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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 18 June 2025
[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.’
17 June 2025
[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.’
16 June 2025
[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.’
13 June 2025
[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.’
9 June 2025
[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.’
6 June 2025
5 June 2025
[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]
4 June 2025
[life] What The Hell Are People Doing? … A visualisation of what the entirety of humanity are up to right now. ‘Sleeping: 50.79%’
30 May 2025
[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!”’
29 May 2025
[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.’
26 May 2025
[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.’
22 May 2025
[laws] The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws … ‘Ringwald’s Law of Household Geometry: “Any horizontal surface is soon piled up on.”’
21 May 2025
[politics] Trump Presidency Countdown… The slow count down to Trump’s end. ‘91.732702% remaining’
16 May 2025
[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.’
15 May 2025
13 May 2025
[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…’
12 May 2025
[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.’
7 May 2025
[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.’
6 May 2025
[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…’
5 May 2025
[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.’
2 May 2025
[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’
1 May 2025
[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?’
30 April 2025
[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.’
28 April 2025
[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.’
25 April 2025
[sushi] Super Sushi … Nicely done gallery of Lego Sushi builds.
23 April 2025
[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.’
22 April 2025
[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.
21 April 2025
[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.’
17 April 2025
[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.’
16 April 2025
[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.’
10 April 2025
[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?’
9 April 2025
[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.’
8 April 2025
[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?’
7 April 2025
[comics] Shopping for Superman … The trailer for a documentary about the rise and fall of American comic shops.
4 April 2025
[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.’
3 April 2025
[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.
2 April 2025
[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.’
1 April 2025
[history] On this Spot, 1st April 1780…
30 March 2025
[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.’
28 March 2025
[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”.’
27 March 2025
[music] Vangelis – Dr. Stergios Tegos Tapes Playlist … In 1988 Vangelis composed music for about 11hrs of Microneurosurgery videos created by a surgeon he was friends with. Go listen. [see Metafilter for more detail]
25 March 2025
[world] Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M. … ‘Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.’
24 March 2025
[blogs] What was it like? … Phil Gyford takes a look at what weblogs were like in 2000. ‘So many of these, particularly the Blogger sites, feature short and frequent updates. Several posts a day, each with a timestamp. In retrospect it could be seen as people crying out for something like Twitter – a way to share brief snippets of text frequently and (given how many posts refer to other bloggers) sociably.’
21 March 2025
[comics] Alan Moore’s Five Tips for Would-Be Comics Writers … ‘4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.’
19 March 2025
[web] Barbelith Underground … I came across an archive of the Barbelith Underground web forum last week while working on the 25 Years of LMG post. Rediscovering it intact and online felt like discovering a lost piece of the old internet.
18 March 2025
[covid-19] What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick With Coronavirus … Five years ago, I remember reading Jessica Lustig’s powerful writing about caring for her very sick husband who had Covid-19. It was too much to blog at the time but the article has stayed with me.
17 March 2025
[web] E/N – Everything and Nothing Websites … A look at E/N sites, another early version of blogs. ‘Urban Dictionary definition: it refers to a type of post that means everything to the poster, and nothing to anyone else.’
13 March 2025
[blogs] Early SMS Blogging … Last week I was trying to find a UK Blog that was sending SMS messages to blog posts in 2001. I’ve managed to dig it out of the Wayback Machine, screenshot below. The SMS messages feel like tweets. it’s an early attempt at Twitter in 2001! ’12:41 via SMS: You know the more I think about this SMS blogging lark, the more useful it’s becoming. Blog from a sports game, holiday, your car…’
11 March 2025
[tv] Larry David Age Quiz … Can you guess which are the older pictures of Larry David? ‘When the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm aired in 2000, Larry David was 54 years old. For comparison, that is how old Paul Rudd is right now. But the benefit of looking older when you’re young is that it’s hard for others to tell the difference when you age.’
10 March 2025
[manson] Netflix’s Chaos: The Manson Murders takes on a wild theory. Even Errol Morris isn’t sure he believes it. … Interview with Errol Morris about his new documentary on Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca murders. ‘How do you explain the fact that Manson’s parole officer just let him go again and again and again? He was just free to do whatever he chose to do. Can I explain it? I can’t. It could be meaningful or not. Is it suggestive of something peculiar? It is. But does it tell us that somehow they were all in league with the government? It doesn’t. I think it’s one of the most fascinating stories about investigation and the desire to believe and how hard it is really to investigate anything.’
7 March 2025
[arts] All ifs ands or buts connected by green lines … By Sol Levitt, 1973. [Via Matt Fraction’s Tumblr Archive]
6 March 2025
[comics] An Inside Look at the 13 Pre-Flashpoint Eras of Hellblazer … A great, detailed guide to the many different runs on Hellblazer. ‘Garth Ennis – Illustrated by Will Simpson and Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis’ tenure took Moore’s smug bastard, melded him with Delano’s substance-abusing mystic, and added a love for pubs.’
4 March 2025
[blogs] 25 Random Thoughts about 25 years of LinkMachineGo:
3 March 2025
[movies] Gene Hackman: 20 Best Movies … The French Connection: ‘William Friedkin had planned on pushing Doyle to the outer limits of acceptability; the filmmaker later said that despite the fact Hackman had gone on ride-alongs with Eddie Egan, a.k.a. the real-life Popeye, his lead was so put off by the ugly places he had to go to that Hackman allegedly quit on the second day of production. He was eventually coaxed back, and struggled to find a way in to playing Egan until one day, he noticed the cop “dipping a cruller into a cup of coffee and then pitching it over his head. There was something in his attitude that made everything very clear: This guy doesn’t give a shit about anything except his work.” Bingo! The role won Hackman his first Academy Award. Everyone remembers the famous chase scene — the actor later joked that maybe the car should have won the Oscar — but Hackman is the engine that drives the whole movie.’
2 March 2025
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