I am besieged by awesome links today. Let the battle for freedom begin!

This looks like it could be amusing, if you’re not arachnophobic.

Obviously, these people are not taking themselves seriously and the whole thing fit neatly into the new and rather fun movie genre of “action comedy”.

I love the premise, I love the whiff of a promise of satire of the giant monster movie genre, and that is definitely one bigass spider.

I have always found giant movie monsters boring and cheap and predictable. They are like a merger of two genres I don’t like : disaster movies and monster movies. So I would love to watch a movie that mock the tropes of the kaiju world.

Plus, seriously, what is scarier than a giant spider? I can’t think of another creature that would be more frightening in Giant Atomic Size.

Then we have this brilliant piece of citizen activism and productive culture jamming.

Don’t get me wrong… sometimes culture jamming is artistically valid in and of itself.

But I love, love, love what these people did. Especially because they did it not just by being clever enough to wear almost-identical shirts, but because they succeeded because they were relaxed and friendly (easy when right is on your side) and the pipeline people are all tense and defensive because they know that people will be asking them questions for which they have no good answers.

That is a breathtakingly wonderful example of the battle between right and wrong being won by the people with right on their side. I think these people have the right idea. Show up wherever the megacorps are disseminating their corporate propaganda, and offer people the truth.

That… is how you do it.

Or you can attack the evils of the world via satire.

Note that I said satire, not comedy, because I didn’t find the video funny. Satire is a form of comedy but it is volatile stuff and does not quite entirely fit into the category of comedy.

Some satire is simply to make a point, and not to make people laugh.

I did love the bit about the training montage to 70’s slow jams, though. That was hilarious. But the part before that was just a tad too on the nose to be funny.

Your mileage, as always, may vary on that.

And I love the attempt to make climate change deniers look like a more readily recognizable form of asshole. This makes it easier for the average citizen, who is not all that sure whether they understand enough science to know if climate change is real, to nevertheless identify, mock, shame, and ultimately make entirely irrelevant those kinds of people.

Then we have this rather fun bit of mysterious minimalism : Another Word, Another Day.

Some dude recorded himself saying exactly one English word a day for three years. That’s all that is there. The archives of him saying exactly one word a day in a dry, low-affect voice, with no explanation, no way of identifying the speaker, nothing. Just… words.

Sometimes, it’s not even him. It’s some random British chick, or a guy with an Australian accent, or who knows who else.

I love it. I love it as art, as a beautifully elegant and effective non-statement. By being so anonymous and minimal, it just creates a space without filling it.

Cracked things it is “aggressively insane”, but I think it is magic.

OK folks… harsh tone shift. Things are about to get serious and macabre.

These are supposedly the last moments of Canadian tourist Elisa Lam.

It’s security camera footage taken from the elevator of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. After this, she somehow ended up in the hotel’s water tower, which is fifteen feet tall and locked all the time.

People are treating it like a big mystery, but it seems simple to me.

Seems like she had a very negative brain event. She might have had an embolism or an aneurism that lead to her bizarre behaviour because she was, to put it crudely, short-circuiting. Even ending up in the water tower makes sense… we are monkeys, after all, and born to climb. Locked doesn’t mean impossible to enter.

It is an unpleasant theory, but it fits all the facts and brings it no unverifiable variables.

They say “How did she get through two locked doors and several alarms?”

I answer “How did her murderer?” To me, it’s obviously an inside job. Perhaps an employee found her dead, panicked because they thought they were going to get blamed (or reported to the INS), and either used their own keys or ran to someone who did, and for some reason, they decided that the water tanks on the roof were the perfect place to hide a boy.

On the other hand, this could all just be someone’s idea of how to make a viral video and there is no Elisa Lam and the young lady in the video is alive and well and giggling at people somewhere.

Honestly, at this point, both theories seem equally likely to be true.

I look forward to the eventual fictionalized version of this that will end up on Law and Order, Bones, or some other crime type show.

And finally, we have my little video contribution of the day.

Completely unexpectedly, it’s… A SLIDESHOW!

I was going to do a review of Behind The Candleabra, which I watched off DVD with Joe and Julian recently, but sleep robbed me of my ambition so I had to fall back on the ol tried and true.

I don’t know why I beat myself up over resorting to slideshows and Musical Minutes. The slideshows are funny and entertaining. I watched a few from a few months back recently, and they still hold up. They even made my roomies laugh.

I was just so much more ambitious and creative when the daily video thing began! Now I feel like all I do is tread water.

There must be some new frontier out there that needs me.

Maybe audio podcasts…