Month: March 2013

Eostre Linky

Cavalorn, aka Adrian Bott, he of the Prometheus decoding that was linked all around the world, has also been doggedly debunking claims around the pagan origins of certain Easter traditions.

Toy Story 2 was nearly deleted during production. Reading this story made me anxious.

Rock Paper Shotgun apologises for using female writers.

Latest Japanese schoolgirl trend: fake martial arts explosion blast photos

Oliver Stone’s JFK implicated a Christchurch newspaper in the conspiracy. David R pointed me at this Chch library page with details of the newspaper in question and the whole story.

Map of Doctor Who in London

Map of Awkward Moments in NYC

Boy’s high school choir performs choral version of a ballad by Kiwi rock legends Shihad.

(The only comments on the youtube video are two members of Shihad saying ‘this is awesome’.)

How many historians does it take to change a lightbulb? (via Hamish C)

Architecture Daily: can we please stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers? (via Allen Varney)

Albums reimagined as book covers

A potent visualisation of drone strikes in Pakistan over recent years

50 perfectly-timed photos

I was gonna link to a YouTube video: Watch all six Star Wars movies at once! But it has been removed from lots of places. Give it a google, you might get lucky – well worth a look…

And finally… one way to sell a used car

Gun Thumb Linky

Laurie Penny on Steubenville. And, the Good Men Project has a potent primer on rape culture. That’s all I can bear on the subject right now.

Cthulhu cakes

Music videos have been done as action movies before, but this one is a particularly fine example of the form.

In 1988, the LA Times described the far future world of 2013… (via Miri)

Movie guns changed to movie thumbs

Undergraduate history, illustrated (via Hamish Cameron)

The AV Club rounds up 13 great stand-up stories about meeting celebrities. This is good stuff, I actually listened to more than half of these. They lead with one by Tig Notaro that my fellow This American Life listeners will recall.

Mr Spock’s great advice to a biracial teenage girl (via tof)

Dylan Horrocks draws critters from the Monster Manual

Lovely new food blog by a friend of this parish: Nom All The Things

She started out in nudie films, and ended up making your mobile phone work. Along the way she met Hitler. Hers is a very unlikely story, nicely told here – I knew most of the dots here, but not how they connected. (via Peter B)

Great Disney spoof: After Ever After

Clear explanation of the logic behind those dumb Facebook posts that get tens of thousands of comments and likes. (via Julian von Sligo)

That “plus-sized” Swedish mannequin that burned up the social media last week? It was a hoax. [No it wasn’t! Check the link! Thanks Evie & Gem!] Which actually interests me even more.

Candid superhero moments

Luke’s Change: a Star Wars conspiracy theory? (via everybody & their brother)

Star Wars family tree

And finally, via John Machin, the Procatinator. This is a hit or miss kinda automated thing, but the hits made me laugh beyond the power of speech.

Equality Linky

Marriage equality passed second reading! Here’s my buddy’s vid again

Photos of children around the world with their most prized possessions
(this kinda risks that thing of “look how poor those brown people are” but, nah, it’s good.)

D&D 80s cartoon starring Brian Dennehy! Sort of.

Espionage on Twitter?

School of Thrones

Game of Thrones 90s style

Game Of Thrones creator reads children’s stories

Game of Bones

Great New Yorker feature on the Bolshoi Ballet

The original Bond babe (via Mash)

“Vodou is like a gun”

Star Wars Angelus (via Edel) (it is an Irish joke for Irish people but I need to have a Star Wars link here so)

Ten years since Iraq. I can’t bear to think about it. We who protested were right in every way, and those in power were just as much wrong. Here’s a short essay on the matter that I did read, and appreciated.

Smithsonian photo contest (via Ivan)

Every one of these things is made of paper. Incredible. (via Allen Varney)

Passive voice in newspaper headlines on sexual assault. Damn. (via Karen)

The first Feminist Frequency video is out! Really great exploration of the Damsel in Distress trope, its origins, and how it pops up in early video games. Very pleased that Cal and I kicked in a few bucks to support this. And in a freak of timing, this news broke: a reworking of Donkey Kong so the princess is the hero.

And finally (via Tof): skeletor is love

Guest Post: Love Matters

It’s second vote day for the Marriage Equality Bill, & an old friend of mine has a few thoughts about that. The video Craig and his husband Marcel made, at the bottom of the post, is worth watching and sharing. Tell your elected representatives that love matters!

In the past I could not relate the idea of being gay to pride. I remember seeing gay pride campaigns and not understanding the connection between being gay and pride. I no more felt proud being a Kiwi or Pakeha or gay or having blue eyes for that matter. They are all simply ways of describing the attributes of who I am, they weren’t something I had earned, and therefore there was no way to be proud of them.

Today I have a better sense of what pride means. It’s not pride at what I’ve accomplished. It’s pride that I am entitled to and should be given the same respect as everyone else. It’s as simple as this: everyone is entitled to be respected for who they are and treated the same under the law. Some call it pride. I call it respect and civility.

Discrimination is a form of cancer in society. It causes people to feel disenfranchised and isolated, and reinforces ill-treatment of the target group. In my opinion, this prevents a society from ever reaching its full potential.

