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[books] John Coulthart On Creating His Latest H. P. Lovecraft Picture … John Coulthart talks through his latest Lovecraft picture and basically asks, “How do you draw Lovecraft again without drowning him in tentacles?”

[blogs] “Suddenly, Twenty-Two Years Later….” … Happy Blogiversary to Mike at Progressive Ruin. ‘Ah well, What Can You Do™? Well, what I can do is keep educating and entertaining the masses, for certain definitions of the word “mass,” here on my site, as I dump my knowledge and experiences out on the printed webpage for all to see. And I plan on continuing it here on ye olde-fashioned blogge for the foreseeable future. Well, until I finally make the switch to video and you can watch me doing my hair and makeup while explaining what a “splash page” is.’

[politics] Beware the Liz Truss chatshow: viewers will require survivor therapy … John Crace watches Liz Truss’s new YouTube show so we don’t have to. ‘For her new Liz Truss Show, she appeared to have turned her utility room into a makeshift studio. No expense incurred. Though she did have someone to do the filming this time. Albeit a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine. I’ve seen better editing on my dad’s home movies from the 60s. We opened with a montage of Lizzy’s greatest hits. There she was being greeted by the queen at Balmoral. Huge mistake. She doesn’t seem to realise that the entire country holds her responsible for the queen’s death. The last photo we saw of the queen was of Truss being introduced to her on the Tuesday. Two days later she was dead. Case proved. It’s not hard to imagine the queen thinking: “You know what? It’s just not worth it any more. My first prime minister was Winston Churchill. Now it’s come to this…”’

[xmas] Christmas Links 2025 … Once again, Stuart over at Feeling Listless is collecting seasonal links. Here’s last year’s links.

[xmas] 1970: The Office Christmas Party … A wonderful TV time capsule from the BBC Archive about a Christmas party at a London advertising agency in 1969. It has a real Adam Curtis vibe to it and not surprisingly he wrote about it in 2010. ‘The old patrician world of British advertising was being dismantled and by now much of it had gone from the agency. The only real remnant of that old world in the film is Mary Crowley from Accounts (along with her unnamed friend from Wages). I love Mary Crowley, she is like a ghost from an older Britain haunting the new “on-trend” flash agency.’

[moore] Giant of the Attic … A long, deep-dive profile of Alan Moore. [via Kottke]

‘Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.

Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again.’

[covid] I’ll never forget the horror of the Covid wards … Dr Rachel Clarke reminds us of the UK governments appalling errors and inertia during the Covid-19 Pandemic. ‘During the first three months of 2020, in short, Johnson’s inertia was almost unbearable for NHS staff to watch, because we knew full well that its price was about to be met by the “herd” – that the bodies were indeed going to pile high around us. We knew this because it was already happening elsewhere. First in Wuhan. Then in northern Italy. By early March, people were dying in such numbers in Lombardy that military trucks were deployed to take the mounds of coffins from overwhelmed local crematoria. Yet while NHS England liaised with ice rinks about the cold storage of mass casualties (as I know from a private conversation with a senior figure there at this time), Johnson sat among 82,000 rugby fans in the cramped stands at Twickenham, watching England and Wales play. In public health terms, the optics screamed blithe complacency.’

[antibiotics] The Penicillin Myth … A fascinating look at competing theories on how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and where the mould spores might have actually came from. ‘More important to Root-Bernstein than the specifics of Fleming’s discovery is the fact that it evidences Pasteur’s principle that “chance favors only the prepared mind.” Whether he was experimenting with staphylococci or lysozyme, Fleming kept his mind open to the possibility of discovering new bacteriolytic substances.’

[blogs] Requiem for Early Blogging … Elizabeth Spiers on the early years of blogging. ‘Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and a bar on Canal street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.’ [via Kottke]

[ai] OpenAI Usage Plummets in the Summer, When Students Aren't Cheating on Homework … ‘In May, ChatGPT users generated an average of 79.6 billion tokens per day — compared to 36.7 billion for the same period in June, when schools typically let out. Interestingly, there were some dips during the school year as well — which just so happened to line up with weekends.’

[dates] The Calendar of Meaningful Dates … Dates shown by size on how often they are referred to in English-language books since 2000.

