[Wordpress deleted most of this post. I’ve rebuilt as much of it as I could remember, but with fewer pithy asides and probably forgetting to acknowledge some sources. C’est la vie.]
Freaks and Geeks is getting the AVClub Classic treatment. The pilot episode writeup appeared today. It’s my favourite TV show ever, employing the form of commercial television for a character study with novelistic depth, and founded in a humane compassion that is rare in any narrative.
The “PUNK” music collection, exclusively on CD. Basically the only collection of punk music you’ll ever need. Features all your favourite punk bands, like INXS and Crowded House. (via DavidR)
There have been many articles on Steven Moffat and gender politics in Doctor Who, but this one is the sharpest I’ve found. (To be honest though it’s his longform plotting that bugs me more.)
On Facebook, I share stories about my 2-year-old daughter from time to time. This one rapidly became infamous. I proudly share it further here.
Cal asks a very sad Wee Beastie why I made her sit in the corner.
WB: (crying) Because I didn’t listen.
Cal: I think you should say sorry to him.
WB: (looking down) Sorry daddy.
Cal: You should look at his face and say sorry.
WB: (meeting my eyes, very sad) I’m sorry about your face daddy.
There’s one week left of May, which is plenty of time for you to miss a meal. Send the money you saved to the good people at Kaibosh food rescue, a thoroughly splendid local operation that takes food that would be wasted here and delivers it to hungry people there. Worth a few of your dollars, I reckon.
I still can’t find a version of that Patton Oswalt Parks & Recreation clip that will play in NZ. Mentioned a few weeks ago, it sees Oswalt improvise the plot of a new Star Wars film. Well, someone has animated it, and it seems like it will play everywhere.
Oh my god this made me laugh: someone compiled every instance they could find where a rapper has referenced former NBA player Alonzo Mourning in their lyrics. Mostly they follow the standard structure for such references: “it’s [meaningful word] like [word that frequently appears close to the first word even if using it here makes no sense at all]”. (They also missed the first ‘Zo reference that popped into my head, from Public Enemy no less.)
Pitchfork’s Daft Punk article is full of bells and whistles and I found it almost unreadable. This is the first big article since NYT’s Snowfall to try and enhance the reading experience, and I think it’s also the moment that shows how Snowfall isn’t the future after all. (And not for this reason, either.) Just put words on the screen, people. Just put words on the screen.
No, not Early Edition style future news. I bashed out a new article for the Ruminator, about what news websites are going to look like in a decade. Hint: a lot less like newspapers, a lot more like interactive infographics.
GeoGuesser is a fantastic browser game and destroyer of productivity. It lands you in a random Google Maps Street View spot, and you have to guess where in the world you are. (again via David Ritchie then everybody.)
I’ve made it about a quarter of the way through Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story audiobook. Really good stuff, full of things I didn’t know and vital connecting tissue linking things I did know. The author has supported the book with a marvellous tumblr full of scanned original art, period photos, and other bits and pieces. Here’s one that deserves a wider audience than the comics geekery, though: four young Japanese Americans, reading comics in an internment camp; Howe adds some poignancy by working out exactly what was going on in the comic stories they were reading.
All right. There have been some impressive home-built Iron Man costumes over the last couple years, but this GW Space Marine is outright scary:
Moth City, which has been featured on this linky several times before, is an online comic by a Kiwi creator. Now it’s free to read on Thrillbent, which is fast becoming the hottest place around for online comics presentations. Tim Gibson’s creation is just picking up more and more steam as it goes, which delights me.
Ordinary American investing in Blue Chip stock gets 11% return on investment. Pharmaceutical industry investing in lobbyists to prevent drug price negotiation gets… more. No, more than that. Nope, still more. No, even more than that. Er.
And finally, a copy of the weird Doctor Who/Eastenders crossover – this version complete with production notes. (Yes, this crossover was a real thing. It is… not good.)
Here’s a salutary lesson for those in the museum & exhibition fields (including, from time to time, me): the Met tries to recreate the legendary bathroom at CBGB’s, demonstrating that some things cannot be recreated in any meaningful way.
How to draw sexy without being sexist: fascinating little discussion spinning out of the recent redesign of some superhero costumes. (Don’t read the comments, of course.)
So it turns out that crazy creationist science homework was a real thing. And the second page of the worksheet is even more revelatory than the first. More info at snopes, of course.
