Category: Friday Linky

First reading in Parliament passed, by a resounding 2 to 1 majority – it seems like NZ is on the road to marriage equality. Marvellous, marvellous news. Go celebrate with the webseries Husbands, by Jane Espenson among other smart folks. It has just started season 2, has a bunch of neat cameos, and is funny.

Doing the rounds again, a timely reminder of just what a dramatic and risky achievement Neil Armstrong (and Aldrin) managed: Nixon’s speech (by William Safire) prepared in case they didn’t come back. (via Frank)

Melanie Lynskey, NZ’s most Charlie-Sheeniated export, is doing a guest blog run at the interesting Film Experience. I like her DVD collection. Unsurprising really.

Back to the Future in Grand Theft Auto

How the patent system is really, really broken, and Apple’s recent legal victory shows how bad this is for pretty much everything. (via Michael U)

Some cute babbies listen to a guitar. I would have linkied this even before I became a dad. 45 seconds of delight.

Ruth H sent me the amazing Schmidt Pain Index. This is like a menu at a whisky appreciation night, only describing insect stings. (She got it via Mindhacks, who got it via RadioLab, which means this is the third time in six weeks that Friday Linky appreciates Robert Krulwich.)

Somehow or other Malc found this, which is an argument against the existence of e-books that just gets a leeeeeetle bit out of control. Er, WILDLY and OFFENSIVELY out of control.

Y’all are reading Gem Wilder’s blog by now right? She does linky stuff too! Her latest Wilder Web update has a big list of happymaking things, Laurie Penny on Julian Assange, Royal Tenenbaums, Stockholm subway, and moar! And she says nice things about me, *blush*.

Best personal ad ever?

It is actively hurting me to think about climate change stuff right now. George Monbiot captures the zeitgeist in his blog this week, pointing out that news of a huge new record melt of arctic ice was ignored by UK media, while front pages were covered with excited debate over where a new airport runway should go. In the US, the Republican National Convention has turned out to be a de facto climate denial party, rolling back even the verbal concessions to its reality made during the GWB administration. And closer to home, there’s this and there’s this and aaaargh. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
Go read this post by Steve Hickey about why he’s giving a few bucks to the 350 movement. I recommend you do the same. I haven’t done this yet myself but blogging about it here will compel me to follow through. I’ve got to get back on the train of taking actions around this, and every little step builds momentum. (Also related: why we are poles apart on climate change, via Karen)

Baby Got Back, in the style of Ian McKellan (via Judd Karlman)

NYT investigative piece about online reviewers for hire. (via Making Light)

Album sleeves in their original locations (via Pippy D)

Do you have enough reasons yet to love Emma Stone? No? Here’s another one then: Blade Runner photoshoot (via starlajo)(LINK FIXED NOW DOH SORRY)

Star Wars, spaghetti western style (via Pearce)

Jayne Eyre (not a typo) (via Making Light)

An amazing piece of whimsical guerilla public art: ride the bus, make a fish eat people’s heads.

And finally, via Chris Elder: water wigs, images of water exploding on the heads of bald men.

Dog Shaming is being linkied everywhere but I’m linking too because it is indeed perfect. Dogs have a broad range of dog-type emotions, but “shame” might be the one that is most similar to the human version.
Also canine: BARKOUR! (via Fraser P)

I’ve linked to The Dark Room before, but here it is again because it’s been turned into an Edinburgh Fringe show. Well worth a click around. No, I haven’t made it out of the Dark Room, not without being beaten to a pulp anyway. (ta to Craig Oxbrow for the heads up)

Teju Cole, previously mentioned here during that whole Kony debacle, has been continuing his awesome micro-length fiction on Twitter (so different to the other microfiction I’ve seen on Twitter which is almost always about cleverness). Here he explains why a Mos Def/Talib Kweli/Common track from the late 90s is perfect music. (Via Amund. Circuitous hat tip to Michael Upton who recommended listening to Black Star back before it was cool to recommend listening to Black Star.)

Also about hippity hop music: this fascinating piece analyses the rap technique of fabulous Jean Grae from a music composition perspective; & Nathan Rabin’s history of hiphop reaches ’91 with lots of early Tupac and a surprising-to-me revelation about MF Doom’s identity pre-MF Doom.

Music puns! (via MrsMeows)

Strong Female Protagonist: a neat webcomic. Gender, superhero deconstruction, social justice, other stuff. Beautiful art & confident storytelling.

