Month: May 2012

Dancey Linky

Dancey! says the wee beastie, carefully inserting a CD into the stereo. Dancey!

From many people – a fascinating and funny short film of a depressingly plausible high-tech future

Top voice actors do a readthrough of the entirety of Star Wars

The scale of the universe (via lots of people)

The Easter Island statues go deeper than I expected. The photo of an excavation here is amazing.

Photographic essay on the extraction industry around the Canadian oil sands. I found this really fascinating.

If you understand coding even a tiny little bit you will enjoy learning about Objectivist C

Via Ian Hicks: the world’s subways are converging on an ideal track layout

Teachers secretly dance behind students. (The first 30 seconds gives you all you need.) (via MrsMeows)

Heck of an argument for Scottish independence. One strand says that successive UK Parliaments have broken their contract with their citizens, and it’s time to get out of what has become an abusive relationship.

There is officially a cthulhu wasp (via Theremina)

Vintage children’s books my kid loves (via Kate Beaton)

The Roman Empire: travel times revealed in an incredible interactive tool.

Courtesy Dave McCormack, an entertaining judgment. (I imagine that in those legal TV shows where the judges are always pithy and sarcastic, all the written judgments are like this one.)

Unpaired words

How a book is born: interesting infographic

And finally, a genuine treasure: goon show radio

Dragon: 02 to 06

I’ll embed #2 just because:
Dragon_Comic_02

The rest are all available over on flickr. I don’t think anyone wants me to put these all on the blog – do you?

In these episodes you meet Zappy the Trigger-Happy and Gizzard the Naughty Wizard, which google assures me remain unused character names to this day. PWNAGE!

You also gain a clear appreciation for how I was getting bored with the actual drawing bits, so lots of heads floating in blank space and big lettering and that sort of thing.

And the jokes get stupider.

Nevertheless, this continues to make me smile, so i inflict it upon the world 🙂

Read the whole series here!

Dragon: 01

I am delighted to have finally scanned in a comic I made waaaay back when I was 10 years old. (If I remember right, I completed these early episodes at the start of the year, before my birthday.) Here begin the adventures of Nogard the Dragon!

Dragon Comic 01

This was, I think, the first strip comic I ever created and it actually shows some ability to work with panels and pace gags. Any semblance of technique was of course hoovered up from the comics I was reading at the time. These were Marvel’s Avengers (at this point, deep in the Roger Stern era) and IPC’s 80s revival of Eagle (firmly into its decline), of course, but of more relevance: the legendary British humour comic Oink!, whose humour I was eagerly trying to emulate, and the backmatter strips in the gamer mag Dragon Magazine: Larry Elmore’s Snarfquest and Dave Trampier’s Wormy. If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.

Note that some skills weren’t picked up so readily: for example, I couldn’t draw or letter for tuppence. I remember some of my classmates who were just so talented on the cartoon front. Luckily this didn’t hold me back. And also, I couldn’t actually structure a story for tuppence either. That dramatically-named “Scarlet Castle” in the first panel? You’ll never hear of that again. That mid-strip fight-sequence? Complete filler. And that weird interstitial creature talking directly to the audience? Well – there is a reason for him but lord knows what I was thinking at the time.

So, here it is. The remainder of the story will turn up on Flickr in due course, and will be linked in a future post or two. Unsubscribe now!

Rumpus Linky

Following on from the loss of MCA, there came the sad death of Maurice Sendak. May the wild rumpus continue on forever. Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote this great piece about reading the Wild Things to his the kids. The Comics Journal had a great piece on the man. (Tequila!) And check out these radio interviews with the man via Fresh Air.

Dot thing. (via FogOnWater)

Wolfenstein 3D, the forerunner for pretty much every big computer game today, turned 20 today. The game is now free to play in your browser (and, if you’re quick, on your iDevice). And there’s a director’s commentary! (via d3vo)

The New Yorker got brilliant film reviewer Film Crit Hulk to review the Hulk’s part in this Avengers film.

Speaking of which. Avengers: the actual origin story. No this is really it.

Via JetSimian, a writer reminisces beautifully about being a 12-year-old LARPer in some caves in Thatcher’s Britain. Vaguely related: how to ask on Craiglist for a D&D group.

Have you seen the oatmeal’s Tesla comic yet? You must. Tesla = amazing.

Context-free patent art

The angry underground world of failed pickup artists. (via MrsMeows)

Flowchart: What kind of female character is she?

The Descriptive Camera. Delightful.

And finally: (via theremina) dogs dressed as crustaceans.

