Category: Friday Linky

Aw yuss, another Friday Lunky! AW YUSS OW!

Here is a penguin who is a ranking officer in the Norwegian Army! He is in Edinburgh and I never even knew!
Early storyboards for Star Wars
Cloverfield retold as a series of Google Maps tags (thanks Talula!)
Stephen Fry writes about the beauty of language as only he can: “Nonetheless, I can no more change my language and the sum of its discourses than I can add a cubit to my height or, sadly it seems, take a pound from my weight. Well, perhaps that’s going a little far. I can attempt to disguise my language, I can dress it up into even more elaborate and grandiose orotundity, prolixity and self-consciousness, Will Self-consciousness you might say, or I could dress it down into something stripped. Stark. Bare. Simple. It would be hard to dress it down into something raggedly demotic without it being a patronising pastiche of a street argot to which I quite evidently have no access and in whose mazy slang avenues I would soon get lost, innit? In a sense I am typecast linguistically and although I can for fun try on all kinds of brogues and dialect clothes, my voice, my style, my language is as distinctive as my fingerprints.”
And finally… LIVE PUPPYCAM KYOOT

Happy Halloween…
From Peaseblossom, two Thriller-related treats. One demonstrates how online video is pushing lip-sync into a new folk-artform, when what seems like a couple hundred students deliver an astonishing one-take performance of Thriller as the steadicam roams throughout their school, checking out the geeks, the jocks, the wasters, the band… even cooler is that it isn’t even in their native language. They’re all French, from IUT of Rouen. Anyway, it is no surprise that I adore this.

LIP DUB IUT SRC ROUEN 2008 from arcanes-prod on Vimeo.
And for extra Thriller thrills, here’s Thrill the World, a noble online quest to get people to dance the Thriller dance en masse – over 4,000 people took part around the world. There are many videos…
Remixing and snarking on daily comic strips is another big web past-time. My brother brought this online delight to my attention, and it is great fun: Marmaduke explained in which the hidden depths of each Marmaduke cartoon are revealed. Ben likes this one in particular. Oh that big dumb dog!
(Related: weirdly, Garfield Minus Garfield has just been collected and released as an official Garfield book by the Garfield publisher, with the blessing of Jim Davis.)
Chris Cole, inspired by the Chema Madoz photos last week, emailed me a link to the breathtaking paper-folding artworks of Peter Callesen. Just amazing – no glue or anything involved, just taking one sheet of paper and slicing into it then folding it up.

Michael’s comment on last week’s linky, finding one of the abandoned cities on Google Earth, introduced me to the Google Sightseeing blog which visits all kinds of neat places around the globe. Here’s a giant kiwi design cut out of a chalk hillside in England! Not as well-endowed as the Herne giant, but still kinda impressive.
And finally, this local news story gave me a laugh…

An amazing tour through a bunch of real-world ghost cities, almost none of which I’d heard of. Mesmerizing.
This one’s been all over the place – the 2008 US electoral campaign as a game of D&D


I love these photos by Chema Madoz
And finally… the brokers with hands on their faces blog!

this week: has been busy and while I’ve had things worth saying i haven’t had time to do them justice. Ah well. At least there are always linky:
Cool knitted stuff, including a bunny the size of a hotel, and cephalapods
Back in 1982, one of the first of those “clues to a real treasure” books was released in the US: The Secret: A Treasure Hunt contained verse and paintings pointing to the location of 12 treasure casks buried by the author. More than 25 years on, only two have been found, one in 1984, the other in 2004. The hunt continues over at The Secret wiki! (Curious side fact: the treasure from the most famous of these books, the UK’s Masquerade from 1979, was found not by a puzzle-solver but by a guy who had inside info from the writer’s ex-girflriend. Wikipedia has the scoop and the solution.)
hix over at multi-dimensional has been running a series of posts on long-range thinking, and why we’re all so crap at it. He’s going somewhere interesting with this, and it ties in to something I’d never heard of, Superstruct, an internet game set in 2019 in which the world’s players respond to major global threats. Keen!
If you’ve ever played one of those classic text adventures (Eat Cake, Take Note, Go North, etc) then you’ll dig this: MS Paint Adventures has a cartoonist draw a scene and then receive “commands” from the internet audience, and then draw the next scene, and so you progress through a very strange adventure indeed. Like a lot of these things, takes a little while to get into its rhythm but is addictive once it hits stride.
An episode of Kamikaze Cookery, a twenty-minute cooking show in which a normal person tries to cook a recipe from one of those glossy recipe books fronted by Jamie Oliver. Cue much insulting of Jamie Oliver and a very entertaining show. Give it a try – I was tipped off that this was coming by esteemed sheep-hater Johnnie, and its good to see an episode out. (There’s also another episode in which they cook a steak with a blowtorch and a vacuum cleaner.)

And finally, a daily three-panel gag strip about the eagle eternally devouring the liver of bound Prometheus! Like Garfield only with a bird eating this dude’s liver in every strip.

Ephelants! Ephelants in a hotel lobby! Not a Muppets sketch – actual and real! A particular wild herd had a hotel built on their patch, and decided they were gonna eat the fruit there anyway. Charming story and photos here.
Fine, okay, here’s an ephelant-related Muppets sketch too. One of the best from the post-Henson 90s Muppets Tonight reboot.
I saw this several places but at mundens first: the literal re-interpretation of Take On Me! Just wonderful.

