The alternate moose just tipped me off to the existence of some weird, interesting group creation thingamies at Reddit. You’ve heard of “first world problems”, right? Reddit has developed that concept somewhat, in some pretty bizarre ways. Find out more about the screaming and the tower and the giant wasps.

Very tangentially related: middle class movie posters

Mail order husbands (via Gator)

Deep Throat in the 21st century: Wired has a guide on how to leak something and not get nailed for it.

An interactive visualisation of every running joke in Arrested Development. (via David Ritchie, and then the entire AD-loving internets.) AD has to be the densest TV show ever, right? There’s just so much stuff in every episode. And with new episodes almost due, AD lovers really need to check out this delightful taster: Insert Me Anywhere

GeoGuesser is a fantastic browser game and destroyer of productivity. It lands you in a random Google Maps Street View spot, and you have to guess where in the world you are. (again via David Ritchie then everybody.)

I’ve made it about a quarter of the way through Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story audiobook. Really good stuff, full of things I didn’t know and vital connecting tissue linking things I did know. The author has supported the book with a marvellous tumblr full of scanned original art, period photos, and other bits and pieces. Here’s one that deserves a wider audience than the comics geekery, though: four young Japanese Americans, reading comics in an internment camp; Howe adds some poignancy by working out exactly what was going on in the comic stories they were reading.

The Battle of Helm’s Deep, in Lego. The scale of this model freaks me out.

You’ve tried typing “Atari Breakout” into Google image search, right?

All right. There have been some impressive home-built Iron Man costumes over the last couple years, but this GW Space Marine is outright scary:

Moth City, which has been featured on this linky several times before, is an online comic by a Kiwi creator. Now it’s free to read on Thrillbent, which is fast becoming the hottest place around for online comics presentations. Tim Gibson’s creation is just picking up more and more steam as it goes, which delights me.

What if Point Break was remade by David Lynch? Or Wes Anderson? Or Tommy Wiseau?

Ordinary American investing in Blue Chip stock gets 11% return on investment. Pharmaceutical industry investing in lobbyists to prevent drug price negotiation gets… more. No, more than that. Nope, still more. No, even more than that. Er.

A photographer visits the crumbling remnants of the Star Wars Tatooine sets.

Matt Taibbi continues to justify the existence of Rolling Stone magazine: Everything is rigged: the biggest price-fixing scandal ever

An 1809 depiction of an alien invasion by Washington Irving (he of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow & Rip van Winkle fame) (via Svend)

And finally, a copy of the weird Doctor Who/Eastenders crossover – this version complete with production notes. (Yes, this crossover was a real thing. It is… not good.)

in move has four main characters. (Pro tip: it is dumb to have four main characters in your first attempt at writing a novel.) Part Three has a focus on Adam, the goofy tall one without a great deal of confidence. He is, you could say, the nice one.

Reading along with the story as it has gone live, I’ve been struck by just how unpleasant the characters can be. It’s meant to be that way of course – I was trying to capture something of how life actually felt, and this sort of behaviour was everywhere. Teenage boys possess great nobility and kindness, but their world rewards a different register of behaviour.

Related: the scale of the distance between what the characters say and do, and what’s going on inside their heads. The size of the gulf here is part of NZ male culture. We blokes are famous for retreating from any kind of genuine emotional expression. (We all go off pig hunting or hide in our sheds, apparently.) This isn’t exactly healthy, and our high rates of alcohol abuse and suicide are both regularly linked to this tendency, but there remains a certain kind of pride in it – watch any of our television advertisements for beer and you’ll see this kind of behaviour quietly rewarded.

This story’s main characters were assembled in a particular way, to demonstrate contrasting approaches to key concerns that were part of the world for me and my friends. Reading it now, I guess they also demonstrate different approaches to interiority. This shows up most clearly in their unpleasant moments; also their most vulnerable ones.
That’s how it works.

I’m curious to note a change in myself, as well. For better or worse, I judge these character flaws more harshly than I used to. I’m two decades older than them, and I suppose this means I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be them. A future of being yelled at by my teenage daughter awaits?

