Was looking forward to settling in and doing a nice solid linky but I lost a doc I’d spent hours on and need to recreate it urgently. So very minimal linky only. Sorry folks.
Yeah I know, I don’t know how I lost it either. Apparently I hadn’t clicked “Save” once in all that time. I thought I’d learned good habits there long ago. Ah well.
Ryan Pequin’s Three Word Phrase updates very irregularly, but it makes me happy every time. He has odd rhythms that come through strongly in panel and dialogue pacing, and they are funny rhythms. I recommend you read through a bunch, see if you get sucked in. (Warning: occasional instances of sex, but they’re all done with this innocent observational style so they don’t feel anything like dirty jokes. Still, if you have prudish workplace, don’t look.)
The nine best Sesame Street special guest appearances. I’ve already linked to many of these in the last few years. A few in here I hadn’t seen though. I won’t spoil the surprise. Needless to say, it’s all worth your time.
And finally, from 1975, Helen Mirren takes on and takes down sexist Michael Parkinson. Haven’t watched this yet but it’s one of those things you hear about. Presumably it lives up to the legend!
Willa had a cold this week, not super fun, but she’s good again now. HOW EXCITING IS MY LIFE!
Webseries action happenin’ all over the place:
Jane Espenson is the biggest name behind HUSBANDS, which launched yesterday. It’s a sprightly sitcom about a casual couple who go to Vegas, get drunk, and end up married! Yep, that old concept – only in this case, the couple are two gay men. Love it.
Emma Caulfield’s Bandwagon is rocking its way through a new season. I never got into the first season (actually a film chopped into bits) of this behind-the-scenes-in-LA comedy, but the new one caught my attention with an audacious plotline around making “GLEE for black people” – urban Glee! I have no time to catch up but worth checking it out, fer shure.
And of course Felicia Day’s groundbreaking series The Guild is well into season 5, and this one is going heavy heavy on the guest stars. A great turn by Neil Gaiman last week, and there’ve been a whole lot of other familiar faces in recent eps. Good stuff!
All those folk are Buffy alumni. Via another Buffy name, Amber Benson, I came across another brand-new web series, called Sex, Drugs & A Capella. It’s like Glee with none of the really obnoxious bits. I’m going to embed this one – it’s really great, and obviously put together by someone who knows how to edit. And there is great singing.
Speaking of editing, Salon.com has been featuring some great video essays that (like the one for The Thing I linkied last time) dissect a film sequence and show you how it works, or doesn’t. They’re both really worth watching to understand visual grammar. The first one tears a sequence from Nolan’s excellent The Dark Knight to pieces, and the second one celebrates a sequence from an entirely forgettable Angelina Jolie flick called Salt.
NZ$100,000 funding for the best low-budget film idea – you need to mock up your poster and tagline. I should find someone to make a poster of my MARCH… OR DIE! concept, wherein a young woman discovers that small-town New Zealand marching girl troops are actually engaged in carefully-choreographed battles to the death. (Some amongst you will have heard me saying repeatedly over the last decade that NZ should develop a cheapo straight-to-DVD exploitation film industry piggybacking on all the infrastructure and expertise we have here. The Knifeman is my pick to career-change into NZ’s Roger Corman.)
Speaking of climate change, Al Gore’s 24-hour global climate reality event is on right now. Or has it just finished? Regardless, it’s important stuff. I love the language: “climate reality”. Considering the way the anti-science forces like to use words as weapons, this is one highly-sharpened piece of rhetorical technology.
You might have heard about the plane in Detroit that was the location of a terror scare on 9/11. Did you hear that the woman who was suspected of being a terrorist is a blogger? Her account makes for sobering reading.
George Lucas added a line of dialogue to the new version of his Star Wars films – Darth Vader saying “Nooooo!” Here is the best response you’ll find.
NZ is about to go a bit mental, because the Rugby World Cup is starting. For 6 weeks we will be in agonies of roaring enthusiasm, severe frustration, not a little wishing all the rugby and tourists would go away, and of course the barely-suppressed angst that we will once again lose the big dance despite being number 1 in the world. Forgive us, furriners, if we make even less sense than usual until the end of October.
Here are some linky that are strongly themed around subjects that are not rugby:
Oh man, I could watch this again and again and again: Schulz draws Charlie Brown
U.S. productivity indexed against wage levels. A simple graph that shows just how bad it’s gotten there (and throughout most of the Western democracies, although not to this extent.) Households responded by going into debt and sending both mum and dad out to work, but those responses are at capacity now – something’s gotta give.
NYT gives a good explanation of decision fatigue, which is a good thing, because this is a crucial idea to understand what it means to be human. Read with reference to every single infuriating statement by economic conservatives and law’n’order bellowers that people should’ve made better decisions. (Game designers should also be aware of this too – there is scientific support for the idea of willpower as an expendable and diminishing resource pool.)
This is a creepy Korean comic that has been doing the rounds. There have been reaction videos. It’s fascinating from a technique perspective, and very successful as a done-in-one creepy tale. If you haven’t looked at it, you should. All in Korean but no translation is needed.
Someone does the numbers on that idea that if you click the first link in any Wikipedia post, and the first link in that one, and so on, it will eventually lead to Philosophy. Cool!
Okay I know I said I wouldn’t have rugby stuff, but look – if you are minding your own business and suddenly an official delegation from rugby turns up, and you need to make a speech in a hurry, here’s the tool for you!
I do love how NZ’s (awful) anti-filesharing legislation has become known all over as the Skynet Law. Hee. Maybe we need shouty Christian Bale to lead the resistance?
As the ill-advised prequel to John Carpenter’s (ill-advised remake of) The Thing approaches, here are some Thing linky: an audio version of the story “The Things” that retells the movie from the alien’s point of view. The text is there to if you just wanna read it, I thought I’d linkied to the story ages ago but apparently not.
Also: closely-argued (very detailed) video essay about the ambiguous ending of The Thing – are there enough clues to work out the film-maker’s intention? As Mr D Ritchie of Hamiltron has pointed out, includes a slightly-too-long clip from the essayist’s student film, to the bemusement of all.
