- 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.
various
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]
Wednesday various
- I’m not really sure why you’d want bots to pretend to be you on social network sites, and the confused grammar of the fine print doesn’t really make things clearer [via]:
The bot does not born with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prothesis [sic] added to an user’s account. With the aim to help him to forge a digital identity of what he would really like to be and by trying to build a greater social reputation for the user. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.
- The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. I dunno, I’m still using mine on a regular basis. (Though it predates my capping by a couple of years.) [via]
- Guess the film by the final image. I got less than half. Slightly spoilery, for some films more than others. Of course, I can’t tell you which films without ruining the whole thing. [via]
- A wonderfully detailed analysis of set design and spatial awareness in The Shining. He concludes, I think rightly, that a lot (if not all) of these “errors” were intentional, meant to disorient and unnerve viewers who would, maybe only subconsciously, pick up on the impossibility of the architecture. It gets to the heart of something I’ve discussed with enthusiasm before: using lies in fiction to tell the truth, creating a more believable world by adding less real elements. [via]
- And finally, a virtual supermarket in a subway station. [via]
Tuesday various
- “The body of a Massachusetts woman went unnoticed for two days in a Fall River public swimming pool, which remained open to the public and was even visited by health inspectors, generating outrage and calls for an investigation.” More here, including how such a bizarre and awful thing could actually have happened. [via]
- I think this song by Paris Hilton is, predictably, dreadful, but I actually prefer when Hilton does stuff like this, when she’s at least doing something. The paparazzi paying attention to a lousy pop star is marginally better than its paying attention to a do-nothing heiress, right?
- Well I for one am shocked — shocked! — that drug trials aren’t conducted realistically in the world of superhero comics!
- Roger Ebert on Transformers: Dark of the Moon:
I have a quaint notion that one of the purposes of editing is to make it clear why one shot follows another, or why several shots occur in the order that they do.
- And finally, Improv Everywhere’s latest mission is just lovely:
I used to work right around the corner from that park. (We’re now maybe 10 minutes away.) [via]