And finally, this great blogpost starts with a sexist controversy surrounding a recent Wonder Woman comic book, and ends up surveying the ways toxic masculinity is messing up whole swathes of pop culture appreciation. (Even Monkees fandom for pete tork’s sake.)
I loved this edition of Manfeels Park. Hee hee! (Remember that all the dialogue is drawn from real exchanges online, with source link below the comic!)
Via Gareth: the voices of Pinky & the Brain read… Pulp Fiction. (Just one scene!)
Dangerous Treasures: A story of Lovecraftian horror, frantic action, and deepweb forum culture, by the lovely folks at Strange Company. (9 minute short film.)
And the Humble Bundle right now has Telltale Games’ back catalogue, including the astonishing Walking Dead Season One as just part of their $1 set!!
And finally, Billy calls this a “really remarkable Wikipedia entry” and I have to agree. Every paragraph in the early going has a wild new idea in it. Then it gets even more densely packed with ingenuity. Read it! Jonathon Keats
A reappraisal of Event Horizon – I saw it in the cinema and I remember really liking it, despite the reliance on jump scares and loud noises. The comments reveal how it continues to divide people – about 50/50 “thank you someone said it” vs. “you are bonkers it sucks”.
Trainwreck fans who’ve been missing gamergate will be delighted to hear there’s a new incredibly dumb online gaming ragefest targeted, in what is surely just one more coincidence in a long line of them, at yet another woman. This one’s about (“about”) game writing, which is something I do and get paid real human dollars for, so I feel I can say with at least some authority that there is no merit whatsoever to the alleged reason for this ragestorm. Maybe I’ll get frustrated enough to blog about it. (NO morgue no)
And this short vid summarising psychologist Paul Bloom’s take on why empathy is a bad thing is infuriating in its bland dumbness. “We go to war because we are told people are suffering and we need to save them, then it turns out we harm loads more people, THANKS EMPATHY”. Linking to see if I’m motivated enough to read deeper and figure out if this guy has a point or not. But I suspect not.
Both those via the Nextdraft newsletter of interesting things, well worth the subscription.
Yes I’m a sucker for this story: an ode to promposals. Teens making a big deal of asking someone out to prom, partly trying to go viral, partly just for the joy of feels. (Yes of course this is a rose-tinted view of high school life which is still as full of misery as it ever was; that’s the whole point. I heart it.)
Via my aunt Margaret – geek vs. nerd infographic, plotting words associated with geek vs those associated with nerd, across 2.6 million tweets.
Hey you guys you know how Obama did a foreign policy thing that was “be like minimally civil to Iran” not “threaten to blow Iran into a smoking crater” and the entire Republican political world went wiiiild? Turns out things are going beautifully. Thanks Obama.
Long, searing indictment of the complete capture of society by Boomer interests. Surgically dissects what sits behind those comments telling young people to stop acting so entitled and to start working hard. Aussie article, but you could go through and put a tick by the paras that apply equally to NZ – there would be very few paras left unticked.
The secret lives of tumblr teens – while insightful, I found this depressing reading. It starts as a discussion of why the clever weird kids gravitate to tumblr, and then, like the kids in the story, gets entirely caught up in the mechanics of making money through the network.
The New Yorker has an interesting profile of Mr Money Mustache, who gives advice on living frugally, retiring early, biking everywhere, that sort of thing. (My Cal is something of an enthusiast.)
Via Angus Dingwall – “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” turns 15. Contentious claim there from the NY Mag that it was the first real internet meme – expect fierce warfare from “Mr T Ate My Balls” partisans.
Ima link to Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the Grammys because I’ve seen a lot of hiphop performed at awards shows and I always look forward to those performances and they always, always suck. Hiphop is the opposite of award shows. But Kendrick killed. Watch it. The Hamilton performance is also very much worth your time.
Investigative journalism from Buzzfeed would have been the setup for a joke about cat pictures a short time ago, but now some great work is coming out of the viral content giant. Here’s a glimpse of how they work, and maybe what the future of journalism looks like.
There’s no such thing as everlasting love (according to science” says The Atlantic. Interesting piece about one line of research into “love”. I appreciate anything that busts up the love mythology so prevalent in Western culture, but this article, like so much science reporting, skates over a lot of nuance that presumably exists. It reminds me of a forum post I wrote two decades ago declaring love is “a trick of the light” – I stand by that post, inasmuch as I remember what I said, but suffice it to say I have been steadily adding nuance to my understanding for twenty years since.
And finally… a ranking of all 118 sweaters seen on Twin Peaks. As my brother put it, “An intersection of obsessive, cult, and pointless that may be the most perfect snapshot of what the internet is all about.”
via Hannah Shaffer, Worst Draft: “”Worst Draft is a minimalist word processor that removes the two biggest roadblocks for writers: editing & distractions. Users will be unable to delete anything more than a few most recently typed words, and they will also be unable to access any other applications without first closing Worst Draft.”