Month: March 2014

Habit Linky

How to change a habit (flowchart image – the bits of research I know square with this)

Graph the audience grades of your favourite TV show (uses IMDB episode-by-episode ratings out of 10)

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir does some for-real critical thinking about the Hunger Games and Divergent (et al.) – ” They are propaganda for the ethos of individualism, the central ideology of consumer capitalism, which also undergirds both major political parties and almost all American public discourse.” – love to see someone other than Mash thinking this hard about stuff.

Rodger spies some significant, and troubling, gaps in the kinds of books out there for children.

Interview with Antiques Roadshow US expert about how they make the show – surprisingly to me, really interesting!

A brief history of evil finger-tenting.

The Hardy Boys meet True Detective

Lotta discussion of the Atlantic’s feature on whether we’re overprotecting our kids. I haven’t read it yet, but Svend notes: “I wonder how different the world would be if the United States had managed to get universal health care back in the 30s with the New Deal. If you couldn’t sue cities for injuries, would the homogenization of playgrounds have been as severe?” (sorry to quote your email without permission Svend but this is a smart question so I’m doin’ it)

via d3vo, the best nerd rage you will find on Facebook’s Oculus Rift buyout

Four steps to fixing inequality (via James Shaw)

Typecast, a cover of Royals

And finally – sad to hear of the death of Dave Brockie aka Oderus Ungus. (Not that I ever listened to GWAR but.) Here’s the man himself reading Goodnight Moon:

12 Years A Slave (USA/UK, 2013)

I am part of the film’s third audience, neither American White nor American Black, privileged to watch from outside, safely, to look upon the horrors and the injustice and whisper thanks that my people never devoured themselves with such madness, to observe with smug fascination at the broken ways of some other kind of people so different from my own. But the film doesn’t let me take this escape, for the unspeakable encompassing specificity of the American slave trade is an expression of something within, and Ejiofor and Nyong’o and Woodard and the rest don’t let me hide from the truth that I am complicit too, my veins are thickened with power, my people have embraced their strength and murmured that it could not be helped, and I sit white and healthy in what I call my property on a land my people once desired, a system of normalised exploitation replicating soundlessly around me, and just because my ancestors did not take a whip I cannot be at rest, it is in all of us, and it is in me and mine at strength, the sins are mine, and if I tell myself I am safe from this film I am lying, because it rebukes me too, it must rebuke me, it must teach me to hate a part of myself, but not just that, but also to love some part, some small part, that knows how justice might be found at any cost, that might be coaxed to hold on to justice, that might be tricked to fight for justice, for that is in my lineage too. This film is not safe, is not an instructive lesson in good morals for middle-class white people, it is not interested in me, but it comes for me anyway, and it looks at me, and it looks at me, and it looks.

Kiss Linky

I defended that kiss video last week. By the end of that day I’d seen loads of other discussion/argument/parody about it. Here’s the essentials:
All the parodies
NYT tells the story of the video – and it just reinforces my belief that people who thought they were being lied to have the wrong end of the stick.
Vice made its own strangers kissing video, using ordinary men & women off the street. Literally.

Speaking of kissing that guy, a fascinating article about how, when you get song lyrics wrong in your head, it often doesn’t matter too much. Via the NextDraft email, sign up to NextDraft!

Speaking of music with fuzzy lyrics, GQ has a neat, tight oral history of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Westboro Baptist Church, they of the picketing military funerals, do a weird cover of Royals.

The Garry lab & its alumni continue to make science awesome. This (free to read) paper shows if your name is easy to pronounce, people find it easier to believe you. It cites that legendary “Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia” Onion article.

Via Damon – a fascinating sliding logic puzzle. There’s an intuitive rhythm you get into quite quickly, but some cleverness would be needed to finish this!

“Second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling.” a linguist explains doge. Via Michael U, or someone on Facebook who tagged him and the tag made it show up in my feed but not on any search I can come up with Facebook UX continues to be a joke but anyway thanks mysterious person who tagged Michael.

Via Stephen Fox: a one-woman cover of Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box. Fun.

