Still a week to go before this famous carnival, but our local version is on today. As carnivals go it’s pretty semiotically thin, but I think it counts, particularly because it has increasingly taken specific cues from big carnivals like the N’Orleans mardi gras (kissing beads, huh?). I love that there’s a big event in Wellington’s calendar that’s all about dressing up in silly costumes. I only wish it wasn’t so very, very white middle class heterosexual. Maybe its too corporate an event to ever really get its freak on, but as it gets bigger and bigger, surely other more socially anarchistic networks could take steps to subvert it and use it as a platform to upend the social order? I live in hope.
Also of Wellington, this short moonrise clip that went viral in the last couple days. It took me ages to actually bother to watch it, because, it’s a moonrise, how good can it be? Answer: really very very good.
Also widely circulated and well worth a look: the Smithsonian mag tells of a Russian family who lived in isolation for 40 years
Bet you anything that this article about school friends who decided to continue their high-intensity version of tag into adulthood has already been movie optioned. Will Ferrell will star.
A reworked Courier font intended for screenplays. (via Gregor)
One-page comic strip retelling of Pride & Prejudice. Manages to include pretty much the whole story, also some jokes. (via Alexis)
White People Headquarters (via Pearce)
Hey, Comics Alliance is reviewing Barb Wire, that crazy B movie that retells Casablanca with Pamela Anderson in the Bogart role and Temuera Morrison as Ingrid Bergman. I have a real soft spot for that dumb film.
Cartoonist Ben Kling’s funny dictator valentines (a photo-based ripoff of this has gone viral, but the jokes belong to Kling, and his art makes them 1000% better) (via Miri)
Pulp magazine cover generator (whoa this is a MAJOR timesink I haven’t even dared try it) (via Gareth S)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, who you should just read regularly because he’s great, delightfully describes the conceptual breakthrough that allowed him to make sense of the niceties of grammar in the French language – superhero comic parallel universes
Kyle Baker is a phenomenally talented and very funny comic creator. He has put all his creator-owned work online, free for you to read. You can stop working now, you’re done for the day, you have to spend the rest of it reading all these amazing books. (Start with Cowboy Wally or Why I Hate Saturn.)
Fascinating approach to doing a motion comic – it’s kind of like a flipbook, but way more engaging than that sounds: Malaria.
Lovecraft postcard correspondence goes a bit Lovecraftian. (via Theremina)
Did you play QWOP last week, the amazing running game? You should have! Try it now! To whet your appetite here’s a video of a guy running with exactly the speed and grace of Your Guy in QWOP. This almost made me lose bladder control. (via ObjectiveReality in comments here last week!)
Tweenchronic Skip Rope. It came out around New Years when you were distracted. If you haven’t seen it, you gotta. It’s special. (And yes, it is by the same group that made Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.)
Hugh D pointed out Vinepeek, which plays random freshly-uploaded Vines (6-second video clips). Has the potential for work-unsafeness; Salon.com just ran an article on sexual content among the Vines.
Obligatory Star Wars link: a different point of view.
And finally, on the same theme via the Gator… Vader Schwarzenegger