[gaming] John Romero on the birth of id Software … An excerpt from John Romero’s autobiography Doom Guy. ‘The ability to program games that move so smoothly on the horizontal axis within the game world was earth-shattering technology. It meant we could write games for the PC that rivaled the games created for gaming systems like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari without the need for their specialized hardware. Players didn’t need to invest in a new console! All they needed was a PC and the game files. Nowadays, this is what venture capitalists mean when they talk about “disruption.”’

[life] Current Status… (from @flotsammm)

[sandwiches] I don’t know who need this today but here’s a website with animations of rotating sandwiches. You’re welcome.

[comics] Howard Chaykin – A Life in Comics … An entertaining, wide-ranging interview with Howard Chaykin. ‘As early as 1973 or ’74 when I did the Scorpion, the last line of the first issue is, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Altruism is for Albert Schweitzer. I get paid.” And I stand on that. The motivations of heroes in the context of comics is nonsense to me. Batman is about a rich guy who had a bad day when he was eight. Superman is about a god-like being who comes to the Earth and puts aside his god-like nature in the service of a clientele that is functionally beneath his contempt. These characters patronize and pander to a fantasized belief system that has nothing to do with anything even vaguely smacking of reality. And the more realistic they become by dint of sort of slathering on gravitas, the more idiotic and foolish they become. Modern myth? Just suck a dick.’

[photos] Digital Image Basics 101 – All about images from cameras and scanning … A great resourse looking at the basics of digital images. ‘This scanning material is about the basics of scanning photos and documents. The purpose here is to offer some scanning tips about using your scanner, and to explain the basics for scanning photos and documents. It is also about the fundamentals of digital images, about the basics to help you get the most from your images from your scanner or camera.’

[opinions] 100 Incontrovertible Opinions … ‘Covid: Of course the vaccine worked you morons.’

[funny] “I’m just a Poe Boy…”

[alan] Alan Moore’s Fortean Times Reviews from 1994 to 1997 … A nicely scanned collection of book reviews from Alan published in the 1990s.

[comics] Tripwire Talks To 2000AD And Vertigo Writer John Smith … I was wondering what had happened to comics writer John Smith and found this recent interview. ‘Regarding Hellblazer… I can’t remember if we were told about it, or if it was hot news going around a comics convention, but we all knew that Jamie Delano was leaving the book, so I think all of us young keen British writers were asked to pitch for the job. I think it was then-editor Stuart Moore who rang me up and asked me. So, I planned out a years-worth of stories (I imagine we all did) and crossed my fingers. Garth got the gig, of course, but later on they needed some fill-in issues, so that’s how “Counting by Numbers” came about. There were more straight-up horror ideas, but for some reason Sean and I settled on that one. I think probably because I was staying at his in Peckham at the time, and there was a launderette around the corner, so we just went there, and Sean took some photos then sent me duplicates so we both knew the layout of the place. Constantine is one of my favourite characters, and I’d love to have a proper go at him!’

[photos] Palette – Colorize Photos … A powerful AI powered photo colorization tool.

[books] The Only Good Culture War… …

[comics] FROM HELL! The COMPLETE Cartoonist Kayfabe Review of the Jack The Ripper Masterpiece! … Go watch the Cartoonist Kayfabe team’s complete review of From Hell.

[books] Where to start with: Iain Banks … A beginners guide to the novels of Iain Banks. ‘The one to drop into conversations about AI – All Banks’s Culture novels feature Minds, hyperintelligent mirror-surfaced ellipsoids that run starships and other large engineering structures. But in Excession, the Minds become the primary protagonists, as they debate what to do about the titular phenomenon – an inscrutable alien artefact that seems to be older than the universe itself – and about a barbarous competing civilisation that glories in the name “the Affront”. As Minds are persons, they are not obliged to be open and honest with one another or anyone else, and some conspire to allow “gigadeathcrimes” on utilitarian principles, rather like crazed effective altruists.’

