I managed to get the gallery down to a shortlist of six. You can vote below, or visit the gallery to see all the entries. (Highly recommended — there is some incredibly creative and wonderful work there.)
Feel free to tell me what an idiot I am for my choice of six in the comments!
Voting is open until October 11th.
Though I’m not sure this cartoon has the elegance of the madeleine episode from The Remembrance of Lost Time (the first volume of which I’ve actually read), this cartoon wins on brevity. If you want to save yourself several weeks of reading, and need to know about this reference, you can find the text for the madeleine episode here, or even better, you can read my own memory of how this passage goes, as follows:
“No
sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. I had developed superpowers. I could fly, and turn invisible, invisible, not only in the metaphorical sense, in the way that I was non-existent to the crowds of French wankers surrounding me because I was their social inferior, but actually unable to register to their visual senses, no matter their level of acuity! My brain was pulsing with incipient powers that raised in me several anxieties; would I be able to rip the bodice off the dancing girl who had so recently slighted me because of 
my deeply introverted and overly sensitive, many would say almost womanly nature, with my new found and burgeoning telekinesis? Would she object to my transparent advances, or succumb to my new super-strength, virility, nay, almost god-like extroversion and clear superiority? In any case, revenge would be mine!”
The Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures contest is now closed to entries — I’ll announce the five finalists later tomorrow, and then you can all vote on your fave. Why so long to announce the shortlist? Well, I think everyone should have a chance to revel in the collective genius and creativity of the whole gallery, which can be found here.
One of the longest-running carnivals on the web, the Storyblogging Carnival, has a new edition up at Diva for Geeks.
Virtual reality goes mythological in You Can Punch a Unicorn, at Name Your Tale. You may also want to check out a continuing series here on The Skwib, A Brief History of Unicorns. Part one: Getting Biblical. Part two: Vedic Culinary Prescriptions. Part three: The Golden Age of Unicorns.
And Defenestration – A Literary Humor Magazine – has lots of good stuff on offer. Their last issue is here, and a recent effort of mine is here.
I sometimes wonder about this.
I will admit to only reading the first three or four paragraphs before re-tweeting, but some people don’t seem to read any of an article before recommending it.
You can follow me here, by the way.