Citizen 16

Holy shit! Only forty minutes to collect together a bunch of neat links from the past 30 days and arrange them in a new and easier to pick through format before the month is over! Can I manage it? Well, yes because even if I don’t I’ll just change the publish time and pretend that I did. Ah, deadlines: they only exist for the people who are paid for this sort of thing.

Words:

• News outlets had a great month. Seriously, any month in which you can run a story about a student throwing a puppy at a bunch of German Hell’s Angels has got to be a top month for journalists.
• Similarly, here we have a contender for Headline of The Year.
• And then John Walker linked to this Guardian reporters heroic efforts at live blogging the endless Isner-Mahut Wimbledon match. Yeah, I know, Wimbledon – but don’t run away, this is top stuff. A sample:

7pm: The umpire climbs down from his chair and starts mildly slapping the net cord with his right hand. No one knows why. John Isner winds up for a backhand and misses the ball entirely. No one knows why.

What’s going on here? Once, long ago, I think that this was a tennis match. I believe it was part of a wider tennis tournament, somewhere in south-west London, and the winner of this match would then go on to face the winner of another match and, if he won that, the winner of another match. And so on until he reached the final and, fingers crossed, he won the title.

That, at least, is what this spectacle on Court 18 used to be; what it started out as. It’s not that anymore and hasn’t been for a few hours now. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it is long and it’s horrifying and it’s very long to boot. Is it death? I think it might be death.

• Okay, so one news outlet didn’t have a great month. Would you be surprised to hear that it was the Daily Mail?
• Has apocalyptic fiction killed off the enthusiasm and excitement that we used to feel for the future? Jim Rossignol explores the issue.
• “At some point around the 22nd hour without sleep – as I forced myself to play Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game whether I liked it or not – I asked myself, ‘How did it come to this?’”
• Three reasons why we buy those crazy Steam bundles. Pretty apt considering that Steam is pretty much all crazy bundles this week.
• An interesting take on the story of Red Dead Redemption. Contains massive spoilers for the ending of the game, just so you know.

Pictures:

• Illustrations of those things you’re just left to figure out on your own.
• Ultra Culture linked to the Jeff Bridges website. Why? Because it’s full of brilliant hand drawn illustrations of the films he’s starred in!

Sounds:

• This is what the Sun sounds like. A sci-fi movie, as it turns out.

Videos:

• Violinist plays Super Mario Bros live to Super Mario Bros. Bloody hell!

• Live performance of the final song in Plants vs. Zombies by its composer.

• Another piece linked by John Walker: Dan Telfer delivers the best audience solicited stand-up routine about dinosaurs you’ll ever see.

• And finally… I nearly didn’t bother with this, but what the hell. Baby sloths are cute as fuck.