[space] Bicycle Racing In Space Could Be A Thing … Hard science fiction gives us the possibility of MAMIL’s in space! ‘…the idea for the space bike comes from a short story called Grand Tour by Charles Sheffield, who was a mathematician, physicist and writer of hard science fiction. The story is about an annual race called the Grand Tour du Système. The route starts out from low Earth orbit going to Lagrange point 4 (L4), a location along the Moon’s orbit where the Earth’s and Moon’s gravitational fields conspire to provide a stable position. From L4, the route continues halfway to the Moon and then returns to Earth orbit. Altogether it’s around 600,000 kilometers long.’

[lego] The Surprising Magic of the Macaroni LEGO Brick [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] … Who knew you could do so much with the macaroni LEGO brick?

[crime] ‘Why I might have done what I did’: conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer… Fascinating article on Malcolm MacArthur, Ireland’s GUBU double-murderer.

‘“Well,” he said, wasting no time, “the first thing to be said is that I lived a blameless life until 1982. Entirely blameless. If you were to plot my life along a graph, morally speaking, you would see a very flat line for the first 37 years, then one very sharp spike in the middle, followed by another completely flat line right up until the present day.”

“Given,” I said, “that that seems to be the case – ”

“Oh, it is the case,” he said.

“Well, I thought we might try to talk about why it happened.”

“Fine,” he said. “But you must remember that this was a financial situation. It wasn’t what you might call irrationality, or lack of control. There was a problem to be solved. And you might well ask, well, why solve it using this particular technique? And that’s a legitimate question. But it wasn’t an act of madness.”

After the call ended, I sat on the bench, staring at the words I had scribbled in my notebook as we spoke. I circled the word “problem”, and then the word “technique”.’

[iphones] How to (Really) Bypass Paywalls in Safari on iOS in 2023 … A great guide to avoiding newspaper paywalls on iPhones.

[space] Mars and it’s smallest moon Deimos (from r/spaceporn) … ‘The UAE’s Hope spacecraft captured Mars’ smaller moon, Deimos, from a distance of about 62 miles (100 km). This Deimos image is the 1st-ever high-resolution view of the far side of the little moon…’

[tv] Best ‘Black Mirror’ Episodes, Ranked … ‘A pair of men hunker down during a blizzard at a remote outpost to share three tales of deception and murder, but they’ve both got secrets galore. In what must be the darkest Christmas special ever made, Jon Hamm relates his past life of sleazy seduction-coaching by night and torturing digital copies of living people by day, racking up a host of futuristic sins along the way. His companion Rafe Spall isn’t much better, having handled his separation from his wife, shall we say, poorly. As mini-twists give way to jaw-dropping mega-twists and the episode’s core concept gets frightfully postmodern, both actors deliver skin-crawling work as villainous but sympathetic figures.’ — White Christmas Episode

[fiction] Fictional Brands Archive… A collection of fictional brands created for films, TV and video games. ‘NERV (German for “nerve”) is a special organization that was put together to combat the Angels after the Second Impact and is the organization responsible for the creation of the Evangelions. NERV is an international organization with their center of operation located in the city of Tokyo-3, Japan. More specifically, they run the majority of their research and operations out of NERV Headquarters, a large facility located in the GeoFront.’ — NERV

[excel] Microsoft Excel v1.00 (san inc crack) … Use the first version of Excel in your browser. Click below but it needs a fast link to download quickly.

[games] Arcade Authorship – High Score Table Credits … Designers of early video games sneaked their initials into high score tables as credits – this article expands the initials into names. ‘The practice was birthed in a time both when displaying any but the most crucial text on screen was novel and the value of people making the games by the companies themselves was poorly thought of. Sneaking one’s name into the game had precedent before high score tables, yet with their advent it became a subculture. Sometimes rebellious, sometimes intricate, and oftentimes serving as an aspiration for high score chasers, this phenomenon largely of the 1980s was one of the few ways game creators could signal themselves to game players.’