Stuff’s “Ice Age” story has changed

Following up on this post: In response to a complaint from me (and presumably communications from others as well), Stuff has stripped the inaccurate material out of their “Ice Age” story and added an apologetic note at the bottom.

It can’t take away the effects of the earlier version, but it at least ensures that this isn’t another link that can be circulated through the climate change denier echo chamber.

The person I communicated with sounded embarrassed by the whole affair – as they should be, it is a humiliating failure. Here’s hoping the lesson has been learned.

RIP Pio

I have a half-finished Friday linky but no stomach to finish it. Just took a call from my mother who saw this in the paper, and let me know a young man I knew had killed himself.

In my last year of high school, Pio was just starting. I was a school prefect assigned to his class, and he was in the basketball team I coached with my friend Matt. But I actually met him the year before, on a bushwalk organized for my year and his, to build some connections between incoming pupils and impending school leaders. We did most of the walk together, forging an instant connection. I can’t remember what on earth we talked about but he was smart, funny, and great company. I was delighted when I ended up assigned to his class the next year.

It was May of that year that Pio’s family was devastated by tragic violence. Everything collapsed around him. The school made some efforts, with the basketball team at the forefront – but my fellow coach and the staff liaison were well out of our depth. I don’t know what else happened around him then. We were all worried.

The next year, I was at university but with my friend kept coaching this young basketball team. Pio was by all appearances back to his old self. Neither of us were convinced, but it was good to see him apparently doing okay. After that year we lost touch. I ran into him in his final year of school, where he was himself recognized as a school leader, and then I did think he’d come right despite his awful experience. But that was just me being naive.

Last time I saw Pio was at a funeral in 2006, one of his classmates from that same class I was prefect for. He was on good form and we had a great chat. On leaving I kicked myself for not trading numbers with him. I’ve thought several times since that I should look him up, particularly since moving back to Lower Hutt. But I never did.

It sounds like his mental wellbeing starting slipping not long after that last time I saw him. It sounds very sad. And apart from feeling upset, I feel angry and helpless. I look around this bloody country and all I see is more and more pressure being applied to those who are the most vulnerable. At the same time, what support we’ve managed to put in place is being undermined and hollowed out or just taken away. There’s nothing civilised about what we’re becoming. If our society is worth anything at all it should have found a way to help Pio, and his family two decades ago.

We have to do better than this.

Peace be with you, Pio

Stuff.co.nz Journalism Fail

Main story at stuff.co.nz for the last hour or two: “Solar Minimum could trigger ice age”

Check the article’s opening paras:

The world could be heading for a new ‘solar minimum’ period, possibly plummeting the planet into an Ice Age, scientists say.

Researchers say the present increase in sun activity with solar flares and storms could be followed by this minimum period.

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of global-warming alarmists.

The research for this comes from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

WHAT THE HELL.

“Refuting the predictions of global-warming alarmists”? What kind of language is that? Completely inappropriate.

To google, and in moments I’ve found the abstract and ScienceDaily’s summary. From the latter:

…those findings cannot be directly transferred to future projections because the current climate is additionally affected by anthropogenic forcing.

So, from “climate is affected by anthropogenic forcing” to “refuting predictions of global warming alarmists” in one easy step.

This is UNACCEPTABLE. Where did it come from? A media release from one of the “climate sceptic” pressure groups? Heads should bloody well roll over this.

Too angry about this to say any more.

EDITED TO ADD: see also Hot Topic and The Atavism

Cosplay Linky

This is an 18 second video of the best home-made costume I’ve ever seen:

Via Dylan, Eric Valli’s amazing photography of people living off the grid

Great idea well-executed: Broadway show of Mary Poppins puts on special autism-friendly performance. It’s clear they really thought about how to do this. Awesome.

The Republia Times: play at being the editor of a newspaper in a country that is not free (browser game).

This week’s Star Wars content: the Stormtrooper Shuffle. Amazing student project.

The Weird Al Yankovi of other music genres (yes Weird Al does all genres just roll with it)

Search the deep reaches of the net easily with MillionShort, which strips off the first million (or hundred thou, or ten thou) results.

The entire Slender Man mythos – an immense shared storytelling initiative played out mostly through online video – has been compiled.

The Atlas of True Names

Stuck on an essay? Deadline approaching? Here’s your solution: EssayTyper

Tim Denee linked to wiki’s page on distinguishing green and blue in language. Very interesting.

Map of musical styles

Via loads of people: your logical fallacy is…

And finally, via Dave Cormack, depressing cat video