LinkMachineGo

[books] 1980s Computer and coding books from Usborne … A nostalgic collection of coding books for kids freely available from the publisher’s website. ‘Many of today’s tech professionals were inspired by the Usborne computing books they read as children. The books included program listings for such iconic computers as the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, and are still used in some computer clubs today.’

[movies] 10 Great Shark Attack Films … Great movie list from the BFI. ‘The Shallows contains its narrative within the restricted space of a rocky outcrop where surfing medical student Nancy (Blake Lively) is stranded just 200 yards from the shore following a shark attack. Jaume Collet-Serra’s film realistically plays out the drama in vivid detail, as Nancy steadily dehydrates, sustains blood wounds and gets ever weaker as the great white increases its attempts to attack her. While the narrative of The Shallows is ostensibly Nancy surviving her ordeal, like Jaws it invests its shark with meaning beyond lethal threat, as it functions as both apex predator and major metaphor for the recent loss of her mother. Just as the shark circles Nancy, so does her grief, patrolling her psychological borders, waiting to consume her.’

[life] The Onion: Study: 97% Of Average American’s Day Spent Retrieving 6-Digit Codes … ‘“Our findings suggest that U.S. residents spend roughly 23 hours each day—or 160 hours every week—attempting to log in to online services, being told they need to check their phone for a six-digit code, and then entering that code into the website or app for verification,” said lead researcher Andrew Singh, adding that many Americans have to skip meals and forgo showering in order to find time to read and transfer over the hundreds of codes needed daily to access their medical records, work emails, and food delivery accounts.’

[life] The life and tragic death of John Balson: how a true crime producer documented his own rising horror … A powerful, personal story about the health and ethical impacts of working on true crime TV in the UK.

‘As a producer, it was Balson’s job to persuade bereaved families to tell their stories on camera. “The thing about factual TV is that the raw material is just people, and your relationship with those people,” says McKay, who has also worked as a true crime TV producer. “That puts massive stress on the people whose job it is to organise and wrangle them.”

Because his contributors were usually based in the US or the UK, Balson routinely worked 18-hour days across three time zones. “You spend all day looking at photos of dead bodies of people who have been murdered in gruesome ways,” says Rosy Milner, 30, a factual TV producer and former colleague of Balson’s from London. “You read about sexual abuse and crimes against children. And then a contributor in the US texts at 10pm, asking for a phone call. You book the Zoom at midnight and keep going.”’

[web] Digital hygiene … Great set of tips to improve your internet security. ‘Work-life separation. Ideally, do not log in or access any of your personal services on work computers. Most of them have company-operated spyware installed on them to protect the company’s intellectual property. This is all well and good and makes sense, but you should know that any activity on the computer is quite likely extensively logged (networking, keyloggers, screenshots, etc.) and possibly actively monitored by the security department.’

[games] The story of how Boulder Dash was created … Peter Liepa, the creator of Boulder Dash, interviewed. ‘It was a very simple model, and it probably only took a day or two to write. But once I had that, I could sit there for hours. I had a random number generator that would just scatter rocks and earth on the map, and I’d run the joystick through it, destroying earth and watching the rocks fall. Then I realized that, oh my god, this is actually kind of fun. It was like a kid playing in the mud; building little dams and letting water flow through. You had a toy to play with. The more I played with it, the more I realized it led to a fun and addictive experience. Even if all you did was destroy earth and watch rocks fall, that was already entertaining. But then, I could also run into a dense area of rocks and try to make my way through the maze.’

[comics] Rare early British fanzine Orpheus, featuring work by Ian Gibson, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse rediscovered … Scans can be found here. ‘In the second part of his wonderful interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Steve Moore talked about the almost mythical issue 2, which was printed in Spring 1973. However, because Steve Parkhouse and Barry weren’t happy with it, it was never released. The printing and paper aren’t as high quality as with the first issue, so perhaps that was the reason?’

[life] We are now closer to 2050 than 2000…

[politics] Dominic Cummings: oracle of the new British berserk… Update on what Dominic Cummings is up to.

‘He recited his current favourite examples of state failure – fugitive terrorists using human rights law to sue the Ministry of Defence, deep-state officials murmuring of riots in the provinces, politicians who hide from responsibility behind the scripts of their civil service administrators. He connected this with his current favourite historical parallel: the crisis of capitalism, technology and ideology of the 1840s, which he compares to the revolutions in AI and “biological engineering” in Silicon Valley about to “smash into all our lives”.

