Month: December 2010

New Years Linky (by Jenni)

Hi everyone, I’m Jenni. Since Morgue and Cal still have a baby I’m doing the Friday linky this week. I gave this a lot of thought, I mean come on. Morgue’s Friday Linky is a Big Deal. People have come to expect a certain level of awesome from the links and the responsibility of providing said links should not be taken lightly. I hope I don’t disappoint you.

A life coach authored article worth reading if you’re the type to evaluate your life as we head into a new year…why are so many people unhappy?

Meg Cabot (author of The Princess Diaries books) on The Princess Thing and how people are looking at it wrong.

Those of you who read my blog will know about this guy anyway, but I love this guy so here he is again. Mark, a gay, educated and sensitive to sexism man, reads Twilight. Hilarity ensues. He’s also done all of Harry Potter and is just starting the second book of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

An infographic that shows how the world has changed in the last decade.

Jezebel has been running a rather excellent review of the best female comic creators of 2010. Check out Part one and part two.

For low effort, big impact reading try the Twitter length horror stories at Dead End Fiction.

I will abuse my linky writing power to bring your attention to this short animation done by my sister in law’s family. The narrator is my husband, Lee.

Looks like I’m meant to have another video in here, so here’s Tron: Legacy in 30 seconds.

And so concludes the Friday Linky – Jenni edition. You can check out my blog here. I hope you weren’t too bored.

[morgue adds: SO not bored! This stuff looks really cool, can’t wait to dig into it! Thanks Jenni! Go check out her blog for chat about writing, crafts, and other random things, including the always delightful Things I Love Thursday.]

About Willa

For those wanting details, here are details. Everyone else, feel free to skip.

Willa is named for her paternal great-grandmother – my father’s mother. G-gma was Williamina and known as Mina, but we went with the alternative spelling Willamina to be known as Willa (and for an easier time spelling her name). Both versions are Scots variants on the Germanic form, Wilhelmina. It means “protector”, which is a pretty good name meaning to have.

Willa’s middle name Therese appears on both sides of the family tree. She’s taking my last name, Davie, at least for now. We don’t have a long-term strategy for a family name. We can talk about it with her when she’s old enough to have an opinion, I guess.

Willa arrived weighing just under 9 pounds (just over 4kg), which is big but not huge. She was long, 53cm I think, so she might have inherited my height. She could just lift her head right from birth, and a week on is easily able to support her own head long enough to turn it towards whatever she wants to look at.

Willa likes to sleep with her hands on either side of her forehead, fingers curled forward. She’s a good healthy feeder and is generally very content and happy. We are seriously counting our blessings in this regard because a lot of our friends have had rough rides with their new babies; hopefully this good streak will continue. (Cal jokingly argues that she deserves some easy time after a long nausea-ridden pregnancy!)

Willa has big feet. I took four randomly-selected pairs of baby booties to the hospital; three pairs were much too small, and the other just fit.

We read her her first story today; Hairy Maclary. Of course she had no idea what was going on but I think she picked up that something a bit special was happening. She spent most of the duration looking at the book rather than at Cal or me, and Cal thought she liked listening to my voice. (It’s a good book, lovely to read. Also: full of dogs, which fits into Cal’s masterplan to have every child in the world love dogs.)

She’s wonderful, basically, and the most amazing thing is how much it seems like she belongs here. Having her in our lives is perfectly right.

Oh also I’m total stereotypical dad with a camera full of baby photos. But I will try not to spam y’all.

[We haven’t opened our hoose to visitors just yet, but I look forward to showing her off soon!]

Christmas Linky (by Pearce)

Hi. I’m Pearce. Morgue and Cal have had a baby, so today you get linky from me.

An explication of James Bond’s taste in whiskey.

Black Christmas is a compilation you can download for free of The Cramps’ favourite Christmas songs.

In that vein here is a YouTube playlist of Lovecraftian Christmas songs, by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

Richard Pryor in the Star Wars bar, because I couldn’t bear to link to the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Homosexual Frogs is an interesting discussion of the Political Correctness thing.

Gruesome Victorian-ish porcelain dolls.

I first ran across Shrine of the Mall Ninja a couple of years ago courtesy of William Gibson’s blog.

It was eight years yesterday since Joe Strummer died. Lest We Forget.

Brian Cox teaches Shakespeare to a toddler:

Merry Christmas to all!

Remember kids: Santa is a professional. Don't try this at home!

[morgue says: awesome! Hey y’all, go read the Pearce blog! It is full of coolness.]

Waiting Linky

[yes still waiting come on baby]

Time lapse – 10 years

Hear the individual recording tracks of Helter Skelter and Gimme Shelter. There’s probably more of these out there.

Great article about young Haitians learning to make films. (By Anne Nocenti who used to write Daredevil back in the day, funnily enough.)

