Month: May 2014

Sam Burke found this neat description of a more effective way to win arguments than saying “I can prove you’re wrong!” Not suitable for all circumstances, but I’m adding it to my arsenal.

The 25 most underrated movies of the 90s (via Edel)

Cyberpunk city made out of Lego

Gustave the crocodile has his own wikipedia page. He is believed to have killed 300 people. (I discovered his existence through the Snap Judgment podcast’s Monsters episode.) (The Wee Beastie watched today an episode of a Disney kids show featuring an alligator called Gustov… coincidence or conspiracy?)

The worst waiter in history

Low-budget Beasts (shared with love, costuming the Beast is HARD)

A great 7-minute film pointing out how Edgar Wright uses all kinds of filmmaking tricks to make his films funny, while other comedy directors… don’t. (Via Dave Chapman)

Arthur Chu is a self-identified nerd who found a weakness in the design of the legendary US gameshow Jeopardy, and proceeded to become a (somewhat controversial) champion. He’s just revealed another talent, for the written word – and for clear insight into the troubling misogyny infecting nerd culture. I was going to make this linky clear of all references to the recent awful events in the US, but this one deserves a wider audience.

The science of Bruce Lee’s one-inch-punch.

On the latest This American Life, Molly Ringwald and her 10-year-old daughter watch The Breakfast Club together.

Chinese bootleg Star Wars comics (via Jamie Norrish)

Artists create works inspired by pages in an 90s X-Men coloring book. (via the Alligator)

Gem’s Wilder Web is always worth a look but this week’s crop of links is particularly genius. Homemade Disney costumes, Cliff Curtis interviewed, the Modern Maori Quartet doing the Game of Thrones theme, and moar! Go and check it out…

And finally, via Pearce, the many delights of Liartown USA (warning, often NSFW!)

If you follow one linky this week, make it this: Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic about the case for reparations for Black America. It’s an incredible piece, rigorous and searing and delivered in calm and measured tones but you can feel the acidic rage sitting underneath. Coates focuses on property as his way into racial divisions and the continuing reality of white supremacy; the stories in the last few linkys about the wasteland communities of New Jersey are given stark context here. It’s tough, challenging, and might just become one of those pieces that is referenced and remembered for decades after publication. Read it.

Why do we eat the way we do? We think we’re in charge of how we eat, but, nope.

Infographic: am I reading a Gothic novel?

Flaws only a protagonist could have.

Genuine headline: Crocodile injured by falling accountant

Psychic Sally falls flat in front of an audience in the UK. Fascinating to see how she loses the crowd here.

Everything is broken – this piece could also be titled “why your computer will never, ever be secure”

The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years. The lack of vision/comprehension/courage within news organisations astonishes me. Even now, in 2014, digital-delivered news keeps pretending to be a newspaper. Madness. The NYT’s self-review on this subject is interesting reading – the full leaked report is here and I mean to give it a close read one of these days, in the meantime Nieman Labs has a great overview/summary of the key insights. Basically, the NYT knows it’s messing up, but it isn’t doing a great job of fixing that. Metadata is a huge mess, to pick one obvious sign of disarray.

I should link to my vision of the future of online news, a year ago on the Ruminator. The NYT is doing some things – the “Times Topics” present news aggregated by general topic, e.g. on Stop & Frisk, but it looks to me more like a search result page than something that has been curated. And that, I think, is where the future opportunities are for news organisations – curation and editorial direction at this level, instead of offloading that to an automated process.

The report did point me at a place that is trying to do some of the things I wondered why no-one was doing. Vox.com launched a couple months ago with an express aim of providing context to its news coverage, e.g. using what they call a “StoryStream”. Here’s an example on the Abramson ouster story, while we’re talking NYT. It’s pretty thin, and I mean that literally as well as figuratively – it links a bunch of stories vertically, sure, but where’s the horizontal links to other, related, issues and story streams? Nevertheless, it’s obviously been collated by a human with an eye toward noting how the pieces make up a larger story, so that’s something.

One media trend I didn’t discuss in that piece is the growing trend towards smartening up a longform piece using smart scrolling and dynamic images. (The one everyone cites is Snow Fall.) Certain kinds of feature journalism can work like this but the investment is high, and even then it feels like only a small step. Still, here’s a great example frm the last week: The Reykjavik Confessions: The mystery of why six people admitted roles in two murders – when they couldn’t remember anything about the crimes.

Why do people keep believing stuff even when they’re shown it isn’t true? This New Yorker piece has gone quite viral, even though it’s all quite old news. Depressing old news.

Should we have trigger warnings on academic classes?

David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. (Lynch was offered the gig, but turned it down. This applies the full suite of Lynchisms to Jedi – it’s neat fun.) (via Andrew Watters)

Non-paradoxical Swedish poster (via Mike Sands)

The new Guardians of the Galaxy poster is terrible! The “fixed” version at this link is great.

So a couple linkys back I had a story about American Football coming to China. Here’s the very different story of American Football coming to India. Spoiler for the difference – the China league started because a young Chinese guy thought “this would be awesome!”, the India league started because a wealthy US woman thought “Indians need to learn how to be manly and also we can make money from this”.

Chart of the vocal ranges of popular/famous singers

And finally, the most scandalous photo in Doctor Who history, rendered in Lego.