Who influenced who? Crazy data visualisation (via Hugh Dingwall)

NZ is considering legislation to require plain packaging for cigarettes. British American Tobacco’s response is the most reprehensible social marketing campaign in quite some time. (Big spend, too, with lots of TV ads as well as newspaper/magazine presence.) “CREATE” shouts the advertising (see the poster on the NBR), or if you read the small words too, If We Create It, We Should Own It. Yep, they’re making it about intellectual property, which is (1) so unlikely to succeed they’re either grasping at straws or running some elaborate double game, and (2) even more sickening than the usual corporate attempts to co-opt the idea of creative ownership. And I know this isn’t even a link, I’ve basically put a rant in the middle of a linky this week, sorry about that.

Laurie Penny writes an epic, personal, (very triggering of course) piece on rape. Julian Assange on the one hand and the entire Republican party on the other have generated lots of noise on the subject lately, but this account cuts through the din.

Photorealistic portrait created with ballpoint pens.
Speaking of which: customer reviews for BIC’s “For Her” Ballpoint Pen.

Great 2010 Fortean Times article on Dennis Wheatley, writer of super-popular stories of Drawing Room Satanists. (via Danyl)

The rise and fall of grunge typography (via Allen Varney)

53 jokes you probably missed on ‘Arrested Development’ (yep, most of these I missed)

163 horror movies in 2 1/2 minutes

James Earl Jones reads The Raven (via Bruce Baugh)

Door does a Miles Davis impression (via Nick Tipping)

TARDIS blueprint (via Allen Varney)

Maude Apatow (yes relation) writes about falling out of love with Twitter

And finally, via Russell Brown, it turns out Western music has been doing music videos wrong this whole time. K-Pop with PSY shows the way:

NASA and we know it (via half the internet)

Trond thinks about the contradiction of corporates that don’t extend free market principles to their own internal structures, instead operating in strict command & control hierarchies.

Step aside Lego. Playmobil madness is here.

Famous album covers recreated with my socks (via Gem Wilder)

The invader

No doubt you’ve seen the remix Gotye made of his most famous track, entirely from YouTube clips of people covering (or parodying) the song. Svend has pointed out this was inspired by the interesting remix project ThruYou. There is also a TED talk.

War Sand: whoa.

15 minutes of lovely coffee chats between paired-off Brit comedians. Really enjoyable.

Backstage lingo in NYC restaurants (via Paul Litterick)

For my academia peeps: Why Impact Factors Suck

What makes Paris look like Paris?

I’ve seen a few guides to how to correctly fold fitted sheets, but I never remember them. Here’s an excellent step-by-step that is impossible to forget. My sheet-folding life has changed for the better!

David Tennant – spoken word performance of Spandau Ballet’s Gold

The story of…. pallets. Really interesting. (Allen Varney again)

New website actually reads through the Terms of Service for many websites & rates them. Cool cool cool. (Allen Varney again again.)

“Science chicks from history!” (a tumblr) (via Kat Urbaniak)

Mo Farah running away from things

More people are killed by cows than by sharks. So: cow attack survival guide

Indy scenes that never happened (via Craig Oxbrow)

And finally, via Dave Cormack and several other people: Baby Got Back, sung by the movies

And also finally, from everywhere, it’s another Call Me Maybe riff. Wait a second, Chatroulette is still a thing that exists??

Sunset to light is a new short film – images and music – by some friends. It’s London, now, and it’s quite lovely. The musos involved are beloved to many Wgtn folk as members of the Dukes of Leisure. Not embedding it, because it really needs to be seen in its native environment as embiggened as your screen can handle. Nice work guys. Go see go see go see.

As I write this, people are getting out of the NZFilmFest screening of Kubrick’s The Shining, and tweeting about it. Mr David Ritchie sent me this link the last time I got all Kubricky on here: The Overlook Hotel, ephemera from The Shining

Darth Vader in love (by Peter Serafinowicz)

Oven temperatures LIE TO YOU man

Medical reviews of every episode of House

8-bit covers to classic novels

The Truth about Colbert-style Truthiness – more stunning research out of Maryanne Garry’s lab

Christian fundamentalists vs. set theory

HP Lovecraft answers your relationship questions – this is exactly what you expect it to be, executed to perfection (via Mike Upton)

Juan Cole’s list of the top 10 differences between white terrorists and other terrorists has been going rapidly viral, and for good reason. Check it.

6-minute excerpt from a charlie kaufman keynote address, adapted into an evocative short film that is pretty inspirational really

Public transport decorated like Versailles. Wow.

Why Silver medallists look so blue

Infographic of the 100m race across history – the rate of improvement here is quite astounding. How long can this possibly continue? How much of this improvement is physiological, how much is technique? Wow.