The entirety of the 1910 Frankenstein film

The AV Club’s been running a great series, Whatever happened to Alternative Nation?, which is an account of the “alt rock”/”grunge” era from the perspective of a guy who grew up amongst it. Which is to say, he writes about my life, dude. Well written and worth a read for those who, like me, had their minds blown a bit when they first heard Smells like teen spirit in ’91. (Though I didn’t become a Nirvana fan for a few years after that.)

80s sci-fi/fantasy mixtape

Photoshop at work on Megan Fox

From my bro: Law & the multiverse, a blog deconstructing the legal ramifications of superhero stories.

Amazing coin-based stop-motion film. (With 1-minute making of at the end.)


Damn you Autocorrect!

Tintin meets Lovecraft

Awkward School Pictures

And finally… WTF Woody from Toy Story? (not safe for work, or for your dignity)

Easy A (USA, 2010)


When you are waiting for a baby, sometimes you go to the cinema and watch low-stress high-school flicks. I like high-school flicks. This is one of them.

Premise is that Emma Stone’s character pretends for various reasons to have sex with a variety of young men, and is vilified as a slut. The A of the title is a reference to The Scarlet Letter. It’s an interesting enough premise – anything that takes on the hypocrisy around teens having sex deserves props just for that.

Reviews I’ve seen have been giving this three stars. That’s about right. It’s well-executed and smarter than most stuff aimed at teens but it’s off-balance. It’s a bunch of good bits but there’s something about the assembly that doesn’t ring true.

Way I see it, this film is hamstrung by the very culture war it ostensibly takes on. It ends up playing nice and moral, even though it’s dealing with the failure of conservative morality. It doesn’t allow itself any teeth, and it has to fake its structure in order to rationalise its set-pieces.

Like, the core of the idea? That’s a meaty premise. Power in there, and some uneasy truths. But the film can’t own them and has to get its story going using a fakey-fakey imaginary high school social scene. It works like this: main character, brainy normal ignored Olive, lies to say she’s lost her virginity. What happens after this is that the entire school gossip ferociously about her, and she becomes an instantly notorious celebrity.

This is, needless to say, Not How It Works In Reals. This is fantasy-adult version of high school. Which is in itself fine, it just means we’re in symbolic high school movie not representative high school movie. However, look at the way those symbols get lined up: one sexual encounter = reputation for sexual promiscuity. This is the Family Values view of reality, embedded within and framing a story that tries to attack that same view of reality. The whole film is a contradiction in terms; it’s no wonder it doesn’t hold together.

That faultline goes right through the characters. Olive is a great character, mouthy and smart and creative and self-possessed. All the other high schoolers are bland, at best, or empty caricatures, at worst. The film keeps referencing John Hughes’ films, but for all their faults Hughes’ teens always had character. This film: no. How can they feel genuine when they have to exist as part of a fakey-fakey social world? Instead, the well-written character mojo runs through the adults, particularly Olive’s parents and her favourite teacher. In their chipper, smart dialogue (all the most fun sequences in the movie involve these adults) we can see that the main influence on this movie isn’t The Breakfast Club or Say Anything; it’s Juno. But that just cycles back to that key difference again. Juno added up to a coherent argument. This film can’t allow itself to do that.

So, I wanted more from this film. I do find the core premise fully engaging: a girl who recognizes that sexual experience is status currency, positive for men and negative for women, and then proceeds to upend status relationships in the male hierarchy while subverting the negative consequences that are put upon her. But this film only toys with these ideas, and never really engages with them. And sure, I wasn’t expecting a Show Me Love*-style dramatic exploration of how normative sexual culture operates among teens. But I wanted something that had more to say than this, something closer to The Breakfast Club, to Fast Times, to Superbad, even to American Pie.

Now, that’s a lot of paragraphs of negative. I feel like I need to redress the balance here: I liked this film a lot. It entertained me. Watch it on DVD if you like high school flicks. Enjoy Emma Stone’s great starmaking turn. Laugh at the genuinely funny stuff all the adults get to do. But don’t think too hard about it, in case you end up making long rambly blog posts. Like me.

* I prefer the alternate title for Show Me Love, but I try to avoid setting off the internet filters at people’s workplaces so I have not mentioned it.

On Having A Girl

It is Monday and I am not at work and do not yet have a baby.

We are likely to have a girl-baby. Can never be sure: sister of my office-buddy was expecting a girl, but last week got a boy. Still, my brain is mostly pointing towards girl, and that – that! It has given me cause to ponder. And ponder’d I thus: it makes me glad that I know so many amazing women.

Like, for serious, I know some *amazing* women. Doing incredible stuff, selfless stuff, high-powered high-achievement stuff, visionary stuff, good friend stuff, generous soul stuff. Stuff in all directions. Women who make me collapse with laughter. Women who walk up to dumbness and kick it in the gonads. And, not least, women gone through tough times & come out firing on all cylinders.

(Needless to say my Cal is all over these. Women in my family also strongly feature, yo.)