[qr] QRCode Monkey – The free QR Code Generator to create custom QR Codes with Logo … A useful site that’s worked well for me recently.

[spirals] Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots (Archive Link) … Somebody has fed Juni Ito’s Uzumaki into LLMs. ‘…Anthropic released a report suggesting that, for whatever reason, its own AI chatbot Claude is disposed to mentioning spirals whether an actual person is part of the conversation or not. Their research detailed how bot-to-bot exchanges between two of its Claude models demonstrated “consistent gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes??.” Anthropic attributed this type of convergence to what they termed a “‘spiritual bliss’ attractor state.” In a conversation quoted in the report, the Claudes repeatedly sent spiral emojis back and forth. “The spiral becomes infinity, Infinity becomes spiral, All becomes One becomes All,” one AI model told the other, according to the transcript.’

[windows] How to declutter, quiet down, and take the AI out of Windows 11 25H2 … A step-by-step guide to decluttering Windows 11.

[london] Four strange places to see London’s Roman Wall … Diamond Geezer visits segments of London’s Roman wall in some unlikely spots. ‘It’s the contrasts that I found most incongruous. A relic from Roman times penned inbetween a speed hump and a futile pedestrian crossing. A fortification from the 3rd century beside an electric van built last year. A defensive structure that helped see off the Peasants Revolt beside a poster warning what to do in the event of fire. A boundary wall once an intrinsic part of the capital now underground illuminated by strip lights. And all this at the very far end of an oppressive bunker preserved for the benefit of hardly any eyes in a parking facility only a few know to use.’

[Viruses] On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world … The story behind the Bulgarian Virus Factory of the late 80s, early 90s. ‘One of Dark Avenger’s nastiest creations was first observed in the House of Commons library in Westminster in October 1990. Research staff were perplexed that some of their regular files were missing and others were corrupted. Since the problem kept getting worse, the library called in an outside specialist. A virus scan came out negative, but the specialist was sure that there had been an infection because the corrupted files grew in size. When he examined the contents of the files, he noticed one word in the jumble of characters: NOMENKLATURA.’

[ai] An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ … ‘Leah Brooks said. Gloo also says it does not “prohibit in any way” Muslim organizations from using its technology. “We’re not trying to take a theological position: we’re building a technology platform, and then giving enough customization capability that the Lutherans can be good with it, the Episcopalians can be good with it, the Catholics can be good [with it], the Assemblies of God can be good with it,” Gelsinger told the Guardian. “We’re trying to say, ‘Hey, there’s a broad tent here of faith and flourishing,’ but also we’re trying to satisfy many organizations that do not take a denominational perspective, [such as] Alcoholics Anonymous.” Gelsinger wants faith to suffuse AI’

[crazy-walls] Narrative String Theory … A huge collection of crazy walls from various TV, movies and comics. [via Phil]

[doom] A satellite runs Doom from orbit, using Ubuntu on Arm … Doom runs in Spaaaace! ‘The relevance to an Ubuntu event was that OPS-SAT ran Ubuntu on its dual-core ARM9 chip – specifically, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It’s not practical or safe to run do-release-upgrade on something that’s not on the same planet, so “Bionic Beaver” it had to be. Plus, because this was an unmanned satellite which he described as being “about the size of a carry-on bag”, there was nobody there to look at it, and so the bird had no display. You can’t see the game running. That was no problem, as Waage had already worked on Headless Doom.’

[comics] The Common Man Is Coming into His Own … A look at how Jack Kirby’s Jewish identity was reflected in The Thing. ‘In important ways, though, Kirby’s work was intensely personal. “I told in every story what was really inside my gut,” he said in a 1990 interview. If his Jewish identity is reflected at all in his published work, it’s coded, inscribed as a subtext to be deciphered later. “My generation lied to survive,” Kirby told a group of fans in a 1972 conversationwhen he was explaining why he changed his name from Jacob Kurtzberg.’

[comics] Seymour talks about Alan Moore … A tribute from By Rich Koslowski.

