Yesterday, went to dentist for first checkup in 3 years. He said “all good”. A dentist saying “all good” is one of life’s nicest, most reassuring things.
Happy April Fools Holy Thursday linky. I was all keen to do an April Fools Pantheon of Plastic entry, following DavidR’s suggestion, but after far too long clicking through action figure custom galleries and flipping the pages of Tomart’s Encyclopedia & Price Guide to Action Figure Collectibles, I still hadn’t found any photos that felt like they could play. No doubt I’ll have a great idea as soon as I post this, but oh well.
Flatlander pointed at this interview and response with a young right-wing politico on the subject of Earth hour. It is hilarious, and we should all seize the rhetorical flourishes on display for future use. Everyone likes “I think my argument is so powerful that it’s not necessary to talk about it” but I am fond of “it fails on three fun-loving levels”, which must be an actual talking point for him because he repeats it in both interviews. Outstanding.
The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t destroyed the universe yet, but it did give us a Tweet that will be remembered long after Twitter has faded away.
Elyssa a.k.a. The Moon Whispers, late of Wgtn and now home in Italy, has released a bunch of free music, including a new track Tutto Intorno e Ombra. (You have to subscribe to her email list to get the download link.) From the site: “Elyssa writes enchanting dark ballads with evocative vocals and a storytelling slant. ”
From Rodger: Polka Face! Wunnerful.
Seen the Scarface School Play yet? As a hoax it was never gonna last more than five minutes, but as a piece of wacko guerilla pop-art, it’s something amazing.
Weird, the Weird Al biopic. Am I the only one who genuinely would love to see a Weird Al biopic? A doco would beeven better.
And a round-up of linky about Dylan, interviews at BoingBoing, newsarama and more. Tomorrow I’ll be going to the NZ Comics Weekend opening, and hopefully on Saturday too to see the Wgtn launch of the first NZ edition of Dylan’s classic work, Hicksville. Bookman Beattie writes about Hicksville here. Dylan is a lovely chap and a great creator, and is currently serializing new work free on his blog: hicksvillecomics.com
Sitting next to my computer for the last few months has been an issue of Cerebus, the long-running nearly indescribably series by Dave Sim. I picked up a stack of them in a ten-cent sale a decade ago and have finally been working through them. Sim was a champion of the comics form and provided a showcase for plenty of up-and-coming creators, and a back-up in this issue (#177) is by a woman named Nina Paley. She, I remembered instantly, had written and drawn some great funny strips for Dark Horse Presents back in the 90s (and indeed, Sim’s intro mentions Diana Schutz, editor at Dark Horse). What, I wondered, had become of her? Well, it turns out she made a movie: a full-length animated feature called Sita Sings the Blues. Roger Ebert gives it an extensive and glowing review here. Ebert:
“By this point, I’m hooked. I can’t stop now. I put on the DVD and start watching. I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens.”
It’s back in the circuit because it’s just been made available, free, under a Copyleft license. An interview with Paley at CBR tells the fascinating story. And you can watch the film here. I haven’t, yet, but I will, because it looks AMAZING. And now I can put that Cerebus issue away!
So that Wikileaks post yesterday was picked up by Reddit and traffic on this blog went into the stratosphere yesterday. On Weds I had 283 unique visitors, pretty typical; on Thursday that number jumped to 92,487. Whoa. What’s especially odd is that the post in question contained nothing at all new – it just copied and pasted some tweets from the Wikileaks twitter feed. Purely a right place/right time kinda deal.
This one has been everywhere this week, and it is far weirder than I expected: Alien vs Pooh. Also related to the incompatibility of the Alien films with childhood, this from io9: Old Alien toy ads will ruin your childhood all over again. Check out the Predator who attacks with his dreadlocks!
Trace Hodgson’s legendary 80s political/social satire Shafts of Strife. I can remember being astonished that this weird comic strip was running in the staid old Listener! (via Stephen Judd; Shafts of Strife presented online by the lovely Roger Langridge, whose Muppets comics still aren’t available in NZ.)
Scott Pilgrim trailer!
Watch some B-movies on AMC’s site. Streamed without region-lock; I am afraid of how much of my time this could eat. Worth a look just to see the titles of all the movies.
Minuit’s Aotearoa, a great track with lots of images from NZ’s past, has become something of an expat classic. It was mentioned in the DomPost yesterday which reminded me I had it sitting in my Linky folder. Lovely, but beware if you are a NewZillinderAbroad, it may give you a case of the homesicks.
Also NZ-specific is this great post from Reading the Maps last September, looking at whether we NZers are right to feel so distant from the appalling acts of genocide that have occurred elsewhere in the world. Shoulda linky to this ages back but still a great read.
“When the New Zealander comes“, some post-apocalyptic fiction from 1911, complete with illustrations. (Published in the Strand magazine, what published the Sherlock Holmes stories.)
Have I linked yet to anything about Brenda Braithwaite’s boardgame Train? I know it’s come up in several email conversations in the last few months. Anyway, Luke sent me this article, which is a good overview of this unusual, confrontational game/art piece.
Did you watch that amazing DICE presentation I linkied last month, on the Facebook-isation of everyday life? One throwaway mention in that presentation was a professor who uses an experience point system to grade his course. More info on that is here.
It’s Friday linky time, first one at the new hosting site. Groovy. I’m gonna go into the depths of the linky file, pull out some stuff that’s been sitting there for aaaages without ever being grabbed up into a linky. Nothing fresh! Everything old! Come and get it!
Play classic Games Workshop strategy board game Space Hulk, live online.
The Day Tripper photos were taken by a new arrival in Wellington, of random folk he met on buses. They got a little bit of media coverage, but not much, because the Flickr set only shows a few hundred views. Take a look – nice slice-of-life photography. And if you’re a Wellingtonian, you might see someone you know – I did.
Relatedly, girls in bikinis perform The Big Lebowski. To sell bikinis, apparently. But I dunno man but watch it but.
Repton last week made two posts that I really appreciated: this one about anonymity on the web (technical stuff here, beware) and this one straight after about some highlights from the Lateral Science collection of wild science-related things.
Have you seen this video showing just how much TV is shot green-screen? Will blow your mind. When filming TV, it is now easier and cheaper to hang up a green curtain in a back lot and CGI the street in, than to actually go down to an ordinary street corner.
And you have probably seen this wonderful music video featuring a human-sized Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson contraption, too, but if not:
Some Friday Linky for you:
Indulge your vertigo: 12 dramatic views looking down.
A surviving audio-free clip from Dead Bart – the infamous lost episode of The Simpsons with a “hyperrealistic” section:
One of the things I like doing after a Friday linky is scanning the departures. I feel happy when it shows that every linky had a few people check it out. But last week there were no recorded clickthroughs on the enigmatically unexplained linky Boomdeyada. So here’s the explain: Discovery Channel made an amazing promo featuring all their scientist-types singing about what is cool about the world. Then lovely webcomic XKCD made a comic version giving props to the Discovery channel. Then someone else made an animated version of the XKCD comic. Then some other people made a new version of the song about how they love XKCD. It’s wicked. Watch all of them. And yes, that last one includes a few famous folk, at least famous in geek-type circles.
And finally… a blog devoted to analysis and discussion of men wearing gorilla suits
Q: What did Tarzan say to Jane when he saw the elephants coming?
A: Here come the elephants.
Elephant jokes are seen by many commentators as symbolic of the culture of the United States and the UK in the 1960s. Oring notes that elephant jokes dismiss conventional questions and answers, repudiate established wisdom, and reject the authority of traditional knowledge. He draws a parallel between this and the counterculture of the 1960s, stating that “disestablishment was the purpose of both,” pointing to the sexual revolution and noting that “[p]erhaps it was no accident that many of the elephant jokes emphasized the intrusion of sex into the most innocuous areas.”
All over Wellington, people are dressing up in the crazy costumes because the Rugby Sevens are in town!
But here are some unrelated linky. First-person tetris. I can’t bear to play this, and the music reminds me of when I used to dream tetris. Did you ever dream tetris? There’s a wiki article on the Tetris effect that is worth a read. Pass Fail – using visual design/usability principles to make boarding passes more useful. Compare the designs and be enlightened about how uselessly most information is presented to us. (Notably, the fantastic Air New Zealand boarding pass is given a significant thumbs up – it’s obvious why, when you compare it to what else is out there.) Did aliens play a role in Woolworths? I think I first saw this via Public Address, but it’s been around a bit, for good reason. Stray dogs in Moscow – absolutely fascinating.
Following from the 39 Steps discussed a couple days ago, here’s the BBC’s 21 Steps, a story told in interactive form. It doesn’t load for me at all, sadly, but it sounds very interesting – maybe someone out there can get it to go? The Society of Unordinary Young Ladies – comic in which the female characters from 80s sitcoms team up to fight crime.
(Facebook) Ant Timpson provides a lengthy interview with the guy behind seminal mash-up video experience, Apocalypse Pooh.
And finally… Japanese Chewbacca loves Sea Chicken!
