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.
Still a week to go before this famous carnival, but our local version is on today. As carnivals go it’s pretty semiotically thin, but I think it counts, particularly because it has increasingly taken specific cues from big carnivals like the N’Orleans mardi gras (kissing beads, huh?). I love that there’s a big event in Wellington’s calendar that’s all about dressing up in silly costumes. I only wish it wasn’t so very, very white middle class heterosexual. Maybe its too corporate an event to ever really get its freak on, but as it gets bigger and bigger, surely other more socially anarchistic networks could take steps to subvert it and use it as a platform to upend the social order? I live in hope.
Also of Wellington, this short moonrise clip that went viral in the last couple days. It took me ages to actually bother to watch it, because, it’s a moonrise, how good can it be? Answer: really very very good.
Hey, Comics Alliance is reviewing Barb Wire, that crazy B movie that retells Casablanca with Pamela Anderson in the Bogart role and Temuera Morrison as Ingrid Bergman. I have a real soft spot for that dumb film.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who you should just read regularly because he’s great, delightfully describes the conceptual breakthrough that allowed him to make sense of the niceties of grammar in the French language – superhero comic parallel universes
Kyle Baker is a phenomenally talented and very funny comic creator. He has put all his creator-owned work online, free for you to read. You can stop working now, you’re done for the day, you have to spend the rest of it reading all these amazing books. (Start with Cowboy Wally or Why I Hate Saturn.)
Fascinating approach to doing a motion comic – it’s kind of like a flipbook, but way more engaging than that sounds: Malaria.
Tweenchronic Skip Rope. It came out around New Years when you were distracted. If you haven’t seen it, you gotta. It’s special. (And yes, it is by the same group that made Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.)
Thou greybeard, old Wisdom! may boast of thy treasures;
Give me with young Folly to live;
I grant thee thy calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures,
But Folly has raptures to give.
The girl who played Veruca Salt in the classic Willy Wonka film wrote a book about it that is (a) free to download [EDIT: nope, not any more, it’s now US$10!], and (b) apparently really great. (via Gino)
Vanity Fair has published an extensive feature on Freaks & Geeks, my pick for second-greatest TV show of all time (after The Wire). There’s an oral history, new behind the scenes pics, and an amazing reunion photoshoot that brought back all the main cast, most of the secondary cast, and plenty of bit players. LOVE IT.
A eulogy for Occupy: fantastic first-hand journey through Occupy’s successes and failures. Includes plenty of details I’d never heard before, including a brutal analysis of the failure of the General Assembly process that was at the heart of Occupy, and some great insights into what Occupy created that wasn’t easily visible from the outside.
This one time, Yoko Ono and Jim Henson hung out online with Ayn Rand. No, it really happened [No it didn’t – see below], and the transcript is fascinating. (via Allen Varney) [It is fictional! My factchecking on this was pretty limited. D’oh! Thanks David R esq. for the save.]
Toy laptop for boys vs. toy laptop for girls. Can you guess how they are different? Well, one of them looks like a laptop, and the other is bright pink. But that ain’t even the worst thing. (via Theremina)
Kiwi dark crime webcomic Moth City – really good! (supported by Creative NZ no less) – sequential art peeps will want to see how it layers and changes elements.
Ryan North, who I mostly know through links from Kate Beaton but has been linkied here before for his in-depth analysis of the Back to the Future novelisation, has a kickstarter up for a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure version of Hamlet, illustrated by Ms Beaton and many others. Sounds groooovy, and actually quite interesting too. Blew through its target in the first few hours of day one – 29 days to go!
Speaking of Kickstarter and Hamlet – here’s one for a project to adapt Hamlet into a six-episode series. Also sounds very interesting. I really need to get more familiar with this play.
Here’s a comic that mashes up the Muppets and the recent Thor movie. (Drawn to roughly follow Roger Langridge’s character redesigns.) It’s worth a look – way more than you might think.
In comments last week, Stephanie reminded me about the Lizzie Bennett Diaries, which I linked back in July & promptly forgot about. This video-diary adaptation of Pride & Prejudice has racked up 65ish episodes of their core storyline plus loads of other bits and pieces by other characters. Check it out!
Mashup oddity: Nine Inch Nails with, er, the sound effects from Super Mario Bros.
Why the world loves soccer and America doesn’t (via Gareth Michael Skarka) – I just don’t feel the deep love in my heart for the beautiful game, but this is a good short account of where the appeal lies.
So the IDF livetweeted their attack on Gaza. Leave aside for a minute the rights and wrongs of the action (and yup I have some pretty strong opinions on that) – and you have another reminder of the fascinating and troubling future that is already happening, a world where the PR war is directly overlaid on the physical conflict in realtime. Did I mention that IDF opponents in Gaza were tweeting right back?
UPDATE: WHAT THE HELL? IDF gamifies war
Waiting for Elmo. (via Dangerous Minds)
And here’s 10 Sesame Street performances worth seeing. Stevie Wonder (not that clip, a different one)! Herbie Hancock! Cab Calloway! More than half of these were completely new to me. (via Vivian)
Everyone’s been sharing this highly informative Reddit thread explaining the nuances of New Zealand culture. e.g. “Something people who come to New Zealand might not be aware of is that the government provides four sheep for every person. Be sure to ask at the airport! Even if you’re just visiting, you can have four sheep to follow you around while you’re here. Some people feel quite bad that they missed out on their sheep.”
Via Gem Wilder, 21 very awkward situations (told in animated gif form) (gif was the US word of the year!) (oh hai john key) (my favourite is the basketball player accidentally rubbing the wrong knee)
Pearce sent me this Prometheus review that’s even more scathing than my one was. A pre-Damon-Lindelof script draft has turned up online too, and the big news is, it pretty much makes sense, unlike the released version. Google for “112142280-Alien-Engineers” and you should find it.
A dad hacks video game to switch all the pronouns around so his daughter can have a hero character who is a girl. Groovy. (Don’t read the comments though unless you want to be exposed to much rage about how he DESTROYED THE INTEGRITY OF GAMING CULTURE RAARGH.)
The MIT game lab has produced a game that demonstrates the effects of the theory of relativity – by setting the speed of light really close to walking speed. Fascinating.
So last linky I shared a “Occupy fizzled out as a failure” essay. Right on cue, Occupy has launched something very real using exciting new thinking that has people talking everywhere – a plan to buy out and write off debt (debt is bought and sold at a fraction of the debt value). Making Light here discuss and dismiss one objection to Occupy’s Rolling Jubilee
