Posts Tagged ‘Zelda’
Wednesday Night Links
* Stanford freshman’s documentary chronicles Huntington’s disease decision. Spoiler alert. Indiegogo fundraising. Twitter.
* My particular demographic: Study Finds Vegetarians Will Live Longer, Are Boring.
* The new governor of North Carolina wants to destroy the state’s crown-jewel educational system.
McCrory echoed a crack the radio show host made at gender studies courses at UNC-Chapel Hill, a top tier public university. “That’s a subsidized course,” McCrory said, picking up the argument. “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”
I’m certain that those classes more than pay for themselves, as the humanities always do.
* Anticipating domestic boom, colleges rev up drone piloting programs.
* Average Student Debt Has Ballooned 58 Percent In The Last Seven Years.
* Damn you, President Romney! Office Working to Close Guantánamo Is Shuttered.
* The Top Five Truths You Won’t Hear Any U.S. Official Admit.
* A 15-year-old girl who performed at President Obama’s inauguration last week was shot dead Tuesday while hanging out with friends in bullet-scarred Chicago. Meet The 9 Year-Old Girl Who Likely Would Be Alive Today If High-Capacity Magazines Were Illegal. Gaby Giffords’s notes for her testimony before Congress; the video is amazing. There was a mass shooting during her testimony.
* One Step Closer To Compensation For College Athletes.
* This is what happens when you give people license to unleash their Inner Authoritarian, when you encourage them in thinking that the arbitrary enforcement of irrational codes of behavior designed to keep a labor force unpaid that is making you billions of dollars are somehow on an equal footing with actual criminal and civil law.
* A newly elected Ohio Supreme Court justice who achieved the unlikely feat of ousting an incumbent without accepting any campaign contributions is not wasting any time in asserting his opposition to the death penalty.
* Teenage Girl Blossoming into Beautiful Object.
* Nearly half of Americans are one emergency from financial ruin.
* GOP’s Electoral Vote Scheme Already On Life Support.
* Frank R. Paul art gallery. Yes please.
* The Subtle Code of Inequality in Children’s Books.
* There’s a monster at the end of this tweet.
* Five Female Characters Who Should Star In Star Wars Episode VII.
* A website for the US judicial system states that jurors are “not expected to speak perfect English”: Cat ordered to do jury service.
* It is often claimed that renewables are still too costly and not yet competitive with conventional energy sources. But what costs are incurred when renewable energies are not used? Every day during which potential renewable energy sources are not utilised but exhaustible fossil fuels burnt instead speeds up the depletion of these non-renewable fuels. Using burnt fossil fuels for nonenergy related purposes (e.g. in the petro-chemical industry) in the future is obviously impossible. Thus, their burning – whenever they could have been replaced by renewables – is costly capital destruction. This study concludes that, estimated conservatively, the future usage loss resulting from our current oil, gas and coal consumption is between 3.2 and 3.4 trillion US Dollars per year.
* You are living in a simulation: New $1.6 billion supercomputer project will attempt to simulate the human brain.
* A Russian family that disappeared into the Siberian wilderness in 1936 and had no contact with other people for more than 40 years.
* And an epic game of tag that has been going on for 23 years.
Thursday Night Links
* Why did small business owner and gamer dad Mike Hoye spend the last few weeks hand-tweaking the text in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so that the main character was referred to as a girl instead of a boy? As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”
* Romney Adviser: Not a Single Person on the Campaign Thought He Would Lose.
* What You Can Get for $228,646,000. I could have lost them basically everything for half that.
* Nate Silver explains that malapportionment in the Electoral College may actually be flowing the Democrats’ way in the near-term:
The problem for Republicans is that in states like these, and others like Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, they are now winning by such large margins there that their vote is distributed inefficiently in terms of the Electoral College.
By contrast, a large number of electorally critical states – both traditional swing states like Iowa and Pennsylvania and newer ones like Colorado and Nevada – have been Democratic-leaning in the past two elections. If Democrats lose the election in a blowout, they would probably lose these states as well. But in a close election, they are favored in them.
