From The Morgue

Via Frank N, and then most of the internet, a lovely zoomable view of the galaxy. (The tech behind it is super neat too!)

So the IDF livetweeted their attack on Gaza. Leave aside for a minute the rights and wrongs of the action (and yup I have some pretty strong opinions on that) – and you have another reminder of the fascinating and troubling future that is already happening, a world where the PR war is directly overlaid on the physical conflict in realtime. Did I mention that IDF opponents in Gaza were tweeting right back?
UPDATE: WHAT THE HELL? IDF gamifies war

Waiting for Elmo. (via Dangerous Minds)

And here’s 10 Sesame Street performances worth seeing. Stevie Wonder (not that clip, a different one)! Herbie Hancock! Cab Calloway! More than half of these were completely new to me. (via Vivian)

RPG folk – grab the free quickplay edition of my buddy Dale’s new horror RPG, EPOCH! It’s got some really interesting stuff going on in it. Check it check it out.

Everyone’s been sharing this highly informative Reddit thread explaining the nuances of New Zealand culture. e.g. “Something people who come to New Zealand might not be aware of is that the government provides four sheep for every person. Be sure to ask at the airport! Even if you’re just visiting, you can have four sheep to follow you around while you’re here. Some people feel quite bad that they missed out on their sheep.”

Anyone out there wanting French to English translation services? My friend Heather is in the game and now she has a website ho ho ho. (Also, editing.)

SFX covers 10 episodes every sci-fi show must have (via Craig Oxbrow)

Via Calum Dow, a cringingly funny but VERY unpleasant tale of a pregnant lady getting a massage that goes very very wrong. Better for listening than reading, but the page gives you both options.

Via Gem Wilder, 21 very awkward situations (told in animated gif form) (gif was the US word of the year!) (oh hai john key) (my favourite is the basketball player accidentally rubbing the wrong knee)

Pearce sent me this Prometheus review that’s even more scathing than my one was. A pre-Damon-Lindelof script draft has turned up online too, and the big news is, it pretty much makes sense, unlike the released version. Google for “112142280-Alien-Engineers” and you should find it.

Illustrations of dozens of characters from The Wire. As a poster.

When a woman cries, she’s emotional and irrational. But when a man rages, that’s just being direct.

A dad hacks video game to switch all the pronouns around so his daughter can have a hero character who is a girl. Groovy. (Don’t read the comments though unless you want to be exposed to much rage about how he DESTROYED THE INTEGRITY OF GAMING CULTURE RAARGH.)

The MIT game lab has produced a game that demonstrates the effects of the theory of relativity – by setting the speed of light really close to walking speed. Fascinating.

These photos will tell you all you need to know about the David Petraeus affair scandal.

If you find a free photoshop service online, be wary, because it might be the Photoshop Troll! (via d3vo)

Irish graphic designers create a group exhibition out of their most frustrating client instructions.

So last linky I shared a “Occupy fizzled out as a failure” essay. Right on cue, Occupy has launched something very real using exciting new thinking that has people talking everywhere – a plan to buy out and write off debt (debt is bought and sold at a fraction of the debt value). Making Light here discuss and dismiss one objection to Occupy’s Rolling Jubilee

And finally, Windows95 tips and tricks.

After 8 years of Dubya, Americans were so out of control they accidentally elected a black man. Four years later? Four years of relentless obstruction and lunatic rage at his presidency? I kinda think re-electing a black man is the greater achievement.

US election retold in cleverly animated webcomic form

Iconic album covers reimagined with superheroes

Cutting, important argument about why Occupy Wall Street failed – because it was too mired in academia, for a start. Don’t agree with everything here but there are definitely some home truths for supporters of the Occupy movement. (via Amund)

Craaaazy amazing: a mental abacus “sport” that goes SO FAST. Wow! (via Maire)

& a potential breakthrough in mathematics – turns out there’s something more to know about a + b = c. The guy who’s advanced this proof sounds like a very interesting cat. (via Ivan)

Who said it: Hitler or Lovecraft?

The Necronomicon – it’s like the Bible, but different! (via Craig Oxbrow)

In praise of the hashtag. The hashtag as new literary device? This writeup is actually off on several things, but it gets a lot right. The # is the symbol character of the ’10s just like the @ was the symbol character of the ’00s.

