Friday Links

• Best Volleyball Blocks Ever with Scott Sterling. This video is three and a half minutes long, and I laughed almost the entire time. Props to Mr. Lapinski for telling me it exists.
• For April Fools’ Day I posted an essay to the Buffy subreddit entitled The Marzipan Code: Buffybot’s Secret Revealed. With painstaking and ridiculous analysis, I carefully demonstrated that a single random line of throwaway dialogue is actually chock-full of deep, symbolic, Shakespearean meaning. The results were worth it.
• Onion story: Study Links Clinical Depression To Getting Dunked On. “… test subjects exhibited low self-esteem, despair, and lost interest in normal activities after being dunked on with a devastating monster jam.” Well, they’re not wrong.
• Onion story: How A Contested Convention Would Work. “Q: What is a contested convention? A: A way to ensure the voice of the people is heard and then checked for any obvious mistakes.”
• You know how infomercials always show sad schmucks trying to do something without the Product, and it’s just so hard? (There has to be a better way!) Here’s 4 minutes and 34 seconds of that. Among the items that are just too difficult to use, you’ll find cell phones, bath towels, and soap.
• I must be behind the times, because I only learned today that there’s a new Star Wars coming out this December, set between Episodes III and IV. It’s called Rogue One. Part of me wants to complain about the sheer volume of Star Wars getting pumped out lately, but it’s hard to complain about trailers like this one.
• This news story is an obvious April Fools’ joke, except it wasn’t posted April 1, and it turns out to be totally real. Sweden now has its own phone number – you can call the country. The person who answers is an ordinary Swedish citizen, selected at random from among Swedes who downloaded the corresponding app. So, um. Want to talk to Sweden?

Have a succulent weekend!