Anyway. Adam’s the nice one. You can read about his life starting here. He’s been sitting at the bottom of the pecking order for a long time, and things are due for a shake-up.

Agents of Shield, the Whedon-crew TV series spun out of the Marvel superhero film universe has been picked up for series. Lots of people are very excited! I’m quite excited too actually. But take a look at this:

Back in October, Bleeding Cool was one of many places with the casting notes for the five characters:

SKYE: This late-20s woman sounds like a dream: fun, smart, caring and confident – with an ability to get the upper hand by using her wit and charm.

AGENT GRANT WARD: Quite the physical specimen and “cool under fire,” he sometimes botches interpersonal relations. He’s a quiet one with a bit of a temper, but he’s the kind of guy that grows on you.

AGENT ALTHEA RICE: Also known as “The Calvary,” this hard-core soldier has crazy skills when it comes to weapons and being a pilot. But her experiences have left her very quiet and a little damaged.

AGENT LEO FITZ and AGENT JEMMA SIMMONS: These two came through training together and still choose to spend most of their time in each other’s company. Their sibling-like relationship is reinforced by their shared nerd tendencies – she deals with biology and chemistry, he’s a whiz at the technical side of weaponry.

About three weeks later, Ming-Na Wen was cast as Agent Melinda May:

Soulful and slightly damaged by her combat experiences, Melinda is an ace pilot, a weapons expert and a soldier who can – and has – gone beyond the call of duty… In the original casting call, Agent May was listed as Agent Althea Rice, aka The Calvary.

Then the announcement of the series pickup, as reproduced at Bleeding Cool included character descriptions:

Coulson’s team consists of Agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), highly trained in combat and espionage, Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) expert pilot and martial artist, Agent Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker); brilliant engineer and Agent Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) genius bio-chemist. Joining them on their journey into mystery is new recruit and computer hacker Skye (Chloe Bennet).

So Althea Rice, a weapons expert and pilot, morphed into Melinda May, martial artist and pilot, somewhere around the time an Asian actress was cast in the part. Is this another instance of that All Asians Are Martial Artists trope? (No other characters appear to have changed names or basic descriptions.)

No point jumping to conclusions – this might be a PR flack writing a press release and making assumptions, for a start. But it’s a curious change nonetheless. File it away for now.

(Big nod to Mike Foster and Steve Hickey, who spotted the Asian martial artist trope in the announcement and talked about it, sparking my interest.)

Chomsky & Foucault debate, in 1971, about whether human nature exists and what that means. No, I haven’t watched this yet. (via Nic Sando)

Here’s a salutary lesson for those in the museum & exhibition fields (including, from time to time, me): the Met tries to recreate the legendary bathroom at CBGB’s, demonstrating that some things cannot be recreated in any meaningful way.

How to draw sexy without being sexist: fascinating little discussion spinning out of the recent redesign of some superhero costumes. (Don’t read the comments, of course.)

Spock vs Spock in a car ad – extremely well done. Worth watching even though it’s an ad.

Star Trek Fashion Blog (via Hamish)

So it turns out that crazy creationist science homework was a real thing. And the second page of the worksheet is even more revelatory than the first. More info at snopes, of course.

Scroobius Pip merch t-shirt has in-built Scroobius Pip mask. Genius.

Aussie Star Wars (via Mike F)

Also via Mike F, another Cat Friend & Dog Friend video, again executed perfectly.

Judge Dredd gets a polished half-hour fan film, Judge Minty – haven’t watched this yet but Jet is the man to ask about such things, so linking his way.

Webcomic with Conan the Barbarian as a life coach

Kids, the highly controversial and provocative indie movie about young teenagers getting up to mischief in NYC, is twenty years old. Here’s a fantastic article that tells some of the story behind the scenes and tracks down what happened to the featured players. Yep, one of them ended up on The Wire. (I remember walking out of the cinema after watching Kids, and feeling like I was really glad I’d seen it, but I sure hadn’t “enjoyed” it and I didn’t think I’d ever want to sit through it again. This many years on, some of the impact it had on me – the rawness of the content and the style – is still fresh. But I do want to watch it again, after all.) (via @auchmill)

Flipping around gendered book covers – some neat designs.

