Third reading passed! We watched the NZ Parliament TV as MPs gave speeches, mostly powerfully and emotionally supportive, and we mocked the elevator music as the votes were cast, and then we cheered as the count came back. And I personally cheered as the whole Parliament & gallery broke into song, Pokarekare Ana…
While on the other side of the world, Margaret Thatcher’s funeral.
Huge congratulations to all my friends whose lives just changed in a tangible way. It’s about bloody time. I kiss you all. Yay!
I’m setting this one to go live at the departure time of our flight – we’re doing a weekend in the South Island for a wedding. It’ll be the Wee Beastie’s first time on a plane. She’s pretty good at spotting them in the sky and is I think equal parts excited and intimidated by the prospect of being inside one of these noisy machines. Here’s hoping that excitement prevails.
Anyway, here’s some linky for your Friday. Raiding the earliest stuff in my linky folder, 2010 and 2011 links…
Hitchcock & Me – blogger reviewed everything Hitchcock did. That was in 2011, still going with a more general Hitchcock brief – there’s been a lot of Hitchcock happening lately, most recently the new show Bates Motel.
I turned, if my calculations are correct, 37 this week. In my brain it feels like a perfectly balanced age, because 3+7=10. Throughout the coming year I will expect everything I do to be quickly matched by a complementary response.
Star Wars! Fan film of a lightsaber fight. Neat stuff, nicely done. Lens flares! (via Craig Oxbrow)
Some folks have made a viable random comic generator. I enjoyed clicking through for a while. It works because they’re really strict about the structure – first panel is always a setup, second is always a twist, third is always a resolution.
The Shadowy Residents of 1 Hyde Park (via mundens) – an interesting exploration of the super-super-rich. Curiously it has a very boring opening, while hiding a killer hook a few paras further down – The really curious aspect of One Hyde Park can be appreciated only at night. Walk past the complex then and you notice nearly every window is dark. As John Arlidge wrote in The Sunday Times, “It’s dark. Not just a bit dark—darker, say, than the surrounding buildings—but black dark. Only the odd light is on. . . . Seems like nobody’s home.”
I was gonna link to a YouTube video: Watch all six Star Wars movies at once! But it has been removed from lots of places. Give it a google, you might get lucky – well worth a look…
It’s second vote day for the Marriage Equality Bill, & an old friend of mine has a few thoughts about that. The video Craig and his husband Marcel made, at the bottom of the post, is worth watching and sharing. Tell your elected representatives that love matters!
In the past I could not relate the idea of being gay to pride. I remember seeing gay pride campaigns and not understanding the connection between being gay and pride. I no more felt proud being a Kiwi or Pakeha or gay or having blue eyes for that matter. They are all simply ways of describing the attributes of who I am, they weren’t something I had earned, and therefore there was no way to be proud of them.
Today I have a better sense of what pride means. It’s not pride at what I’ve accomplished. It’s pride that I am entitled to and should be given the same respect as everyone else. It’s as simple as this: everyone is entitled to be respected for who they are and treated the same under the law. Some call it pride. I call it respect and civility.
Discrimination is a form of cancer in society. It causes people to feel disenfranchised and isolated, and reinforces ill-treatment of the target group. In my opinion, this prevents a society from ever reaching its full potential.
I know first hand what it was like to be bullied…relentlessly for being gay, and laws that discriminate against gay people indirectly and implicitly reinforce this behaviour. Young LGBT suicides are an absolute tragedy, as are any youth suicides. A society built on acceptance and respect instead of fear and discrimination nurtures and fosters our youth. We owe it to them. We owe it to ourselves.
We have been together now for 15 years, and I look forward to the day when the most interesting thing about that is not the fact we are a same-sex couple, but how it is that he has put up with me for this long.
I’m looking forward to the next 15 years, but this time being your NZ husband.
P.s. No Winston Peters, human rights are not a question of popular vote. Human rights are a question of entitlement and respect. Same-sex marriage is not impinging on the human rights of any other section of society and your job as an elected representative is to protect human rights, not to deflect attention away from the real point of the discussion: State-endorsed discrimination. Tsk tsk.
However, you know what? Even if it came to a popular vote, I have confidence Kiwis would support it.
A blog named “Monster Legacy” makes a longer, more detailed version of the exact argument I made in my Prometheus review (in the section ‘Les Cousins Dangereux’). It’s the only other place I’ve seen this argument made, which I think is a bit weird, because to my eyes it is both obvious and fundamental. Although I think I was kinder than Monster Legacy, because I decided to treat Prometheus as a conceptual remix, not a thematic betrayal.
You may not have listened to the mashup of Nine Inch Nails and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. I only succumbed after about fifteen people had already raved about it, and to my surprise, it really lived up to the hype. If you haven’t, do yourself a favour.
This one gif has been everywhere lately, showing the sun in motion through the galaxy with the planets swirling around it. Trouble is, it’s wrong.
What Coke contains (via Lew, kinda mindblowing for what it says about humanity)
Kathleen’s tales of her time in Afghanistan continue with this great one about local monster stories.
Via d3vo – remember that movie, The Fifth Element? Remember that crazy singer in there, who was singing something that (it was claimed by the filmmakers) couldn’t be done by a human voice? Turns out, it can be done by a human voice. Here’s the human in question, doing the thing.
I enjoyed watching this speed painter do his thing. If you like thinking about how perception operates, you’ll enjoy it even more, because it demonstrates some of the freakiness inherent in the apparently simple act of seeing.
Three worthy crowdfundy things, to which I draw your attention:
Conquering Corsairs: Pirates of the Silver Sea! A card game designed by a couple of Kiwi lads, about pirates vying for gold and prestige and generally being piratical. Just hit its target! Well done guys. Only a few days left on this one!
Send speedstacker Ahlani to the USA: this 12-year-old girl lives around the corner from us. She’s globally ranked in the niche sport of Speed Stacking. She’s fundraising to get her and her mum across to the worlds. (Speed Stacking is pretty amazing to watch. And check out the reward levels – they include “we will bake you a banana cake” and “we will send Ahlani’s brother around to your place to do odd jobs”. This is good stuff guys!)
Liam Barrington-Bush (friend of a friend) is crowdfunding to publish his book “Anarchists in the Boardroom”, which is the fascinating culmination of years of work and thought looking into how organisations work and how people experience the workplace. It’s about taking lessons from social media and social movements to find new ways to structure your organisation, to make it “more like people”. Really interesting stuff! He’s hit his tipping point target, so the book is definitely going to happen – congrats Liam!
Wonder Woman fan-made trailer. How can it be 2013 and still there’s never been a big film featuring a woman action hero kicking bad guys around like this? Or even a medium film? (Am I forgetting one?)