Twice now I’ve posted collections of links to funny things from long ago (in internet years) which are still funny. In the course of this I’ve found some good things that are not humorous (or are not centrally humorous), and I thought I’d link to some of them. What unites these is that they’re all old links, and all of them were linked, at some point, from Attempts 1.0.
Fiction
“The Traitor”, by Curzio Malaparte, translated by Walter Murch
Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer — a marvelous little story by MightyGodKing that starts in wistful thinking and ends in a neat twist.
Five classic SF stories to read for free online:
• R. A. Lafferty, "The Transcendent Tigers"
• Joanna Russ, "When it Changed"
• Robert Silverberg, "The Man Who Never Forgot"
• Howard Waldrop, "The Ugly Chickens"
• Gene Wolfe, "Paul's Treehouse"That time that Zach Weinersmith wrote an incredibly cool SF story as a 14-panel comic.
Pup Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe (scroll down to the first panel, but after that scroll right, not down)
Peter Watts’s powerpoint on Vampires: Biology and Evolution. This one is a bit complicated. In his superb SF novel Blindsight (that link goes to an online text, but you can & should buy a copy too), Watts uses vampires with his own particular twist, fairly different from others and extremely interesting. To promote the book (I think) he put together a powerppoint as if by the company that resurrected (go watch it) the vampires, which he did at SF cons. This is one of his performances (recorded, with the slides as the visuals). So it’s sort of an introduction to the world, but not directly related to the book. But the book is so dense with interesting ideas that I, at least, found it helpful to go in already having a handle on one of them: so far from a spoiler, it’s a help.
About Fiction
Andrew Rilstone writes a great essay called “Do Balrogs Have Wings? (here reprinted under the title “How to Misread The Lord of the Rings”). I think I disagree with him about Tolkien, FWIW. Still a great essay.
Jo Walton on The Industrial Ruins of Elfland. (It’s hard now not to read it in light of her brilliant novel (published a few years after that post) Among Others.)
For this one, I’ll just quote what I said years ago:
Adam Roberts presents a marvelously (and, I think, self-consciously) mad reading of Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. What I love about this one is that it starts of convincing (i.e. that Dickens's affair with Ellen Ternan affected the story) and ends up in insane numerology (the reading of prisoner 104's "name"), but the dividing line between them is so hard to place: where, exactly, does Roberts's reading slip from plausible to lunatic? It's fascinatingly hard to say.
Amusements
Yeah, ok, I’m including a few funny ones. Sue me.
Things That Don’t Exist. I found it charming (and quite the earworm). Lyrics here.
Two impressive impressionists: Jim Meskimen Does Shakespeare in Celebrity Voices and 50 Impressions in 50 Seconds.
Only for Comics Nerds
Some (but not all!) of these are funny, too.
Images from the campy 60s Batman show overlain with quotes from Frank Miller’s revisionist graphic novel The Dark Knight Retuns
Things That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies
Jonathan Lethem’s brilliant essay “The Ecstasy of Influence”. Make sure to read to the twist in the middle.
Sam Harris on the fireplace delusion (a good piece that, I think, remains relevant beyond the end of the Internet Religious Wars).
Ryan North explains Gricean linguistics in two comics (one, two). (A longer and more academic explanation can be found here.)
While I’m at it, my all time Ryan North dinosaur comic is this one about the phrase “beg the question”.