Sprinkles from around the web: Interesting links 4/30-5/06/10

Sprinkles from around the web

Links of interest I’ve found around the web. Your mileage may vary.

Charity

So Nashville Is Flooded… How Can I Help?. If you haven’t heard, Nashville’s under water. Check out this link for a list of ways to help.

Contests

Win a trip for two to Jordan. ExOfficio’s the company I work for, and we’re giving away a trip. If you’re over 18-years-old, live in the US, and are not related to me, put your name in. Odds are pretty good.

Fandom

The Accidental Arab: Alexander Siddig interviewed by Jamal Mahjoub in Bidoun. I’m a big fan of Siddig and this is truly a wonderful interview. Both Siddig and Mahjoub share their experiences portraying and writing (respectively) Arabian characters and about their own identities.

“According to my mother, within six months I had learned English and within two years I had forgotten Arabic.” — Siddig

How ‘The Karate Kid’ Ruined The Modern World. This is brilliant.

Every adult I know–or at least the ones who are depressed–continually suffers from something like sticker shock […]. Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.

Hugo Weaving confirmed as the Red Skull in Marvel Studios’ ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’. Elrond/Agent Smith will be trading punches with Captain America on the silver screen.

No Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batgirl or Really Any Girl Coming from DC Animation Any Time Soon. This sucks for introducing new audiences to comic books.

Due to slow and low returns for their Wonder Woman film (one of my personal favorites) [DC Comics/Time Warner has] opted out of producing a proposed sequel. Worse, it’s also discouraged them from adapting Batgirl: Year One or basically any other vehicles for female heroes.

Ryan Choi is my Atom.
Ryan Choi is my Atom
The Racial Politics of Regressive Storytelling in DC Comics. Chris Sims’ excellent essay on how DC’s unintentional erasing of characters of color in legacy roles for reborn white Silver Age heroes is racially problematic. Plus, Ryan Choi makes a way better Atom than Ray Palmer. Sims follows up by talking about how kids are growing up with the more diverse heroes in cartoons and are going to have a hard time with the cast of white characters who died before they were born.

Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for the Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition) DVD. Hilarious. (Hint: It’s McSweeney’s and not real.)

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

Zinn: I think that’s correct. Tolkien makes no attempt to hide the fact that rings are wielded by every other ethnic enclave in Middle Earth. The Dwarves have seven rings, the Elves have three. The race of Man has nine rings, for God’s sake. There are at least 19 rings floating around out there in Middle Earth, and yet Sauron’s ring is supposedly so terrible that no one can be allowed to wield it. Why?

Local

Local boy with cancer turns into a superhero for a day. A touching story about a boy who got the highways shut down so he could pretend to be a superhero. He got to ride around in a DeLorean. Awesome.

At Qwest Field, Electron Boy was directed by frantic fans to the Sounders locker room, where the entire team was shouting for help behind jammed doors.

Major fire burns under Ballard Bridge. I watched this fire burn from my house on Wednesday night.

Science

Idaho scientists find fabled worm. A giant earthworm called Palouse was thought dead, but found in an Idaho/Oregon forest.

Stephen Hawking: Humans Should Fear Aliens. Some day, I’m going to write down the story about how when I was in 7th grade, my Lutheran school teacher told me two things 1) that animals don’t have souls and thus, don’t go to heaven and 2) believing in the existence of aliens went against a belief in Jesus. I stopped believing in what my teacher was saying right then and there.

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” — Stephen Hawking

Technology

• Have 5+ yrs SEO experience? Please help US Department of Labor classify SEO correctly.

10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account. Facebook’s been doing a lot of shady things with privacy rights lately. I’ve deactivated mine before. However, I now keep mine around because I take of ExOfficio’s social media, including Facebook.

I’ve decided to delete my account on Facebook. I’d like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I’d like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I’m not missing anything.

A Brief History of Markup. History is important, and as a web producer, I find it very important to understand how web languages evolve. Including what’s in store for HTML5.

Diaspora Project: Building the Anti-Facebook. If you’re fed up with Facebook, these guys are attempting to build an open-source social networking node that you own and control all the privacy levels on it. Interesting, but still in development. Their video’s kind of cute in an awkward way.

Meet The New Google & Its Colorful, Useful “Search Options” Column. If you haven’t been on Google in while, they’ve changed their layout a bit.

Mint.com Launches New App for Android. Real time information on my bank account for my mobile phone? Sweet. If you haven’t tried out Mint, I highly suggest it. Great for budgeting and keeping track of your finances.

One in eight to cut cable and satellite TV in 2010

The biggest reason why customers will cut the cord, according to the study, is the growing cost of pay-TV service. Cable and satellite viewers pay an average of $71 per month, and they receive an average annual price hike of 5%, according to research firm Centris.

Whiteboard Friday – Facebook’s Open Graph WON’T Replace Google. SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin explains how Facebook’s Open Graph won’t be overtaking Google and how SEO is far from dead.

Writing

Why You Shouldn’t Write for Other Writers. Writers. We’re cleaver in the best of times, but often the cleverness is completely incoherent to outsiders, especially non-writers. Microsoft’s Hotmail billboards, I’m looking at you.

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