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Doomed Linky

Trek: photos from 70s Trek conventions. The audio commentary for each photo is worth listening to.
Trek: make customized paper stand-ups of Star Trek characters, Intended for roleplayers but just fun to play with!
Print ads for classic computers. Great! (Trek: Shatner with grinning endorsement in several ads.)
Boys know that girls like puppies. But what breed of puppy has the most pulling power? Here is a handy graph. Full details of the experiment are here but I can’t bring myself to watch the videos because I think this is likely to be creepier than I want it to be.
Helen R linkied this a while back: the baby name wizard, which tracks the use of names in the U.S. since 1880, by gender. My name, Morgan, runs at a relatively constant frequency for boys – but it doesn’t show up as a girl’s name until the ’70s, then explodes to massively outnumber the boy Morgans. This is why.
And finally… how the heck have I never seen the demented genius that is the DOOM comic? Encyc Dramatica is, of course, all over it, featuring a mind-blowing/mind-numbing dramatic reading of the comic. RIP AND TEAR! RIP AND TEAR!
[edited – last minute update linky:] Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: the Board Game!

You might as well know

I’ve been sprung as an operative for the Illuminati.
I’ll have to wait for my Bavarian masters to get back to me about how to handle things from here. Perhaps, since I think the war is won, we can shed our outer skins and walk around as proud reptiles at last?
And following up my previous claim (in comments) that scientists who don’t accept the AGW hypothesis are outliers: this survey of over 10,000 geoscientists showed over 80% support for AGW. More nuance in the article:

climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 and 64 percent respectively believing in human involvement. Doran compared their responses to a recent poll showing only 58 percent of the public thinks human activity contributes to global warming.

Filament – the thinking woman’s crumpet

[I’m advertising at you again – what can I say, except that friends are doing cool stuff.]
My friend Suraya is launching a print magazine. This, in itself, is a sign of madness in today’s world, but thankfully hers is a beautiful madness, and a clever one too.
Filament magazine is “72 quarterly pages of intelligent thought and beautiful men”. It offers smart articles and sexy pictures aimed at straight women. Here’s the website, which is worksafe provided your work doesn’t mind topless men and the word “erotic”.
It’s likely not gonna be available in shops (unless some enterprising indie mag shops chase Suraya down and ask to carry it, I guess) – but you can grab it easily using Paypal. Looksee. And if you act fast you can pick it up cheap! Reduced prices until the end of Wednesday (U.K. time?)!
It sounds like a great idea for a mag to me (speaking as someone who thinks an awful lot about the magazine as medium but is profoundly disappointed whenever he stands in front of a magazine sales rack). I’ve put my money where my mouth is and signed up for a copy, even though (as the alert among you may have noticed) i’d be a pretty poor excuse for a straight woman. But don’t take my word for it: terrifying internet prophet Warren Ellis has also lent his support.
If it sounds like your flavour of crumpet, you know what to do.

Race Issues

Last few months have been awash in race issues. Going to note ’em down here, for my own reference as much as anything else. There are no conclusions.
Pocket God controversy: an iPod game called Pocket God comes to broad notice for its depiction of primitive and stupid islanders, which borrows imagery from stereotypes of pacific islanders (with a dash of other “primitives” imagery thrown in). Pasifika people are not happy; anthropologists dissect the representations used; the makers make respond with some token changes. Most fans of the game don’t see what is the big deal.
Eskimo candy controversy: Canadian tourist in NZ calls out our iconic “Eskimo” lolly for using an offensive term for the Inuit people. The company announces it has no plans to make any changes. New Zealanders are outspoken in their venom towards this PC-gone-mad tourist. Canadian media is bemused, even though the expert on the term says it’s offensive.
People of Colour and SF/Fantasy: an epic, sprawling argument over depiction of people of colour in genre fiction; became known as Racefail. Good summary here. More recently, a new alt-history book proposes an alternate history of America where the native Americans have never existed. Comment thread about the book explodes as native Americans express concern about being removed from history. Somewhere in the chaos, people note that a common assumption is that the SF/F audience is pretty much white, leading to much sarcastic self-identification as “unicorns” by PoC fans of the genre. This leads to a “Wild unicorn herd check-in” where PoC genre fans by the hundred raise their hands and announce their existence. (Been following this one mostly through the coverage of Bruce Baugh, who draws some good conclusions from this speaking as a white creator).
Melissa Lee: Government wunderkind bye-election candidate Melissa Lee, who is Asian, causes a huge storm by suggesting that heavily-Polynesian South Auckland is full of criminals who are… there’s a motorway… actually, it doesn’t make any sense, so don’t worry about the detail, or check out the Gordon Campbell report. Race is not overtly mentioned here but sits just under the surface. A commenter on the Aotearoa Ethnic Network mailing list cheekily applauds the government’s racial progress in successfully bringing the wealthy elite of all ethnic groups together through their shared fear of the underclass.
Hmm. There have been other prominent race-related stories in the media, although curiously Obama has not been any of them. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Eat This Linky

