major scales.

Finally, I give you a sloth flying. Well, mostly a sloth being lifted. But hey. Enjoy either way.