Kids, the highly controversial and provocative indie movie about young teenagers getting up to mischief in NYC, is twenty years old. Here’s a fantastic article that tells some of the story behind the scenes and tracks down what happened to the featured players. Yep, one of them ended up on The Wire. (I remember walking out of the cinema after watching Kids, and feeling like I was really glad I’d seen it, but I sure hadn’t “enjoyed” it and I didn’t think I’d ever want to sit through it again. This many years on, some of the impact it had on me – the rawness of the content and the style – is still fresh. But I do want to watch it again, after all.) (via @auchmill)
Debt – the first five thousand years, in Mute. The only issue of Mute I have is full of marginal notes where I argue with the writers (at least it is on the articles I actually read) – this one is just as full of assertions and angles that seem wrong to me, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here too. I recommend it, but go in with your brow pre-furrowed to save time. (via Svend)
Have I linked to Scarfolk Council before? It’s worth a second go even if I have. An alternate 1970s English county, as seen through its posters, recordings and other documentation. Marvellous, weird, frequently hilarious.
This New Yorker article is one that makes me happy. Social psychology, for better or worse, is my discipline, and it seems like it’s finally sorting out one of its ongoing weaknesses. There’s a problem across all sciences around replication – the most prestigious journals demand new research, and academic careers demand publication in prestigious journals, so there’s a strong incentive against spending time on double-checking previous findings. The replication problem has always been particularly acute in social psychology, because it’s so hard to zoom down into fuzzy social complexity and figure out exactly what’s going on in a situation. Bring it on, folks. Also contains some other fascinating stuff – I didn’t know the famous Milgram electric shocks experiment was replicated in 2008!
For the last few years, Philip Sandifer has been writing amazing, fascinating essays about Doctor Who, tracking it across its history from the 60s on, linking it to social movements and literary criticism and alchemy and more. He has just reached the new series, and begins with an incredible close reading of the first episode for Chris Eccleston and Billie Piper. It’s lovely stuff, thoroughly readable and full of great little jokes and insightful turns of phrase, but adding up to something even greater than the sum of its considerable parts. If you are interested in Doctor Who at all you need to read this, but if you care at all about television as a medium then you’ll get something out of it. You probably do need to have watched the episode though. Jump in: Rose
Tea is the fashion! Stunning 60s marketing campaign by the NZ Tea Council to get the Yoof drinking tea. (via the Pikitia Press NZ/Aus comics blog)
Ooh, linguists gonna love this. The punctuation mark “slash” is being verbalised in speech. You hear it the same way you’d expect e.g. “Can she visit slash stay over?” which is the same as “visit/stay over”. But language is always changing, and changing fast – and the meaning and use of “slash” has already drifted in some fascinating new directions. How invigorating!
Quite enjoying having a new short chapter of “in move” pop up in my news feed every day at noon! I don’t remember writing most of what I read. Surprised by quite how much pashing has been going on in the first few chapters, too. But that’s teenage boys for you, just always pashing everything.
This new Kiwi webseries is really well done! Gets the editing right to maximise the comedy, something a lot of webseries struggle with. It’s by the woman behind the excellent, little-seen and poorly-trailered film “My Wedding & Other Secrets”, if that’s any additional recommendation?
The Ruminator is a new groupblog that launched about a week ago and is just figuring out its voice as its many writers make their first posts. I’m a contributor, and my first post is up. It’s about how, when music shops and bookshops close down, there’s some additional consequences:
One by one, these stores are closing up for good. As they close I wonder if there is something at work here beyond the normal swell and fade of commerce and retail, something with an impact that reaches beyond “retail therapy” and the ding of a cash register. I can’t shake the feeling that this is a change that matters, and that what we are losing here will reduce us, irrevocably. [Read the rest]
There’s plenty of other Ruminating writers there, too. Go check ’em out.
Riverbend, the Iraqi blogger who was posting regularly in the buildup to the invasion, and after, has made a new post after years of silence, marking the 10th anniversary of the war’s beginning.
There’s a GREAT clip circulating of Patton Oswalt improvising the plot of a new Star Wars movie (part of a Parks & Recreation story apparently) – I watched it, it was awesome, but the one I watched is no longer there and I can’t find another with permission to view from NZ. Google “Star Wars Filibuster” and try your luck, it’s well worth a look.
My buddy Dan’s story “Waking The Taniwha” has been published at Wily Writers (guest editor: Richard Dansky) and I still haven’t listened to it but it’s been up a while now so I’m linking to it anyway.
I’m setting this one to go live at the departure time of our flight – we’re doing a weekend in the South Island for a wedding. It’ll be the Wee Beastie’s first time on a plane. She’s pretty good at spotting them in the sky and is I think equal parts excited and intimidated by the prospect of being inside one of these noisy machines. Here’s hoping that excitement prevails.
Anyway, here’s some linky for your Friday. Raiding the earliest stuff in my linky folder, 2010 and 2011 links…
Hitchcock & Me – blogger reviewed everything Hitchcock did. That was in 2011, still going with a more general Hitchcock brief – there’s been a lot of Hitchcock happening lately, most recently the new show Bates Motel.
