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writer, singer, webwrangler, blogger, comedy tragic | about.me/vivsmythe

• A little dose of Awesome: Lego in Space!

  By tigtog on 2012-01-30 • ( 6 )

  

  Canadian high school students Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad have launched a Lego man almost 25 kilometres above sea level – high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.

• There really is a tumblr for everything

  By tigtog on 2012-01-24 • ( 11 )

  

  OMSFSM totally NSFW. Link in clear text because I don’t want anybody to say that they weren’t warned.

• Sunday Singalong: Remembering Etta James

  By tigtog on 2012-01-22 • ( 5 )

  

  Lots of folks have been playing her ballads or her blues songs of lost love, which are classic Etta, but I especially loved her when she got playful. This is one of my favourite versions of You Can Leave Your Hat On.

• Sunday Penguins!

  By tigtog on 2012-01-22

  

  How did we miss Penguin Awareness Day on Friday? Oh the shame.

• Otterday! And Open Thread.

  By tigtog on 2012-01-21 • ( 24 )

  Today’s otter video is a tribute to the passing of an online Best Mate who loved his coffee, whisky, urban legends, puns, poker and pointed sarcasm. Vale atque ave, Phil Gustafson – somewhere a JATO car is pacing your passage, and somehow a scuba suit is involved. Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires.

• Signal Boost: Ada Initiative talk at #lca2012

  By tigtog on 2012-01-19 • ( 5 )

  

  Watch a livestream video of the Ada Initiative founders at Linux Conf Au

• Quickhit: a black man’s view on Schroedinger’s Rapist

  By tigtog on 2012-01-19

  …my objection to anti-black racism being used as a rhetorical device by those who will never face it, is that black people engage in tons of behaviours to make white people feel safer. We do this all the damn time. We make accommodations in speech, behaviour, dress, mannerism, conversation topic – a wide diversity of adjustments that we make in the presence of our white friends […] I don’t appreciate being deputized into your anti-feminist screed in this way.

• The reading iceberg: promoting ‘serious’ male narratives over ‘trivial’ female narratives starts at school

  By tigtog on 2012-01-17 • ( 10 )

  

  It took me years to realise that I had been educated to privilege men’s writing over women’s. Like a lot of girls educated in the ’70s and ’80s, I grew up reading a canon of ‘great literature’ written by men (and, primarily, for men) … At school we read almost exclusively male writers … our one woman author was Jane Austen.

• First Rule of Holes: expensive social media strategy failing edition

  By tigtog on 2012-01-17 • ( 10 )

  How long do you have to wait for a measly 250,000 votes on FB before you realise the target market just isn’t interested enough in whether your animated mascot ‘lives’ or ‘dies’? The intensely irritating ad is building an aversion response within this consumer which is likely to last for years, and I’m far from the only one. Well done, expensive social media marketing ‘experts’!

• I don’t think that means what you think it means: Margaret Court edition

  By tigtog on 2012-01-12 • ( 3 )

  

  It is hard that they can voice their opinions but I am not allowed to voice my opinion. says Margaret Court, freely sharing her opinion on the pages of The Australian.