Christopher Walkenthrough: computer game walkthroughs in the voice of Christopher Walken (via Dave Chapman)

Samuel L Jackson Lorem Ipsum

How can there not be a movie of this? An amazing slave escape story. Edge-of-the-seat true life adventures!

That Kate Nash performed the Buffy musical episode. (Kate Nash gets a lot of flack, but Scroobius Pip rates her, so.) (That Buffy musical episode is a great episode of TV, but I still think it really doesn’t work outside of that context.)

Big Sugar has been weirding the evidence of the dangers of sugar for years. Like Big Tobacco, only successful. Fascinating.

The National Office of Importance

And finally… The Snuggery (via Pearce)

How to learn: Mastering linear algebra in 10 days

Star Wars girl gets a treat. Couple years back this girl was bullied at school for liking Star Wars more than pink princesses. This is the tale of her great costume for this year’s Halloween. (via Anthony Kitt)

Linda Blair’s on-set dialogue delivery for The Exorcist (via Pearce and loads of other places)

Mean Doses offers up the PSYning

12-year-old uses D&D monsters to help his dad with some eye-tracking research. And is lead author on the paper! NEAT.

H.P.Lovecraft Institute of Software Design
The physics of “The Call of Cthulhu” (PDF)

Amazing! A magical feature of the London underground, one I never heard of before. (via Making Light)

You’ve seen that pic of the baby-as-Ripley-in-power-loader costume, yeah? Mat Gritt found video. Yay!

I read about this project when it was a plan. It rather exceeds expectations. Check it out: boxes of english-language android tablets dropped, with no instructions, in isolated & poor Ethiopian villages. Within six months the kids not only have taught themselves to use them – they’re HACKING THEM.

Ha! The game Monopoly? Was stolen! From a game in the public domain! (via Allen Varney) (still a sucky game)

Wgtn cartoonist Grant Buist created a complete webcomic adaptation of Waiting for Godot’s act one. Using clip art of cacti.

Big History – an alternative curriculum for schools, that puts our place in the world in perspective. Nice. (via Ivan) (actually this reminds of the curriculum my high school history teacher Michael Fowler invented for the junior-school class he made up “heritage studies”)

Can I buy you a coffee? This is an analogy. It seems like a pretty sharp one.

James Bond: the nymphographic

and finally, ELECTRIC BOB’S BIG BLACK OSTRICH (or, LOST ON THE DESERT)

and also finally, the ultimate educational game, FROG FRACTIONS. Just play it, to the end.

Gangnam juggernaut continues. Amazing Big Trouble in Little China riff:

And, even better, legendary dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei does his own version:

Dangerous Minds, who have been supplying Friday Linky with content for years now, has blown up big with a massively-shared post about Facebook’s (frankly insane) monetisation idea that breaks the core functionality of their own service and makes you pay to get it back. I fully expect it to be rolled back almost entirely before the year is out, but FB is experiencing financial pressure for the first time so maybe they’ll double down on this craziness? It ain’t like G+ is gonna take all the users away…

Also from Dangerous Minds: super-realistic sculpture of Ripley in Alien

Speaking of Facebook, that’s where Pearce has been sharing a horror movie a day. Here’s one to share, 1979’s ‘Zombie’. Sayeth Pearce: “If you don’t want to watch the entire movie, go straight to 33:30 and watch one of the most legendary scenes in horror movie history.”

The Exorcist as 80s sitcom.

Alan Moore sings on the hard-to-find/copyright-spiked Black Dossier record – listen to it here

Lady computers for your delicate lady computing hands. Built-in horoscopes! No I’m serious.

A history of photomanipulation
(via Maire)

Amnesty International’s new thingy, that uses your Facebook timeline to suggest what would happen to you in a repressive regime

The hard numbers behind the gender gap in academic publishing (via Amanda Lyons)

This guy is kinda my hero today, too: high school dude goes and does social-good health research, gets published, is awesome – then identifies a technical weakness in *his own paper* and *retracts it himself*. Legend.

Kiwipsum – A kiwiana themed dummy text generator, bro (via Heather)

The 10 best films of the 1890s. (Includes the actual films, which are mostly about a minute long each.)

This sounds groovy! The mysterious package company (via Anna Klein)

Arranging your bookshelf is like deciding seating at a dinner party…

Decoding the Canadian “sorry”

And finally, first seen via Mike Foster, here is CAT BOUNCE

So I was going to link to some of the trolling & bullying stories that are unfolding at present. Then I decided I just didn’t want to. There are some tricky and interesting issues embedded in the stories, but the stories themselves are so unpleasant that you are almost certainly happier not knowing. Instead I will just link to The Art of Controversy (Schopenhauer).

(That has been sitting in the linky folder for about a year… so have the next two.)

Irina Werning’s second set of “back to the future” pics, restaging people’s youthful snapshots many years later.

The 12 most baffling genres of stock photo, explained!

Now, fresh stuff. This academic mansplaining tumblr has been tearing up the place in the last week. Check it out. Some of the stories are amazing – but, and this is crucial, they are all entirely believable.

Simplified map of the London tube

Star Wars illustrations in the style of classic religious art.

The AVClub is doing a readalong of the Sandman comics series

Whoa: There were plans for an Audrey Horne spin-off from Twin Peaks???

Lord of the Rings family tree project

A short film in which Sean Penn and Kid Rock learn to love each other despite their political differences. If you can watch this you are a stronger person than me, but it is fully worth clicking through to random points and trying to fathom what the hell this signifies about political discourse in the USA.

Via Svend, here is a Kickstarter for a boardgame. It is a Christian boardgame. Watch the video. And, um, yes.

Salon article “Burning Man is on its last legs” is actually not about Burning Man being on its last legs, but it is a really quite effective description of what it feels like to be kicking around at the infamous desert festival.

As Halloween approaches, here’s a creepy short film. (via Craig Oxbrow) Really very nicely done. Gave me a shiver.

Babysitters Club: Where Are They Now?? (via Amanda Lyons) (misses out Claudia Kishi becoming a twitter hashtag – Gem Wilder has the scoop on that)

HackerTyper was suggested by @nzben for use during @keith_ng’s TV appearances about his adventures in leet superhacking (apparently he used a little-known exploit called File > Open)

One switched-on couple I know have been making a real effort over a long time to bias their daughter’s media consumption towards stuff with gender equality. Here’s a sign of the fruits of all that work: her reaction to Star Wars. This, right here, is a glimpse of a different and better world. Much respect, you guys.

Speaking of gender stuff: 10 female electronic music pioneers you should know – Delia’s in there of course, plus 9 others. (via @theremina)

Matchy matchy (via Tim Denee)

Janet pointed me at this amazing reinterpretation of the famed “marshmallow study” (where kids try to hold off eating marshmallows, you know the one). Smart critique looks like this!

The countdown clock to the Hobbit premiere is now live in Wellington, but did you know there was another completely separate Hobbit movie out this year?

And finally, via @mcquillanatornz (who all the cool kids are following on Twitter these days): Beetles dressed as Jurassic Park characters. So perfect in every way.

Still not convinced this isn’t a brilliant satire, but – via Lev Lafayette – a video that will totally convince you to vote Romney. Fantastic, right to the end.

(I’ve embedded a lot of video this week. That’s made the blog hiccup in the past – if anyone hits problems loading the page, give me a comment or email and I’ll turn some of the embeds into links.)

Timeline of cybernetic creatures (via Bruce Sterling)

Get a commentary track for a movie that is still in theatres. Start of a new trend?

The AVClub lay out the 50 best films of the 90s. (Part 2) (Part 3) I remember the 90s. It was a time when I went to a lot of movies. I have seen most of these films. Though I still haven’t watched their pick for #1 film, mostly due to my longstanding (and mostly irrational) aversion to the subject matter.

Fantastic hacking of the graphics on the London tube.

Bad Lip Reading has been around for a while, but this takes their work to a Whole. New. Level. Don’t skip this one.

Concept art from the legendary unmade John Sayles sequel to Jurassic Park, which involved dinosaurs becoming a military special operations squad.

Orkney, man. That place is remote as all get out, but also it turns out, was way more important than you’d guess way back in the day.

