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[books] What's the point of hardbacks? … A London indie bookseller investigates why publishers still release hardback books first despite most readers seemingly preferring paperbacks. (via) ‘None of my conversations gave me any more reason to believe that readers want hardback novels. When I asked about their personal reading preferences, even my interviewees weren’t so keen on hardbacks. “I haven’t read a hardback in years,” said Jim Gill. Kay Peddle called paperbacks “the ultimate format”: cheap, portable and with “no pressure to keep it pristine. Sand, grime and dog ears all add to the charm”.’

[people] “America Screams” with Vincent Price (1981) … Go watch a television documentary hosted by Vincent Price that explores the history of American amusement parks and roller coasters. (Internet Archive)

[cthulhu] President Nyarlathotep Is Simply Engaging in Classic “Mad Outer God” Negotiating Tactics … ‘But—and just hear me out here—the American voters did resummon Nyarlathotep because enough of us remain enthralled by his unfettered madness, wanton cruelty, and nonsensical brinkmanship. This is classic Negotiating 101 courtesy of the Faceless God himself! Sure, he may have kicked it up a notch from “sheer madness” to “abject depravity,” but that’s for the pundits to debate. That said, yes, it seems like the promise to “fill every womb with salt and every testicle with spiders” is sort of backfiring.’

[life] The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done … Oliver Burkeman on how Darwin, Dickens, Virginia Woolf and others all topped out at about four hours of real mental work a day. ‘The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to “maximise your time” or “optimise your day”, in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don’t worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.’

[comics] Simon Bisley’s Jesus … This was a surprise – Bisley has done a range of Bible illustrations — Happy Easter to those that celebrate. (via)

[void] The Void Would Very Much Like You to Stop Screaming Into It … ‘It is, I’ll admit, entirely possible he’ll start another war, or several wars, or even a world war because Melania finally escaped, or his sons were revealed to be Uday and Qusay Hussein in disguise, or something. But he’s just one guy. One freaking guy. You have got to stop coming here, day after day, screaming into me about him. Especially using that many curse words. I think we can both admit at this point that the screaming isn’t working. The screaming isn’t making you feel any better.’

[books] Ken MacLeod on the life and work of the late sc-fi legend Iain M. Banks …

[epstein] Rich Brain … How Epstein’s emails reveal the super-rich’s obsession with preserving their wealth. ‘Something middle-class people may not realize is that an age of yawning inequality actually makes very rich people more anxious, too. Once again, you might imagine a liberating effect of extreme wealth. But that isn’t how it turns out to work. The cost of sinking into the below-ground becomes more unimaginable. The abyss becomes more terrifying. And, therefore, changes to the system, higher taxes, rising populist tides — all of it is terrifying. Wealth taxation, specifically, like the new proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna for a 5 percent annual wealth tax on America’s nearly 1,000 billionaires, triggers especially visceral feelings. The billionaire class often takes it like a punch in their grandson’s stomach.’

[tv] ‘I wrote The Sopranos to get over my mother wishing me dead’: David Chase on his mob masterpiece – and his new LSD epic… David Chase interviewed by Stuart Heritage. ‘Chase is such good company that I could happily while away the afternoon getting into the weeds about MKUltra. But our time is running out, so I return to the reason why he’s here. The Sopranos is such a foundational show, shaping our culture in ways we no longer even notice, that I ask Chase what he considers to be its legacy. Fourteen seconds pass in total silence as he considers his answer. “Well, hopefully it’s that God is in the details,” he offers.’

[moore] Scans of Alan Moore’s Scripts for Big Numbers #1 and #2 [via]

[life] A Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas … A list about the etiquette of using chopsticks in Japan. ‘Tatebashi (also known as tsukitatebashi, hotokebashi) !!! (Serious) To stand chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice. This is taboo, as it is the way rice is presented as a Buddhist funeral offering.’

[comics] Wizards of Leroy (And Wrico) Lettering … Todd Klein writes about a mechanical lettering technique found in 1940s and 50s comics and some of the letterers who utilized it. ‘It’s a slow and time-consuming method of lettering. You hold the T-square firmly in place with one hand while keeping the template against the top edge and sliding it to the right position with the other to ink each letter. Correct spacing comes by trial and error while watching the ink pen. It took me at least four times as long as regular freehand lettering. I lettered one story with it, and vowed to never do so again! (I made a font from it.) As with most things, if you practice enough, you’re bound to get faster and better at it. That’s what happened to Jim Wroten…’

[tv] ‘Would you like me to cry now?’: Louis Theroux on the manosphere, marriage and misunderstandings … Louis Theroux profiled. ‘in his memoirs Theroux recounts his brother’s best man speech, which drew comedy from a Twitter handle Theroux used, “Loubot2000”. “Its conceit was that I was a temperamental bit of hi-tech kit that needed a troubleshooting guide.” He quotes, “Congratulations on purchasing your new Loubot 2000! … The Loubot 2000 is highly introspective and may sometimes go into power-save mode. To restore normal functionality, try asking one of the following questions: was Jimmy Savile really a paedophile? What do Scientologists actually believe? Are chimpanzees dangerous? This should reboot the system.”’