This is neat:

Cynical C chooses classic works of film and literature (Alien, The Sound of Music, Homer’s Odyssey…) and then finds reviewers on Amazon who gave them one-star reviews.
Find your new timewaster: Whitechapel thread on webcomics. I’ve only made it through the first two pages – heaps and heaps of stuff here.
Ten-minute horror movie. Warning: may give you nightmares. (Via Pearce, of course.)
Keetra Dean Dixon shows her installation art. The anonymous hug wall is fun, and the blood pillows made me smile.
And finally… interactive hot tub girl! It’s… well. Yeah.

No, Seriously?

I have slept on this, and now that I have a new day before me and I can perhaps view things in their proper perspective, can I say:
Christine Rankin as families commissioner? W T monkey-fighting F is this insanity?
And she was offered the children’s commissioner position before that? (Can’t find a linky for this, it was in the Dom Post yesterday.)
For the furriners who have made the mistake of reading this far:
* Take the most divisive public argument in recent NZ history, the so-called “anti-smacking legislation” that removed the defence of reasonable force for prosecutions of physical abuse of children
* Add the most divisive and despised civil servant in the last couple decades, the brash overconfident wonder who took our social safety net provider and ran it gleefully into the ground in the bad old 90s, under a welfare-is-bad National government; she was of course on the side of the reactionaries in the smacking argument
* Serve hot!
Says Ms Rankin: “We need to stop being politically correct.”
*head smash wall – repeat until fade*

Dollhouse Roundup (no spoilers)

Watched the last episode of Dollhouse the other day.
Back in March I said that integrating the procedural into the serial would determine:

whether Dollhouse will be remembered as an incredible one-season show that took a little while to hit its stride, or a weird one-season oddity with great ideas and poor execution.

Turns out it was the first one. The show really delivered the goods in the second half of the season, giving solid hits on meaty ideas as well as fun plots and the twisty-twist goodness you want from a conspiracy show. It was in no way perfect – some of the reveals were undercooked, with the Alpha backstory in particular not being what I hoped it would be – but it still made me happy to be watching it. And the ideas – it gleefully kicked the lids off a half-dozen issues and tipped them out, raising many questions about identity, gender, power, memory, rights…
It also gave me my favourite TV moment of the last few years, where Victor was in the chair with the [X] imprint and being asked questions. You’ll know the one if you’ve seen it.
Anyway. I recommend it. Clipshow the first five episodes then get into the good stuff.

The 48: “Dedication”