Another talk from NYU’s Clay Shirky, who is everywhere at the moment in the wake of his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ about new technology making it easier to work collectively. Here’s Clay talking about the role of inconvenience in social systems, and how the same fluidity of new media that makes organising easy causes problems when it comes to interacting with institutions. How can we inject inconvenience in the right places to achieve certain kinds of functionality? Great case study of the guy who got sued by his university for organising an online study group! Not a great talk, but it covers some cool stuff and essential if you’re thinking about this stuff. (Hint: I am.)
And finally… a children’s book like you’ve never seen before. “When she woke up, Ellen thought about her dream. And deep, deep down inside herself Ellen really did wish that she could marry her daddy some day. This is what happens when an entire culture starts taking Freud seriously…

The only acceptable excuse for not regularly reviewing the best photoblog there is is that you only internet at work (some images include arty nudity). Everyone else, get on to it. It reliably makes me laugh, gasp, and marvel.
Last night I went along to the local Drinking Liberally, where the speaker was Gordon Campbell, brilliant journo formerly of the now-broken Listener, currently delivering incredible election coverage for a pittance over on Scoop. If you are a New Zealander and you have the slightest interest in the fate of this nation, you owe it to yourself to get on to his Election 08 coverage. Start right now with his latest piece, an analysis and discussion of our two main party leaders refusing to debate with our minor party leaders – in a proportional system, that’s a big call. Top-notch stuff by one of NZ’s best journalists, free to the web. You can’t go wrong.
No Right Turn linked to this and it is well worth your time: The Guardian writes about Jamie Oliver’s new show. The continuing social/political awakening of Jamie Oliver is one of the more welcome developments of the last decade – he is an incredibly high-profile figure with the capacity to reach a huge audience and shift perceptions around the incredibly important subject of food. This article writes about how, in his new show, he comes face to face with the UK working class who have lost the ability to manage their own nutrition; and, even more interesting, it shows recent research that demonstrates how buying crappy food makes rational sense to those on a tight budget. Class still structures UK society.
Speaking of class, check this out: this is the page to register to buy tickets at the Royal Opera House in London. Have a look at the drop-down options for “Title” – it goes somewhat further than “Mr, Mrs, Ms.” (This one tipped off by the Private Eye.)
ObYouTube: David Letterman reacts to John McCain snubbing him. He doesn’t take it too well. (This one has been all over the web for the last week.)

And finally, this was surely the most incredible kids media content of the 80s – the ridiculous, gory and downright amazing Dinosaur Attacks cards from Topps.

Your assortment of linky this Friday includes:
Concept Ships – a blog of conceptual drawings of nifty spaceships. Breathtaking imagery. Good for SF and design heads or anyone who likes nice pictures of things.
The Superest, another drawing blog, in which an artist comes up with a wacky superhero/villain, then another artist devises someone who would defeat them, and so on. The first twenty or so were nice but meh, then somehow it found its groove and since then it’s been amazingly inventive. Plus: funny drawings!
Via the Alligator, a New Yorker piece on Sarah Palin, elites and moose: “Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there.”
And speaking of moose – how about some baby moose and their mama playing in a sprinkler?

And finally, a free-in-pdf comic in which a gorilla who is also a luchadore fights creatures from the Cthulhu mythos. I linky you…. El Gorgo!

Avast, ye bilge-scum, ahoy! There be linky ahead! Yarr, we shall plunder their riches me hearties, and send the rest down to Davey Jones! Arrrrrr!
(Yep, it’s that time of year again. Don’t forget to celebrate in your job interviews and performance review meetings!)
A great piece of spoken word courtesy of Judd about being a kid at the library and more:

Film people will be well aware of Ron Cobb, whose incredible design work on many films is justly revered – his work on Alien was an important grounding counterpoint on the wildness of Jean Giraud and the weirdness of Giger, while being every bit as beautiful as either – and his CV also includes key design work on Star Wars, Total Recall and others. But I didn’t know until this week that Cobb was a particularly acidic political cartoonist as well. Some of his social comment cartoons are included at the link, well worth a look.
The music trend sweeping the internets by storm: take one of your MP3s and add some cowbell! And a little bit of Christopher Walken! More Cowbell shows the way! Recent artists given the cowbell treatment include Foo FIghters and Eric Clapton at the time of writing…
Political linky: incisive description of how the right-wing noise machine in the US can operate an attack on everybody’s friend, Oprah Winfrey, and get away with it. Bonus linky: The Edge, a cultural comment site that looks amazing but I’ve only just started to explore it.
And finally: KARATE CHIMP WILL ROUNDHOUSE YOU

Weird signs
The US Presidential Election as a game of Magic: The Gathering.
British Medical Journal article on the efficacy of parachutes in preventing death from gravitational challenge.
Interiew with Mike Leigh about the Canadian debut of “Happy Go Lucky”, previously discussed on this blog here – if you saw this film, give it a read, it gives Leigh’s perspective on what he has created.
And finally, yet more proof that old-skool comics were seriously weird: a complete Herbie story. Prepare to say “what the what?”
[most of these linky courtesy Making Light and Journalista]