1) Darkseid is impressed by Thanos’s coffee.
2) 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense Of The World. James Nicoll, some of these are relevant to your interests.
4) How to build a cat fountain in Minecraft. Video. Note: that’s not a fountain for cats to drink from. No, it is not.
5) The Most Important Book on Color Theory Is Now an iPad App.
7) A printer with no paper tray. You just set it on top of a stack of paper and let it go. h/t @KeithCalder
Last night Twitter (and the rest of the internet) had a bit of a freak-out about Ben Affleck being cast as Batman in the new Man of Steel movie. Most of them were all: “Have we watched Daredevil and died in vain?”
But hey, remember when this guy was cast as Batman?
Good times, good times. Everyone thought he would be completely wrong for the part, and you know what? He was!
But it wasn’t his fault. Tim Burton made a Batman movie but he didn’t actually like Batman.
Remember this guy?
Head quirks aside, George Clooney was a terrific Batman, but his movie was even more ridiculous and off-putting than Keaton’s. There’s a case to be made for calling it a camp classic, I guess, but it didn’t do much for the franchise and it certainly didn’t help Clooney.
But what about Batman Begins? That was a great Batman, right? Hey, did you know how hard it is to find a picture of Bale in the mask with his mouth open? I think this is why:
Look at that damn tongue. When he’s playing other roles, t’s not such a big deal that Bale talks with his whole freaking tongue right at the front of his mouth, but the Batman mask focuses people’s attention on the actor’s mouth because that’s the only human part showing. It was the most distracting thing about the movie, even beyond the voice.
But you know what? It was still a good performance. Even better, it was a pretty good movie with a pair of good/pretty good sequels.
And now the terrible Affleck Daredevil is the cause of a lot of shirt-tearing. Well, I’m going to come out and say it: The problem with Daredevil was the movie itself, not the performance. Affleck’s name is the one everyone knows, but he wasn’t to blame for that script (with Murdock kung fu fighting in his civvies to flirt with Elektra) or the ridiculous cgi and sound effects. There were several scenes that worked, and part of the reason they worked was Affleck’s performance (I’m thinking about the aftermath of the fight in the bar specifically).
I wanted to drop in a clip of the more egregious fake effects here, but Fox is careful about yanking its IP off YouTube.
So Affleck’s performance as Batman will be well-received in large part depending on how the script is written, how the scenes are shot, and a thousand other factors. Batman movies have reached the point of being franchises, like James Bond; it’s no longer enough for most of the audience to say “Batman movie!” and get people to line up. You need to make an actually decent movie. Like Clooney, Affleck will be remembered by the quality of the film he’s in.
Did I mention it’s being directed by Zach Snyder?
Added later: io9’s 50+ greatest tweets about Affleck being cast as Batman
1) A really wonderful webcomic. Seriously. Check it out. You might have to scroll down a little.
3) Whale nearly swallows divers. Video
4) Comedian hides funny/absurd messages in hotel rooms.
5) Ten coolest things you can make with a 3D printer. Yeah, it’s a slide show, but this one’s worth it.
6) Copy machine changes numbers when making copies. h/t Making Light.
7) Very interesting: Husband takes photos to convince wife that her hallucinations aren’t real, but wife sees them in photos, too. After being put on a new drug, the hallucinations mostly go away, except in those photos.
Most people will be remembering for the years he spent playing a Klingon or many other roles, but this was his most powerful role to me.
I didn’t have a lot of interest in superhero cartoons until this episode and this performance. After years of quipping villains, his Mr. Freeze was electrifying.
A great performance on a terrific show. Rest in peace.
1) A male comic artist puts out webcomics under a female name and sees things from the other side.
2) Saddled with student loans in the U.S.? There are ways to get rid of them without paying.
3) The best places to build wind and solar power by the map, and it’s not where you think.
4) Best way to out a superhero’s secret identity: UV gun. Superhero tan lines.
5) The Machete Order: How to watch the original Star Wars films and the prequels in a way that doesn’t suck too much. h/t LJ user blackhanddpants
6) William Gibson on the visual and thematic virtues of PACIFIC RIM.
7) Vanishing literature: more evidence that our copyright terms are too long.
1) Weird Ways To Burn 200 Calories. Video.
2) Excaliber, the world’s tallest (121 feet) free-standing climbing wall.
3) First of all, how do the astronauts was their hair in zero G? Awesome! Second of all, female astronaut. Awesome! Last, hair care tips from the woman on board? Hmph. I hope she gets to play guitar or something next time. Video. (Still, zero g hair-washing.)
4) The terrible and wonderful reasons I run long distances, by The Oatmeal.
5) Favorite movies laid out as vintage treasure maps.
6) Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal. This is so simple and absurd. I love it.
