Month: July 2013

6.5 Linky

Last Sunday we had a wee shake in our town. It felt bigger than any other earthquake I’ve ever felt – a good rumbly build up and then a few good side-to-side rocks. Since Wellington is built on a major fault line, everyone here knows there’s a big one coming one day, and having seen what happened in Christchurch this quake (and the swarm of fore- and aftershocks) certainly got the heartbeat going.

My friend Nick happened to be playing in a live album recording as it hit:

So anyway! What linky can I offer you today?

Kiwis! Make sure you watch SUPER CITY tonight 10pm! Madeleine Sami’s genius multi-character half-hour comedy about Auckland is back for season 2. Give it some eyeballs.

Should I hang my washing out? (via David R)

The story of Batman according to Prince’s soundtrack (via Pearce)

Essay about how social media defaults all relationships to “ongoing”. I have often talked about the end of goodbyes in relation to travel, but this is focused on romantic entanglements. I’m not entirely convinced by it but there’s definitely something captured here that my generation and earlier didn’t have to manage.

My babby sister got engaged! Congrats babby sister. Here is a discussion of how the label “Bridezilla” is used to threaten and control you! (I think the article goes too soft on how the whole mythology & industry around weddings works to encourage extreme behaviour – but full support to the notion that women have a hard enough time being assertive without the threat of being called Bridezilla if they do too good a job of it.)

“In 20 years we’re all going to realize this Apple ad is nuts”

First page of Finnegan’s Wake, with MS Word’s spelling and grammar checker activated.

I will never get tired of behind-the-scenes photos from classic-era Sesame Street

A lovely redesign of the posters for the Before… films.

The Visible Hand in Economics reviews inequality-is-bad core text, The Spirit Level, and finds it wanting. I feel like I need the book to hand to really engage with this, but I’m keen to give its argument a proper shakedown through this lens. Of course, I’m also inclined to think most straight economic arguments underweight the psychological effects of inequality – see, for example, this Upworthy clip about what happens when you set up a rigged game of Monopoly.

Linguist finds a language in the process of being born (via Maire)

Evie found a version of Alanis’s “Ironic” that was rewritten to actually be ironic.

It’s time to finally give up on the Loch Ness Monster (includes link to that one xkcd strip)

My Little Po-Mo: deep-culture analysis of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, in the style of my favourite pop-culture blog, the Tardis Eruditorium.

Conversation rules for gentlemen (c. 1875) (via Kate Beaton)

Disney characters as modern-day College students (via Hamish Cameron) – some of these just NAIL it. Aladdin!

Korea’s photoshop trolls make the world a better place

Star Wars content: Belly-dancing female Wookiee backed by a Klingon band (via Billy)

And finally, via David R… the movies sing Ice, Ice Baby

The racism in the Trayvon case is here:

The justification [of self-defense]… is not available to a person who… initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless… Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm….

There’s the racism. Right there.

It all hinges on that “reasonable belief”. In the culture of racial anxiety and safety paranoia that dominates certain swathes of the USA, it is much easier for a jury to accept that a white man reasonably believes he is in such danger from a black man, than the reverse.

(Note that the accused doesn’t need to be a racist for this to have an effect. Nor does the judge, nor the prosecution or defence, nor the jury.)
(Yes, Zimmerman wasn’t white. Still counts.)
(Yes, the legislation says that the basis of the belief must be the degree of force. Still counts. A punch from a black man is straight-up more terrifying than a punch from a white man.)
(The blockquote above is my selective quoting from the relevant Florida legislation, as excerpted by Ta-Nehisi Coates – read his post too.)

Star Wars Linky

So over on the Ruminator I made a post about Star Wars, specifically about why there’s a Star Wars-related link here every week. I think it’s sorta interesting, plus it has something like a billion Star Wars links in it. So, you know, go take a look, and tweet it or whatever. Tweets feel great.

Since then I’ve discovered this week’s Star Wars linky: Lando sings karaoke in the Cantina bar.

A short film that offers an ominous take on the idea of what a superpowered being would mean in the world. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet but it seems like it’d be hot stuff.

Twin Peaks pie & coffee: supercut & infographic

Huge US govt dept displays an admirable thoroughness in computer security: smash everything with a brick.

Genuinely disturbing account of increasing deployment of armed response units in U.S. policing. Founded on the same mix of paranoia and unchecked power that causes most of that nation’s problems as it shuffles backwards into some kind of weird capitalist authoritarianism. (Not that any other nation is free of this kind of overreach.)

Biggie vs. Thomas (the Tank Engine) (via Richard Burge)

The Rockwell Integrated Space Plan. (Space as in rocketships, not space as in architectural design.)

The Anagramaton: a Twitter bot that finds tweets that are anagrams of each other. Amazing. (via DavidR who got it via Mike Upton; no, I’ve been corrected, via Mike who got it from David)

99 Problems (via Mike Sands)

Fascinating wee article about crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and how they work. Well worth a look, especially if (like me) you occasionally suspect you should know more about Bitcoin.

Kindle Worlds: release your fanfiction through this official route, earn real money, get incredibly rich. Okay maybe not that last one. An odd selection of worlds there at launch…

Huge book domino chain at the Seattle public library (which is a really cool space, I hung out there quite a bit when in Seattle)

How Rambo was perceived in Tonga and Bougainville. Wow.

