Friday Linky - From The Morgue

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

Integer Linky

Via John Fouhy: Dungeons and Dragons Ability Modifier Sequence from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. As John said in his tweet, “This is some kind of nerd congruence. I struggle for words.”

Rare Star Wars posters from around the world. Some of these are very odd.

Lovely illustrations of kids playing Star Wars. There’s a bunch, click “next” to move through them.

Also, Star Wars invades Sochi (via Mike Upton)

Boromir death simulator. (via Darcy)

Barbie defends her decision to appear in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and Slate points out how vile this “defence” is (via Simone)

Music for Making Love (via Pearce)

Elsa from Disney’s Frozen calls out the other Disney princesses. In song, of course!

College Humour on the engagement ring diamond scam…

This piece owes a debt to: the classic, all-time famous Atlantic magazine feature on the scam that is the engagement ring diamond. Still viral thirty years on! (Blaise put this on my screen this time ’round but it keeps cycling.)

Via my mum, maps of stereotypes

For my mum (and other Austenphiles), 15yo Jane Austen’s satirical history of England

And finally, The saga of Moon Moon the derp wolf.

Nijinsky Linky

(No Nijinsky included)

Get prepared tomorrow

Star Wars as told in the original tapestry

Listen to the music that was inscribed on a random butt in that one Bosch painting.

Woman recreates the selfies of the guy who took her phone (via Camilla)

Young people swap clothes with their grandparents (also Camilla)

Nature offers a clear, humbling account of how my discipline ended up accused of being mostly wrong.

Go Make Me a Sandwich patreon – sponsor a blog about women and games. I played a small part in inspiring this blog’s existence, funnily enough.

Conversational map: when a London Kiwi meets a London Kiwi (via Ian Hicks)

The Typefight: typefaces fight it out.

Evolution of the Vertigo zoom – haven’t watched this yet but, come on.

Evolution of the Dolly Zoom from Vashi Nedomansky on Vimeo.

And finally, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to remove the baby from “Full House”, and it doesn’t work at all, but it exists, because the internet.

Get Prepared Linky

This February 22, join me and a whole mess of other people and check your disaster preparedness kit. That’s the anniversary of the big Christchurch quake. Mark the anniversary by checking you are ready when trouble comes your way. Join the Facebook group or follow us on Twitter (Eek I really haven’t promoted or used the Twitter much, huh.) Spread the word.

How the Beatles went viral in the USA – a detailed account from Billboard. Beatlemania happened because a bunch of social, technological and political events converged in unexpected ways. They were always going to be big, but there were a lot of lucky connections that led to them getting that big, that fast.

Perfect fluid group movement: 2-second F1 pitstop.

Interesting French short film imagining a gender-flipped society as a way of highlighting the inequalities in our own. It doesn’t all work (the limitations that are built right into language can’t be evaded, and it shares the widespread French misunderstanding of Islamic dress) but there are some powerful moments here, most of them small details.

Star Wars as 80s high school movie: character designs, sketches of key scenes.

Gaddafi’s Point Guard – memoir of guy in a Qadafi-owned basketball team who found himself in the middle of the revolution. Some unpleasant stuff in here, no doubt.

Dick Cheney gets a hard, hard look in this epic NY Review of Books piece. He’s part of my axis of evil, with Blair and Rove on either side of him.

13 portraits of homeless people as they wish to be viewed (via Gem Wilder’s reliably superb Wilder Web)

Prochronisms – looking at TV shows set in the past, and using some data mashing to find words that are out of place. Not to shame the writers (boring) but to look at how language, and society, changes (interesting!) – mostly looking at Downton Abbey and Mad Men. (via Dylan H)

I took off my hijab (via Camilla S)

Epic list of monster-themed boardgames, mostly from the 60s and 70s. Lots of photos! I’ve never even heard of 90% of these.

The little girl from that famous 1981 Lego ad has been found.

And finally, via the beloved David R., Bad Romance vs. The Avengers

Bad Romance x Avengers from Fishball51 on Vimeo.

Skeletor Linky

Skeletor voice actors play with Skeletor action figures.

