Category: Friday 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!

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.

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

This one’s gonna be video heavy. Its just how it worked out.
A Sound of Music breakout in Central Station, Antwerp. I’m always a sucker for this stuff.
Cyclist hops his way around Edinburgh. Mindblowing cool on display here. (Presumably they edited out all the bits where cheerful neds called him a homosexual and playfully hurled their empty bottles at him.)
Snakes on a Plane – cuss words edited for TV. (As found by buzzandhum.)
(not video) A great wee wordless comic that is optimised for online reading.
Microsoft Songsmith creates music out of stock charts entering the recession
Flight of the Conchords fan lipsync contest entrants edited together – great fun
Lord of the Rings fan film appears to be raising the bar, judging by this trailer
(not video) Alien vs Predator done right.
And finally… Iron Man vs Bruce Lee. Serious.

Got a meeting to get to, but haven’t given linky in an age so want to clear some bookmarks out. I’ve seen many of these in multiple places so apologies if this is all old news. Here goes:
Play sudoku for charity
Urban camouflage
Human behaviour in response to a cute little lost little robot.
NZ’s best investigative journo, Nicky Hager, gets his own site
Neat NYC montage photos
Nonwrestler marks a year of the weekly free mp3 posts – each week highlighting a neat, free choon from somewhere around the nets. This gives me the new music, which I like.
Reggaeton guy Jintero MC has moved to my home city and loves it. So he made a song about it. The video features more bikini babes grinding against local monuments than I customarily encounter, though. [LINK FIXED]
Tim Denee designs twenty covers for The Big Sleep.
And finally… Barack says: you can have my number, baby.

The epic, inspiring journalism of Izzy Stone – what independent journalism looked like in the 50s and 60s. Original publications visible here – pick one at random.
Kiwi cartoonist Toby Morris sketches his life in Amsterdam.
UK mediawatch done smart: MailWatch keeps an eye on the Daily Mail, and The Sun Lies tracks uber-tabloid The Sun.
An incredible tale of a true-life diamond heist.
Dollhouse watchers, get yer analysis from The Exploding Kinetoscope and Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty. And don’t forget the weird and under-noticed online experience.
Gameheads – check out StoryTron and try to manage the international aftermath of 9/11. Interesting stuff.
Alan Moore’s long-lost Big Numbers #3 turns up in photocopied form!
And finally… Dan Meth’s Pop Cultural Charts

You’ve seen the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are already, right?
Serious bit: computer security circles are rumbling a bit about a big virus already embedded in millions of machines and set to receive new instructions on April 1. I don’t know enough to say whether this is a real issue or just sky-is-falling stuff, but practising good computer hygiene is very important anyway. So read this, and if you don’t have ’em already, pick up your completely free virus protection at AVG or Avast.
Now. Usually at the end of each linky I try to put the weirdest, most inexplicable thing down as “and finally”. But today there’s too much stuff worthy of the spot. So here’s what I like to call “And finapalooza”:
And finally…
…heavy metal band name chart…
…how did I not hear about this 25-second Smurfs film?
…
…Cat Sh*t One, a gritty war film starring animated bunnies, man what
…Wolverine art appreciation month
… a Japanese TV show convinces children they are being attacked by zombies
…Christopher Walken justifies the existence of Twitter
…Yvette’s Bridalwear (via)

Back on the scene like a linky machine!
You gotta know this one got me excited: Canadian history cartoonist Kate Beaton finally gets a proper website.
This is amazing – a transcription of the story conference that decided how Raiders of the Lost Ark was going to go. You will never see Indy’s relationship with Marian the same way again.
Kim Stanley Robinson, noted SF author whose masterwork Red Mars got linky here a couple weeks back, writes about the climate crisis: Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme. This is real deal thinking.
A really interesting looking free game is described over at Xorg. I haven’t played it yet myself but I have downloaded it, which by itself is pretty unusual for me. Check it out!
authonomy, a Harper Collins publishing site where users post their masterpieces and other users rate the excerpts, top-rated stuff getting bumped to where the editors can attend to it… This is a really cunning mix of crowdsourcing and PR that might signal some interesting times ahead.
The Grizzled Dog creates his own supernatural mythology around dubious behaviour and stealth photography in Bangkok.
It has been a good year for gigs, not that I’ve been at any of them; the latest to rock the socks of the gig-going crowds was Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, who shared a little ditty she’d written about our own fair city:

Its no wonder everyone loves her.
And finally… girl whose YouTube channel is full of acoustic Bad Religion covers gets close while the band do a soundcheck and sings with them.

Some legal free books to download at Suvudu, including Kim Stanley Robinson’s magisterial work of hard SF, Red Mars. Available in .pdf at present, other formats to come.
Everyone’s education into the ridiculous scheme that is the global financial system continues. Three great, fun lessons this week: first, a fun and helpful visualisation of the crisis of credit:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
Second, the failure of (you guessed it) the U.S. biz media, entertainingly skewered by (you also guessed this bit) Jon Stewart at The Daily Show:

Third, Vanity Fair writes an amazing piece about Iceland, the country that collapsed itself. You’ll be amazed by how much is explained when you hear that Icelandic men like to barge into you in the street.
This month’s MySpace Dark Horse Presents has not one but two stories I commend to your attention:
an exclusive Achewood strip – in colour! And also an exclusive strip by Kate Beaton – in colour! This is the good stuff right here.
If you know of Watchmen, you DO NOT want to miss this: Watchmen as a Saturday Morning Cartoon. So very funny and so very wrong.
I was also gonna linky to the new Ed Brubaker-written Zoe-Bell-starring free web TV Angel of Death, but it seems to have gone from Crackle even though the press release announcing it is still up all over the web. Huh. (Also featuring Lucy Lawless, apparently. Starring two Kiwi actresses then! Heh.)
And finally… somehow this is even creepier than it should be.

I bang the worst dudes (Sorry, Mom) (via the bassett hound)
Nosing ahead – the lovely fluffworld writes about the difficulty of creating space and taking the leap to live life on her own terms, particularly by becoming a writer. The comments and replies are great, except for that one by that tone-deaf mr_orgue dude.
Some Ukulele awesome:
first, ukulele hero Jake Shimabukuro making his uke gently weep (don’t know where I saw this one)

second, a great little number by two performing arts grads in London, I Heart You Online (this one thanks to badjelly)

More awesome retro-fied book covers, this time for the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books.
Conchords fans rejoice: Tim Denee recreates those great NZ tourism posters for your downloading pleasure (New Zealand… Rocks!), Kiwi Gothic delivers an icon mixup, and a t-shirt design that knows what time it is. And for those who haven’t seen season 2 yet (me included), here’s something: My Sugarlumps.
Pride and Prej as Facebook updates
And finally… a two-minute film adaptation of Lovecraft’s Shadow Over Innsmouth, with CGI fishmen. And it’s a musical.