[timeline] Chronology of Everything (almost) … A timeline of the Quality Comics Universe put together by Alan Moore and Steve Moore including Axel Pressbutton, V, Marvelman and the Warpsmiths.

ALTERNATIVE REALITY ONE

1982 – Marvelman not reborn.

1988 – World War III.

1992 – Fascist take-over of Britain, controlled by Fate.

1997 – V debuts.

[comics] Horror Manga That Transcend Borders: Ito Junji / Horror Manga Artist … Go watch this wonderful TV profile of Junji Ito on what inspires him among other things.

[web] Here’s some RSS links and feeds I use everyday:

About Feeds: What is a feed? – a beginners guide to using RSS from Matt Webb.
Newsblur – the RSS Reader I use. Has web, iOS and Android versions. Free for up to 64 sites.
Tomorrow’s UK Headlines – Daily UK Newspaper headlines collected by the BBC. Available early in the morning all week – I’ve also created feed accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky.
Doonesbury and xkcd – daily cartoons work really well with RSS.
The Guardian’s Watch This – a feed of interesting British TV being broadcast today.
Kill the Newsletter – sends newsletters to RSS. Works well as a read later service and your email inbox doesn’t get full of unread emails.
RSS Tricks – more ways to use RSS to view sites like Reddit and YouTube.

[web] Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS … Cory Doctorow’s guide to customising your browser to make the internet more bearable. ‘It’s ridiculous that websites put so many barriers up to a pleasant reading experience. A slow-moving avalanche of enshittogenic phenomena got us here. There’s corporate enshittification, like Google/Meta’s monopolization of ads and Meta/Twitter’s crushing of the open web. There’s regulatory enshittification, like the EU’s failure crack down on companies the pretend that forcing you to click an endless stream of “cookie consent” popups is the same as complying with the GDPR. Those are real problems, but they don’t have to be your problem…’

[rss] The View From RSS … Caroline Crampton explains how she uses RSS feeds to sift through a torrent of content for her newsletter. ‘My favourite thing of all, though, is when people have fun with the differing perspective that RSS gives you on the web. Dave Rupert runs an “RSS Club”, where members pledge to publish stuff to their feeds that never appears anywhere else — a secret, just for those in the know. Many use it for more personal writing, or works in progress, or art that they don’t want to expose to the whole internet yet. Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers.’

[comics] Tatjana Wood, Award-Winning Comic Book Colorist, Dies at 99 (archive.ph) … NYT Obituary for the long-time DC Comics colourist – worth visiting for the lovely photo of her with the Eisner Hall of Fame trophy. ‘Karen Berger, who edited Swamp Thing, wrote in an email about Ms. Wood: “Her magnificent and evocative palette was a perfect fit — she was an integral part of the magic of that groundbreaking series. She loved coloring ‘Shvampy,’ as she called him in her thick, gravelly German accent.”’

[games] 1984: BANDERSNATCH, BAILIFFS and the Battle for a HIT GAME … Another time capsule from the BBC Archive – this time the state of the British computer game industry in 1984 featuring Ocean Software and the collapse of Imagine Software.

[play] XKCD Dependency … Make the tech stack fall with this amusing interactive version of the XKCD cartoon. [via]

[royalty] ‘We’ve been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years’: the inside story of a royal disgrace, by his biographer … An eye-opening overview of the venality of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. ‘Throughout Mountbatten-Windsor’s time as special representative for international trade and investment, ambassadors would feed back that he was a liability, rude and visibly bored at official engagements. His staff often requested attractive women be invited to events, to which “one consul replied, ‘I’m a diplomat, not a pimp,’” according to Entitled. “One bean-counter had complained about Andrew’s expenses,” Lownie says, “querying whether he could put massages on the taxpayer’s tab, and it was pushed through. We’ve been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years.” These warnings were unheeded: “There was a safe at the Foreign Office to keep all this stuff,” Lownie says.’