Perfect parody of a Trent Reznor song

Who better to smack down Kirk Cameron than a whole mess of other grown-up child TV actors?

Map of USA, each state labelled with the IMDb’s top-rated film set there.

How toast got trendy: actually a really, really interesting story.

Booth babes don’t work

The entirety of Reservoir Dogs, told via tweet

Angelo Badalamenti recounts devising the haunting theme to Twin Peaks. Great!

Best New Yorker cartoons, according to New Yorker cartoon editor. New Yorker cartoons are such a special case – always, perfectly, consistently sort-of-amusing.

Tracking flu trends using google search results

Comic-form open letter to newly-crowned chess world champion Magnus Carlsen

And finally, Feeling Cagey

Amicable Linky

Conference call in real life:

Someone actually figured out a way to make money on Spotify: by singing Happy Birthday to everyone in the world, one by one. (via Mike U)

If you, like me, like to watch the Superbowl but only watch the Superbowl, here’s a 2-minute season recap that really doesn’t make much sense to those who aren’t following the game but has lots of jokes in it so.

Map showing global warming contributions, per capita. NZ is an angry red, right up there at the top of the villains list. Longtime readers will know how much I hate that.

Emotional Baggage Check (via theremina)

Your next job application could involve a video game

Do you like beer? Do you like music? If you are a member of this vanishingly rare intersection of people, you should check out Buzz and Hum, my friend’s new beer and music blog.

Eye-opening photos from Kiev, by a ground-level indie journalist trying to communicate what the hell is going on over there.

Map of pre-colonial Australia.

NZ according to google autocomplete (by Grant Buist)

Video of in-depth conference presentation on NSA spying revelations. I haven’t watched because I want to live in my bubble of ignorance a little longer. (via Ed)

10 great performances from the Apollo Theatre, including 13yo Lauryn Hill at the Amateur Night. (I went to Amateur Night when I was in NYC, one of the best things I did in that crazy town.)

Middle-earth, from space

Cat freaked out by videochat with owner

And finally, I’m gonna share the whole email I received from d3vo:
Hi Morgue,
Yesterday while idling some time away, exhausted, I was trawling through youtube videos of people trying Vegemite. While on tour in Australia Oprah tried Vegemite:

Burns Linky

“O thou! whatever title suit thee,—
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie!
Wha in yon cavern, grim an’ sootie,
Clos’d under hatches,
Spairges about the brunstane cootie
To scaud poor wretches!”
Robert Burns: Address to the Devil
Not the Bard’s best work – he calls himself out for ranting in the second-last stanza! – but reliably funny. And if you can read Burns without sounding it out in your head and grinning, you’re a more disciplined soul than me.

Fight Club carpark fight sequence, with Tyler Durden removed.
& at the same link: 30 films from 1984, all turning thirty this year.

Harry Potter: images from a world where Voldemort won.

Piles of old magazines & newspapers, each pile carved out of a single block of wood. Whoa.

Clever miniature photography that makes Star Wars model vehicles look real

Infographic of whisky flavour profiles (via Mundens)

A while back my friend Johnnie excitedly mentioned he’d just been working in the recording studio with Brian “Brian Blessed” Blessed. This is why: a World of Warcraft animated fan film. Trailer below, full movie has just been released, find out more here.

TRAILER – Death Knight Love Story Pt 1 – Jack Davenport, Anna Chancellor, Joanna Lumley, Brian Blessed from Strange Company on Vimeo.

A solidly enjoyable compilation of 6-second videos, each a mind-blowing trick of digital editing:

Six-word peer review (via Karen W)

How a math geek hacked OKCupid to find his perfect match. Hmmn.

An oral history of SWINGERS. I will love this movie forever.

A speculative map: Africa if it had not been colonised

The nasty messages hidden in “Do what you love, love what you do” (via Richie G)

Marvel Comics wiki on Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys

117 Buffyverse characters, ranked worst to best. Impressively committed to the idea of ranking characters. (Via Eliza Dushku, funnily enough.)

And finally… Prodigy’s Firestarter music video, without music

3 Linky

The Wee Beastie is 3 years old today! Hurrah!