Cassandra in tracksuit bottoms, then. And given the scale of this upheaval, the corresponding Cummings programme is remarkably precise, but limited. His great theme is, to put it facetiously, paperwork management. Government should be narrower, sharper, modelled after the administrations of Pitt the Younger (he speaks as if there is no difference between late-18th-century carronade procurement and modern bureaucracy).’

[comics] Dark They Were And Golden Eyed Adverts … DTWAGE was a sci-fi and comic book retailer based in London in the 1970s. Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alan Moore and many other comics artists created adverts for them.

[tv] Adam Curtis's Shifty Playlist … Feeling Listless has put together a playlist for Adam Curtis’ new documentary series.

[hardware] More Undervalued Hardware Companions … An update to a great list of list of hardware gizmos you never realised you needed. ‘Small Powerful USB-C Chargers – The times when you need a large PSU brick and a thick unmanageable cable to charge your 65W laptop are long gone…’

[comics] Jack Kirby Draws Jack Ruby … Today I discovered that Jack Kirby did a annotated 3-page comic about Jack Ruby for Esquire Magazine in 1967. ‘Ruby looks like a dissipated, angry version of Kirby’s later creation, Goody Rickels. He’s a small man who thinks he’s big, and other than brooding over the president’s assassination and killing Lee Harvey Oswald, he spends most of the three pages doing things such as ordering cold cuts, placing advertising for his club, going for a swim, demonstrating something called a “Twistaboard,” and having a Coke.’

[politics] The race to succeed Sadiq Khan … It’s looking likely that Sadiq Khan will stand down as London major before the next election in 2028. ‘But friends of Khan tell me that he has privately indicated he does not plan to stand for a fourth term. Some attribute this to the strain of being the most heavily guarded person in the country after the King and the Prime Minister. “Hand on heart, had I known when I first began this journey what it involved for my family, I can’t unequivocally say I would have done this,” Khan reflected last year.’

[curtis] Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war. .. Curtis setups the UK history described in his new documentary Shifty. ‘It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.’

[oceangate] So what was Stockton's motivation for his decision? … A thoughtful Reddit posts on the motivations and decisions that led to the Titan submersible implosion. ‘I guess the only thing that makes sense to me is the comment by another redditor that “it HAD to work.” He bet everything on it. Since switching to carbon fibre after the Fosset sub was built (started OG in 2009, and this was sometime around 2011/2012 I believe) – his entire business model revolved around being able to monetize submersibles.’

[tv] 10 Most Shocking Reveals From Netflix's OceanGate Titan Submersible Documentary … Fascinating documentary from Netflix that shows some of Stockton Rush’s movtivations. ‘Although they worked on the Titan, many of the engineers had little to no confidence in the vessel. This is best displayed by the testimony of Tony Nissen, the Director of Engineering, during the Coast Guard investigation. He asserts that Stockton Rush asked him to go into the Titan for a test dive, but he refused to go inside the vessel for a dive. Theoretically, if anyone should have had confidence in a submersible’s efficacy, it would be the head of engineering.’

[history] The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris … Wonderful story about the radioactive traces Marie Curie left behind in Paris where she worked. ‘”The lab was already decontaminated in the 1980s,” says Huynh. At the time, the practice in the museum was to “try and scrub off the contamination with abrasive sponges, and if radioactivity was then still detected, it meant it had sunk into the material, and they’d throw away the whole thing and replace it” with a copy, he says. The lab bench, for example, was replaced with a replica, Huynh explains. Today, weakly radioactive traces such as the ones on the chair and doorknob are allowed to stay in place, he says, and are considered as heritage.’

[comics] Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales … Garth Ennis mentions an unseen anthology series with Alan Moore during a 2024 interview. ‘There’s a series called Yuggoth, and it’s based on the work that Alan did – Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft. And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline. Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.’

[comics] Ha Ha. Maybe a Comic Book Would Make Me Happy … from Matt Fraction’s Tumblr Archive.

[tech] Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet … Doctorow discusses enshitification, twiddling and more… ‘A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that “”bill themselves out as ‘Uber for nursing'””. The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to “”play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced””. In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. “”Because, the more desperate you are, the less you’ll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.”” That is horrific on many levels, he said, but “”it is emblematic of ‘enshittification'””, which is one of the reasons he highlighted it.’ [The Keynote can be found on Youtube]

[life] What The Hell Are People Doing? … A visualisation of what the entirety of humanity are up to right now. ‘Sleeping: 50.79%’

[comics] Waiting For The Check: In Conversation With Eddie Campbell, Again – The Gutter Review … Interview with Eddie Campbell from 2023. ‘There’s an anger there almost all of the time. Usually it’s an anger about money. Looking back now, now that I’m out of that, I managed to — for two decades — I managed to bring up a family as the breadwinner, somehow. We were never delinquent. Everything came out right and everyone came up right. There was never any embarrassment about the car being repossessed. The bills were paid on time. And I think…why was I so angry all the time? Everything was pretty good. Everything came out alright in the end. I don’t know why I was so angry. I would have been a much happier individual if I had just taken a second to notice that everything was working out. Or as my wife had said — “I don’t know why you worry about this stuff all the time! It always comes right in the end!”’