[comics] Mike McMahon’s “Wasp not Wasp!” … a little-seen comic by Mike McMahon from the very rarest of Alan Moore collectibles.

[science] Scientists crack the case of "screeching" Scotch tape … The science hidden in Scotch Tape. ‘In 1953, Russian scientists peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum reported detecting electrons with sufficient energy to emit X-rays. Other scientists were skeptical, but this phenomenon was finally confirmed in 2008, when UCLA physicists produced X-rays while unwinding a roll of Scotch tape in a vacuum chamber.’ [via]

[tech] How Nick Land Became Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsayer … Let’s catchup with the populariser of accelerationism. ‘Land can now hold court in the ballroom of a mansion where sushi and seltzer are being served. Clearly, these ideas, and the political energy they carry, have escaped containment. But now, having spread, the new reactionary thought seems to have lost some of its momentum. “Nobody knows where we’re going,” Yarvin said, on the stage. Land agreed, adding, “I think the thing is that muddling through is the world that we are now living in.”’

[life] ‘Like an electrical gong bath!’ The Sheffield supermarket going viral for the symphonic sound of its freezers … A delightful story about three musical freezers in a Co-op in Sheffield. ‘Earlier this week, another Redditor shared a video of the freezers in all their aural glory, later earning a huge second audience when reposted to X. A debate ensued. Was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U somewhere in the electronic hum? “I think it’s developed a slight discordant edge over the last couple of months,” one Reddit user wrote.’

[life] Current Status: Schadenfreude …

[moore] Alan Moore: ‘There Is Something Dark And Ugly Within The Heart Of Fashion’ … Alan Moore Interview from 2013 on Fashion Beast. ‘I met [Malcolm McClaren]; he gave me a choice of three films to make. The one that immediately appealed to me was ‘Fashion Beast’ a combination of the Beauty and the Beast fable and the strange and tragic story of Christian Dior. Malcolm gave me a couple of books on Dior, a few on fashion, just so I could acquaint myself with that world. He suggested Flashdance and Chinatown as other influences I might look at. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I began to see what he meant. After that, he pretty much left me to my own devices.’

[sega] A Look Back at Ecco the Dolphin … Remembering the Sega Genesis dolphin game. ‘Ecco the Dolphin is a beautiful game, with lush blue oceans filled with colorful coral and vibrant aquatic life. The dolphins themselves are rotoscoped from real animals, giving their look and animation some extra realism. But despite early promises of dolphin flipping action, the adventure quickly becomes frightening. The screen becomes subtly darker as you venture further into the ocean depths, made especially scary since you’re constantly hunting for safe spots so you can breathe. Ecco makes a terrifying shrieking noise when damaged, and death can come quickly, especially if you’re squashed with larger objects. It’s a very difficult, often frustrating game that requires a lot of patience, particularly after dying.’

[socialmedia] Study Finds the Internet Isn’t Quite as Toxic as Everyone Thinks … ‘If your perception is that most people on the internet are vile monsters poisoning the well of online discourse, it only seems that way because three percent of people just won’t shut the f—k up. Algorithms amplify that outrage. Instead of burying it, thus doing us all a favor, algorithms that care only about engagement statistics behind a post. They don’t consider the content itself and end up tossing the most toxic stuff onto a marquee for all to see.’

[comics] The Judge Dredd Cover That Never Was … The hidden art behind 2000AD #18’s Judge Dredd cover. ‘In 1977, [Don Lawrence] was hired to draw the cover for 2000 AD Prog 18 which was meant to illustrate that issue’s Judge Dredd story ‘Brainblooms’. But it turned out there was a hitch – he hadn’t drawn Dredd! Lawrence’s cover featured ‘Greenfingers’ Ma Mahaffy harvesting her grotesque plants but as creepy and bizarre as the cover was, editorial at the time didn’t feel it was ‘dynamic’ enough.’

[moore-monday] 'Putting Descartes Before the Horse' … An interview with Alan Moore by Koom Kankesan. ‘By the time I was twelve, I think I was more interested in my writing as a thing in itself rather than as a way of courting praise and attention, although it’s likely there was a fair degree of overlap in that particular Venn diagram. By then I’d absorbed a large amount of nonsense poetry (which I’d always had an interest in because of all the outrageous things it does with logic and language), ghost stories, science fiction stories, and the other material you might expect from a boy of that age. All of these things would be filleted for the aspects that seemed to me to be of most worth, which would then be assimilated, clumsily and ineffectively, into my own attempts at writing.’

