We spend a lot of time on the internet here at the BRI, and, as you know, it’s a barren, loveless wasteland that will suck every last Higgs Boson of your soul out of your body, taken away to be stored in the Devil’s servers (pretty sure they’re in the Cayman Islands) for eternity. But every once in a while we get lucky, and we run into “Internet Wonders,” like this:

Welcome to Tellers of Weird Tales, an online encyclopedia of the men and women, writers and artists, who contributed to Weird Tales magazine and its companion titles,Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, from their founding in the 1920s and ’30s until the revivals of the 1970s and ’80s.

That is just a great idea. It simply features writers (and magazine artists) of stories you’re not likely to come across in a lot of places around the internet, and gives a short bio and a list of their work.  Their aren’t examples of the work (except in the case of artists – and those are very cool), but it’s easy enough to use Google with the titles to find the stories.

Here’s a sample:

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Née Elizabeth Stevenson
Aka Mrs. Gaskell
Born September 29, 1810, Chelsea, London
Died November 12, 1865, Holybourne, Hampshire, England

For Weird Tales: “The Old Nurse’s Story” (story, Oct. 1927)

Elizabeth Gaskell, friend and associate of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Eliot Norton, and other prominent people of her age, was a successful and well-loved author despite her short life. With Dickens, Wilkie Collins (see below), and three others, she wrote “The Haunted House,” a collection of interconnected stories set in a haunted house. “Conducted by” Dickens (who also wrote the first and last installments and one in between), the story was published in All the Year Round in 1859. Mrs. Gaskell’s contribution to Weird Tales was “The Old Nurse’s Story” from October 1927.

We googled “The Old Nurse’s Story,” and found it at the Project Gutenburg of Australia. (The Gutenburg sites are another wonder of their own that we’ll have to write about one day.) So that’s two wonders for the price of one.

We approve!

P.S. To see more cool attractions on the World Wide Web we’re highlighted over the years, hit “Internet Wonders” in the tags below this post.

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Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’s HOLIDAY SALE – 30% of all books (here’s the latest!) – goes through December.

Have you heard of Kickstarter? It’s an online fundraising website that more and more people are using to raise money for projects, from musical recordings to films to science projects, and much more.

How it works: People apply to Kickstarter to have their project appear on their website. They have to establish a fundraising goal, and set a deadline to reach the amount. If it gets the okay the project goes up, and, hopefully, people start pledging whatever amount they’d like to give for the project. If not enough money is pledged – no money is collected. If enough is raised, kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon (they handle the money collection) takes 3-5%, and the person with the project gets the rest.

How successful has Kickstarter been? Since being founded in 2009, they’ve s raised more $75 million dollars for more than 10,000 projects. And almost 50% of the people who apply reach their funding goals. That’s not bad.

And check out their highest-funded projects. (They’re listed in different categories.):

• TikTok + LunaTik by Scott Wilson and MINIMAL wanted to design a way to turn iPod Nanos into “the world’s coolest multi-touch watches.” How much did they raise through Kickstarter: $942,578.

• A Comic Anthology created entirely by more than 140 women: they got $109,301.

• A filmmaker got $345,992 to make the film Blue Like Jazz.

Pretty dang cool.