7) This is what happens when you try to take video of police in Sweden. Video. (h/t to James Nicoll).
1) OMG, another terrorist attack in England! But maybe you haven’t heard of it because it was an attack against a mosque.
2) We only just started watching GLEE on Netflix (and I didn’t much like it) but we were all saddened to hear that one of the stars died of a drug overdose.
Media reports keep saying “He had just spent a month in rehab to break his addiction” as though it’s a shame that rehab failed him, but what few people say is that the risk of death by overdose is incredibly high after an addict has been clean for a while. Their tolerance drops, and when they fall off the wagon they go back to pre-rehab levels of drug use. That can be lethal with lowered tolerance.
I realize it could be undermining to say: “We don’t want you to fall off the wagon, but if you do…” but someone ought to warn people.
3) And of course there’s the Zimmerman verdict, which… Christ.
To paraphrase a great man: We are what our record says we are. How can we sensibly expect different?
4) There’s a growing movement for people to boycott the movie ENDER’S GAME because the author of the novel is a wackadoodle homophobe who done work for the NOM and has, in the past, advocated revolution if the same-sex marriage became legal. Lionsgate acknowledged the issue in their own official response, but I like this response better.
Personally, I doubt I’ll be seeing the movie myself but I was already meh on it before I heard about the boycott. Color me skeptical of stories about child soldiers. Besides, if I’ve already skipped the sequel to the rebooted Star Trek, Epic, Oblivion, and a bunch of other half-baked summer fare, I really can’t see myself stealing writing time for this film.
5) In much lighter news, JK Rowling published a book under a pen name, which was just outed last week.
I’ve talked about this a lot on Twitter and it’s hard to summarize everything for this space. Personally I think it was a smart thing for her to do; a pen name gives her the freedom to write without expectations. No one is comparing her books to the last Potter book, no one expects a huge event out of it. It’s just her doing what she wants.
Now that it’s out, of course, it’s like the blind wise sages describing an elephant: Some people think she tried to abandoned her fans, some think she proved that publishing is all (or mostly) about luck, some think it’s all about how a few bestselling authors dominate the market and make things incredibly difficult for new and midlist authors.
And then there’s this:
So, I can now say that I turned down JK Rowling. I did read and say no to Cuckoo's Calling. Anyone else going to confess?
— Kate Mills (@Kate7Mills) July 14, 2013
Which I think is hilarious.
So I was reading Darin Strauss’s The Banality of Butter: What Hannah Arendt Can Tell Us About Paula Deen in The Atlantic Wire and I reached this section:
… sometimes what we call evil — and what can bring about the most horrible outcomes — can often more accurately and simply be thoughtlessness of a sort. That is to say, people, and communities, are often no good at the kind of abstract thought that helps us understand the experience of others. [italics original]
This lesson comes from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and as Strauss says in his Atlantic article, it’s absurd to compare what Paula Deen did with what Eichmann did.
I’d like to pause here to emphasize that: for Strauss, the point here is not to compare what Deen did with what Eichmann did, and I have no interest in trying to compare what serial harassers inside SFWA or other convention spaces with what Eichmann did. That would be absurd.
But the way that communities react to these issues is very much to the point. Deen’s supporters have refused to acknowledge that her behavior was worth condemnation, or that their assertion that what she did was no big deal stems from a cultural abscess that should have been lanced a long time ago.
Another quote:
Again, Arendt was perhaps the first to write coherently about the trouble communities have in seeing the world as being something other than what they have been conditioned to see — without any kind of cultural empathy.
Isn’t that what we see from the harasser-apologists? People with no empathy for the way women are treated in their shared spaces, and who think women should just suck it up, or laugh it off, or consider that maybe possibly kinda could this all be a misunderstanding?
It seems to me that there are few more effective ways to rile up a bunch of people than to puncture their self-image as people of virtue.
1) Dungeons & Dragons and the Influence of Tabletop RPGs | Off Book | PBS Digital Arts Video
2) Camera allows you to see parkour from the POV of the traceur. Video.
3) Cartoon rejection rates at the New Yorker. Includes a TEDTalk of course because New Yorker.
4) A Visual Guide To The Mastery Of Kirk-Fu.
5) Extremely unfortunate spelling mistakes on Twitter.
2) How To Use Math To Crush Your Friends At Monopoly Like You’ve Never Done Before.
3) A series of photographs showing various types of rounds cut in the cross-section. Way more interesting than it sounds.
4) Beautiful kinetic sculptures. Video.
5) An offer of free lodging always has some kind of catch to it, right? (People are weird)
6) The Ten Best Superhero RPGs ever. I’m not obsessed with them like the author of this article and I certainly haven’t played all the games on this list, but I agree with his top two.