Climate Reality Linky

Willa had a cold this week, not super fun, but she’s good again now. HOW EXCITING IS MY LIFE!

Webseries action happenin’ all over the place:

Jane Espenson is the biggest name behind HUSBANDS, which launched yesterday. It’s a sprightly sitcom about a casual couple who go to Vegas, get drunk, and end up married! Yep, that old concept – only in this case, the couple are two gay men. Love it.

Emma Caulfield’s Bandwagon is rocking its way through a new season. I never got into the first season (actually a film chopped into bits) of this behind-the-scenes-in-LA comedy, but the new one caught my attention with an audacious plotline around making “GLEE for black people” – urban Glee! I have no time to catch up but worth checking it out, fer shure.

And of course Felicia Day’s groundbreaking series The Guild is well into season 5, and this one is going heavy heavy on the guest stars. A great turn by Neil Gaiman last week, and there’ve been a whole lot of other familiar faces in recent eps. Good stuff!

All those folk are Buffy alumni. Via another Buffy name, Amber Benson, I came across another brand-new web series, called Sex, Drugs & A Capella. It’s like Glee with none of the really obnoxious bits. I’m going to embed this one – it’s really great, and obviously put together by someone who knows how to edit. And there is great singing.

Speaking of editing, Salon.com has been featuring some great video essays that (like the one for The Thing I linkied last time) dissect a film sequence and show you how it works, or doesn’t. They’re both really worth watching to understand visual grammar. The first one tears a sequence from Nolan’s excellent The Dark Knight to pieces, and the second one celebrates a sequence from an entirely forgettable Angelina Jolie flick called Salt.

Interesting case study of media coverage of the “Ground Zero Mosque” story.

NZ$100,000 funding for the best low-budget film idea – you need to mock up your poster and tagline. I should find someone to make a poster of my MARCH… OR DIE! concept, wherein a young woman discovers that small-town New Zealand marching girl troops are actually engaged in carefully-choreographed battles to the death. (Some amongst you will have heard me saying repeatedly over the last decade that NZ should develop a cheapo straight-to-DVD exploitation film industry piggybacking on all the infrastructure and expertise we have here. The Knifeman is my pick to career-change into NZ’s Roger Corman.)

Now, what else…

Vladimir Putin: Action Man (I actually prefer to think of him as a Big Jim, but that’s just me)

The guy who found that Diamond Planet talks about science. And climate change. This is a good read.

Speaking of climate change, Al Gore’s 24-hour global climate reality event is on right now. Or has it just finished? Regardless, it’s important stuff. I love the language: “climate reality”. Considering the way the anti-science forces like to use words as weapons, this is one highly-sharpened piece of rhetorical technology.

Another climate change effect, underway now, ahead of schedule: giant red crabs invade Antarctica in their millions. Contains unsettling video.

You might have heard about the plane in Detroit that was the location of a terror scare on 9/11. Did you hear that the woman who was suspected of being a terrorist is a blogger? Her account makes for sobering reading.

George Lucas added a line of dialogue to the new version of his Star Wars films – Darth Vader saying “Nooooo!” Here is the best response you’ll find.

Via the Alligator:

Tape Generations from johan rijpma on Vimeo.

And finally, from the triumphantly returned Critical Miss: Chess for Dogs.