Old amigo Malcolm Craig, formerly of this parish but now back in that parish, has launched a new podcast (with a friend). It ties in more-or-less with the undergrad American history course they’re teaching at University of Edinburgh. First ep is about slavery, and is up now in all the usual podcasty places.
Urban design foolishness of the week: apparently the standard city street lane in the US is 12 feet. That is… very wide indeed. And it’s killing people.
Master Jedi David-R Kenobi advised me that the completely mad shot-by-shot recreation of Empire Strikes Back is now finished. He recommends the asteroid sequence, at 38 mins-ish. I just randomly clicked into several places, and of the bits I saw, the C3PO at 34:45 was my favourite. Perfection.
British military black ops teams planted fake evidence of black masses in Northern Ireland to convince people that paramilitaries were also Satanists, or something. (via Robert Whitaker)
Deadspin’s explainer for Gamergate is great. Because Gamergate is a mess. It started with dumb misogyny, grew, and currently claims to be a respectable movement for journalist ethics in computer games, but identifies the principal ethical dangers as “social justice warriors making games all feminist and stuff”. Or something. (The death threats continued of course.) But better than talking through the madness of Gamergate, this article also identifies the patterns sitting in here and how they are the future of the culture wars – when the Tea Party is made up of digital natives, these are the tactics they’ll use. A great read, if hugely frustrating.
I’ve linked before to the marvellous levitation photos of Natsumi Hayashi. I received an email: she’s got an Artsy page now, love from a person connected with Artsy. Artsy is a thing with artists where you can follow them, explore their work, buy prints etc. Check it out.
Predator: The Musical. The voices for all the supporting characters are perfect.
And finally, pretty sure this is indeed the worst cat ever. Certainly the least photogenic.
Re: gamergate – have you seen this? http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/16/of-gamers-gates-and-disco-demolition-the-roots-of-reactionary-rage.html
(belated reply) Ayup. I’ve been tracking Gamergate pretty steadily. It’s like watching one of those elaborate 60s psychology experiments that would never get ethics approval nowadays, only it’s real and there’s no end in sight. Such a train wreck.