1. Walter Russell Mead:

The looming struggle over water is not difficult to foresee. As China and South Asian countries use more and more water in urban development and agriculture, available resources will be intensely protected. China controls the vast Tibetan plateau, where most of South Asia’s rivers originate. Not only does China appropriate upstream resources, but pollution flows downstream, making what water downstream nations have available increasingly unsuitable for consumption or agriculture.

2. New Resident Evil ARG site and the site it takes you to.



3. Graphic design in the movie Moon.



4. Offline Gmail. (The only Chrome app other than Angry Birds that I've installed. Are there others worth installing?)



5. The latest nick and dent sale at TFAW (lots of comics and toys).



6. Tenacious Toys has Kidrobot Azteca Series 2 Dunny blind boxes on sale.

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1. A Gizmodo writer went on two dates with a guy she met on OK Cupid and then wrote a post about how he was a loser for being a world class Magic The Gathering player and not mentioning it in his profile (or maybe she had a different motivation for going on the dates). He participated in an interesting q&a at Reddit. Also funny: Top Signs You’re on a Date With a Gizmodo Writer, including "refers to post-dinner plans as 'occurring after the jump'."



2. Hotel elevator with separate buttons for staff and guests.



3. How to report scraper sites to Google. Via.



4. Lime green couch wallpaper. Via.

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1. Coilhouse fundraising art auction.



2. "Google Street View To Map Amazon - - Street View teams will mount camera-trikes to boats and also pedal through river communities."



3. I added pricing information for the Adventure Time toys I posted several days ago.



4. id Software's Rage will be free for the iPhone and iPad for the new few days.

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1. Win a Kindle (if you're 6 to 14):

Can you write a thrilling, gripping story in just 247 words? We've teamed up with top author Neil Gaiman to set the writing challenge of the summer!



Take the title 'The Guardian', and let your imagination run wild. Tell your story in 247 words exactly, send it to us and the best story will win a Kindle pre-loaded with Neil Gaiman's amazing books published by Bloomsbury (including The Graveyard Book and Coraline). Five runners-up will each received a signed copy of The Graveyard Book.

Details and Neil's story here.



2. Google bought Motorola.



3. "Two construction workers were stuck in an elevator that was filling with water, Captain Melvin explained, with a hint of amazement in his voice. By the time firefighters arrived, the water level had risen as high as the two trapped men’s necks."

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1. Getting banned from Google+ not only leads to being banned from other Google services, but also apparently prevents you from even viewing other people's public Google+ pages.



2. Bill Simmons's latest podcast is an hour-long interview with David Stern about the state of the NBA lockout.



3. The Germanic conquest of England, circa 400 AD:

The massive movement of people was apparently triggered in 407 A.D., the year in which the ailing Roman Empire withdrew much of its army from Britain. Soon afterwards, it stopped paying its soldiers altogether. As a result, the last legionaries took off.



This left the island unprotected, an opportunity that the starving people on the continent couldn't pass up. Angles, Saxons and Jutes left their mound dwellings and broad bean fields in the wetlands of northern Europe in droves.



Entire family clans set out to sea, usually in the spring and summer when the water was calm. Their ships were bulging with household goods, cows and horses. According to an old chronicle, the land of the Angles was soon "abandoned."

Via.

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1. Wired on Google's demand for real names on Google+, except for celebrities. Via.



2. There's an overabundance of brilliant musicians and chess players.



3. This is a pretty cool low-fi scary game. Via these sites.

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Celebrate your love of Twitter, Google, and Facebook with these social networking propaganda posters on sale at Etsy. Via.

*Buy propaganda posters at eBay.

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1. "Grocery Outlet, Supermarket Chain Where Oddball Products End Up." (Oddball products like Cleavage Creek wine.)

2. Relationship advice.

3. "Book Of 'Roadside Prostitutes' Made Entirely With Google Street View."

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1. Llama overlooking Machu Picchu.

2. Apparently I need to eat at Black Market Liquor Bar in Studio City. Via.

3. Another Google+ horror story. I have no idea why they delete not only your G+ account, but also your Google Reader account.

4. And this is why Google wants so bad to force people to use their real names on their social service. Via.

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1. Since my dumbphone works great and is cheap, I've been waiting for an iTouch with a solid camera. Optional 3G would be the cherry on top.

2. Seriously, it's one report after another of Google deleting accounts without warning, and then restoring them for celebrities. Some class action attorney should look into it. And you'd have to be nuts to buy a Chrome OS netbook.

3. Sculpture of a pigeon pooping on a Nazi. (But I was actually looking for video of this from the opening.)

4. Has there been any evidence that the News of the World phone hackers used their misdeeds to expose actual news? Or was it just to go after tabloidy gossip?

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1. It wasn't (just) an iceberg that sank the Titanic. Via.

2. Two really cool Google Street view events. Click ahead one step to see sudden winter and the rapture. Via.

3. The SWAT team that protects NASA.

*Buy patches at eBay.

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1. "Clark Kent has very rarely changed into Superman in a phone booth, including not once on the 1950s Superman TV series!" And at the same link, Death of the Endless appeared in an issue of the Hulk.