[tv] Shifty – A new series by Adam Curtis coming to BBC iPlayer in June 2025 … ‘The films tell the story of the rise of that unstable and confusing world from the 1980s to now. They use a vast range of footage to evoke what if felt like to live through an epic transformation. A shift in consciousness among people in how they saw and felt about the world. Hundreds of moments captured on film and video that give a true sense of the crazy complexity and variety of peoples actual lives. Moments of intimacy and strangeness and absurdity. From nuns playing Cluedo and fat-shaming ventriloquists to dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain’s past.’

[books] Lovecraft was an American William Blake Alan Moore on H.P. Lovecraft. ‘In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge. You tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you’re absolved of literary obligations and pretensions. Your vision is purer. The obligations of the deadline leave the conscious mind less time to edit the subconscious outpourings and a truer story leaks through, despite what is lost in literary polish.’

[laws] The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws … ‘Ringwald’s Law of Household Geometry: “Any horizontal surface is soon piled up on.”’

[politics] Trump Presidency Countdown… The slow count down to Trump’s end. ‘91.732702% remaining’

[ai] AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships … ‘Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life.’

[movies] Killing Me Is Not Going To Bring Back Your Apples … by Adam Perocchi.

[comics] Zodiac Killer Revealed by His Love of Comic Books, Author Says … WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! ‘He noted that a “Halloween card” that Zodiac sent on Oct. 27, 1970 included the curious phrase, “By Fire, By Gun, By Knife, By Rope” — four ways the Zodiac planned to kill his victims, in order to make them his slaves in the afterlife. Kobek — like some past Zodiac sleuths — traced the phrase to a 1952 Western comic book, Tim Holt #30. “In the background, on the cover, there was a ‘wheel of death,’ and on the wheel of death is says ‘by knife, by rope, by gun, by fire.’ That is a clear quotation. It’s never existed anywhere else,” Kobek explained…’

[life] What does Werner Herzog’s nihilist penguin teach us about life? … ‘We then see footage of another of these “deranged” penguins, 80 kilometres off course, sliding on its belly towards certain death. These shots of the solitary birds marching to their demise, mere black dots against the white expanse, are perfect in their portrayal of loneliness and desolation.’

[moore] Long London, Magic & the future of Humanity … Recent Alan Moore interview from Smoky Man in Italy. ‘In From Hell we suggested the late Victorian period, 1888, and specifically the Whitechapel murders as, metaphorically, the birth-cries of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in Lost Girls, Melinda and I posited the late Edwardian era, 1913/1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, I think just as legitimately, as the beginning of the modern world. I suppose the ultimate truth is that every decade, every year, potentially every sunrise is the end of one world and the start of a new one, although over the course of the Long London quintet I want to see what happens when that truism comes up against the currently popular adage that the old world refuses to die and so the new world cannot be born.’

[tv] The TV killing spree: why are so many smash-hit shows about women being murdered? … ‘It might sound counterintuitive to find solace in such grisly fare, but I find there is something soothing about following a plotline where someone, usually a woman, comes to harm or tries to outwit a psychopath, leading to an investigation. Clearly I’m not alone…’

[movies] The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey … A look at the creation and destruction of the Space Jockey prop from Alien. ‘It’s how Giger commonly worked: his darkly surreal paintings were rendered spontaneously, as though they were beamed in directly from his own nightmares. The twist was that Giger was also technically gifted enough to understand how these unearthly shapes could then be turned into physical objects.’

[life] 100 Men vs. 1 Gorilla: Primatologists Explain Who Would Win … … ‘Most silverbacks would much rather take a nap, eat some good food, play with the kids, take another nap … gorillas know how to live a pretty good life, and none of it is wasted wondering if they could knock out 100 humans’

[bbc] 1959: The AUDIOPHILE's Quest for PERFECT SOUND … Go watch this wonderful short-film about audiophiles and the technology of sound in 1959. Directed by John Schlesinger for the BBC. ‘Do they like music? Or are they in love with equipment?’

