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
Does it really matter if the Loch Ness Monster is real (or Bigfoot or anything like that)? Aren’t they basically campfire stories?
I never worried whether the stories Mr. O’Hagen used to tell at camp were true or not – all that mattered was that he said they were true and we believed it while he was telling us the story.