Tag: fridaylinky

I turned, if my calculations are correct, 37 this week. In my brain it feels like a perfectly balanced age, because 3+7=10. Throughout the coming year I will expect everything I do to be quickly matched by a complementary response.

Star Wars! Fan film of a lightsaber fight. Neat stuff, nicely done. Lens flares! (via Craig Oxbrow)

Explore gender bias in music playlists (via Nick Tipping)

A script for countering telemarketers. (this is old – I think I first saw it a full decade ago – but still good)

25 minority characters that Hollywood whitewashed – man, old Hollywood sure was racist, huh! It’s great that things have – oh wait. I’ve just reached the second half of the list. (via Sonal)

5 things about ubiquitous computing that make me nervous

Little girls dressed up as superheroes will never stop being awesome. Ballerina Hulk is the best ever.

Fully-dressed superheroines – this isn’t a new idea but these images have been massively discussed this week.

Hogwarts: the next generation

Was the Harlem Shake truly a viral phenomenon, or a corporate one? Is there even a difference any more? Forbes has some interesting comments to make.

Huey Lewis does American Psycho doing Huey Lewis This made me LAUGH. And it disturbed me. So that’s a win for them.

Some folks have made a viable random comic generator. I enjoyed clicking through for a while. It works because they’re really strict about the structure – first panel is always a setup, second is always a twist, third is always a resolution.

The Shadowy Residents of 1 Hyde Park (via mundens) – an interesting exploration of the super-super-rich. Curiously it has a very boring opening, while hiding a killer hook a few paras further down – The really curious aspect of One Hyde Park can be appreciated only at night. Walk past the complex then and you notice nearly every window is dark. As John Arlidge wrote in The Sunday Times, “It’s dark. Not just a bit dark—darker, say, than the surrounding buildings—but black dark. Only the odd light is on. . . . Seems like nobody’s home.”

The Guardian does a lovely infographic of 50 years of Doctor Who

Apparently Paul McCartney asked Delia Derbyshire to do a version of ‘Yesterday’?

Conspiracists ahoy – check out the fascinating multilayered links between Rosemary’s Baby, The Beatles White Album, and the Sharon Tate murder…

Oh, I missed this completely! The Edinburgh Book Sculptress made an encore appearance late last year.

Movie supercut of breaking the fourth wall

Game of Thrones cheat sheet for those starting s3

And finally, via theremina, Des Hommes Et Des Chatons

Cavalorn, aka Adrian Bott, he of the Prometheus decoding that was linked all around the world, has also been doggedly debunking claims around the pagan origins of certain Easter traditions.

Toy Story 2 was nearly deleted during production. Reading this story made me anxious.

Rock Paper Shotgun apologises for using female writers.

Latest Japanese schoolgirl trend: fake martial arts explosion blast photos

Oliver Stone’s JFK implicated a Christchurch newspaper in the conspiracy. David R pointed me at this Chch library page with details of the newspaper in question and the whole story.

Map of Doctor Who in London

Map of Awkward Moments in NYC

Boy’s high school choir performs choral version of a ballad by Kiwi rock legends Shihad.

(The only comments on the youtube video are two members of Shihad saying ‘this is awesome’.)

How many historians does it take to change a lightbulb? (via Hamish C)

Architecture Daily: can we please stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers? (via Allen Varney)

Albums reimagined as book covers

A potent visualisation of drone strikes in Pakistan over recent years

50 perfectly-timed photos

I was gonna link to a YouTube video: Watch all six Star Wars movies at once! But it has been removed from lots of places. Give it a google, you might get lucky – well worth a look…

And finally… one way to sell a used car

Laurie Penny on Steubenville. And, the Good Men Project has a potent primer on rape culture. That’s all I can bear on the subject right now.

Cthulhu cakes

Music videos have been done as action movies before, but this one is a particularly fine example of the form.

In 1988, the LA Times described the far future world of 2013… (via Miri)

Movie guns changed to movie thumbs

Undergraduate history, illustrated (via Hamish Cameron)

The AV Club rounds up 13 great stand-up stories about meeting celebrities. This is good stuff, I actually listened to more than half of these. They lead with one by Tig Notaro that my fellow This American Life listeners will recall.