Salon’s Hack List is marvellous this year – each entry written in the style of the hack it is honouring

Charlie Stross wants bitcoin to die in a fire
The weird mechanics of a bitcoin heist
(less controversially, Stross also hates Microsoft Word)

Minimalist circular city maps

Superhero spankings

A big assault on the selfish gene metaphor (there have been replies to this, of course, but I haven’t read any of them yet)

BuzzFeed article generator

The full stop (aka the period) – now it means “I am angry with you!”

Via John Fouhy, and also in the field of internet linguistics, I can’t even

Interesting discussion of the word of Norman Rockwell. I’ve always had a huge soft spot for Rockwell because I grew up with a big coffee table book of his work in the front room.

Pianist up on stage before large audience. The orchestra begin. But they are playing a different concerto to the one she prepared for. What happens next? (Well, she conquers, of course.)

Via Georgios, a lunchbreak romance

And finally, old Finnish people with things on their heads

Invisible Cow Linky

Matt Taibbi (still making Rolling Stone worthwhile all by himself) breaks down the situation in Camden – one of the USA’s dying cities. The man who struck the killing blow? Leading candidate for the Republican candidacy, Gov Chris Christie. (via Amund)

Twistiest tongue twister ever. But it’s a nonsense phrase as far as I can tell, which is cheating as far as I’m concerned…

People with opinions about the NZ film industry ought to read Jonathan King’s perspective on the thorny issues of subsidies.

This:

I wrote a Python script to run the Monty Hall problem 1000s of times. You're better off changing your mind. Plus, I want that hour back.

— David Ritchie, Esq. (@dritchie) December 12, 2013

Confirmed: the Universe is a hologram! (Actually more technical and theoretical than this, of course, of course, but it’s always good to be reminded that for several decades hardcore scientists have basically concluded our perception of reality is wildly screwed up.) (via Chris Elder)

Love Actually movie critic showdown. I’ll just link to the opening salvo and finishing move, both by Christopher Orr. The second one links to a bunch of other responses. Sadly only five words survive of my post about it from a decade ago: “Went to see the new Brithope”. I said this whole thing that I’ve never seen anyone else get into. I might have also talked about the Keira Knightley/Egg storyline, because that’s by far the most interesting to talk about – Orr devotes most of his second piece to attacking it with gleeful ferocity. Love Actually! It has become a Christmas classic, though.

The world’s first real-life superhero. A gunfighting PI with hooks for hands. Weird and fascinating.

Upworthy headlines! Everyone is talkign about them now, not just me. They are a thing!

7-year old Russian kid draws pictures of himself riding around shooting bad guys. The pictures date from the 13th century.

Arresting series of nude photos – raises some questions about being “attractive”. Just fun. Not safe for work, obviously. (via Susan IIRC?)

This clip of Jason Segel and Paul Rudd, promoting 2009 bromance I Love You Man, has been doing the rounds. Because they are obviously really tired and it all goes very weird. Lovely

And it gives me an excuse to link to my review of the film, which was a real high point of this blog if you ask me.

Ursula K. LeGuin goes deep & smart into Tolkien & Middle-earth.

Ray Bradbury’s newly-released script for Moby Dick.

You’ve all seen this dog breeding thing, right? Damn. The photos are intense.

What life is like for players right on the bubble of being in the NFL (via Blaise)

Model of the I Love Lucy soundstage from above. Wondrous, somehow. (thanks David R for advising that this is a model, not a pic of the real thing! D’oh.)

And finally, via Hamish: find the invisible cow

Flat Linky

Ian Rankin reviews Asterix and the Picts.

There’s a “wander about Middle-earth” thing, linked to the new Hobbit film, for users of the Chrome browser. I looked at the first bit and it was very pretty.

Short film by Alfonso Cuaron’s son showing who was at the other end of that radio contact in Gravity

Web series Flat3 is back for another run of lovely, funny episodes about an all-girl all-Asian flat in Auckland. So good. Watch it! Here, I’ll make it easy, here’s the first ep of the new run: