Nijinsky Linky

(No Nijinsky included)

Get prepared tomorrow

Star Wars as told in the original tapestry

Listen to the music that was inscribed on a random butt in that one Bosch painting.

Woman recreates the selfies of the guy who took her phone (via Camilla)

Young people swap clothes with their grandparents (also Camilla)

Nature offers a clear, humbling account of how my discipline ended up accused of being mostly wrong.

Go Make Me a Sandwich patreon – sponsor a blog about women and games. I played a small part in inspiring this blog’s existence, funnily enough.

Conversational map: when a London Kiwi meets a London Kiwi (via Ian Hicks)

The Typefight: typefaces fight it out.

Evolution of the Vertigo zoom – haven’t watched this yet but, come on.

Evolution of the Dolly Zoom from Vashi Nedomansky on Vimeo.

And finally, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to remove the baby from “Full House”, and it doesn’t work at all, but it exists, because the internet.

Get Prepared Linky

getready2

This February 22, join me and a whole mess of other people and check your disaster preparedness kit. That’s the anniversary of the big Christchurch quake. Mark the anniversary by checking you are ready when trouble comes your way. Join the Facebook group or follow us on Twitter (Eek I really haven’t promoted or used the Twitter much, huh.) Spread the word.

How the Beatles went viral in the USA – a detailed account from Billboard. Beatlemania happened because a bunch of social, technological and political events converged in unexpected ways. They were always going to be big, but there were a lot of lucky connections that led to them getting that big, that fast.

Perfect fluid group movement: 2-second F1 pitstop.

Interesting French short film imagining a gender-flipped society as a way of highlighting the inequalities in our own. It doesn’t all work (the limitations that are built right into language can’t be evaded, and it shares the widespread French misunderstanding of Islamic dress) but there are some powerful moments here, most of them small details.

Star Wars as 80s high school movie: character designs, sketches of key scenes.

Gaddafi’s Point Guard – memoir of guy in a Qadafi-owned basketball team who found himself in the middle of the revolution. Some unpleasant stuff in here, no doubt.

Dick Cheney gets a hard, hard look in this epic NY Review of Books piece. He’s part of my axis of evil, with Blair and Rove on either side of him.

13 portraits of homeless people as they wish to be viewed (via Gem Wilder’s reliably superb Wilder Web)

Prochronisms – looking at TV shows set in the past, and using some data mashing to find words that are out of place. Not to shame the writers (boring) but to look at how language, and society, changes (interesting!) – mostly looking at Downton Abbey and Mad Men. (via Dylan H)

I took off my hijab (via Camilla S)

Epic list of monster-themed boardgames, mostly from the 60s and 70s. Lots of photos! I’ve never even heard of 90% of these.

The little girl from that famous 1981 Lego ad has been found.

And finally, via the beloved David R., Bad Romance vs. The Avengers

Bad Romance x Avengers from Fishball51 on Vimeo.

Skeletor Linky

Skeletor voice actors play with Skeletor action figures.

Perfect parody of a Trent Reznor song

Who better to smack down Kirk Cameron than a whole mess of other grown-up child TV actors?

Map of USA, each state labelled with the IMDb’s top-rated film set there.

How toast got trendy: actually a really, really interesting story.

Booth babes don’t work

The entirety of Reservoir Dogs, told via tweet

Angelo Badalamenti recounts devising the haunting theme to Twin Peaks. Great!

Best New Yorker cartoons, according to New Yorker cartoon editor. New Yorker cartoons are such a special case – always, perfectly, consistently sort-of-amusing.

Tracking flu trends using google search results

Comic-form open letter to newly-crowned chess world champion Magnus Carlsen

And finally, Feeling Cagey

Amicable Linky

Conference call in real life:

Someone actually figured out a way to make money on Spotify: by singing Happy Birthday to everyone in the world, one by one. (via Mike U)

If you, like me, like to watch the Superbowl but only watch the Superbowl, here’s a 2-minute season recap that really doesn’t make much sense to those who aren’t following the game but has lots of jokes in it so.

Map showing global warming contributions, per capita. NZ is an angry red, right up there at the top of the villains list. Longtime readers will know how much I hate that.

Emotional Baggage Check (via theremina)

Your next job application could involve a video game

Do you like beer? Do you like music? If you are a member of this vanishingly rare intersection of people, you should check out Buzz and Hum, my friend’s new beer and music blog.

Eye-opening photos from Kiev, by a ground-level indie journalist trying to communicate what the hell is going on over there.

Map of pre-colonial Australia.

NZ according to google autocomplete (by Grant Buist)

Video of in-depth conference presentation on NSA spying revelations. I haven’t watched because I want to live in my bubble of ignorance a little longer. (via Ed)

10 great performances from the Apollo Theatre, including 13yo Lauryn Hill at the Amateur Night. (I went to Amateur Night when I was in NYC, one of the best things I did in that crazy town.)

Middle-earth, from space

Cat freaked out by videochat with owner

And finally, I’m gonna share the whole email I received from d3vo:
Hi Morgue,
Yesterday while idling some time away, exhausted, I was trawling through youtube videos of people trying Vegemite. While on tour in Australia Oprah tried Vegemite:

Burns Linky

“O thou! whatever title suit thee,—
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie!
Wha in yon cavern, grim an’ sootie,
Clos’d under hatches,
Spairges about the brunstane cootie
To scaud poor wretches!”

Robert Burns: Address to the Devil
Not the Bard’s best work – he calls himself out for ranting in the second-last stanza! – but reliably funny. And if you can read Burns without sounding it out in your head and grinning, you’re a more disciplined soul than me.

Fight Club carpark fight sequence, with Tyler Durden removed.
& at the same link: 30 films from 1984, all turning thirty this year.

Harry Potter: images from a world where Voldemort won.

Piles of old magazines & newspapers, each pile carved out of a single block of wood. Whoa.

Clever miniature photography that makes Star Wars model vehicles look real

Infographic of whisky flavour profiles (via Mundens)

A while back my friend Johnnie excitedly mentioned he’d just been working in the recording studio with Brian “Brian Blessed” Blessed. This is why: a World of Warcraft animated fan film. Trailer below, full movie has just been released, find out more here.

TRAILER – Death Knight Love Story Pt 1 – Jack Davenport, Anna Chancellor, Joanna Lumley, Brian Blessed from Strange Company on Vimeo.

A solidly enjoyable compilation of 6-second videos, each a mind-blowing trick of digital editing:

Six-word peer review (via Karen W)

How a math geek hacked OKCupid to find his perfect match. Hmmn.

An oral history of SWINGERS. I will love this movie forever.

A speculative map: Africa if it had not been colonised

The nasty messages hidden in “Do what you love, love what you do” (via Richie G)

Marvel Comics wiki on Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys

117 Buffyverse characters, ranked worst to best. Impressively committed to the idea of ranking characters. (Via Eliza Dushku, funnily enough.)

And finally… Prodigy’s Firestarter music video, without music

3 Linky

The Wee Beastie is 3 years old today! Hurrah!

Salon’s Hack List is marvellous this year – each entry written in the style of the hack it is honouring

Charlie Stross wants bitcoin to die in a fire
The weird mechanics of a bitcoin heist
(less controversially, Stross also hates Microsoft Word)

Minimalist circular city maps

Superhero spankings

A big assault on the selfish gene metaphor (there have been replies to this, of course, but I haven’t read any of them yet)

BuzzFeed article generator

The full stop (aka the period) – now it means “I am angry with you!”

Via John Fouhy, and also in the field of internet linguistics, I can’t even

Interesting discussion of the word of Norman Rockwell. I’ve always had a huge soft spot for Rockwell because I grew up with a big coffee table book of his work in the front room.

Pianist up on stage before large audience. The orchestra begin. But they are playing a different concerto to the one she prepared for. What happens next? (Well, she conquers, of course.)

Via Georgios, a lunchbreak romance

And finally, old Finnish people with things on their heads

Invisible Cow Linky

Matt Taibbi (still making Rolling Stone worthwhile all by himself) breaks down the situation in Camden – one of the USA’s dying cities. The man who struck the killing blow? Leading candidate for the Republican candidacy, Gov Chris Christie. (via Amund)

Twistiest tongue twister ever. But it’s a nonsense phrase as far as I can tell, which is cheating as far as I’m concerned…

People with opinions about the NZ film industry ought to read Jonathan King’s perspective on the thorny issues of subsidies.

This:

Confirmed: the Universe is a hologram! (Actually more technical and theoretical than this, of course, of course, but it’s always good to be reminded that for several decades hardcore scientists have basically concluded our perception of reality is wildly screwed up.) (via Chris Elder)

Love Actually movie critic showdown. I’ll just link to the opening salvo and finishing move, both by Christopher Orr. The second one links to a bunch of other responses. Sadly only five words survive of my post about it from a decade ago: “Went to see the new Brithope”. I said this whole thing that I’ve never seen anyone else get into. I might have also talked about the Keira Knightley/Egg storyline, because that’s by far the most interesting to talk about – Orr devotes most of his second piece to attacking it with gleeful ferocity. Love Actually! It has become a Christmas classic, though.