Mr Spock’s great advice to a biracial teenage girl (via tof)

Dylan Horrocks draws critters from the Monster Manual

Lovely new food blog by a friend of this parish: Nom All The Things

She started out in nudie films, and ended up making your mobile phone work. Along the way she met Hitler. Hers is a very unlikely story, nicely told here – I knew most of the dots here, but not how they connected. (via Peter B)

Great Disney spoof: After Ever After

Clear explanation of the logic behind those dumb Facebook posts that get tens of thousands of comments and likes. (via Julian von Sligo)

That “plus-sized” Swedish mannequin that burned up the social media last week? It was a hoax. [No it wasn’t! Check the link! Thanks Evie & Gem!] Which actually interests me even more.

Candid superhero moments

Luke’s Change: a Star Wars conspiracy theory? (via everybody & their brother)

Star Wars family tree

And finally, via John Machin, the Procatinator. This is a hit or miss kinda automated thing, but the hits made me laugh beyond the power of speech.

Marriage equality passed second reading! Here’s my buddy’s vid again

Photos of children around the world with their most prized possessions
(this kinda risks that thing of “look how poor those brown people are” but, nah, it’s good.)

D&D 80s cartoon starring Brian Dennehy! Sort of.

Espionage on Twitter?

School of Thrones

Game of Thrones 90s style

Game Of Thrones creator reads children’s stories

Game of Bones

Great New Yorker feature on the Bolshoi Ballet

The original Bond babe (via Mash)

“Vodou is like a gun”

Star Wars Angelus (via Edel) (it is an Irish joke for Irish people but I need to have a Star Wars link here so)

Ten years since Iraq. I can’t bear to think about it. We who protested were right in every way, and those in power were just as much wrong. Here’s a short essay on the matter that I did read, and appreciated.

Smithsonian photo contest (via Ivan)

Every one of these things is made of paper. Incredible. (via Allen Varney)

Passive voice in newspaper headlines on sexual assault. Damn. (via Karen)

The first Feminist Frequency video is out! Really great exploration of the Damsel in Distress trope, its origins, and how it pops up in early video games. Very pleased that Cal and I kicked in a few bucks to support this. And in a freak of timing, this news broke: a reworking of Donkey Kong so the princess is the hero.

And finally (via Tof): skeletor is love

Robert W pointed me at this great text-only street fashion blog, which is satire so deadpan it hardly even knows it’s satire.

NYC past – large-format historical photos of the greatest city in the world

Everyf***ingwebsite – yeah, they’re all like this, pretty much.

Amazing bootleg Star Wars figures from Turkey. So good!

A blog named “Monster Legacy” makes a longer, more detailed version of the exact argument I made in my Prometheus review (in the section ‘Les Cousins Dangereux’). It’s the only other place I’ve seen this argument made, which I think is a bit weird, because to my eyes it is both obvious and fundamental. Although I think I was kinder than Monster Legacy, because I decided to treat Prometheus as a conceptual remix, not a thematic betrayal.

You may not have listened to the mashup of Nine Inch Nails and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. I only succumbed after about fifteen people had already raved about it, and to my surprise, it really lived up to the hype. If you haven’t, do yourself a favour.

This one gif has been everywhere lately, showing the sun in motion through the galaxy with the planets swirling around it. Trouble is, it’s wrong.

What Coke contains (via Lew, kinda mindblowing for what it says about humanity)

Kathleen’s tales of her time in Afghanistan continue with this great one about local monster stories.

Via d3vo – remember that movie, The Fifth Element? Remember that crazy singer in there, who was singing something that (it was claimed by the filmmakers) couldn’t be done by a human voice? Turns out, it can be done by a human voice. Here’s the human in question, doing the thing.

Write academic papers right into your web browser??

I enjoyed watching this speed painter do his thing. If you like thinking about how perception operates, you’ll enjoy it even more, because it demonstrates some of the freakiness inherent in the apparently simple act of seeing.

Enterprise vs. Enterprise

Via Ivan: irrefutable theories of book cover design

The alternate moose, some months back, shared the complete text of Tesla’s brief autobiography. I am certain this is worth reading, although I haven’t done it yet myself. (Tesla!)

And finally… gizoogle.

Wonder Woman fan-made trailer. How can it be 2013 and still there’s never been a big film featuring a woman action hero kicking bad guys around like this? Or even a medium film? (Am I forgetting one?)

