A few interesting reads have cropped up in my feed reader recently.

This one is a long, fairly interesting post on the etymology of various video game characters names. Very long, but interesting if only for the trivia, and the subtle and strange changes in names from Japanese to English translation (or sometimes from Italian or German to Japanese to English).

Ever since Ferrett posted a link to his OverThinking It essay, The Horrific Underbelly of "Up", I've been reading the essays on OverThinkingIt. Recently a reader wrote in asking if the use of Deus Ex Machina was a crutch for lazy writers and if it was overused in the new series of Doctor Who. The resulting essay, The How of Who, weighed in at six pages (the first few about Deus Ex Machina in general) and proved to be an interesting analysis. As the graph on page 5 shows, Technobabble solves 12 of the tenth Doctor episodes plots (7 solved by unexplained Timelord superpowers).

And on a lighter note, Matryoshka cell phones.

Also, I have two more DreamWidth invite codes available.