Beginners guide to the “red pill” movement, a.k.a. the hive of theatrically oppressed men who are causing so much crap right now.
Wash that nonsense out of your brain with this: 17yo Megan Follows’ audition for Anne of Green Gables. Just perfect. (via Marguerite)
Jen’s report on the search for 43 lost students and her Contributoria page for a proposed follow-up trip to the UN.
Replace all internet images with Cookie Monster
A dystopian Young Adult novel, twitter-style. (via Matt Cowens)
Jon Stewart may be going but Last Week Tonight is back:
Phil Sandifer has finally concluded his epic critical journey through the 50-year history of Doctor Who. The final piece: a book-length account of the entire story of the show’s creation and development, as a single post. Stunning.
A visit to a future Earth, after the ravages of climate change.
Vanity Fair has been asking celebrities about the Serial podcast.
20-minute doco about the people inside the Jabba the Hutt puppet. I can’t make this play on my machine for some reason. Someone tell me if it’s good.
Norman Rockwell art facts. I have much love for Rockwell thanks to a marvellous coffee table book owned by my parents through my childhood.
Reddit’s NZ community is extremely helpful with this request about the size and ferocity of spiders in New Zealand. Spot the member of Parliament…
Apparently the entirety of the Game of Thrones world has been created in Minecraft
Fascinating account of how Ta-Nehisi Coates created one of the best comment sections on the internet, and how it just couldn’t last.
Fanart corner: Hipster Star Wars
Visualisation of colour words by gender. I haven’t even looked at this properly, maybe one of you will tell me if it’s worth the trouble.
More from Nate’s dive into classic tunes: 1979 Aussie hit Space Invaders.
I had never heard of the witch who exorcised the demons from Bowie.
Might be time to go back to weekly Friday linky. This got long. And finally…
And, of course, the Taylor Swift vs. Nine Inch Nails mash-up:
Man redpillers just scare the crap out of me, at least partially because a lot the general ideology that they spout seems to be very attractive to the youth of today (within certain circles). I actually had to deal with some of these types of views while I was tutoring, and while I was always polite within the classroom, outside of it I had some pretty tense discussions with some of my students.
I don’t know how this idea of the meritocracy has become so embedded (actually I do, I just don’t want to think about it) within our culture when it’s so patently ridiculous but it seems pretty central to the narrative that a fair portion of my students used to understand themselves and the world around them.
One thing which was interesting was a long debate we had about defining success and the role of subjectivity it any definition (in which I leaned very heavily on Donna Haraways’ “situated knowledges” idea). It was VERY interesting to see how that debate broke down along socio-economic and ethnic lines.