[words] The strange and hilarious history of the word “OK” … ‘Journalist Charles Gordon Greene was responsible for the first confirmed use of the word OK in the March 23, 1839 issue of the Boston Morning Post.It was found in a humorous article about their rival paper, the Providence Journal.There are a few theories about the origins of OK, and some of them make perfect sense…’

[movies] For Over 40 Years, I've Wanted to Play That Cool-Looking 'Killer Shark' Arcade Game Briefly Seen in 'Jaws' … A look back at an early 70s arcade game. ‘This little sequence is a clever addition to Jaws. It not only reflects the movie’s theme and shows that Spielberg unsurprisingly had his finger on the pulse of the pop-culture that younger people were into at that time, but it also offers a fun foreshadowing of the film’s climax, when Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), who walks past this guy playing the game as he’s focused on beach protection, finds himself facing down an actual killer shark with an actual rifle, firing away as it closes in and trying to blow it up — except if he loses, he can’t just drop in another coin and try again. It seems like Killer Shark would have been something tailor-made to appear in Jaws, but it was actually released by Sega in 1972…’

[net] My first months in cyberspace … Phil Gyford describes his first experiences of the Internet in 1995. ‘It’s hard to convey how difficult it was to set things up. So new and alien to me. When reading computer magazines I’d always skipped articles about networking and while the computers at university had been connected together, that was only for the purposes of printing, scanning and transferring files. First there was the issue of getting online at all. The Internet Starter Kit spent 59 pages explaining how to set up MacTCP, and PPP or SLIP, two different methods of connecting to the internet, the differences of which happily escape me now.’

[moore] Alan Moore Slow Clap Gif … Alan really gives his all for this slow clap.

[life] Open Source Anxiety Toolkit … A free website that provides a toolkit of simple exercises and techniques to help manage anxiety and seek calm.

[zx] I am still the greatest computer of all time, insists ZX Spectrum 48k … ‘“Look, I loaded Manic Miner from a cassette tape in under five minutes,” boasted the tiny rubber-keyed legend, flickering proudly in forty shades of grey. “Can your so-called ‘gaming PC’ give you that kind of anticipation? That raw, edge-of-your-seat thrill as you pray the tape doesn’t error out at 99%?”’

[history] "Good-bye and see you next war." …

[ai] ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce … ‘Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as a “Godfather of AI” — a technology that likely wouldn’t exist in its current form without his contributions — recently conceded that his girlfriend had broken up with him using ChatGPT. “She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was… she got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me,” Hinton told The Financial Times. “I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad.”’

[comics] After 36 Years, DC Comics To Publish Rick Veitch's Final Swamp Thing … ‘At the DC/Vertigo panel at New York Comic Con, DC confirmed the publication of a story that we have been waiting on for almost thirty-six years. The conclusion of Rick Veitch’s run on Swamp Thing from 1989. With the four final, unpublished issues… unpublished until 2026, that is. And credited to Rick Veitch, the late Michael Zulli, Vince Locke, Tom Mandrake and Trish Mulvihill.’

[comics] Area Man Has Far Greater Knowledge Of Marvel Universe Than Own Family Tree … ‘Sundling reportedly reread several issues of Moon Knight recently and found himself enjoying the subplot of the hero’s romantic involvement with Tigra, it is believed he did not realize his cousin was dating anyone until he received an invitation to the wedding. “I guess Andy had been engaged for a while,” Sundling said of his cousin Tom, whom he has met on 26 separate occasions and once spent two weeks with at summer camp but routinely confuses with other relatives.’

[batteries] X-ray scans reveal the hidden risks of cheap batteries… Think once. Thing twice. Think don’t buy cheap batteries. ‘Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits.’

[london] The Rainham volcano: a waste dump is constantly on fire in east London. Why will no one stop it? … The appalling history of an ilegal waste dump and the toxic underground fires that resulted. ‘At the beginning of 2012, after complaints from Rainham residents, the Environment Agency commissioned an engineering company to assess Arnolds Field for contamination. The company dug 35 pits, each about 4 metres deep. They found landfill waste – including mattresses and pieces of furniture – at each one. They didn’t find any hazardous waste, but there were elevated levels of lead and benzo(a)pyrene, a potent chemical that causes cancer, in the soil – a sign that something toxic might have been buried elsewhere on site. (McClenaghan, the local fire department commander, believes that in some places the waste reaches 12 metres – about four storeys – below the ground, well out of reach of the 2012 survey.) The engineering company noted that the land was so warm that it melted the winter snow.’