Female Super Hero Fan Film from Jesse V. Johnson on Vimeo.

An indication of how complicated it is dealing with climate change: some wind farms are making the problem worse

Popular Science magazine has made its archives fully available online!

The US Foreign Service’s official policy on Yeti-hunting. (via Craig Oxbrow) (& here’s Ed Hillary with a yeti drawing, from the buildup to his 1960 yeti-hunting expedition)

Frat boys mobilise to support a transgender frat brother – this is great.

Full audio performance of a Han Solo adventure, Smuggler’s Gambit

The only Simpsons infographic you’ll ever need

Key & Peele do the Gandhi vs MLK rap battle

Colour photographs of segregated USA

Michael Upton shared this YouTube channel where songs you know are transposed into a different scale, usually minor to major, and… the results are consistently weird. Find how your favourite song’s integrity has been violated!

A Norwegian prison where prisoners are treated like people. Great piece by a long-term inmate of the UK prison system who now writes for The Guardian.

Massive Lego Hogwarts

Zeus Blog writes a lovely piece giving due respect to Ray Cusick, designer of the Daleks, who has just died.

Myths about NZ wildlife

Albums that should have been

And finally… scientifically accurate Spider-Man

Two years on from the big Christchurch quake that still casts a very very long shadow over this country. I’ve decided that this is the perfect occasion to check my emergency preparedness kit every year. I’ve been encouraging people to join me, mostly via Facebook – your Like would be welcome, but what I really want is for you to check your kit, too. Here’s the government’s advice site.

Stephanie left this in comments last week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUL6MBVKVLI
http://stevemccurry.com/galleries/last-roll-kodachrome
A photographer called Steve McCurry took the last roll of Kodachrome film made by the Kodak factory and turned it into a special project. Well worth a watch.

What is James Bond’s actual favourite drink? A loving and exhaustive article (that still manages to mis-spell whisky). (via Pearce)

Couples switch clothes. A photo series. (via Dylan)

The extraordinary science of addictive junk food – if our biological system is like a computer, junk food makers are like hackers.

Run, Tom Cruise, Run (via David R)

Candyman: the David Klein story – feature documentary about the guy behind legendary American candy ‘Jelly Belly Jellybeans’, made by Wgtn’s own Costa Botes, music by friend of this parish Tom McLeod, and a good watch. It’s on Hulu so you’ll need Media Hint or something to watch it from outside the US. (also via David R) (Here’s my review from when I saw it at film festival – basically, a fascinating character study, very good film, but too long for me to call it great)

Dangerous Minds has the rundown on the Harlem Shake – what the meme is, where it comes from, what it means, and why the people of Harlem think it’s dumb. Sorry, Harlemites, this is bigger than you. Dale Cooper is doing it.

That writer who said those mean things about Our Kate the Princess – read what she actually said, guys. It’s smart stuff. You might not agree, but the media storm over this is embarrassing. (via Marie)

Animated GIFs that do something other than make you laugh: they look amazing. (via Tim Denee)

Strategic blunders in the Battle of Hoth. Comments are good, too.

And carrying on the Jared Diamond attacks, here’s a piece from Slate. I have never read Diamond, but to the best of my knowledge this kind of attack is absolutely in line with the general academic view on his works, but it seems like it really hasn’t escaped that sphere – I’ve seen scientists and other smart people writing off this stuff as sour grapes, even. It’s worth knowing that there’s controversy around him.

Middle-earth linguist, who created languages for Peter Jackson (starting from Tolkein’s baseline), starts a blog.

Goats yelling like humans (via Darshi, and lots of other people)

Alasdair wrote something very cool about short stories and novels and Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. If you like writing or reading or detectives, read it.

Mosh pits: just like particle physics, apparently (that’s one for all the bogan physicists out there)

Jet Jaguar, aka friend of this parish Michael Upton, has released a 3-track EP: Single-Digit High – the first of a bunch to be released this year. Listen to it, download it, pay something if you like. I’ve only listened once so far but it was good. There are beats in it. Give it a try.

you had one job

And finally, via James Dodwell – the cutting edge of fairground rides is quite scary stuff. This piece starts out a bit dry but it is absolutely worth it to see the breathtaking rare footage within.

Hearts and chocolates and all that. ROMANCE.

