- Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC’s editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts? [via]
- The science of the trailer [via]
- Dear Photograph [via]
- Keira Rathbone’s Typewriter Art. Just stunning. [via
- And finally, ‘The Wire’ meets ‘iCarly’. Warning: pretty big spoiler for The Wire. Possibly for iCarly, too, for all I know. [via]
news
Wednesday various
- I liked Ryan McGee’s review of the new show Take the Money and Run, which he describes as “LARP&Order.” I don’t think I would remotely enjoy the show.
- The Stanford Prison Experiment 40 years later. [via]
- The headline reads: North Dakota is not a state and never has been. I’m reminded of TV Nation’s visit to the so-called state. [via]
- You know, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about schools no longer teaching cursive, but I think I’m pretty much okay with it. [via]
- And finally, John Hodgman on acting:
[W]hat I kind of began to understand about acting is that it’s similar to writing. You warm up for a while, you hate it, you don’t know what you’re doing, you feel totally fake and phony, you feel like you’re mechanically imitating what you did before and you’ll never be able to get any inspiration again, and then suddenly this voice starts coming out of you. And whatever it is you’re working on, if you’re writing, you realize there’s a story that you’re trying to tell that you didn’t know that you were trying to tell. And I think acting is the same way. There’s this period where you’re just pretending to be a human, and then, all of a sudden, some kind of human really emerges from you.
Tuesday links
- I’m with xkcd on this: fuck cancer.
- The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes. I can’t say I agree with everything here, but it’s an interesting article, particularly the argument against having Thor and Captain America both do double-duty by setting their characters up for The Avengers.
That said, I enjoyed both of them just fine as summer entertainment, and while I enjoyed X-Men: First Class no small amount either, I think it’s ultimately the least successful film of the three. (I haven’t seen Green Lantern.) Matthew Vaughn’s “auteur vision” seems cribbed from a few other places (like Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie, and like Mad Men), and there’s some pretty iffy racial and gender issues at work in the film as well. But maybe that just underlines Pappademas’ main argument: at least the movie has some distinctive stamp to it, however flawed. [via]
- NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law [via]
- Soap operas moving online. This will bear further watching. The news, not the shows. (God no.) [via]
- And finally, Who owns the copyright on a photo taken by a monkey? [via]
Monday various
- I am strangely fascinated by NASA’s book for the visually impaired, Getting a Feel for Lunar Craters. It’s sold out right now; they do have the text and an audio version freely available, but that seems like it misses the whole point of a tactile book. [via]
- Have we all been playing Monopoly wrong all these years? I like Waxy.org’s post about it, in which Andy Baio writes, “It’s interesting to see a commercial game see the same sort of cultural variation as other children’s folk games.”
- TV’s ‘Cash Cab’ kills pedestrian in Vancouver. Reality television is dangerous, people! [via]
- Can you survive Baltimore’s 5k run? Sounds like The Wire meets The Walking Dead. [via]
- And finally, the Empathic Civilisation [via]