Tag Archives: Friday Links

Aside from today’s big news, I was also interested to see this fact-checked version of Trump’s speech. Remarkably, he does say some things that are true, and they’re almost as fascinating as the lies.

Speaking of which, here’s a surreal and captivating Japanese ad for Donald Trump. Except it’s not Japanese, and it’s satire, not an ad.

How to handle it when your daughter says she likes girls.

Any fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Buffy in the house? I made a thing.

Enjoy your freakin’ weekend!

There’s this thing called TiddlyWiki, and despite the ridiculous name, it is – as the kids say these days – the best thing ever. Basically it’s Wikipedia, except it’s just on your own computer, so only you can edit it, and you start with a blank slate and make the articles about whatever you want.

It’s a great way to organize free-form knowledge and ideas. I’m using it for Crane Girl now – characters, settings, plot, etc.

It’s possible I might be a little obsessed. But then, that’s nothing new.

According to this, some elephants are self-aware.

Rock on, elephants.

This is cool.

This is funny.

Both are a few weeks old. But then, so are a lot of babies, and people friggin’ love babies.

Secret project to be revealed Monday in all its glory. Stay tuned.

• 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!

Let’s Speak English is a webcomic I just discovered, by Mary Cagle, about her own real-life experiences as an American in Japan teaching English to grade-school kids. It’s funny because it’s true, and also because it’s funny. This one is possibly my favorite.

Watch out for April Foolers, and have a resplendent weekend.

One of my favorite music videos of all time is a fan-made Avatar: The Last Airbender video, set to the song “Remember the Name,” created by a YouTube user called ravenhpltc242. Besides being fun to watch, it’s also very well-made in a technical sense – the action beats match the musical beats, the special effects are slick, and so on. It appeals to the 10-year-old boy in me (that’s a good thing). I’ve watched it over a dozen times.

Naturally, I had to do a Buffy version.

Essentially, I took the same music, the same concept, the same design, and most of the same timing, but used Buffy clips, images, and audio instead. So it’s heavily modeled on the Avatar video. But don’t get me wrong, it was still a ton of work. In many ways, working off another video is easier than doing it from scratch, but in some ways it’s even harder.

So here it is: Buffy- Remember the Name.

Yes, I’m an übergeek. We can all agree on that.

Oh, also, here’s this cool thing and this funny thing.

Have an übergeeky weekend!

John Oliver RE: Donald Trump.

That is all.

Did Leonard Nimoy Have Antonin Scalia Killed to Give Obama Enough Supreme Court Votes to Cancel the 2016 Election? One site (HardDawn.com) is asking the tough questions.

Even better than that article’s headline – if such a thing is possible – is NPR’s oddly serious article linking to it, which ends with a postscript so delightful it can only be quoted verbatim:

Correction
Feb. 16, 2016
A previous version of this post failed to recognize that HardDawn.com is a parody website.

Although, to be fair to NPR, it is getting ever more difficult to tell the actual political beliefs from the satires of them. Poe’s Law in action.

Have a better-than-mediocre weekend!