Month: October 2011

Big Bad Linky

Halloween! Here is the AV Club on one of the most unnerving sequences I’ve ever seen on the big screen, the bit in the car from Scream 2. I remember singing the praises of this scene on the way home from the cinema, good to be reminded why I liked it so much!

And also for Halloween, you could do worse than dip into the deep weirdness of the Slender Man…

And look what horror movies have done to us

Great one-star review of Orwell’s 1984 on Amazon: “Jackson’s “Thriller”? (the soundtrack of the summer, and the biggest selling album of all-time) – not mentioned; Frankie Goes To Hollywood (their breakthrough year leading to world pop domination) – not a whisper…”

BBC Domesday project – snapshots from all across the UK in 1985, there to explore and compare to a growing number of 2011 updates.

The Royal Society have opened their archive. At the link, BoingBoing points out a few amazing things you can find there. I’m afraid to start looking in case I don’t stop.

All four Twilight books in one short webcomic

At Dangerous Minds, a great writeup of Occupy Wall Street from the point of view of a cynical lefty New Yorker. Check this bit:

My favorite moment—or moments, I should say—of my three visits to Occupy Wall Street was watching the open-air Big Apple double-decker tour buses drive past, full of tourists with their fists in the air! That was an amazing thing to see. Witnessing that sight, repeatedly, I might add, was as sure a confirmation as anyone should require that a little over a month after its improbably beginnings, OWS is becoming a mainstream phenomenon.

Judd Apatow, Feminist, says Elle mag. An interesting view of the guy behind Bridesmaids & Knocked Up.

Fierce essay on the anti-Stratfordians, who think Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. Not a takedown exactly – it takes as read that their position is nonsense – but a bracing assault on their way of thinking, drawing explicit comparison to creationists demanding schools “teach the controversy”. All sparked by that new film, of course.

And then there’s this guy doing Shakespeare in celebrity voices. Some uncommon ones in there along with the classics you all expect.

A blog of things people used as bookmarks as found by a second-hand books dealer. (Which reminds me of my own encounter with an interesting bookmark.)

Found this filed in the wrong section of my bookmarks, no idea how long it’s been there. Aaaaages. Still cool. It is CuteRoulette, randomly delivering cute videos for cute cuteness! Except it seems to be bringing up a lot of dead links now. I assume it was curated, and is no longer being curated. Anyway, worth a look if you like cute videos cute cute kyoot kawaii.

And finally… Slave Leia PSA

Unknown Title – Watch more free videos

Occupy Wall Street

(Sitting here in New Zealand, I am obviously well-placed to Give Advice to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here on my blog I address an audience of as many as TEN different people, and I’m sure the weight of these multitudes will carry this message to the people who need it most. You’re welcome, freedom.)

OWS does not have a list of policy and process demands (yet) and it houses enormous diversity. This movement, says the media and political establishment, is incoherent and without focus.

But the OWS protestors do have a clear single focus; an overarching unified goal of which they share pursuit. The goal is this: getting the powerful to admit there is a fundamental problem with the economy.

This should be the core message of the protests. Every time a camera gets turned on someone at OWS, we should hear this demand. (I’m sure someone has said these words, somewhere, but I haven’t seen it and that means it isn’t high enough profile.)

The protesters all know there is a fundamental problem. They say to the camera: “We are here because our society is broken”. But I haven’t heard anyone say “and we demand that the bankers, the politicians, the media pundits, admit this!”

If this was the message, then perhaps the TV cameras would spend a little less time asking protesters what policy changes they want, and a little more time confronting bankers and politicians with the realities of the system they have created.

(OWS is changing the discourse anyway.)

FATE OF NATIONS linky

The Rugby World Cup final on Sunday. If NZ loses, then the world may explode. THIS IS NO LAUGHING MATTER! IT IS A HAKA-ING MATTER!

More links re: The Thing – a comic story that appears to be Vikings vs. The Thing, characters from The Thing (1982) watching The Thing (2011).

How to tell if you’re reading pseudo-history (via Ivan)

Timeline of Food (via making light) – man some stuff is way older than I thought it was

Psychology finds a long-lost shipwreck

100 years of East London style…

From D3vo – futuristic megastructures. Amazing visuals, radical ideas. I’ve seen less than a quarter of these before.

Steranko concept art for Indiana Jones before Harrison Ford was cast

Saying “um” is good

Oddities of Stop Motion – that creepy Mark Twain clip, Jan Svankmajer, many more…

Camera that takes photos where you can adjust the focus afterwards. Clever!

Via everyone, well worth a watch if you haven’t yet: Quantum Levitation

And finally… Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses

Oily Linky

The scariest thing about NZ’s current oilspill is that it’s so incredibly minor compared to other events elsewhere.

Anyway, let these linky drift towards your mental beach and collect on the pristine sand of your thought processes:

The Thing musical. SPOILERS for the 1982 movie and, let’s face it, for the 2011 movie too. (Thanks to Mr David Ritchie of Hamiltron for this one.)