Huh, it’s already the second half of 2013, I should really get around to linking to Teju Cole’s “12 essays I wrote in 2012“. And also to reading those essays.

And finally… have I ever linked to this before? been int he linky folder for *years*. It’s Bad Romance.

American Flag Linky

It’s the 4th of July in the USA! To honour the occasion, make an effort to seek out and enjoy an American cultural product or consumer item.

150th anniversary of Gettysburg. Check out these photos of veterans gathering at the 50th anniversary. (via AndyMac)

So, so perfect: all the American flags on the moon are now white.

Twelve Tones. A half hour video about music, patterns, shapes, and stuff. I haven’t watched it yet but Hugh Dingwall says it’s amazing and I clicked around in it a bit to figure out what it was and every bit that I watched was really interesting and made me want to see more. So. Try it.

How I taught myself to code in eight weeks (via mundens)

Why this vintage Masters of the Universe figure still smells bad three decades on (via DavidR)

Jason Everman, the guy who was thrown out of Nirvana just before they were hugely famous and then Soundgarden just before *they* were hugely famous, has an interesting story to tell about those events and what came next for him.

Artist refashions Barbie to real teen-girl proportions. It looks really weird, and also awesome. (Yes I’m linking to an article on Stuff.co.nz, which amazingly enough covered this ahead of all my other much trendier sources. First in NZ for your Barbie-related news needs!)

Like many, I snorted at and shared the image of a CNN panel discussion with the on-screen graphic, “N-Word vs. cracker: which is worse?” When you can’t even say one of the words, you have your answer. But now this clip from that discussion is also being shared, and it’s well worth watching. Levar Burton (best known internationally for Star Trek TNG) discusses how he was raised, and raises his kids, to follow a set routine when stopped by police to avoid being brutalised.

Revising your writing again? Blame the modernists.

Jamie Oliver read his first book recently. I posed a question on Facebook: if one of your friends wanted to read a book for the first time, what book (on your shelf) would you offer? Loads and loads of people made cool suggestions.

Jack Kirby comic artstravaganze: loads of his amazing double-page spreads. It’s kind of obvious why he was the King, looking at all these jammed together like this. (via Dylan)

The impossible “literacy” test once required of black voters in Louisiana. (via Nick Tipping)

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe. Ingenious!

Pac-Man as survival horror game (via Sonal)

My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter

Laurie Penny: I was a manic pixie dream girl
Asher Wolf: I was never a manic pixie dream girl
Read ’em both. (Second one via Gem Wilder.)

C-3PO rapping. How did I never know about this?

And finally, the Unipiper has upped his game… OF THRONES. This makes no sense.

Edwin: My Life As A Koont (2013, New Zealand)

Koont poster

Tuesday night we had a rare outing to the cinema, to see the local premiere of Edwin: My Life As A Koont, a new comedy feature by local low-budget impresario Jason Stutter (Tongan Ninja, Diagnosis: Death, Predicament).

It’s a mockumentary about the eponymous Edwin, who has a medical condition that makes him an asshole. He’s rude to everyone, basically. The film is about his mission to stage a benefit concert for those sharing his condition, helped along his way by Peter Jackson’s dropped cellphone with contact details for half of Hollywood.

And I liked it. I liked it more and more as it went along. The first act mostly just hits the beats you expect, making a lot of play out of the condition’s unfortunate name, and that was fine and dandy but I wasn’t exactly laughing out loud. But then, as it runs out of the obvious gags and starts leveraging its characters, the pic starts to grow in two directions – it gets more engaging and dramatic, and it gets funnier. By the end of the film, I was totally on-side with it, and had enjoyed at least a good half-dozen real bursts of laughter (clearly passing the Kermode test of comedy).

Both of these directions of growth leaned on the same thing: the leads. As Edwin, Bryce Campbell was just excellent. Endlessly watchable, entertainingly rude and obnoxious while finding the right notes of obliviousness and sympathy, and landing his big laugh lines with the timing of an old pro. Shockingly, he’s not an old pro – his IMDB page is remarkably sparse of on-camera appearances, and it’s absolutely delightful that he won the LA Comedy Festival’s Best Actor award for this role.

Playing opposite is Jessica Grace Smith (Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Sione’s 2) as Edwin’s long-suffering girl Friday. And… (disclosure: Jess is family, and the reason we were at the premiere, so…) …she was great. Some sequences were played too broad for my taste but as the film progressed she carried more and more of the dramatic weight as foil and conscience for the film’s collection of mutants and misanthropes. The genuine chemistry between Campbell and Smith pretty much made the film work.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, I liked it. I mean, it’s far from perfect, like any shoestring film – Wellington locations do a lot of stunt double work, for example, and the sound mixing for some crucial hot tub exposition scenes is fatally limited. And there’re certainly a lot of dumb jokes that don’t work too well. But there are enough that do work to make me give this film a clear thumbs up. And to recommend you buy it.

I can recommend you buy it because it’s available for digital download, right now, at the very reasonable price of $2.95. Less than a cup of coffee. (MUCH less, these days.) I reckon it’s worth it.

(It might also have some more screenings at the Paramount in Wellington? Such is the rumour I have heard.)