[epstein] Trove Of Emails About Pedophilia Reignites Nation’s Love Of Reading … ‘“I didn’t realize how much I missed the simple joy of losing myself in words until these massive tranches of sex crime files were released,” said Indianapolis resident Greta Livingston, adding that she now spends the hours she used to waste on social media curled up on the couch and completely absorbed in the lengthy communications between wealthy child predators.’

[crime] The detective who knew too much … A overview of the astonishing 1986 murder of Daniel Morgan. Incredibly, not one strand of forensic evidence was found to implicate anyone. “No blood. No fibres. No fingerprints”, said the coroner, who returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Four months after the inquest, in August 1988, Morgan was buried in Beckenham cemetery in a “recuperable” coffin: cremation was not an option in case the body had to be exhumed for further forensic testing. In police parlance, even at this early stage, the Morgan case was a “sticker” – one that would not be solved.

[moore] The Ordering and Reordering of Data (From Hell) … Elizabeth Sandifer does a deep dive into Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. ‘This, then, is Moore’s real accomplishment with From Hell. Its subject matter may be infinite. So too might its implications. But From Hell itself is finite; it contains five hundred and seventy-five pages, with no more than nine tiny boxes on each one. Moore has taken the infinite scope of Whitechapel and fit it down into the nine panel grid.’

[tech] Favourite well-made apps and sites … A great list of software and websites. I highly recommend LocalSend from the list for quick cross-platform file transfers between nearby devices.

[games] Creating Boulder Dash … The inside story of how the classic computer game Boulder Dash got created. ‘“I just so happen to be the person that opened the envelope containing the floppy disc that Peter Liepa had submitted to First Star Software,” reveals Richard Spitalny, co-founder and president of the company that has overseen every Boulder Dash game for three decades. “I booted the game myself and was hooked immediately. I remember that I did that while I was rushing to leave the offices and I could only spend a minute or two to take a quick look to see if it was something I would pass on to have reviewed. I was able to get into the game easily and quickly because it was so simple and intuitive. I enjoyed the unique challenges, the ’mental gymnastics’, of the caves coupled with the hand-eye and quick reflexes needed to avoid falling boulders and enemies. It was like nothing I had ever played. Needless to say, I was late to my appointment!”‘

[comics] Master Post: Kyle Baker … Go look at this collection of little-seen art from Kyle Baker.

[comics] I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026 … Comics Journal obituary of MAGA commentator and Dilbert creator. ‘In an eerily prescient interview with The Comics Journal in 1988, Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed predicted the next big trend in newspaper comics. “You know who the syndicates are looking for? They’re looking for the dissatisfied stockbroker, sitting in his office right now, he’s about 30 years old, thinking how funny it is, there’s all these office things going on around him, with computers and stuff. And he can draw a little bit. A little bit. He’s got the gags in his mind because he lived them. He’s going to start drawing comic strips, and he sends the stuff off to the syndicate. Even though they’re badly drawn, it doesn’t matter because they’re all reduced down to sub-microscopic size. And they start the comic strip. I have seen so many of these come across my desk in the past five years…they hit fast, they’ve got a good gimmick, and they’ve probably got a hook that sounds good to editors.” The following year, Dilbert, not yet an office strip, made its newspaper debut on April 16, 1989…’

[comics] R. Crumb on His Controversial Work, the 1960s, and How He's Changed … Crumb at 82. ‘Crumb has not exactly adapted to these surroundings. Over 32 years in this village, he has not learned to speak French. And yet, he has no intention of leaving. “I’m kind of passive that way, I guess,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to die here. This is it. Die here with all my junk in this big house.”’

[lists] 21 Unhelpful Lists … Compiled by Diamond Geezer. ‘England’s least busy motorways: M181, M45, M49, M48, M50, M180, M58, M271, M67, M69’

[london] How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground … IanVisits digs into the engineering and bureaucracy behind getting a mobile signal into the deep Tube. ‘The new network doesn’t just provide phone coverage for customers; it’s also part of the government’s Emergency Services Network and might, in the future, replace staff radios when they’re being upgraded. In fact, the customer-facing part of the network, while not insubstantial, is the smallest part of the whole project. Given the hundreds of millions it would cost to upgrade the emergency service network and staff back-of-house radio networks, it makes sense to provide a public service as well.’

[books] A Walking Tour of “The Great When” … A journey around the locations of Alan Moore’s latest book.‘Throughout the day, I had the audiobook of The Great When queued up so that I could list to each part while I was there. It was pretty surreal and pretty magical. 23,997 steps with 1 degree weather. When I left for the walk snow fell on me. It was amazing.’