Five friends take the same photo every five years for three decades (via Gem Wilder)

Via Dave Ritchie: cutting edge science on the effect of peanut butter on the rotation of the earth.

TED as a whole gets a blistering serve in this review of some recent TED ebooks. (via Allen Varney who probably gave me half these other links too.)

Half-drag portraits (via Allanah)

Good advice for when there’s a creepy dude in your circle of friends (via Jess Pease)

Texts from Jane Eyre

And finally… the Moby song.

Two small words that every Kiwi knows: per capita. During an Olympics year we hear these two words even more frequently.

What if every sport was photographed like beach volleyball?

I’ve linked to this before I think but it’s worth another look: athlete body types, an artist’s reference

Did you hear about the badminton teams that were tossed out of the Olympics for playing to lose in order to get a better draw in subsequent rounds? That’s not the Olympic spirit, is it! Also, its a sign that the tournament design is deeply flawed.

Laurie Penny on Olympics-London from the perspective of the tube

Wil Wheaton’s web show “Tabletop” has had a two-parter in which some good people (including John Rogers, showrunner of cult caper TV show Leverage, and Bonnie Burton, until recently the friendly face of Star Wars on the internets) play the story game Fiasco. It’s a good watch, and might give you a sense of why I love the roleplaying game thing so much. (& hey, if anyone out there would like to give this sort of game a try, give me a shout – I am Fiasco-enabled…)

Fascinating (PDF) essay on “phantom states” like Taiwan, Gaza/Palestine, Northern Cyprus… how they function when they aren’t part of the apparatus of global statehood, and the problems they cause.

Star Wars Identities exhibition – sort of pictures of Star Wars things made up of smaller pictures of related Star Wars things? Sort of.

Some more caveats about microfinancing from an insider. This has been discussed in this blog before. The short version here seems to be: the form has potential, but it is trivially easy to abuse and exploit the system and so that is exactly what is happening all over the place. (via Amanda Lyons)

Whoa – a blacklist in the UK for construction industry workers who speak out about worker safety? This sounds horrific.

Busting myths about New Zealand using population data – NZ’s Dept of Stats shows how engaging with the public is done.

Wired has the story of a social media spy, who may not be a spy.

Book covers in the digital age

Big trigger warning for this link. There’s been a big thing on Reddit where sexual assaulters & rapists talk about their actions. Jezebel argues there’s much to learn from this; others have vehemently disagreed (not least due to Reddit’s supposed tendency to provide comfort & cover to misogyny). I tentatively agree with Jezebel on this, not least because this is a huge swathe of content that academics will already be furiously subjecting to thematic analysis. But it does make me uncomfortable. I link it here anyway because even if you don’t click through I think it’s important to know this exists in the world, that the huge conversation that is the internet makes discussions like this possible if not inevitable. Issues of gender representation & sexual harrassment are being discussed seemingly everywhere online right now, so hopefully this is building towards some kind of positive change. (via Daniel Gorringe, among others)

Film special effects guy explains the 7 most common CGI screwups (EDIT: margie points out this guy is a girl. Awhoops. In time between reading this and blogging it, my memory was rewritten to accord with gender steretypes.)

Explaining the Higgs Boson discovery in the form of a mural

Is Margaret Thatcher dead yet? Man, there’s still a lot of fury at Maggie, huh.

Ten fake books in movies that we wish we could read

Every 3D movie is the same

Classics scholar hanging out in Florence writes amazing blog post about why Machiavelli mattered. If you only have the same surface knowledge of the guy that I do, read this.

And finally, via Fraser P:

RIP superlative NZ writer Margaret Mahy. I’m looking forward to discovering/rediscovering her work with the Wee Beastie. Here’s a great essay she wrote on the role of the fantastic, on science, on myth, on childhood, on storytelling, and many other things besides. Contains Tolkien, Vonnegut, Hoban and more. (The availability of this essay is thanks to the wonderful NZ Electronic Text Centre!)

Star Wars bloopers

Forest & Bird’s Nicola Toki, in her regular blog at Stuff.co.nz, covers the case of the elusive New Zealand moose. MOOOOOOOOSE.

The 11 most unintentionally hilarious religious paintings. This is amazing. AMAZING.

Norvig vs. Chomsky: an argument about language & AI, but really about different approaches to science. Comments are very worthwhile.

Harry Potter, ten years later – a sardonic new web series. (via Amanda Lyons)

And – The Lizzie Bennet diaries: adaptation of Pride & Prejudice to video diary form

I keep coming across this and it is still perfect. Comic strip where Freddie Mercury meets Wolverine.

Pantone skin tones. (Yeah, mostly the white end of the spectrum so far, still a work in progress)

Little girl writes why being a woman is wonderful.