Soviet posters from before Stalin constrained the range of approved visual styles (via Joshua Newman)

Debt – the first five thousand years, in Mute. The only issue of Mute I have is full of marginal notes where I argue with the writers (at least it is on the articles I actually read) – this one is just as full of assertions and angles that seem wrong to me, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here too. I recommend it, but go in with your brow pre-furrowed to save time. (via Svend)

Making Mordor’s economy work (via Allen Varney)

Have I linked to Scarfolk Council before? It’s worth a second go even if I have. An alternate 1970s English county, as seen through its posters, recordings and other documentation. Marvellous, weird, frequently hilarious.

And finally: here’s your Halloween costume sorted

For the last few years, Philip Sandifer has been writing amazing, fascinating essays about Doctor Who, tracking it across its history from the 60s on, linking it to social movements and literary criticism and alchemy and more. He has just reached the new series, and begins with an incredible close reading of the first episode for Chris Eccleston and Billie Piper. It’s lovely stuff, thoroughly readable and full of great little jokes and insightful turns of phrase, but adding up to something even greater than the sum of its considerable parts. If you are interested in Doctor Who at all you need to read this, but if you care at all about television as a medium then you’ll get something out of it. You probably do need to have watched the episode though. Jump in: Rose

Tea is the fashion! Stunning 60s marketing campaign by the NZ Tea Council to get the Yoof drinking tea. (via the Pikitia Press NZ/Aus comics blog)

Also at Pikitia: a UK girls comic story about a British orphan who inherits a sheep farm in New Zealand. Fascinating!

Holy cow, there’s someone who is so passionate in their defence of Alien3 that even I think they’re going a bit far.

Making sense of Syria’s conflict: six separate things are going on there

A writer at games site Kotaku records every instance of sexism she encounters for a month.

Going viral for all the right reasons: Reddit users discuss which Muppet would be best placed to assassinate Hitler.

Those beautiful bootleg movie posters from Ghana have been turning up all over the place again; there’s a bunch in the new selection that I hadn’t seen before (via Luke W). Here’s another site that finds other, similarly wonderful movie posters from other places. (via Andrew S)

Also all over the place right now: great behind-the-scenes pics from Empire Strikes Back, again most of these are new to me.

Sexy pool party! This has also been going viral for good reason. The woman in the bikini really commits to the bit.

Not safe for work, or for my mum: 8 other animal-style sex positions (Isabella Rossellini did the bug ones better though)

Also NSFW: Milo Manara’s history of humanity – quite breathtaking, but full of the stylised sexy nakedness Manara is known for.

Cosmarxpolitan

Bertrand Russell writes to Oswald Mosley (via RodgerD)

Mapping New Zealand by where people live. Gosh, my country has a lot of uninhabited space.

Via felicia day: One tiny hand

Ooh, linguists gonna love this. The punctuation mark “slash” is being verbalised in speech. You hear it the same way you’d expect e.g. “Can she visit slash stay over?” which is the same as “visit/stay over”. But language is always changing, and changing fast – and the meaning and use of “slash” has already drifted in some fascinating new directions. How invigorating!

Teaching intersectionality through the game Halo (via Jamie)

Four sisters take a group photo every year for over three decades.

A couple of things I really liked at The Ruminator: vintage photos of creepy window displays and a piece about the flak you get when you’re taking meds for mental health

A profile of my friend Warren, who is a full-time professional maker of Lego structures. (He has a book out.)

The best anti-piracy measure ever taken?

And finally, via Hugh Dingwall: cut me off mid-funk. (Freaks & Geeks people should definitely click.)

This new Kiwi webseries is really well done! Gets the editing right to maximise the comedy, something a lot of webseries struggle with. It’s by the woman behind the excellent, little-seen and poorly-trailered film “My Wedding & Other Secrets”, if that’s any additional recommendation?

Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead? Long article about the post-democracy era that I haven’t read, but @saniac recommends it and he knows his onions so here it is.

At UCLA, one class taught game theory by throwing out all the rules for how you run an exam. (via Joe Murphy)

At the Ruminator: On the death penalty and other brutal punishments

Little girls dressed as superheroes, turned into hero designs

Understanding cultural difference through the medium of McDonalds website designs

Michael Shannon reads the Deranged Sorority Girl email. More dramatic readings of this text, sure to become a staple in audition rooms all over Hollywood.

Fascinating. An internet guy gave up on the internet, and then a few years later came back – but came back in a really, really interesting way.

My buddy Stephen Fox unravels some of the context and meaning of terrorism and how we respond to it.

Star Wars in 60 seconds

Via Rachel B: it’s a chemical party!

Stories about Prince

Historians need to wake up as Yahoo destroys huge amounts of history

Radio Time Machine – a neat gadget – how has popular music changed from 1940 to today?

Complete video of Freaks & Geeks reunion at Paleyfest, 2011 – pleased to have found this!

And finally, via Robert W: old people wearing vegetation

Tuesday 5 [December]
Up 6-30AM. Washed and breakfast 7-30. Parade 8AM. Inspected by the general. Dinner 12 noon. Medical inspection 1-30PM. Some of us put on guard. I expect to go into signalling section to-morrow. I met an old mate here, Mac Brosnan. He is sergeant instructor to the signallers. So I will be all right while I am here, but I hope that won’t be long. I would sooner be back in France than chased around here at drill. It is devilish cold here now. Keen frost, and the doors of the hut are kept open all day long. Fire must not be lit until 5PM. 17th Reinforcements back from leave to-night. Draft expected to leave Friday.

Wednesday 6
Another freezer of a morning. taken out on parade and transferred to signallers under my old mate Sergt Brosnan. On telephone work this afternoon. The company are out on the march to-night but I am exempt. Going out for a stroll and home again to bed.

Thursday 7
Up bright and early. There is no chance of laying in here. Cold and frosty. Out on signalling. I don’t think I will be going with the draft which leaves in a few days. If not I may have Christmas here. I am having a good time with these sigs here as I am the only one here who has been on active service and they don’t interfere with me. Out on station work this afternoon. Came on light shower of sleet and misty. Usual nightly shave and off to bed. Had a letter from old Lizzie.

Friday 8th
Up usual time and out to drill. Just before dinner I got orders to go with the draft to France to-night. Went down and passed the doctor and went on parade where Bill Massy and Joe Ward inspected us. Busy packing up now. We leave somewhere about mid-night.

Saturday 9th
We paraded last night at 11PM and moved off at mid-night. The train left at 1AM. Raining all the time. Arrived Shorncliff 7AM and marched to camp where we had breakfast and lunch. Left there and marched into Folkestone where we went aboard the “Princess Louise” and left about 2PM. Arriving Boulogne abut 4PM. After waiting about an hour in the rain with full packs up we moved off to a rest camp for the night. Got there 6-30PM and later had some tea. I am going to turn in soon, as we will most likely continue our journey to-morrow. Weary and wet to the skin I am off to sleep, that is if I can, as it is on the boards and they are hard, and my greatcoat is wet.

Sunday 10th
Up, washed and shaved. Still raining. We are on the old bully beef now for tucker. Medicinal inspection 10AM. Raining of course. Fell in 3-30PM and marched off in the rain. Entrained 4-45 and reached Etaples Camp about 7PM. Were served out with rifles and bayonets. Had tea and blankets served out. Twelve men to a tent. Turned in and fairly comfortable only wet.

Monday 11th
Up at 6AM and oh but it is cold. Had a wash and breakfast. Another medical inspection. Alotted new tents. Still raining. Had a shave after tea. I suppose we will start drilling to-morrow. I hope we go up to the trenches soon and get amongst my mates again. This is a miserable time of the year to be here. Met a few old hands I knew. Turned in 9PM.