Jenni and Pearce sent me this direct, and I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. If you haven’t seen it you’re obviously following the wrong Twitterbooks. Dr Seuss does Call of Cthulhu

The conceptual ecology of Tumblr is fascinating to me. Image mixing is so incredibly simple in the mature digital era; it wasn’t so long ago that images were expensive in every sense of the word. Now images are about as cheap as words. Big change, and in manifests in thousands of Tumblrs that are basically ironic jokes about celebrities, and also bits of genius like this: My Daguerrotype Boyfriend, or this collection of 8-bit computer games that don’t exist

Team-ups I did not expect: Baba Brinkman (of the rap guide to human nature) and Prof Elemental (of the ubiquitous Cup of Brown Joy). In a promo for MacMillan Dictionaries. Via Matt Cowens

Fairly mindblowing tech demo on adding things to photos. The best thing about this is the stuff they choose to put in the photos. Someone has great taste in statues.

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

This has been lurking in my bookmarks for ages: a 157-song mix of 2010 music, for download from Fluxblog

Chicks like consonant music

Games Workshop wargame army consisting of characters from Monty Python & the Holy Grail.

Neat survey of what NZers are thinking (by my colleague Marc Wilson)

David Brin owns on the subject of distinguishing climate change skepticism from climate change denial.

I bookmarked this a month ago and since then it has been everywhere because it is AMAAAAZING. So if you haven’t seen it already, NOW IS THE TIME. It is: Women of the Future (as predicted in 1902)

And finally… how to open a door

(via Dangerous Minds, again again)

Quick Shots

I miss being able to blog about things in the world. Writing here helps me process and understand things. My comprehension of reality has reduced while I’ve been busy. Anyway, to spare you lengthy tortured posts, here’s some quick thoughts.

Shipwreck: A ship on a reef leaking oil, and the election just changed again. Our PM is under pressure from the media for a change, and he’s not coping. Key has been protected from tough questions his entire premiership for this reason – he can’t handle the pressure while keeping his smiling “nice Mr Keys” persona going. It won’t cause a huge desertion of the National party by voters, but expect Key’s preferred PM #s to drop and the Greens to continue to gather up votes.

OvalBall: I’ve never seen our country like this. The Rugby World Cup really has become a national celebration (even as the promised economic benefits fail to appear, SURPRISE). When we roadtripped up to Hastings and back a few weeks ago, the whole route was lined with festive signs. All Blacks flags in so many windows, flying from so many cars. And so many other flags! And every little town dressing up in global-village finery for the visiting rugby teams. A genuine spirit of love for the game, huge applause for the little-guy teams when they play well. It’s quite a wonderful atmosphere. I’m genuinely delighted. (Of course, if the All Blacks lose to Australia this weekend, there’ll be… well, not riots. But it will be rough. And hard to avoid even if you care not one tiny fig about rugby.)

Occupy: Yes yes, the Occupy Wall St movement has a vast overrepresentation of university-educated hipsters, and elides differences between middle class and working class, and hasn’t articulated unifying principles, and harbours madness on its fringes. It is important to note all of these things. But for heaven’s sake, don’t mistake these concerns for justifications not to celebrate the appearance of a genuine grass-roots societal justice movement that is driving the conversation in the US. (The US being the society whose abject brokenness all other Western societies are striving so hard to match.) There isn’t a completely different movement that does a better job waiting in the wings. This is the shot we get. Wish it well.

Who: loved Matt Smith’s performance this season of Doctor Who, but my enthusiasm for the show as a whole is at a very low ebb. Moffat as showrunner has lost me completely. His big villains are a complete failure of storytelling craft, and the more you try to forgive that, the more holes show up elsewhere. I stand by my earlier call: Torchwood season 4 > Doctor Who season 6.

i Linky

Fascinating to see the reaction to Steve Jobs’ death. Mainstream coverage predictably hagiographical, but there’s a lot of nuance elsewhere. I’ve appreciated these bits by Joel Pitt, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Russell Brown.

The FedEx logo, and the arrow hidden inside it. Very interesting about the process of logo design.

Two contributions from D3vo that he describes as very worthwhile (I haven’t had a chance to look at either of them yet):
1. Vanity Fair article on california, the recession, US politics etc
2. TED talk – Niall Ferguson, the 6 killer apps of prosperity

Another great series of essays by Andrew Rilstone, this time analyzing contemporary (UK) political talk through the lens of bad puns. Part one is here; the rest follow along. Very relevant here in NZ with the electoral cycle rolling closer.

Presume you’ve already seen that vid of the kid experiencing the single greatest plot twist in movie history? (Yep this counts as this week’s Star Wars content.)

17-second vid: Arrested Development cast all do chicken dance after announcing return of show.

Stop-motion ninja fight. Perfectly done.

Ninja from Olivier Trudeau on Vimeo.

Most popular infographics (I lol’d)

Huh – there’s a trademark war going on over Keep Calm and Carry On.

Illustrations from 130 years of the Brothers Grimm

And finally, oh man this is such a great photo collection – Canadian horror house takes snapshots of patrons as they encounter the final big scare.