A defense of Stephen King, and genre writing in general. This is a good example of the form, articulating nicely the relationship between “literary” and “genre” writing, and making room for the (rapidly increasing) overlap between the two categories.
– As an aside, I haven’t read any King for a really really really long time, but I have a hankering. Anyone in easy reach want to loan me one of his early ones?

Ladies, prepare yourselves: Alan Rickman reads Shakespeare’s sonnet 130.

Lovely public artwork: the non-sign

Despite teaching the bystander effect numerous times, I never knew of its potential application in surviving a simulated zombie apocalypse. Some textbooks need revision, I’d say. (via Allen Varney)

Wikipedia has an eye-opening timeline of the far future. Not kidding about “far” – we’re not talking hoverboards here.

The physics of clown cars. And of Batman. Physicists being all whimsical right now it seems. Maybe as a coping mechanism because they get ignored when they say stuff like this?

Speaking of science – a transgendered scientist offers some insight into the gender imbalance in the sciences. (via Gemma Moncrieff)

Lego The Wire (via Mark Williams)

How to name your pet, computer security edition (via Myles Corcoran)

The Matrix meets Office Space

The 1993 live-action film of Lord of the Rings (via Craig Oxbrow). I had no idea this existed, did you? Did PJ? Did the Tolkien estate?

The geek zodiac

Now *this* is how you do a copyright takedown request. (via Chris Elder)

And finally… the Daddy Saddle.

So I’d never heard about the “Call Me Maybe” meme until it hit Cookie Monster. It’s a charming wee pop song, and the Wee Beastie and I have enjoyed watching various sports teams make goofy videos of themselves lip-syncing the song (many of which can be found at the Cookie Monster link above). But the Jimmy Fallon & the Roots performance with Carly Rae Jepsen herself is the winner:

Except then this happened

A browser extension that herpderpifies YouTube comments. I first heard this through Mike Sands. Glorious.

You probably know already that the Shell “Let’s Go” ad campaign that’s been hilariously misused by folk is actually an elaborate disinfo hit by Greenpeace & serial anti-corporate pranksters the Yes Men. That link is to the best breakdown I’ve seen. It really is marvellous in its sophistication, right through to a fake Shell twitter account clumsily ordering people to take down their anti-Shell material under threat of legal action. This is 21st century stuff, right here.

A delightful two-page comic that is as Wellington as it gets. (via Dylan)

A restored church – with a Giger alien as a gargoyle representing Leviathan. (thanks Jamie N!)

This one is all over the place, for good reason. A 6-year-old guesses what classic novels are about from their covers.

(This one is also over the place – a great, hilarious, GIF-heavy review of 50 shades of grey)

Best ever graduation gift

Boomerang vocabulary at the Oxford Dictionary blog (via Ivan T)

Visualising the origins of English words

Geek & Sundry has their new series up: stories written by kids. Just great, 100% great, and that SQUAT team member is strangely familiar too.

A website that takes you to a random website (via Amanda H)

The 50 cutest things that ever happened

Oh and there was also that time Buzzfeed pwned McSweeney’s

Long long essay on Nokia’s CEO and why he is the worst. I didn’t read all of it. (via Stephen J)

How to kill a troll

A visual map of the film Memento. Really nicely done.

Nine climate change pictures we don’t need to see again.

That time five guys stood underneath an atomic bomb. Robert Krulwich gives film & explanation. Crazy, man.

And finally, via this week’s cool stuff at Wilder Woman, a short musical performance. I’m not sure if this would be better if you knew the original version (like basically every NZer will) or if you don’t (like everyone else in the world).

This will probably be a short one, on account of not being able to write any of this Thurs evening because I was out at the release party for Jet Jaguar’s fourth album, “Four”. I’m listening to it now and it delivers good stuff. Check it out for yourself.

The TomKat Split! is actually some trashy magazine gossip in which I’m interested. Scientology is fascinating as well as troubling, and the way the church controls its media exposure and information flow is something to behold. The Independent has a nice short article on how this and a bunch of other events mean scientology is gonna be talked about a lot in the coming months…

A discussion on NZRaG about NZ-made boardgames led to the discovery of this: Political Football, the family boardgame of the Springbok Tour! Blimey. Kiwis will instantly get how odd this is; foreigners will have to struggle through wikipedia because I can’t craft a short description that really conveys how big a deal it was here.

Here is a video for all the single ladies of Wellington (also applies even more so in Dunedin):

(via Amanda Reilly)

Big business as job creators: a short demolition. (Via Allen Varney.)