Felix returned to the trenches in late January.

And the first part of in move has gone live. I read it, too, for the first time in years – I’m going to read along as the sections go up and see how it plays. Verdict on the opening: not nearly as bad as I was expecting. There’s definitely some copyedits I’d do if I was treating it as a live project though! And I do appreciate how this relatively innocuous sequence & decision sets up an entire novel’s worth of angst. You can check it out here if you missed it. It’s a short opener – tomorrow’s update is about 4 times as long…

It’s going to be serialised over here, appearing one chunk every weekday, posts going live at noon (starting tomorrow). When the whole thing’s up, I’ll release it as an epub as well.

in move came about simply because as a teenager I never read anything that felt remotely like my experience of life. So I decided to write it myself. It is, most pointedly, not a coming-of-age story where boys are tested, lose their innocence and become men. Instead it’s a relationship story, about the complex friendship between four people and how it is shaken by threat of change.

I’ve never taken “write what you know” too literally, but for this story I did a lot of that. It’s set in 1993 at a single-sex boy’s school in Lower Hutt, and the four friends in their final year of school join the school’s basketball team. But it isn’t autobiographical; lots of bits and pieces are grabbed from life, for sure, but the main characters and their stories are entirely original creations.

I first started scribbling character notes and ideas while I was the same age as the main characters. I worked away on it, on and off, for a few years after leaving school (particularly in the early days of the JAAM writing group), and eventually completed a first draft. A bit later I went back to it and stripped it back by almost half the length, and then finally, after going to and returning from the UK, I pulled a final edit and tried to do something with it. It received nice-ish “thanks for your first novel” rejections; lit publishers suggested it was really YA fiction, while YA publishers hinted that it was paced and framed too much like “adult” lit for their lists. Either way it never sparked enough enthusiasm for any publisher to want to take a financial risk on it, and, you know, fair enough!

But I do think it’s a good story, and I have a lot of affection for it. Maybe some of you will enjoy reading it too?

Follow along over here: http://inmove1993.blogspot.co.nz/

One by one, these stores are closing up for good. As they close I wonder if there is something at work here beyond the normal swell and fade of commerce and retail, something with an impact that reaches beyond “retail therapy” and the ding of a cash register. I can’t shake the feeling that this is a change that matters, and that what we are losing here will reduce us, irrevocably. [Read the rest]

There’s plenty of other Ruminating writers there, too. Go check ‘em out.

25 fictional detectives & their #1 moves (mash, you’ll wanna see this…)

David Simon brings the ruckus on the US senate’s failure to pass even massively-watered-down gun regulations.

Do not touch, a crowd-sourced music video. Fun! (via Sammyh)

Not much money at all can buy you a fake Facebook girlfriend

The dangers of thinking like an economist

Law & order’s fakest websites

Alison Brie does memes:

Conan O’Brien hosts an 80-minute chat with writers from the golden age of The Simpsons. Marvellous! Had this on while cooking dinner over two nights, enjoyed every minute.

This image should NOT be seen by the whole world (via Hugh Dingwall)

The myth of Margaret Thatcher
and What we talk about when we talk about Thatcher

Riverbend, the Iraqi blogger who was posting regularly in the buildup to the invasion, and after, has made a new post after years of silence, marking the 10th anniversary of the war’s beginning.

Star Wars characters modelling fur for Vogue in 1977

There’s a GREAT clip circulating of Patton Oswalt improvising the plot of a new Star Wars movie (part of a Parks & Recreation story apparently) – I watched it, it was awesome, but the one I watched is no longer there and I can’t find another with permission to view from NZ. Google “Star Wars Filibuster” and try your luck, it’s well worth a look.

Oh my god! They killed Sean Bean!

Perhaps the definitive analysis of those bloody eagles not flying to Mordor

My buddy Dan’s story “Waking The Taniwha” has been published at Wily Writers (guest editor: Richard Dansky) and I still haven’t listened to it but it’s been up a while now so I’m linking to it anyway.

And finally, via my sister Beth… absolute worst pictures of men and cats