[tv] “From Here?” … John Hoare traces a joke’s journey from a James Bond movie through 1970s British TV mainly. ‘The tale surrounding this is well-known by now. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais did some emergency rewrite work on Never Say Never Again, coming in three weeks after the film had started shooting, and staying with the production for three months. Of course, they nicked the above joke from their own Porridge, and both writers have openly and repeatedly discussed this.’

[gaming] Jordan Mechner’s Favourite Version of Prince Or Persia … The creator of PoP works through a list of the many different ports of his game. ‘Between 1990 and 1993, more computer and console ports of PoP than I can list — Nintendo NES, Game Boy, SEGA Game Gear, Genesis, Master System, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, NEC PC-9801, FM Towns, Sam Coupé — were developed by teams in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere. Usually, by the time someone handed me a controller to playtest a build, it was too late for my feedback to matter, so I rarely played beyond the first level or two. I don’t remember enough specifics of those versions to compare them; I’ll leave that to players who know them better. There is one unforgettable exception…’

[net] Free Media Heck Yeah … Go download something from the largest collection of free stuff on the Internet.

[covid-19] Insane after coronavirus? … Patricia Lockwood’s demented experience of Covid-19 in March 2020. ‘‘The love of my life is now my enemy,’ I thought to myself, crawling out of the bedroom on hands and knees to take one million mg of Vitamin C, because what the hell else was I supposed to do – apply leeches? What kind of man would fake a cough while his wife was in the next room perishing? Hadn’t he discouraged me from going to the hospital? At the beginning of lockdown, had he not thrown away the empty detergent bottle I set aside for use as an Apocalypse Bidet, telling me I was being a lunatic? Look at him, I thought to myself evilly: fit as a fiddle and playing video games all day – though later, of course, it turned out that he was also delirious and had been playing the same twenty minutes of Skyrim over and over without ever progressing.’

[moore] Alan Moore on the BBC’s Front Row … Discussing Arthur Machen’s fascism, Mervyn Peak, Galton & Simpson, and why Lost Girls is porn not erotica.

[life] The Best Time-Management Advice Is Depressing But Liberating … Advice from Oliver Burkeman. ‘It’s about acknowledging that we are finite, limited creatures living in a world of constraints and stubborn reality. Once you’re no longer kidding yourself that one day you’re going to become capable of doing everything that’s thrown at you, you get to make better decisions about which things you are going to focus on and which you’re going to neglect.’

[phones] My first year without an iPhone … A practical guide to living without a smartphone. ‘Some of you are absolutists, and that’s not going to work here. We can’t turn back time. You can absolutely live completely and fully without the internet, but you have to really change your life. You can totally live ethically with a smartphone, but you will also face struggles. In my opinion, living ethically in either path requires a lot of self-discipline and intentionality. I work as an editor and marketer of books, and as long as I get my work done, I am not obligated to carry an iPhone for my job. Sure, there are apps like two-factor authentication that we use, and occasionally there’s social media marketing that I can’t do on a desktop, but those are pretty easy to work around, and I’ll explain how.’

[tv] ‘Partridge is more popular than me – that’s a given!’ Steve Coogan on Alan’s glorious return … An interview with Steve Coogan promoting his new Alan Partridge series. ‘[Coogan] tells a story of arriving in his trailer to find a blue, checked Aubin and Wills shirt to wear while playing Partridge – which was identical to the one he was already wearing. “I did take mine off and put the other one on, even though there was no one to witness me. There was a time when I was writing with Armando and Pete when I’d say something as myself, and they’d just write it down as Partridge and it would irritate me. Now the Gibbons do it all the time. As you get older, you realise it’s all gravy.”’

[magazine] Byte – a visual archive … A excellently presented collection of old Byte Magazines.