2. Fun comic book scan featuring Hawkman turned into a gorilla by Gorilla Grodd (site is NSFW).

3. Fascinating that some bloggers hear about a tragedy and immediately devise ways to turn it into a SEO opportunity.

4. Relatedly, the manner in which Google has deleted (and occasionally restored) accounts without warning over vaguely-defined Google+ abuse is pretty disturbing.

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1. I finally saw Deathly Hallows part 2. All in all I thought it was great, with the talk with the Ravenclaw ghost being especially cool. The special effects were terrific, aside from the horrendous broomstick escape from the flames. And the scene with Dumbledore in limbo flickered so badly (in 2D) that I had to look away.

2. Grant Morrison doesn't like superfans (to say the least). The excerpt mentions Morrison's take on Mark Millar's Wanted. A few years ago, I'd heard so much about Wanted that I picked up an issue and was absolutely horrified by what I was reading.

3. Is this from The Onion? Google is offering a credit card "with what it calls a competitive interest rate, an ample credit line and no annual fee. The catch: it can only be used to buy search advertising on the world's No.1 Internet search engine." Via.

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1. Find out what Google thinks you're interested in (and turn off the tracking). Via.

2. JShea posted the three sculptures he created for Gallery Nucleus's Harry Potter show.

3. Since I seem to be obsessed with Bruce Timm's art right now, here's a pinup.

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1. For other Blogger users, here's a useful comment by a Blogger employee from Ann Althouse's blog:

While our export tools may have been somewhat unreliable when handling blogs this large (Althouse is one of the largest Blogger blogs!), along the way helping Ann we discovered ways to improve them and moving forward Blogger will be much better equipped to handle cases like this.

So Ann while I'm personally sad to see you go (if that is indeed the decision), I wanted to let you know that you will always have a home on Blogger and a team who cares about your experience with Blogger. That also (of course) goes for everyone. We love hearing from users, and anyone can bug me directly on Twitter (@electrobutter) if something is on their mind, or hit up the team via @blogger.

It seems like such a typical Google thing to do to make such outreach efforts only when it was too late to keep her on the platform. Her entire Blogger blog was deleted, possibly by error, possibly by a rogue Google employee, last month.

2. "An investigation into Atlanta’s public school system has uncovered evidence that teachers and principals have been secretly erasing and correcting answers on students’ tests for as long as a decade."

3. "For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns."

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Nexus Contraptions, a new free game from Google. It loaded very fast and runs smoothly. Via.

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1. Essentially unlimited free image storage with Picasa if you sign up for Google+.

2. "Beginning Friday, the County of Los Angeles Public Library and the Los Angeles Public Library will offer cardholders the ability to download songs from Sony Music’s catalog -- for free."

3. "Amazon is encouraging reviewers to receive free products through Amazon Vine, an invitation-only program in which the top 1,000 reviewers are offered a catalog of free products to review." Via.

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1. Blogger was down all night again. You had to really hunt for an acknowledgment and solution.

2. I meant to post this last night, but here's a fascinating line from the Figures.com tour of Neca:

Here paint applications are applied based on a Paint Master NECA provides. These can get pretty complex. For example, NECA's Gears of War figures feature 150+ paint applications per figure, most all done by hand in the Chinese factories. That's alot of work to make one figure - about 6 - 9 months from start to finish.

3. Dr. Sketchy's San Francisco had a Star Wars-themed session. Here's a semi-safe for work video of the event, and a totally NSFW version, and you can find the uploaded sketches here.

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1. NY Times' review of the first Chrome notebook:

How well does Google’s newfangled concept hold up in the real world?

Unfortunately, not very well.

It's ludicrously expensive considering its shortcomings.

2. Did you see earlier this week that a PR company promised to punish sites running negative video game reviews? I couldn't help but think of it in reading the uselessly contradictory conclusion to Destructoid's review of Alice: Madness Returns:

In spite of tedium and technical faults, I quite enjoyed Alice: Madness Returns, which says quite a bit for the extraordinary world McGee has created from the blueprint of Caroll's original tales. Fans of the original Alice find plenty of here to love, and will certainly want to return to Wonderland to work towards a satisfying narrative conclusion. For others, putting up with the game's monotonous design may prove to be a personal spiral into madness they may want to avoid.

UPDATE: To be fair, as the commenter points out, Destructoid gave Duke Nukem a terrible review.

3. There's a theme park in Las Vegas where you can operate excavators and other machinery. But packages start at $400 and no kids under 14, so I can't imagine it lasting.

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1. Misconceptions about China.

2. Two lackluster reviews of Samsung's Chrome laptop. Tablets, I understand (although I'll wait until they're half the price). But mostly reading the review of the Chrome laptop I'm left wondering why anyone would buy such a thing instead of buying a Windows laptop with a Chrome browser.

3. If you're a Batman Brave and the Bold obsessive, the latest episode starring The Atom(s) was placed for sale at iTunes ($3) and Amazon ($2) before airing. Via.

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