I am thankful for the privilege of knowing all these people, and being shaped by them, and seeing the world around me get shaped by them too. Because it reminds me that the bad is not insurmountable. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last few months: the bad. Frex: the gender-coded socialization that doesn’t even bother to hide itself and will engulf the wee beastie in body-anxiety and social submission; I hope that the tools we give our daughter (if we do get a daughter) will help her not to breathe it all in.

Except hope isn’t the right word. Because of all these people I know, and because of the way I was brought up, and because I’m not doing this alone, I am confident she won’t breathe it all in. Hell, she might find a way to dodge the flood entirely.

We can do this stuff more-or-less right. I am surrounded by examples of doing it right, after all. And yes, I know they fcuk you up your mum and dad, but: it is my heartfelt intention to fcuk my little girl up in ways that run counter to the ways society at large is trying to fcuk her up. Society doesn’t need the extra help. (And besides, I’m a psychology nerd, and everyone knows psych-heads have a lock on finding new and unique ways to mess up our children.)

So what am I worried about? Like all these women I know, like her grandmothers and aunties, and like her mum, she’s gonna be awesome.

Unless she turns out to be a he. In which case, y’know, all bets are off.

—

Prompt for this post was Simon C linking to this TED talk about growing up as a man. “My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.” Strong stuff.

—

Also: paying tribute to women by no means diminishes the many men I know who are also awesome. Particularly the dads of daughters who are making a bloody good go of it. Nice one dads, I am taking notes.

Washing Machine Linky

So, if you didn’t already, you wanna go read Cal’s blog about the washing machine repairman. It’ll start your day off right.

The washing machine itself – well. I grump about design a lot, sometimes on this blog even, and there’s a reason for that: poor design creates problems. Case in point. Poor design here is not with the washing machine itself, but with the manual. We sent for a repairman because when I tried to follow the manual’s instructions to check a filter myself, I was stymied. Here’s the instruction they give :
(full manual here)

So I pull off the service cover and I see the round thingy on the right, like in the illustration, and I look for the hose on the left. No hose. Nothing at all. Featureless washing machine casing. What the hell?

Turns out – have you figured it out yet? – the round thingy on the right *is* the hose on the left.

(I actually suspected that it might be and tried to loosen it. But it was locked in there very tight, and didn’t want to create two problems if it was something else that wasn’t meant to come undone, and the problem might not be anything to do with this filter anyway. So I figured, let the repair guy deal with it. Maybe you would have unscrewed the hose with more confidence. Fair play to you, and good luck with your future warranty claims.)

[EDIT: no, Cal informs me this is still wrong – the hose is actually around the rear of the machine. The round thingy is a separate filter. You drain the hose *then* open the round thing. Or something. THE MANUAL IS COMPLETELY WRONG. My brain cannot comprehend why this level of fail is commonplace.]

Anyway, I don’t need to tell any more of that story. Poor design is a pain in the backside. That’s it.

So, linky!

Inception – all the dream layers, unfolding in time relation to each other

Regarding the same movie, a bunch of images and infographics.

From Theron, the Map of Metal, which is thoroughly metal. (NB: like YouTube, this starts playing automatically)

1930 article about a flea circus

Learn about the various Hulks on Twitter.

Via Craig Ranapia, papercraft Howl’s Moving Castle

Why the ghosts in Pac-Man behave as they do. Incredibly detailed; I didn’t read anywhere near all of it, but skimming it was fascinating.

More Star Wars as modern mythocultural iconography: Star Wars family portraits. Dr Seuss does Star Wars. A is for Ackbar.

Adam Curtis on behaviourism, class, and identity. Comments are really good.

I’m delighted to see, via Cat, that the Australian Museum website has a page about the Drop Bear. It’s about time this threat was given the scholarly attention it deserves.

On the IMDB, Spinal Tap is not rated out of 10, but out of a different, slightly higher number. Perfect.

Speaking of the importance of design – check out these magic wallets. They’re all very gimmicky, but’s there’s some extremely clever insights buried in these.

Mad Men characters on D&D alignment chart.

And speaking of D&D, how weird is it that this is a real thing: people cramming into a room to watch other people play D&D. The players are all geek celebrities, but that aside – playing D&D to an audience. We are in strange aeons now, dudes.

Did you like Anya out of Buffy? The actress, Emma Caulfield, is releasing her mockumentary Bandwagon in parts on YouTube. I love the self-sendup of LA industry types, and the Buffy cast/crew cameos. (That said, the foil character makes me uneasy.)

And finally… all of Billy Joel’s hits played at once!

no i dont know either

Wikileaks Addendum: Sex Charges

Just want to add – while I have srs reservations about the sex assault/rape charges against Assange, and the way in which they have been handled (which reeks of politicisation) and reported – I’m not in favour of minimising the allegations. Let the justice system do its work. Even if the handling has been awful, I have faith in the courts sorting stuff out effectively.

Smearing the complainants = not good.