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?)
Two years on from the big Christchurch quake that still casts a very very long shadow over this country. I’ve decided that this is the perfect occasion to check my emergency preparedness kit every year. I’ve been encouraging people to join me, mostly via Facebook – your Like would be welcome, but what I really want is for you to check your kit, too. Here’s the government’s advice site.
Candyman: the David Klein story – feature documentary about the guy behind legendary American candy ‘Jelly Belly Jellybeans’, made by Wgtn’s own Costa Botes, music by friend of this parish Tom McLeod, and a good watch. It’s on Hulu so you’ll need Media Hint or something to watch it from outside the US. (also via David R) (Here’s my review from when I saw it at film festival – basically, a fascinating character study, very good film, but too long for me to call it great)
That writer who said those mean things about Our Kate the Princess – read what she actually said, guys. It’s smart stuff. You might not agree, but the media storm over this is embarrassing. (via Marie)
Animated GIFs that do something other than make you laugh: they look amazing. (via Tim Denee)
And carrying on the Jared Diamond attacks, here’s a piece from Slate. I have never read Diamond, but to the best of my knowledge this kind of attack is absolutely in line with the general academic view on his works, but it seems like it really hasn’t escaped that sphere – I’ve seen scientists and other smart people writing off this stuff as sour grapes, even. It’s worth knowing that there’s controversy around him.
Middle-earth linguist, who created languages for Peter Jackson (starting from Tolkein’s baseline), starts a blog.
Alasdair wrote something very cool about short stories and novels and Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. If you like writing or reading or detectives, read it.
Jet Jaguar, aka friend of this parish Michael Upton, has released a 3-track EP: Single-Digit High – the first of a bunch to be released this year. Listen to it, download it, pay something if you like. I’ve only listened once so far but it was good. There are beats in it. Give it a try.
And finally, via James Dodwell – the cutting edge of fairground rides is quite scary stuff. This piece starts out a bit dry but it is absolutely worth it to see the breathtaking rare footage within.
Spencer is a Dungeon Master. Specifically, he’s the guy who put his hand up when (Community creator) Dan Harmon asked the audience at his regular Harmontown night “is there anyone here who knows how to be a dungeon master?” Since then he’s been getting up on stage and running D&D for Dan Harmon, show comptroller Jeff Davis, and a diverse cast of assorted guests. The Harmontown podcast has wormed its way to the top of my podcast priority list in recent times, and Spencer is definitely part of why. He’s just a guy, like so many guys I know, only he’s been caught up in this mad indie-culture anti-structural comedy thing led by a revered cult figure. He used up his annual leave from his job in the back room of an Apple store to go on a U.S. tour with Harmontown. He ran D&D every night on stage. I’m just about to get into the tour podcasts, but today Dan Harmon shared this incredible post about the importance of Spencer. See, it turns out Spencer is the hero of the story. So – Harmontown is often great, and often meandering and a waste of time, but try it. If it’s your thing, it will be your thing in a big way. I’m not even gonna link to it directly. If you’re not intrigued enough to find it yourself, then the time is not right for you.
Via Jon Ball, a drill sergeant in the U.S. asked for a letter of explanation as to why they joined the army. In the stack was this beauty. (Downthread it is revealed the writer is female, and despite the tone of the initial comment, the drill sergeant thinks she’s great.)
Written By A Kid is rocking it, with a return appearance by the kid who wrote the amazing La Munkya story. This is a Valentine’s Day tale (featuring Elvira!):
Any article that starts out talking about the original Cat People will win my attention. This is a marvellous short piece – you get the whole story behind one of TV/film’s biggest current cliches. (Related: I was musing on Twitter recently about the origins of another cliche shot, where the camera looks down on a character and pulls back to a wide shot as they scream “nooooo!” – even without the “Nooo!” I can’t find an overhead pullback earlier than Shawshank…)
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – a webseries contemporary adaptation of Pride & Prejudice – featured in the AVClub this week, and that’s enough excuse to include it here for a third time. Try it, Austen fans! (That includes you, mum.)
Dangerous Minds found a copy of David Lynch’s hard-to-find oddity, Industrial Symphony! Quality is poor, but still! I had a VHS tape of this that I recorded off the telly – it was broadcast one Saturday morning at about 10am on a free-to-air channel back in 1990 or so. Lord knows where that tape went, but I’m excited to see this again. (Warning: Nicolas Cage)
Via auchmill, who happens to be director of an art museum right now: The Art Game, about being an artist. Well worth a look. Takes very little time.
Via Pearce, a classic of the interactive-fiction genre, Photopia – written as part of a grieving process – and its moment of perfect beauty. Play it, I did, it’s short and wonderful and clearly an exemplar of a new kind of literary art production.