Star Wars people = illiterate (via Paul)

Encyclopedia of Golden Age superheroes. By Jess Nevins, who is the planetary expert on this stuff.

An exam gets interrupted in a memorable way

The Golden Ratio: unlearn what you know about it, folks. (Art History people & Maths people will be particularly interested in this.)

Movie stills in their locations

Nick Offerman (him from Parks & Recreation) did a lengthy “Ask Me Anything” with the denizens of Reddit. I do not watch this show but I enjoyed skimming over this. If you are a fan, then it will tickle you I expect.

A lovely essay about encountering the uncanny, in the ghosts and hauntings sense. (via Dylan)

Scientific research produces a comic strip showing the poignant fate of an unlucky panda. (via @fogonwater)

And finally, here is a thing,

(EDIT: Nick Moylan found it in English!)

Star Wars villains with cute bunnies (via Rohan Smith)

TED talks come to NZ – exclusive leaked text of the opening address (delightful snark via Danyl)

The Stranger profiles the sexy, sassy Men of Rock! Bloody marvellous stuff, via Boganette

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (via Cat T)

Wow, I just learned about the Bloop. How did I never hear about this before? The world is full of weirdness. (via someone named Jason B, in conversation with the delightful Sophie O’Doom)

Lost scene from Lilo & Stitch – progressed as far as black-and-whites with full voice work. (via Gail Simone) Lilo & Stitch was a great film.

GWAR never made as much sense as they do here, in a small circular room covering a song by Kansas

Was Hogwarts all in Harry’s head? (via Hugh Dingwall)

This is so simple an idea, and yet so perfectly done. Gilbert Gottfried reads 50 Shades of Grey (via Dave Cormack)

Via Maire: a super-lovely way to learn about the amazing hexaflexagon!

Where will you be in 24 hours? Computer says, here. And it gets it right most of the time.

Neat, beautiful short comic by Eleanor Davis (via Tim Denee)

Check out, and play, the entries for the 18th annual interactive fiction competition

And finally, via Sacha Dylan: photos of women holding vegetables as weapons

If your regular news sources haven’t mentioned the Nazi Space Buddha Iron Man yet, you need better news sources, because NAZI SPACE BUDDHA IRON MAN.

Bill Bailey Docteur Qui. How have I never seen this before? via Andrew Loughnan > Michael Upton.

Reddit user attempts to ignite mass mockery of a Sikh woman. Incredibly, it ends happily for all. (via Calum Dow)

Design floorplans of TV apartments (via Gem Wilder)

When Kate Beaton says to check out a collection of vintage E.H. Shepard illustrations, it is wise to attend.

Tube map of the human body

I’d heard about this but have never seen pics before: how to hide an entire aeroplane factory (via Making Light; Sam, I’m sure this’ll be old news to you!)

A short behind-the-scenes thing on that upcoming Les Mis film. All the singing is done on-camera, no pre-record + miming! The technical challenges involved in pulling this off on such a complex production are mind-boggling, but man, the difference will tell.

Social psychology lessons from Gangnam Style

This excerpt from Ben Goldacre’s new book lays bare how pharma fraud operates through the academic system – by cherry-picking results of course.

Index of music used in NZ television commercials (via my aunt Margaret)

Today is Lunchbox day. Child poverty in NZ has been in the news lately and current affairs TV show Campbell Live has been pushing hard on this issue for a long time now. It’s become impossible to deny we have a problem. The solutions to the problem are political, but as Campbell Live has argued, they are also complex and will take a long time to work through. Meanwhile there are kids hungry right now. So they have instituted Lunchbox Day – taking donations to give Kiwi kids some food at school. In NZ, text “lunch” to 8595 to make a $3 donation. It’s deeply upsetting that there is a need for this, but Campbell Live are keeping the pressure on the bigger aspects of the problem. This is a good thing to do. Help if you can.

Charles Babbage would have killed on Twitter.

An analysis of PIN numbers. How easy is your PIN to guess? (via Making Light)

Hugh Dingwall found this great Delia Derbyshire collection

And finally, this video which has had 23 million views over the last two years, because this is what humans like to look at apparently.