November 2, 2018
Raymond Chow R.I.P.
The legendary Hong Kong film producer, who introduced Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to the world and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the big screen, has died at 91. Chow was a journalist who became a publicist for Shaw Brothers Studios, which churned out hundreds of films and popularised the kung fu genre. He created his own production company in 1970 and soon outmanoeuvred his former employer to grab the actor who would become synonymous with kung fu movies. Chow signed Bruce Lee in 1971 after seeing him on a Hong Kong TV variety show.
Grace Jones: A One Man Show / A Musical Entertainment For Television
A lively performance set from the archives: Grace Jones - A One Man Show (full video on Vimeo; Discogs), which partly captures live performances of Jones' A One Man Show tour which was filmed at London's Drury Lane Theatre and at the Savoy Theater in New York City in 1981. Of the ten songs, six were live, and the other four are studio music videos, capturing some of the the classic Sly & Robbie era tracks. The film was directed by Jean-Paul Goude, who included a photo montage intro of some of the most famous [slightly NSFW] images of Jones from the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the "tiger in a cage" portrait and the "arabesque" photo, which he also created. [more inside]
Reply with cute pet pics, A thread
@PopularPups is a Twitter feed of puppy pictures and GIFs. (I know!) The other day they asked followers to post cute pet pics. They're mostly dogs, with the occasional cat or pig.
Bingo the Otter
【DIY】Plastic bottle shower for otter bingo - An admirable mix of DIY, bathtime fun, and an otter (Bingo).
Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?
Yes. Part of a series on gender, sexism, and the middle ages at The Public Medievalist. [more inside]
“Been awhile.”
An explosive train robbery gives McCree the chance to settle some unfinished business with a few former associates in our latest animated short: “Reunion!” [YouTube] [Introducing Ashe]
“She’s the leader of the Deadlock Gang, a group of rowdy desert dwellers who pull off huge heists. According to her hero page, Ashe is a damage-dealing hero whose semi-automatic rifle fires from the hip or, for precision, from a proper position with aim-down sights. She also carries a coach gun that pushes enemies away from her and propels her backwards. On top of that, she’s got dynamite, which can explode when she shoots at it. When she needs to, Ashe can call on B.O.B, an adorable mustachioed robot sidekick. He was her family’s butler, her lore states. When he arrives, he charges toward enemies and pops them into the sky while firing at them with arm canons.” [via: Kotaku]
Life is like a hurricane
The one show that came completely out of thin air was the Gummi Bears. I remember Michael saying that his kids had just come back from camp and all they could talk about was this new candy called gummy bears, which is the German for “rubber bears.” And I'm always kind of amazed by this, because he didn't know who I was or anything, but he turned to me and he said, "Make me a show called Gummy Bears."An oral history of the Disney afternoon.
We can't save the world, but we can protect and care for [RPG.net]
One of the oldest online RPG forums takes a stance:
"We are banning support of Donald Trump or his administration on the RPGnet forums. [...] We can be welcoming to (for example) persons of every ethnicity who want to talk about games, or we can allow support for open white supremacy. Not both." spawning multiple discussions on other online communities like reddit, resetera, hacker news and twitter. Among the media coverage, Mashable has an unabashedly positive article about the decision and Vice's Motherboard reached out to the admins.
Something’s wrong. Things are bad.
“One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. In avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas. This is the necessary next step following the dystopian moment, without which dystopia is stuck at a level of political quietism that can make it just another tool of control and of things-as-they-are.” Dystopias Now, Kim Stanley Robinson (Commune Magazine)
Not In Service
Western Canada Is Still Struggling to Replace Cancelled Greyhound Service. Here’s what that means for remote First Nations communities who rely on buses for medical travel. [more inside]
Flickr, paying, customer, product etc.
Flickr, hoster of amateur, professional and historic photographs since 2004, make some significant changes, the most noticeable being that in a few months all but the most recent 1,000 pictures in free accounts will be deleted. Some people are not happy, and some are backing up, but there's also an internet legacy issue. Other changes are enhancements to the Pro account, an increase in maximum picture resolution, and the removal of the requirement to sign in through a Yahoo! email. Flickr will eventually settle inside Amazon Web Services. (post title reference)
The Chronicle apologizes for the error
On January 24, 1977, The San Francisco Chronicle discovered the burrito
Have you lost weight?
Max Fagin gets a little excited on Twitter about the potential shift in how we define a kilogram. [more inside]
The Story of the Lamp
Who was the “real” Aladdin? From Chinese to Arab in 300 Years and Who “wrote” Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller are a pair of articles written by Arafat A. Razzaque for Ajam Media Collective about the story of Aladdin. The essays cover a wide range, from next year’s Disney film to how the tale entered the 1001 Nights corpus when the Syrian storyteller Ḥannā Diyāb told it to French translator Antoine Galland. Yasmine Seale has a new translation into English coming later this month, keeping in mind “the particular voices of these two men”.
"Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint."
After thoroughly studying Action movies, year by year, in his "A History of Violence" series (previously) for AV Club, Tom Breihan began a weekly study of superhero movies called "Age of Heroes" earlier this year starting, naturally, with 1978's "Superman". This week he arrived at the fulcrum year of 2008 where both "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" both reside. [more inside]
"I've never seen so many books before in my whole life!"
A thread about book production and premodern libraries in fantasy (and real world history) (SLTwitterThread)
Entitled
Film maker Adeyemi Michael made a short about his mother and the immigrant experience for the Channel 4 Random Acts strand.
The film is called Entitled.
Here is Michael talking about Entitled on BBC World/Africa. "It felt like a duty to me, to celebrate the woman, the mother, the matriarch, the immigrant... The film is looking at this idea that all immigrants are conquerors."
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