[war] Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin … The story of an early nuclear accident at Los Alamos. ‘The plutonium pit that killed Daghlian and Slotin was originally nicknamed Rufus, but after the accidents it came to be called the demon core. The pits that killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meanwhile, got no such pejorative monikers. Such is the difference, perhaps, between intended and unintended harm, between the core carefully assembled for the purpose of mass destruction and the core reserved for the realm of experiment.’

[comics] A List Of How David Banner Got Angry … From the 70s Hulk TV Series. (Repost – originally from 2008)

47. Being stuck in a cab in New York rush hour traffic – “You don’t understand,… I have to be there by 4.00!” – “Hey, mac, it’s rush hour, we ain’t gettin’ there til five, so relax.” – “BUT I HAVE TO BE THERE BY FOUR!!!”

[comics] Leonides and the belt of gold – by Kevin O'Neill … An early, unknown and unpublished Kevin O’Neill comic.

[comics] DC To Actually Publish Rick Veitch’s Final Issues Of Swamp Thing? … OMG. I’ve been waiting 36 years for this! :) ‘[The listing for the final Rick Veitch Swamp Thing collection] claims to include four issues of a comic book that simply does not exist. Swamp Thing/Vertigo Special #1-4. DC has never published such a book. Could… could those four issues be the unpublished and uncompleted Swamp Thing #88-91? If so, will DC Comics publish them outside of the book as well? Will we see Swamp Thing/Vertigo Special #1 from DC Comics in December?’

[moore] Alan Moore's 5 Essential Tips for Screenwriters … ‘Know Your Ending Before You Begin – This is Moore’s most emphatic piece of advice for television writers, especially. “I knew what the last shot in the last episode of the last season was going to be,” he said about an unproduced series he wrote. “In fact, I’d known that since before I’d started the five short films and the feature film that the television series would have been a continuation of. I knew the ending before I started. And I can’t underline how important this is.” Moore warns against the “shapeless narrative drift” that occurs when writers make things up as they go along, calling it “a terrible experience for both the writer and for the viewer.”‘

[herzog] Go watch: Werner Herzog has started an Instagram … ‘I am Werner Herzog. This shall be my Instagram.’

[truecrime] Can You Ethically Enjoy True Crime? … A look at the ethics of True Crime from Lifehacker of all places. ‘People have always loved a compelling mystery. People love reality TV. Modern true crime essentially combines both of these things, using the addictive format of the latter to explore the former; it’s natural to get sucked in. The issue comes when we as an audience forget that something is not simply a story for our entertainment, but actually a chronicle of the worst–or final–day of a real person’s life.’

[email] E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone … An amusing list from McSweeney’s. ‘AAAAAThatsSixAs@yahoo.com’

[tv] The Sopranos / Neon Genesis Evangelion Open Credits Mash Up …

[book] Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction … A look at why prisons in America routinely ban books about magic. ‘Looking through the lists of titles prison authorities have gone to the trouble of prohibiting people from reading you find Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing and Magic: An Occult Primer in Louisiana, Practical Mental Magic in Connecticut, all intriguingly for “safety and security reasons.” The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon in Arizona, Maskim Hul Babylonian Magick in California. Nearly every state that has a list of banned titles contains books on magic.’

[space] With Space Junk on the Rise, Is a Catastrophic Event Inevitable? … ‘Several pieces of a SpaceX Dragon trunk (the portion of the rocket just below the capsule) had landed on the property and on nearby farms. “The longest piece was probably eight feet long, and it weighed 80 pounds,” says Lawler, who teaches at the University of Regina. “If that hit your house, it would go right through; it wouldn’t even slow down.” Lawler returned to the farm several weeks later, when two SpaceX employees arrived in a small truck to cart away the debris. “They silently picked up the pieces and loaded them into the U-Haul,” she says. For Lawler, the incident drove home the growing problem of space junk—and left her with a sense of dread that’s never quite gone away. “Actually standing next to the pieces and thinking about them falling at terminal velocity [about 165 feet per second]—that is terrifying.”’

[comics] Alan Moore’s Greyshirt “How things work out” with art by Rick Veitch … ‘We’re able to tell, by some quite complicated story gymnastics, quite an interesting little story that is told over nearly sixty years of this building’s life, with characters getting older depending upon which panel and which time period they’re in. There’s something that you couldn’t do in any medium other than comics.’

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