[comics] The Comic-Book Aesthetic Comes of Age in “Across the Spider-Verse” … A good look at what makes Across the Spider-Verse worth watching. ‘ It leans hard into, and emulates onscreen, the storytelling devices and the visual flair that make comic books special. Even more than its predecessor, “Into the Spider-Verse” (2018), the film feels designed to show young people, many of whom were raised on superhero movies, why they might care about the comics that launched these characters. It does this so well that, at a time when some Marvel movies haven’t been doing so hot at the box office, “Across the Spider-Verse” has already raked in nearly four hundred million dollars. At 7 P.M. on a Wednesday night, with local schools still in session, my seventh grader and I found most of the seats in our suburban multiplex full.’

[life] I did a cringey thing… A cartoon by Sarah Andersen.

[life] Dead Ringers … The compelling story, from 1975, about identical twin gynecologists who died together under mysterious circumstances in New York. The story was an influence on David Cronenberg’s movie Dead Ringers. ‘On Tuesday, July 14, Cyril lurches one last time out of the twins’ final nesting place. He stumbles as he is about to cross the threshold to the outside world. The doorman who offers to assist Cyril thinks he “looks like death.” Out on the sidewalk Cyril looks at life without Stewart. The first thing he will have to do, he knows, is explain things. It’s not hard to explain why he returned so soon to that crypt in 10H. Only in those two minutes he languished in the womb after his brother’s departure could Cyril have been more alone. He double-locked the door behind him. He pushed an armchair up against it as a further barricade…’

[comics] 2 Kinds of Anger by Justin Green

[www] Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an internet icon … The inside story behind Snopes – the early internet fact checking site. ‘Mikkelson had adopted a surname of William Faulkner’s creation, a family “of pure sons of bitches,” who appear in a number of Faulkner’s works. Mikkelson was very familiar with their saga: Flem Snopes, the central character, possessed a talent for verisimilitude, which helped him climb from outcast sharecropper to bank president and church deacon. Mikkelson would go on to say that he had chosen snopes “simply because it was short and distinctive,” and he’d only shrug noncommittally when asked if he was a fan of Faulkner’s. But people have often pondered the connection to an alias along the lines of snipe, snicker, sneak, or snake. “We all felt that it was deeply, deeply appropriate,” says Teasley.’

[ai] Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People … This talk about AI and much more from 2016 by Maciej Cegłowski seems worth revisiting.

What I find particularly suspect is the idea that “intelligence” is like CPU speed, in that any sufficiently smart entity can emulate less intelligent beings (like its human creators) no matter how different their mental architecture.

With no way to define intelligence (except just pointing to ourselves), we don’t even know if it’s a quantity that can be maximized. For all we know, human-level intelligence could be a tradeoff. Maybe any entity significantly smarter than a human being would be crippled by existential despair, or spend all its time in Buddha-like contemplation.

Or maybe it would become obsessed with the risk of hyperintelligence, and spend all its time blogging about that.

[internet] Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution… A profile of Douglas Rushkoff in 2023. ‘I first encountered Rushkoff’s writing around this time, in 2010, while I was working for a site called Shareable.net. The site’s premise was that connecting everything and everyone to the web would allow people to freely lend the stuff they already owned, creating further abundance for all. Room-sharing platforms would reduce housing costs, and ride-sharing platforms would reduce the number of cars on the road. Rushkoff was a proponent of reorganizing the internet according to peer-to-peer principles, and he became one of the site’s most popular contributors. As platforms like Airbnb and Uber took over, leading the world into a new age of inequality and increased resource consumption, his dream of participatory decentralization died hard. But even amid mounting cognitive dissonance, certain parts of Rushkoff’s faith held out. On reflection, he says, “I blamed capitalism and held the technology itself innocent.”’

[comics] A short history of newsagents and how you bought your American comics from them … The story of how American comics made it into British newsagents from the 1970s to 1990s and created a generation of comic readers. ‘This company was an absolute powerhouse which supplied nearly every newsagent in the UK. They had an incredible range. John Byrne getting a Superman annual as a kid is thanks to T&P. Alan Moore picking up early DC/Marvel titles. Dave Gibbons picking up Green Lantern. Kev O’Neill, etc all got into comics partly due to seeing and buying US comics in newsagents.’