All-time top 5 best uses of punctuation in literature! (via svend)

Also via Svend: a twitter feed of actual TV network notes. When people working in US TV swear about the instructions they receive from stupid bosses, this is the kinda thing they mean.

Two minutes of very scary. I’m liking this trend for micro-length horror films. (via Brian Marshall)

Get a free (digital) copy of the first issue of Ms. Marvel, the great new comic about a teen girl Muslim superhero mixing it up in the Marvel universe! Also three other comics that are probably also good!

And finally, Sarah-Michelle Gellar gives the last word on that lingering question from Buffy: Spike or Angel?

Fool’s Linky

That shameful anti-gay legislation in Uganda? It was probably the result of intensive lobbying by US evangelical Christians. Mother Jones has the full scoop.

The complete guide to listening to music at work. (via Nextdraft. Subscribe to Nextdraft!)

The Loomio free decision-making tool has launched a crowdfunding effort. I haven’t looked much into it but I am assured it is worthy. Check it out.

The collage art of Louis Armstrong (for once I’m ahead of Dangerous Minds, I have encountered this coolness before).

Also, DM puts its indie cred on the line and celebrates the solo album by Spice Girl Mel C (AKA “the one who could sing”). I have great fondness for “Never Be The Same Again”, especially when Lisa Lopes comes in. Gone too soon, that one.

First Kiss: a documentary art video project – this has been everywhere, eeeverywhere. But it’s worth a look I reckon. Then read about how it’s viral marketing (sorta?) and they’re all actors (not all) and… It’s a constructed reality, sure. But I don’t find it entirely cynical, myself.

Grantland has a lovely feature on the sad clown who sang that cover of Royals

The Honest Trailer for Frozen is a gem. (I haven’t seen Frozen.)


The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game has been polished up for its 30th anniversary. Still free to play, of course!

Science admits the 5-second rule is not entirely dumb.

Marvellous account of everything that went wrong with the making of Street Fighter: The Movie. It was meant to be a fun, dumb action film. It became a complete disaster.

The smart young women of Rookie mag have a roundtable about the divisive figure of Kanye West.

Short doco by Community’s Danny Pudi about a legendary basketball team who turned heads by… wearing their shirts untucked.

And finally, dogs in a photobooth.

Reading Linky

I’ve heard about this text presentation method before – flashing words up one after the other so you don’t have to move your eyes – but Spritz is the first company I’ve seen try to make a business out of it. (Curious about what tradeoffs are hidden in there – eyetracking data shows when we read text presented in the usual way, like this paragraph, our eyes jump around a lot, ahead of and behind where we are “up to”, grabbing context data as we go.) (Via d3vo)

Stephen Judd has offered a collection of fascinating articles about all manner of subjects – the first collection of many I hope! I’m particularly interested in this one about caste in India, Gandhi, and one BR Ambedkar who I haven’t heard of before, but as I write I haven’t read it yet. Hopefully by the time this goes up I have remedied that!

The AV Club discusses Dawson’s Creek. I link to it because they agree with me.

Comedy legend Michele A’Court writes a definitive answer to the “are women funny?” category of questions.

Parody of The Wolf of Wall Street trailer: The Worf of Starfleet

(Anyone know their Trek? The moment around 1:10 where they have an overhead pullback NOOOOOO – I have searched before for the origin of this cliche and am curious when this episode aired.)

Via Simone, Mongolian throatsinging rave music. Very throat.

Quite lovely timelapse tour through NZ

Have I linked to LOL My Thesis yet? Academic types provide pithy, hilarious, self-lacerating micro-summaries of their work.

Guy introduces new version of Chess! Yes there have been like eleven billion chess variants created with exciting new pieces like the Unicorn or the Starship Enterprise. I don’t even care about chess at all. BUT – this one still gets my interest by making one of the new rules both elegant and simple: you win if your King crosses the midline of the board. That’s an idea that feels like smart game design. Next step: playtest it for, oh I dunno, two or three centuries? The rules of chess have a high bar for entry. (The rest of his ideas are… less elegant)

Damian Hirst does art on a Star Wars stormtrooper helmet.

And finally, THAT scene from the first Alien film, depicted in Lego