I know first hand what it was like to be bullied…relentlessly for being gay, and laws that discriminate against gay people indirectly and implicitly reinforce this behaviour. Young LGBT suicides are an absolute tragedy, as are any youth suicides. A society built on acceptance and respect instead of fear and discrimination nurtures and fosters our youth. We owe it to them. We owe it to ourselves.

We have been together now for 15 years, and I look forward to the day when the most interesting thing about that is not the fact we are a same-sex couple, but how it is that he has put up with me for this long.

I’m looking forward to the next 15 years, but this time being your NZ husband.

P.s. No Winston Peters, human rights are not a question of popular vote. Human rights are a question of entitlement and respect. Same-sex marriage is not impinging on the human rights of any other section of society and your job as an elected representative is to protect human rights, not to deflect attention away from the real point of the discussion: State-endorsed discrimination. Tsk tsk.

However, you know what? Even if it came to a popular vote, I have confidence Kiwis would support it.

Thanks Craig!

Street Style Linky

Robert W pointed me at this great text-only street fashion blog, which is satire so deadpan it hardly even knows it’s satire.

NYC past – large-format historical photos of the greatest city in the world

Everyf***ingwebsite – yeah, they’re all like this, pretty much.

Amazing bootleg Star Wars figures from Turkey. So good!

A blog named “Monster Legacy” makes a longer, more detailed version of the exact argument I made in my Prometheus review (in the section ‘Les Cousins Dangereux’). It’s the only other place I’ve seen this argument made, which I think is a bit weird, because to my eyes it is both obvious and fundamental. Although I think I was kinder than Monster Legacy, because I decided to treat Prometheus as a conceptual remix, not a thematic betrayal.

You may not have listened to the mashup of Nine Inch Nails and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. I only succumbed after about fifteen people had already raved about it, and to my surprise, it really lived up to the hype. If you haven’t, do yourself a favour.

This one gif has been everywhere lately, showing the sun in motion through the galaxy with the planets swirling around it. Trouble is, it’s wrong.

What Coke contains (via Lew, kinda mindblowing for what it says about humanity)

Kathleen’s tales of her time in Afghanistan continue with this great one about local monster stories.

Via d3vo – remember that movie, The Fifth Element? Remember that crazy singer in there, who was singing something that (it was claimed by the filmmakers) couldn’t be done by a human voice? Turns out, it can be done by a human voice. Here’s the human in question, doing the thing.

Write academic papers right into your web browser??

I enjoyed watching this speed painter do his thing. If you like thinking about how perception operates, you’ll enjoy it even more, because it demonstrates some of the freakiness inherent in the apparently simple act of seeing.

Enterprise vs. Enterprise

Via Ivan: irrefutable theories of book cover design

The alternate moose, some months back, shared the complete text of Tesla’s brief autobiography. I am certain this is worth reading, although I haven’t done it yet myself. (Tesla!)

And finally… gizoogle.

Some Things To Support

Three worthy crowdfundy things, to which I draw your attention:

Conquering Corsairs: Pirates of the Silver Sea! A card game designed by a couple of Kiwi lads, about pirates vying for gold and prestige and generally being piratical. Just hit its target! Well done guys. Only a few days left on this one!

Send speedstacker Ahlani to the USA: this 12-year-old girl lives around the corner from us. She’s globally ranked in the niche sport of Speed Stacking. She’s fundraising to get her and her mum across to the worlds. (Speed Stacking is pretty amazing to watch. And check out the reward levels – they include “we will bake you a banana cake” and “we will send Ahlani’s brother around to your place to do odd jobs”. This is good stuff guys!)

Liam Barrington-Bush (friend of a friend) is crowdfunding to publish his book “Anarchists in the Boardroom”, which is the fascinating culmination of years of work and thought looking into how organisations work and how people experience the workplace. It’s about taking lessons from social media and social movements to find new ways to structure your organisation, to make it “more like people”. Really interesting stuff! He’s hit his tipping point target, so the book is definitely going to happen – congrats Liam!

Female Superhero Linky

Wonder Woman fan-made trailer. How can it be 2013 and still there’s never been a big film featuring a woman action hero kicking bad guys around like this? Or even a medium film? (Am I forgetting one?)

Female Super Hero Fan Film from Jesse V. Johnson on Vimeo.

An indication of how complicated it is dealing with climate change: some wind farms are making the problem worse

Popular Science magazine has made its archives fully available online!

The US Foreign Service’s official policy on Yeti-hunting. (via Craig Oxbrow) (& here’s Ed Hillary with a yeti drawing, from the buildup to his 1960 yeti-hunting expedition)

Frat boys mobilise to support a transgender frat brother – this is great.

Full audio performance of a Han Solo adventure, Smuggler’s Gambit

The only Simpsons infographic you’ll ever need

Key & Peele do the Gandhi vs MLK rap battle

Colour photographs of segregated USA

Michael Upton shared this YouTube channel where songs you know are transposed into a different scale, usually minor to major, and… the results are consistently weird. Find how your favourite song’s integrity has been violated!

A Norwegian prison where prisoners are treated like people. Great piece by a long-term inmate of the UK prison system who now writes for The Guardian.

Massive Lego Hogwarts

Zeus Blog writes a lovely piece giving due respect to Ray Cusick, designer of the Daleks, who has just died.

Myths about NZ wildlife

Albums that should have been

And finally… scientifically accurate Spider-Man