Abandoned suitcases of insane asylum patients (via Dylan)

Car gets stuck at 125mph. Amazingly, this ends well.

Sample the delights of Murs’ comments on RapGenius, explaining the lyrics of hip-hop tracks. (Murs is a guy who is a rapper.)

Awesome celebratory Oscars poster. Really clever!

Drones in pakistan – no, not that sort of drone. Cool!

Can anyone remember the film (late 90s I think, maybe Italian?) that was based on this thing – a filmmaker going from small town to small town getting the locals to pay him to make a movie? (In the film I remember it was totally a scam, but the real story involved real filmmaking, and is much weirder for it.)

From mundens: emoji dick

Afghani skateboarding school, for girls (also mundens)

Unfinished scripts

Amazing minecraft creations

Did Lego really get more expensive?

Lego Lovecraft

The Haunted Toaster of 1984 (via Matt B)

The psychedelic world of old computer ads

Some beautiful and haunting photos of abandoned places (this has been shared all over the place – check it out if you haven’t, the pics are lovely)

Literacy privilege? Hmm.

Vaguely rude placenames of the world – via Mike F

Dancing dude meets sign-flipping dude (also via Mike F)

How to videos: how to make a baby (via Dylan)

Why do aircraft still have ashtrays in the toilets?

Winningest TARDIS model ever (via Damon)

See some of the amazing text games being written for Twine

And finally, via Sam Walker, a nice reminder that my culture’s way of doing things is not every culture’s way of doing things:

Spencer is a Dungeon Master. Specifically, he’s the guy who put his hand up when (Community creator) Dan Harmon asked the audience at his regular Harmontown night “is there anyone here who knows how to be a dungeon master?” Since then he’s been getting up on stage and running D&D for Dan Harmon, show comptroller Jeff Davis, and a diverse cast of assorted guests. The Harmontown podcast has wormed its way to the top of my podcast priority list in recent times, and Spencer is definitely part of why. He’s just a guy, like so many guys I know, only he’s been caught up in this mad indie-culture anti-structural comedy thing led by a revered cult figure. He used up his annual leave from his job in the back room of an Apple store to go on a U.S. tour with Harmontown. He ran D&D every night on stage. I’m just about to get into the tour podcasts, but today Dan Harmon shared this incredible post about the importance of Spencer. See, it turns out Spencer is the hero of the story. So – Harmontown is often great, and often meandering and a waste of time, but try it. If it’s your thing, it will be your thing in a big way. I’m not even gonna link to it directly. If you’re not intrigued enough to find it yourself, then the time is not right for you.

Via Jon Ball, a drill sergeant in the U.S. asked for a letter of explanation as to why they joined the army. In the stack was this beauty. (Downthread it is revealed the writer is female, and despite the tone of the initial comment, the drill sergeant thinks she’s great.)

Tof Eklund wrote this smart, detailed, well-referenced post about gun control in the U.S. Among things I didn’t know: thanks to heavy NRA lobbying, the CDC stopped all research into gun control issues. Whoa.

Written By A Kid is rocking it, with a return appearance by the kid who wrote the amazing La Munkya story. This is a Valentine’s Day tale (featuring Elvira!):

Any article that starts out talking about the original Cat People will win my attention. This is a marvellous short piece – you get the whole story behind one of TV/film’s biggest current cliches. (Related: I was musing on Twitter recently about the origins of another cliche shot, where the camera looks down on a character and pulls back to a wide shot as they scream “nooooo!” – even without the “Nooo!” I can’t find an overhead pullback earlier than Shawshank…)

Map section:
– Map of a galaxy far, far away… (creative commons, too)
– Man spends 7 years drawing an insanely detailed maze
– Map of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands
– Map of post-apocalyptic Seattle

But consent is HAAAARD

Jemima Khan writes a great, smart, fair overview of the Assange situation – some damning details of how he alienated supporters (including her). The last line is a killer.

Following the Wade Davis article a couple weeks back, The Observer covers more Jared Diamond controversy. Here’s the Stephen Corry article they refer to – I think the Observer gives it a pretty unfair hearing here. I’m much more inclined to trust Corry than Diamond, based just on this material.

Get some Verified Facts! Then refresh the page for even more Verified Facts!

