Link roundup

1. Game of Thrones Monopoly board.

2. Photo of a lightning strike above a power plant. Via.

3. "Long before Russia’s femme fatale Anna Chapman fueled countless blog posts and male fantasies, Israel had a female spy whose success in her profession’s dark arts made her one of history’s most notorious honey-traps."

*Buy board games at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Fascinating article about Stanley and Livingstone by Jess Nevins. (If you've enjoyed the various League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes, then you should definitely pick up his companion books.)

2. Steve Wing writing about comics:

And take the Hulk. The Hulk was this rampaging engine of destruction, sure, but still, deep down, he was basically a nice guy. That is, he was the reverse of how we actually were in seventh grade, me and Rick and Jerry: all too nerdishly nice on the surface, but underneath raging.

Via.

3. First 15 minutes of L.A. Noire.

4. First five minutes of Duke Nukem Forever.

Link roundup

1. Yahtzee Croshow of Zero Punctuation participated in an ask me anything at Reddit. One notable comment:

Motion controls are a dead end and the industry has thankfully started to understand that. Nintendo's more recent first-party games have left the motion controller behind almost totally, or use it with no more depth than a token Sixaxis control.

Relatedly here's a great video where he responded to hate mail he received after panning Smash Bros. Brawl.

2. From a much longer article about politics in Italy:

When unification came, it was led not by the major city-states of the past but by the half-French region of Piedmont, an area peripheral to Italian history and with a long record of rounding up and executing Italian nationalists. Nor had Piedmont planned to annex the whole peninsula. Exploiting wars between France and Austria to acquire the rich northern part of the country, the Piedmontese king was faced with a startling fait accompli when the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, initially leading an expedition of only a thousand men, quite unexpectedly conquered the whole of Sicily and southern Italy. Garibaldi then offered the territory as a gift to the now enlarged Piedmont, which, as much to avoid the spread of republicanism as for any other reason, sent its armies south to meet him. On March 17, 1861, Italy became a single state under the Piedmontese crown.

The new country’s prospects were not encouraging. The vast majority of Italians had not sought unity and many had fought against it; those who supported it were divided between republicans and monarchists, and some were not so much nationalist as internationalist, working toward a united socialist Europe. An estimated 97.5 per cent of the population didn’t speak the national language. (Most spoke one of scores of local dialects.) The Catholic Church, which before unification had governed territories in central Italy, remained implacably opposed to the new state and for decades instructed practicing Catholics not to vote in elections. Those in the north had little idea how to govern the economically backward south. In short, in Graziano’s view, it was a complete fluke that the country came into being at all. The fact that it survived, he argues, had far more to do with the fraught power games among France, England, and Austria than with any real will of the Italians to exist as a nation.

Via.

3. Funny 404 error page (ignore the instructions and scroll down).

Link roundup

1. io9:

The Isle Royale wolf population was founded in the late 1940s, and it's been under close scientific observation ever since. Researchers had assumed that the wolves were completely cut off from their relatives on the mainland, but in 1997 one wolf crossed over to the island using an ice bridge, and his arrival may go a long way to keep the population genetically viable.

2. And also from io9:

About 9,000 years ago, the Fuzhou Basin in southeastern China fell victim to rising sea levels, pushing underwater the marshy lands needed for rice farming. The marooned people there became seafarers, which eventually led to the colonization of Taiwan.

3. An ARG at Valve.