For our 48-hr film this year, Jenni’s Angel’s got the genre ‘revenge movie’. The requirements were a rock as a prop, the character Alex Puddle who was an exaggerator, and the line “It doesn’t fit.”
We had a big group at Indigo City to brainstorm when this info came in. My job as head writer was to pull some direction out of this process and winnow down to a solid idea we could all get behind and execute well. I found it really hard. There were a few new things we did that seemed to work well but we ended up spending a long time going almost in circles. It was my job to push out of the circles but I just couldn’t see a direction – not one of the ideas felt right to me. We eventually seized on one idea because, even though I couldn’t see how to make it work, I had a good feeling that we could find a way. Sure enough, we did, with some pieces falling into place in the final stages of the brainstorming session and the rest on the way to our writer’s retreat.
While everyone else slept, the writers punched out a screenplay. We were a new writing team – me with Jackie, Jenni and Steph. We had one person drive the laptop while we talked our way through the outline, then broke the outline into story beats, then turned the story beats into script. We were pleased to find that this went smoothly – the idea unfolded well into the space available, and unlike previous years we weren’t struggling to chop out whole characters and plot twists to fit into the time limit. Finally we went through the whole thing and challenged every word in every line of dialogue, which improved the final version a lot. We sent it out to the troops around 2.30 or 3.00 – which was somewhat earlier than anyone had expected.
We ate mostly healthy-type food while we worked. Mostly.
I was on site at Indigo City about 6.30am as the troops started to arrive. Talked through the piece with our directorial team and the actors, then sat down for a proper read-through where we identified a few dialogue changes to make, most pretty minor, but also adding one extra conversation between our main characters – I scurried into a corner to write that, producing what I think ended up as one of the best exchanges in the whole film, at least from hearing the actors run their lines.
As we set out to the first location I rushed home to write and print a prop, a page of half-written manuscript from an old-school typewriter (thank you free font libraries). After delivering that I hung on set for a few hours and kept working with actors and lounging in the sunshine, until finally bailing when Jenni appeared.
The plan was to go home and sleep but that didn’t work, so I just sat around in a daze for a few hours then went back down to the second location to help get that set. Mostly I was just furniture here as well – the well-oiled Jenni’s Angels team didn’t have much need of an extra pair of hands at this stage. When we broke for dinner I went home and that’s where I stayed while the rest of the team got it done.
We ended up handing in our ‘safety cut’ – the precautionary early version we send down to the hand-in venue in case our final cut runs late. Our safety cuts have always been solid versions of the film so I’m not worried that it wasn’t the intended hand-in version.
Now we have to wait for our heat on Thursday, which is when we’re allowed to watch the film for the first time. I’m looking forward to it. The 48 is a fun challenge every year and I have a good feeling about this year’s film. Its name is “Dedication” (chosen by Jackie) – appropriate to all of us, I reckon.
Thanks team, and especially writing team. You guys are great.

We All In The Linky

Tonight, the 48 Hr Film Comp begins. I’m leading the writing team. We have some big acts to follow – check out the track record of Jenni’s Angels in past years:
2008: Borkhardt Hates You Too (superhero)
2007: Destination Earth (science fiction)
2006: Monster Hunter IV: Beyond Repair (monster movie)
2005: It’s A Wonderful Library (what genre was this, again?)
Should be a blast. In meantime, here be some linky.
Vanity Fair’s 10 Best Political Videos You’ve Probably Never Seen. Nixon rails against Bohemian Grove for being full of homos! Nixon plays the piano! Reagan goes on a game show and… you gotta watch that one, actually.
Japan has an island of empty buildings. Some guys sneaked on to it and took lotsa photos.
Pride & Prej as Marvel comic. (Our local store had a couple copies of the first issue, it sold out fasty.)
As always, I’m a sucker for collaborative one-take music videos. Here’s a guy called Nyle, and his track Let The Beat Build, which seems to be him with his performing art school friends. Love it.
This one is a favourite. Back in the early 90s, a company called Leading Edge Games released a boardgame based on the film Aliens. I had a chance to buy it, once – there were a couple of copies at our local chain bookstore Whitcoulls – but it was way out of my price range so I had to go away and think about it, and I never saw it again. It goes for crazy sums on ebay now – trust me, I’ve looked – so I’d resigned myself to never getting to play it. But now someone has created a computer version of the game, free to play online. It is just as devilishly hard and addictive as had been promised by those good reviews fifteen years ago. Yay!
Gnod – uses some kinda weak AI to build networks of connection between books and films and so-on. Use it as a recommendatorium. Interesting to play around on.
And finally… this New Yorker article gave me the biggest gross-out moment I’ve had since Peter Jackson’s Braindead. Read only if you dare. It’s called… The Itch