* I really don’t understand why Rolling Jubilee is worth doing. Why would we give the banks free money for bad debt they’ve already written off?
* The pros and cons of a Casablanca sequel. Spoiler alert: there is no possible pro.
Legends of Localization
How were the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers different in Japan and North America? Via MeFi.
Nintendo Woodblocks
…from Jed Henry. Via io9. What I like about the Link one in particular is the way it highlights just how Japanese the iconography of the early Zelda games is, and how Americans read the games as traditional European medieval fantasy anyway.
Post *All* the Links
A big post, catching up from most of last week:
* Science fiction on the BBC: A brief history of all-women societies.
* Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe.
* News from MLA! Dissing the Dissertation. Anguish Trumps Activism at the MLA.
* News from my childhood: Another new version of Dungeons & Dragons is on the way. MetaFilter agonizes.
* News from the Montana Supreme Court: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government…”
* News from the future right now: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal.
* How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
* Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda.
* How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive entertainment.
* Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.
* While genomic research on the super-old is in its very early stages, what’s fascinating is what the researchers are not finding. These people’s genomes are fundamentally the same as other people’s. They are clearly very special, but not in ways that are obvious.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955.
* The headline reads, “Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed.”
* Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported.
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum.
* Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses. Keep in mind: that’s their defense.
* Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term.
* Romney: Elected office is for the rich.
* How banks and debt collectors are bringing dead debt back to life.
People who stop paying bills earn lousy credit ratings but eventually are freed of old debt under statutes of limitations that vary by state and range from three years to 10 years from the last loan payment.
But if a debtor agrees to make even a single payment on an expired debt, the clock starts anew on some part of the old obligation, a process called “re-aging.”
So if borrowers again fall behind on their payments, debt collectors can turn to their usual tools: letters, phone calls and lawsuits. By restarting a debt’s statute of limitations, the collectors have years to retrieve payments.
* Wells Tower: In Gold We Trust.
* Epic Doctor Who Timeline. More here.
* Battlestar Galactica: Totally planned. See also.
* The cast of Community plays pop culture trivia.
* “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”
* Classified docs reveal why Tolkien failed to win ’61 Nobel Prize!
* Solve the Fermi Paradox the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal way.
* And you probably already saw Paypal’s latest outrage, but man, it’s a doozy.
Monday Links
* Legend of Zelda turns 25. More here.
* Trolling the troll-watchers: The Anonymous-Westboro Baptist feud (blogged here) could be a hoax.
* Wisconsin update: Josh Marshall thinks Scott Walker isn’t winning.
* Sam Lipsyte won’t play any version of Monopoly that won’t allow people to cheat.
* And Sarkozy has finally admitted the French language is a hoax.
Tuesday Night
Tuesday night.
* First on the Threatdown: coyotes!
* Winooski, Vermont: Great Domed City of the North.
* “How Health Care Reform Won.”
* Is Metroid Prime the Citizen Kane of video games? Hard to pick Metroid Prime over, say, Ocarina of Time, just in the GameCube category alone.
* CNN, always three weeks behind the story, asks whether Obama has lost his mojo in the very moment it becomes apparent that his polls numbers are again rising.
* Also in poll news: contrary to Nate Silver’s recent NJ-GOV analysis it does seem clear that Corzine is moving sharply upward in the polls.
* “Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience.”
* And Life celebrates dumb inventions of the 1950s and ’60s.
The Ocarina of Rhyme
Offworld is not lying: The Ocarina of Rhyme is the greatest video-game/hip-hop mash-up of our age. [download link]
‘One Man Choral Group Performs the Legend of Zelda Theme’
Links I am physically incapable of resisting: “One man choral group performs the Legend of Zelda theme.”
Also going around: another Live-Action Super Mario. Via Boing Boing and Waxy.
Things I’ve Guaranteed to Fall For
Things I’m guaranteed to fall for:
* Video-game theme songs for the string quartet.
* Teller, after the apocalypse.
* Oil paintings inspired by video games and Internet memes.
* Articles titled “Welcome to the Post-Carbon World,” with sci-fi subtitles like “Why do some planets survive their carbon crises and others don’t? A plan for how ours could.”