[tech] Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World … ‘The hysterical tinfoil-hat crowd urges you to turn off your phone whenever you’re going to discuss something private—like your political opinions, religious beliefs, or medical conditions—as if the phone is somehow going to “hear” them and tech companies will use that info against you. In reality, they already know all those things because they know what news sources you read, the contents of your emails, what WebMD pages you’ve visited, and how long you’ve spent at which church, synagogue, mosque, or ethical humanist center. So don’t even worry about it.’

[life] Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project … I always find something useful in these lists of advice and lifehacks. YMMV. ‘Open your mail over the recycling bin.’

[sushi] Super Sushi … Nicely done gallery of Lego Sushi builds.

[comics] The John Wagner and Alan Grant Interview … A Comics Journal interview from 1988…. ‘GRANT: I didn’t think at the time that the “Apocalypse War” story worked all that well, but having read it in album form, I think it’s a really good story and that Carlos [Ezquerra]’s art-work suited it down to the ground. We were given him for that story as they wanted to use one artist all the way through it. They’ve got constant art problems on 2000 AD finding people who can keep up the output that they’ve got to have.’

[microsoft] You Suck at Excel … If you use Excel take a look at this video from Joel Splosky. It has some great tips and demos of powerful, under-used features.

[chris] Misspelled Acomb sign proclaims 'Chris is Risen' … ‘A church was presented with signs reading “Chris is risen” after a mix up at the printers. Acomb Parish Church, in York, had ordered four banners saying ‘Christ is Risen’ but the ‘T’ was missed off the finished article.’

[net] Digital hygiene … A post from Andrej Karpathy offering tips on cleaning up and securing your digital life. ‘The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.’

[netflix] Netflix Codes … Comprehensive list to find categories and genres on Netflix. ‘Why? You probably know that Netflix is using a really strange system to categorize it’s films and tv shows. Indeed, there isn’t any categories tab… We have the solution, with this site, you will be able to find categories by a little code.’

[tv] Looking for Lise … Dirty Feed investigates whether Lise Mayer, co-writer of “The Young Ones,” made any on-screen appearances in the show. ‘The thing which amuses me about this: everyone really wants Lise Mayer to have had an on-screen role in The Young Ones. Because it would tie a nice little bow on proceedings. Everyone else who wrote the show had an appearance, why not Lise?’

[maga] Musk Announces All 340 Million Americans Must Strip And Take Turn Pushing The Wheel Of Pain … ‘Of course, not everyone is going to like the fact that they will be expected to push nonstop without food or water until they collapse from exhaustion and are crushed under the wheel. But the point of this is not to make everybody happy. It’s about making the tough decisions and sticking to them. Say what you will, but ultimately we’re all going to have to submit to the terrible Ring of Blood whose cleansing agony none may escape.’

[space] Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars … Great article arguing why colonizing Mars is impossible. ‘Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?’

[comics] Shopping for Superman … The trailer for a documentary about the rise and fall of American comic shops.

[movies] Baby, The Rain Must Fall (The New Yorker) (Archive Link) … Pauline Kael’s 1982 Review of Blade Runner. ‘“Blade Runner” is a suspenseless thriller; it appears to be a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes. At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant; maybe the booming, lewd and sultry score by Chariots-for-Hire Vangelis that seems to come out of the smoke convinced them that the audience would be moved even if vital parts of the story were trimmed.’

[moore] Alan Moore on Magic … Go listen to Alan in conversation with writer Gary Lachman and artist John Coulthart last year when The Bumper Book of Magic was published.

[life] What are your beliefs about the nature of reality? … Analyse your beliefs with this quiz. ‘Inflationary Multiverse — You accept the cosmological model where our universe is one bubble in an eternally inflating space, with other universe “bubbles” having potentially different physical laws, constants, and dimensions.’

[history] On this Spot, 1st April 1780…

[todo] Who Uses To-Do Lists? … Donald Knuth: ‘… my scheduling principle is to do the thing I hate most on my to-do list. By week’s end, I’m very happy.’

[feet] Your feet are home to billions of bacteria. How often should you wash them? … Life’s important questions. ‘Staphylococcus are the key players when it comes to producing the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) responsible for foot odour. Sweat glands on the skin of the feet release a heady mix of electrolytes, amino acids, urea and lactic acid. The Staphylococcus bacteria consider this a veritable feast and, in the process of feeding, convert amino acids into VFAs. The main chemical culprit is isovaleric acid, which has an unpleasant odour which has been described as having a “distinct cheesy/acidic note”.’

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