The awesome Gem Wilder writes about how to be poor & happy. (Also recommended: Gem’s Wilder Woman blog, where cool linky are shared, awesome women are celebrated, and semi-embarrassing childhood crush objects are reconsidered.)

Classic movies as Persian miniatures (obligatory linky Star Wars content included within)

The LIBOR scandal is slowly, slowly gaining news traction outside the UK. Here’s a great infographic explaining what the hell it’s all about. Time and again I am astonished that the fate and wellbeing of the global economy is, in so many ways, dependent on what is basically an honour system.

Fascinating & surprisingly frank interview with cartoonist Grant Buist on the 10th anniversary of his comic strip of Wellington, Jitterati.

Everyone’s been sharing this, check it out if you haven’t seen it: the weird book room at Abe Books

In the 90s, comedian Patton Oswalt had his very own magical black man experience (Wiki’s got a nice article about the magical negro trope)

When that Gotye song comes on in the car you need to turn it off fast

its from new zealand i think

xkcd answers some what if questions. magical.

And finally… why “Saved By The Bell” was all a dream by a character on another TV show.

Man, remember when that guy tried to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider and said he was a time traveller from the future? (CNet carried the story in, ah, very early April 2010) He said: “The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.” Well, a very Higgsy Boson has been found, so bring on the socialist chocolate, I say!

Via d3vo: Save the Words, a site for anyone who likes words. Seriously dangerous timesink here.

Two English teachers of my acquaintance have written a book intertwining Katherine Mansfield with monsters (hi guys!)

Dangerous Minds has found an amazing Tea Party conspiracy theory. It has to be seen to be believed. You’ll never see bison the same way again.

A fun, and growing, collection of disastrous endings from choose-your-own-adventure type books

Iconic images recreated with Star Wars figures

The chestburster scene from Alien, recreated by kids. Um, OK. This is an odd thing to do.

Dora the Explorer, the movie:

Great, long interview with Laurie Penny (rising progressive journalist) by Coilhouse’s Meredith Yayanos. There is politics and media and gender and a cute pig on some stairs.

James McM, in comments last week, pointed at this: Martin Amis’ mostly-forgotten guide to beating classic arcade games. (This looks really, really familiar to me. Did the Hutt Library have a copy, maybe?)

Marvellous musical performance brings to life one of Roger Langridge’s great comic strips.

Depression (the economic kind) is a choice: I know too little of economics to evaluate this, but it includes some pretty powerful thoughts that sound scarily convincing, e.g. “But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary.”

10 fake books in movies that we wish we could read

And finally… a double helping of Beauty & the Beast. (I went to see this on the big screen when it came out, with my bogan mates. We were a bunch of teenage guys, in a cinema full of tween girls, watching Belle read books and be adorable. And friends? That was a good day.)

So: my gay friends have apparently failed me, because apparently this redub of the opening scene of Disney’s Beauty & the Beast did the gay social media rounds a while back. And it is awesome:

And: as good as that is, this live-action restaging of the same scene – with a few tiny changes – is even more awesome:

Happy birthday mum. At least you will always read my blog.

d3vo reminded me about Chris Walken getting jiggy in this Fatboy Slim vid that I have not seen in an age. Dee-lite.

Gotye Star Wars

Step-by-step guide to actually being a reverse racist

You’ve heard about the online Lego creation playground set up via Google, right?

You Got Retweeted! Yet another satirical trailer for a nonexistent movie, but well worth a watch – you just know this exact movie is in development at one of the big studios.

Kids book versions of grown-up movies – they’re all the same joke, but it’s a good joke

11 authors who hated the movie versions of their books. Related: (via Marie) childhood homes of 20 famous authors

Drawing over sections of photographs. Interesting and fun, obviously required dozens of digital steps to get to an apparently spontaneous conclusion

Floating photos – again, loads of digital effort to get a finished product that feels effortless. Lovely stuff.

Via Gem Wilder – 10 bets you will never lose

Captain Picard puts on a special performance on the bridge of the Enterprise (via Craig Oxbrow)

If this is a genuine fad and not just a few thrillseekers, then Russian teenagers are actually a whole new level of crazy

Why elites fail (The Nation)

Glorious Australian sky timelapse photos (via Ian Hicks)

Harry Potter, race and racism – a shortish article (PDF) (via Amanda Lyons)

The curious history of Graham Crackers and corn flakes (non-Americans who’ve never heard of graham crackers, they’re a crucial ingredient in USA’s ultimate campfire treat S’mores, and if you’ve never heard of S’mores you are missing out on one of the human race’s great achievements).

And finally… the Pointer Pointer