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BlogTalk Oddities

End of March Link Roundup

  • WordPress 2.5 is out, and it is very pretty on the inside. Some plugins break, in particular the livejournal crossposter, but I read there is a fix, so I’m posting to try it (PS: works for me). To make this more than a test, test post, I stick in some links what I have already tagged in my shared items or scuttle, but which I haven’t put in this feed.
  • Here’s a picture essay about the Oz books and subsequent derivative works and how, they kept getting darker until perhaps due to the success of Wicked, the dark adult deconstruction of Oz became practically its own genre. Sort of like Postmodern superheroes, except with ruby slippers.
  • Here’s a slew (that’s like a flotilla, except of stuff) of proposed and rejected ideas for Star Wars merchandise. Bantha slippers, anyone? Jabba the Hutt beanbag? Death Star Grill?
  • The Wikihistory link has been making the rounds everywhere, but, yeah.
  • Literary Divination, A Parlour Game is about creating Tarot readings for fictional or real characters using books instead of cards.
  • Yossi Gurvitz on Prof. Shlomo Zand’s book on the manufactured nature of Jewish history and the Zionist narrative (Hebrew). Though-provoking and some further exploration (or culture archeology axe-grinding) of the history of early Judaism, which Yossi has been ranting about recently.
  • Anders Sandberg is discussing the usefulness of love-potions, or as he calls it the neuropharmacological enhancement of love and why it is likely a good idea.
  • Kenneth Hite complains that theater isn’t bloody enough anymore, mentioning Titus Andronicus and the plays of Seneca, which I just recently read him mentioning in White Wolf’s Requiem for Rome book.
  • Finally, apropos “Earth Hour” (was that the blackening of Google you were on about?), here is Peter Watts all full of bleak and brilliant fury:

    Why, I’ll bet the reduced environmental impact from turning off those lights might even recoup a small fraction of the resources consumed to drive the massive multimedia extravaganza advertising Earth Hour.

    Oh, wait. There isn’t going to be any reduction in environmental impact. Not unless the world’s power-generating utilities decide to scale back the fossil fuels they’re burning to reflect a one-time, one-hour tick in the time series.

    Yes, I know. It’s only supposed to make “a statement”. It’s supposed to be a symbol. And what does it symbolize, exactly? It symbolizes “hope” — which is to say, our infinite capacity for denial