[life] Current Status…

[web] CreepyLink … Turn ordinary URLs into something very suspicious looking. Here’s LMG as an example. ‘Normal links are too trustworthy. Make them creepy.’

[london] Londometer … James Darling’s Londometer determines if you are true Londoner based on your postcode. ‘No nearby Pret A Manger The nearest Pret is 2384 metres away. -3.6%’

[gaming] Bizarro World … A jornalist accidentally discovers his wife is a world-class Tetris player. ‘During a late-night phone call after business had quieted down at the station, he told me that any record in one of the more popular classic games – like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, or Tetris – would always set the classic gaming world on fire. “It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.” What Flewin said next I will never forget. “Oh, my!”‘

[comics] An interview with Crumb biographer Dan Nadel: “He has this incredible instinct for survival” … fascinating interview about a recent biography of Robert Crumb. ‘I must say I was really, really surprised by how fast and how hard he hit in the fall of 1967, that was shocking to me. I had no idea that Robert was so internationally known by the end of 1967. Then Zap comes out in February ’68, Head Comics comes out in October ’68. By the end of ’68, he’s really, really famous. And known for being essentially an avant-garde artist. And he was unclassifiable, like he’s in a Whitney exhibition, he’s in a gallery show, he’s in the East Village Other, he’s in Rolling Stone. He’s across all media. That was really surprising.’

[true-crime] How Not to Get Away With Murder: The stranger-than-fiction story of the Stoney Creek killing … Watch the Dunning-Kruger effect play out in this true crime story from Canada, as two grifters overestimate their ability to getaway with murder. ‘Despite their scattershot efforts, Karafa and Li had left behind voluminous evidence—less breadcrumbs than whole loaves. Surveillance cameras had caught them at just about every stage of the crime: in the condo elevator, at the shooting location, dumping the Range Rover and en route to their various pit stops. The police didn’t need Pratt’s and Romano’s phones to access messages about the meetup; they were able to subpoena texts that outlined the entire plan. They’d found Li’s abandoned Mercedes and the nearby garbage can where she’d left her wig and bloodied sweatpants. Even as Li and Karafa had made their escape, security cameras caught them at Union Station, waiting for a shuttle bus in Montreal and again at the Montreal airport.’

[comics] Out On The Wildy, Windy Moors: Judge Dredd – The Cursed Earth … Tom Ewing is revisiting the early years of 2000AD. Here he’s looking at the first extended Dredd story. ‘Twenty-five weeks with two artists, with colour pages each week, was an exceptional stint on Dredd. Mills in his memoir gives full credit to Nick Landau for shepherding McMahon and especially Bolland (whose detailed, precisely inked work looks, and was, time-consuming to produce) into delivering it. But the storyline also shows how good the writers and editors were at matching stories to artists – maybe aside from the Vegas section, there’s no part of “The Cursed Earth” where you wish McMahon and Bolland had swapped places. Bolland gets to draw the freaky mutants, the deceptively cute aliens and the weird satirical living brand mascots, all segments where his crisp, realistic style enhances the strangeness he’s being asked to visualise. McMahon’s speciality is the Cursed Earth as a blasted wilderness, full of wild-eyed, wild-haired men, robots and monsters.’

[comics] Daredevil vs. The Punisher … from Nate McDonough.

[air-travel] The strange fate of Flight 2069 … Fascinating article looking at an incident nine months before 9/11 where a mentally ill passenger attempted to seize control of a British Airways Flight and nearly crashed it into the Sahara. ‘This is the issue of the flight, as it lives on in the minds of those who survived it: how to measure the price of a disaster averted. Why it torments some of those involved when they came out alive; whether the instinct to seek evidence of cover-up makes any rational sense, or is a feature of trauma. Did 9/11, in changing the scope of potential disaster in the popular imagination, cast Flight 2069 in a sicklier light? Conspiracy theories, in their impulse to look for something bad at work in the machine, are preferable to the awful randomness of what might happen, or nearly happen. Perhaps it is natural for Bill Hagan, bearing the awful responsibility of captain but finding himself out of the cockpit when the attack began, to be poring over counter-factuals 25 years later. Others, like Watson, are at pains to see the story of Flight 2069 rationally, as a neutral “event” and an accident that did not happen – but there was nothing emotionally neutral about it. It was a confrontation with the deeply irrational, with madness, and with death, for everyone onboard.’

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