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – a webseries contemporary adaptation of Pride & Prejudice – featured in the AVClub this week, and that’s enough excuse to include it here for a third time. Try it, Austen fans! (That includes you, mum.)

Dangerous Minds found a copy of David Lynch’s hard-to-find oddity, Industrial Symphony! Quality is poor, but still! I had a VHS tape of this that I recorded off the telly – it was broadcast one Saturday morning at about 10am on a free-to-air channel back in 1990 or so. Lord knows where that tape went, but I’m excited to see this again. (Warning: Nicolas Cage)

Literary translator muses on a transformation in European literature towards a shared Euro-style, and what that says about cultural transformation in the area.

Via auchmill, who happens to be director of an art museum right now: The Art Game, about being an artist. Well worth a look. Takes very little time.

Via Pearce, a classic of the interactive-fiction genre, Photopia – written as part of a grieving process – and its moment of perfect beauty. Play it, I did, it’s short and wonderful and clearly an exemplar of a new kind of literary art production.

And finally… that time Fred Astaire danced wearing an Alfred E. Neumann mask. (via Sinatra-nerd Allen Varney; Mark Evanier put the clip back into circulation, but AICN has the cool photo so I led with that link)

Still a week to go before this famous carnival, but our local version is on today. As carnivals go it’s pretty semiotically thin, but I think it counts, particularly because it has increasingly taken specific cues from big carnivals like the N’Orleans mardi gras (kissing beads, huh?). I love that there’s a big event in Wellington’s calendar that’s all about dressing up in silly costumes. I only wish it wasn’t so very, very white middle class heterosexual. Maybe its too corporate an event to ever really get its freak on, but as it gets bigger and bigger, surely other more socially anarchistic networks could take steps to subvert it and use it as a platform to upend the social order? I live in hope.

Also of Wellington, this short moonrise clip that went viral in the last couple days. It took me ages to actually bother to watch it, because, it’s a moonrise, how good can it be? Answer: really very very good.

Also widely circulated and well worth a look: the Smithsonian mag tells of a Russian family who lived in isolation for 40 years

Bet you anything that this article about school friends who decided to continue their high-intensity version of tag into adulthood has already been movie optioned. Will Ferrell will star.

A reworked Courier font intended for screenplays. (via Gregor)

One-page comic strip retelling of Pride & Prejudice. Manages to include pretty much the whole story, also some jokes. (via Alexis)

White People Headquarters (via Pearce)

Hey, Comics Alliance is reviewing Barb Wire, that crazy B movie that retells Casablanca with Pamela Anderson in the Bogart role and Temuera Morrison as Ingrid Bergman. I have a real soft spot for that dumb film.

Cartoonist Ben Kling’s funny dictator valentines (a photo-based ripoff of this has gone viral, but the jokes belong to Kling, and his art makes them 1000% better) (via Miri)

Pulp magazine cover generator (whoa this is a MAJOR timesink I haven’t even dared try it) (via Gareth S)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who you should just read regularly because he’s great, delightfully describes the conceptual breakthrough that allowed him to make sense of the niceties of grammar in the French language – superhero comic parallel universes

Kyle Baker is a phenomenally talented and very funny comic creator. He has put all his creator-owned work online, free for you to read. You can stop working now, you’re done for the day, you have to spend the rest of it reading all these amazing books. (Start with Cowboy Wally or Why I Hate Saturn.)

Fascinating approach to doing a motion comic – it’s kind of like a flipbook, but way more engaging than that sounds: Malaria.

Lovecraft postcard correspondence goes a bit Lovecraftian. (via Theremina)

Did you play QWOP last week, the amazing running game? You should have! Try it now! To whet your appetite here’s a video of a guy running with exactly the speed and grace of Your Guy in QWOP. This almost made me lose bladder control. (via ObjectiveReality in comments here last week!)

Tweenchronic Skip Rope. It came out around New Years when you were distracted. If you haven’t seen it, you gotta. It’s special. (And yes, it is by the same group that made Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.)

WTF, evolution?

Hugh D pointed out Vinepeek, which plays random freshly-uploaded Vines (6-second video clips). Has the potential for work-unsafeness; Salon.com just ran an article on sexual content among the Vines.

Obligatory Star Wars link: a different point of view.

And finally, on the same theme via the Gator… Vader Schwarzenegger