The world’s first real-life superhero. A gunfighting PI with hooks for hands. Weird and fascinating.

Upworthy headlines! Everyone is talkign about them now, not just me. They are a thing!

7-year old Russian kid draws pictures of himself riding around shooting bad guys. The pictures date from the 13th century.

Arresting series of nude photos – raises some questions about being “attractive”. Just fun. Not safe for work, obviously. (via Susan IIRC?)

This clip of Jason Segel and Paul Rudd, promoting 2009 bromance I Love You Man, has been doing the rounds. Because they are obviously really tired and it all goes very weird. Lovely

And it gives me an excuse to link to my review of the film, which was a real high point of this blog if you ask me.

Ursula K. LeGuin goes deep & smart into Tolkien & Middle-earth.

Ray Bradbury’s newly-released script for Moby Dick.

You’ve all seen this dog breeding thing, right? Damn. The photos are intense.

What life is like for players right on the bubble of being in the NFL (via Blaise)

Model of the I Love Lucy soundstage from above. Wondrous, somehow. (thanks David R for advising that this is a model, not a pic of the real thing! D’oh.)

And finally, via Hamish: find the invisible cow

Flat Linky

Ian Rankin reviews Asterix and the Picts.

There’s a “wander about Middle-earth” thing, linked to the new Hobbit film, for users of the Chrome browser. I looked at the first bit and it was very pretty.

Short film by Alfonso Cuaron’s son showing who was at the other end of that radio contact in Gravity

Web series Flat3 is back for another run of lovely, funny episodes about an all-girl all-Asian flat in Auckland. So good. Watch it! Here, I’ll make it easy, here’s the first ep of the new run:

English has a new preposition, because internet

Where’s Wally/Waldo? Usually in the same places, because brain

Facebook has transformed my students’ writing – for the better

One of Emma’s Sigourney Weaver poems (on Helen’s blog)

Via Rachel B, a great wikipedia injoke – see what this page says on list entries where there is no illustration
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Star Wars invades kitschy Thomas Kinkade paintings

And finally, revealing the secrets behind card tricks. Wow!

Twain Linky

man. just feeling wiped. you too? have some linky.

Mark Twain secretly wrote a vignette of Queen Elizabeth swapping fart and sex jokes with Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon. (via Allen Varney)

Oscar the Grouch vs Grumpy Cat (via Craig Oxbrow)

Linguists in the audience, does this sound legit? “huh” as the one word common to all humans. It sounds like a just-so story to me…

The best hundred novels, from the perspective of the end of the 19th century. (Again, Allen Varney)

Zombie movie scenes rendered as impressionist art. These kinda work on some stupid level; there’s some spice to using impressionist techniques to depict the shambling hordes.

Ol Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang auditioned for the part of Mr Ed. This audio sounds very genuine to me; could it be authentic?
also: oral history of the Clan’s breakout album

Game of Thrones vs Mr Men/Little Miss

Star Wars as an Icelandic saga

Great Gamasutra piece on the demise of “social games” as a thing.

Did you two-strap it? Or were you a one-strap pony? #onestrappa4lyfe

And finally, the Gangsta Party Line. (Not worksafe due to abundant profanity.)

Fermat’s Last Linky

Yeah, busy busy, etc etc. [EDIT: so busy I wrote and published this on the wrong day. Genuinely confused that Friday didn’t follow Wednesday. Buh.]

That one time Homer solved Fermat’s Last Theorem – math geekery hidden in the Simpsons

BABY TEETH short story collection out now. Scary stories about scary children for scary charity. (Charity not actually scary.)

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars (thanks Billy & Jamie; delightfully, Ruth has scheduled reading this as a game session at Kapcon in January!)

Scroll down to Riker

Horror films reimagined as entries in the R.L.Stine horror-for-kids book series Goosebumps. Suspiria becomes “Attack of the Ballet Witches“.

The Thing on the Fourble Board – a lost classic of terror from the age of radio.

Necropants – surely this isn’t a real historical artifact?

My friend Ron has been conducting research into communal religious rituals. His reflections on some physically extreme ritual activity are interesting – warning, contains some unnerving photos.

The decline of wikipedia? For more insights into how the info-sausage is made, read Phil Sandifer’s examination of wikipedia’s awkward embrace of transphobia.

Amazing photography of miniature buildings and vehicles.

The DSM reviewed as a work of dystopian literature.

And finally, superheroes as manatees