It’s May! That means it’s time to Miss a Meal for Kaibosh, the excellent charity that smartly sews up the systemic gaps to take leftover retail food to the hungry people who need it. Skip a takeaway night and send the $$ to Kaibosh, do eeet… (Those outside NZ might look for a local equivalent charity, there are others around on the same model)

I think I’ve linked before to the great, five-minute text game Sacrilege about a young woman in a nightclub looking at her options for taking a guy home. The creator has now written a post-mortem a year on from its release. Play it, then read about it.

RIP Hans Rudi Giger. Freaky dude. The excellent Alien filmmaking nerdery blog Strange Shapes has a brief but insightful obit.

Did you know the age of Miss America correlates with the number of people scalded to death by steam in that year? Just an example from a daily blog of surprising relationships between two things! (Making the point that correlation is not causation, of course.)

I’ve linked before to these images of Disney characters as university students, but it has been massively updated, heaps of new characters.

If the moon were only 1 pixel in size: a tediously accurate map of the solar system

Why does every novel set in Africa have the same cover?

“You can get all the equipment you need to properly sharpen a pencil for less than a thousand dollars” – pencil sharpening done right, a ten-minute movie (via Svend and various other sources)

Perfect: [ALTHOUGH the GRRM account is a fake, curses, thanks Johnnie for setting me straight]

.@jk_rowling Oh my sweet summer child…

— George RR Martin (@GeorgeRRMartin_) May 3, 2014

Even more perfect: perhaps the greatest use of Twitter ever. (Check the dates.)

Some amazing photos of cool stuff at the Chicago Field Museum over the last hundred years. (via AndyMac) Just all sorts of interesting bits and pieces!

Screenwriter types: this article about how one writer stepped up his game when he went to work with Dan Harmon on Community is smart, packed with in-jokes, motivational, and (crucially) has a pre- and post-rewrite version of a celebrated Community script for the compare and contrast. Awesome.

In December, I linkied this great Rolling Stone piece by Matt Taibbi about the New Jersey city of Camden coping with Chris Christie’s decision to pull out the police force. (Christie has since had a very dramatic few months…) Anyway, here’s a great companion piece about Camden: Kathy Dobie writing in GQ about the little league that has been created, and is thriving, in America’s most dangerous city.

And while we’re talking Chris Christie and New Jersey, the New Yorker has an intriguing piece about Mark Zuckerberg committing a hundred million dollars to education reform in Newark… Spoiler: it doesn’t go well.

And finally: all 178 episodes with Tom Baker as Doctor Who, simultaneously

Who displays the biggest vocabulary in hiphop, and how does it compare to Shakespeare? (via Tom Crosby; some of this unsurprising – Kool Keith! – some of it quite surprising indeed…)

Huh, since I added that to the file it kinda went big, maybe bigger than it deserved – the analysis is pretty shallow! But anyway.

Also going viral in a big way, Buffy as Monkey-Island style point-and-click adventure

Live HD video of Earth, from space.

All you need to know about NZ’s boy in the NBA, currently in playoff mode, you can glean from these headlines:
The complete list of people ejected for hitting Steven Adams and Power rankings: Who will punch Steven Adams in the face?

Moulin Rouge did a kids matinee in the 50s… (via Calum)

Nice piece on what John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles did right. (While not forgetting all the stuff it did… less right.)

Visual guide to petting animals properly

What’s really going on when people get grumpy about children getting prizes for trying, not for winning

The five great works of software

Star Wars is actually bees. (via Jamie N)

Quoting Svend, who sent this link: Nothing says “different worldview” like “humorous” newsreel segments

Sounds like NYC has finally caught up to little old Wellington in the coffee stakes

Semi-finally, Creepy Full House

And finally, via Julian von Sligo, the Rite of Spring set to Travolta/Curtis aerobics. Provocative stuff.

Insight into the lovely True Detective title sequence

Disney princesses as drawn as Game of Thrones characters, and via Stephanie, genderswapped Disney characters (beautifully painted, those!)

Basically all my friends in coding shared this article in the last couple days: Programming Sucks. It’s hilarious and cutting and should be read by non-coding people wondering why the whole wired world is the way it is now.

A doco about the LGBT gaming scene (pay what you want) (via Scott Common) – trailer:

Ha ha, some HBO ads lovingly dramatise watching awkward moments on TV with your parents in the room. (via Andrew Salmond)

The definitive ranking of Babysitters Club cover outfits. (via Pearce, of course, who else)

I know there will be some readers who won’t be able to resist this: Duck Tales the theme song as a groovy slow jam

This clip tipped me over into going to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. (It isn’t a clip from the movie.) Irresistible.

If you only ever watch one of Jimmy Fallon’s lip sync battles, make it this one, because emma stone Emma Stone EMMA STOOOOONE

Inequality is the big issue of the moment, and in that world, everybody’s talking Piketty. Here’s Max Rashbrooke with an NZ perspective on this gamechanger. (The Spectator has a bluffer’s guide, too.)

TNC writes about that racist NBA owner getting banned. His take is, as always, smart and sharp. It’s also a bit less celebratory than you’d expect.

And finally, a song that could justify the entire subgenre of “Christian rap music”: