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15 October 2024
[sea] The Sinking of the Estonia … The powerful, human story of the 1994 sinking of a ferry in the Baltic from William Langewiesche. Survival that night was a very tight race, and savagely simple. People who started early and moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death, and although many of those who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of the ultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in their underwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of this race, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7 promenade without delay. There was no God to turn to for mercy. There was no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history, Europe a faint and faraway place. Inside the ship, as the heel increased, even the most primitive social organization, the human chain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clock was running. The ocean was completely in control.
11 October 2024
[comics] Harvey Kurtzman: Seriously Funny … Drew Friedman fondly reminisces about Harvey Kurtzman. ‘Harvey would slowly unwind, sip beer, and reminisce about Bill Gaines and his days at EC, his continuing dislike of Al Feldstein, Will Elder’s wild practical jokes, his admiration for R. Crumb, his theories about the coke bottle design, current politics (at the time he admired Ronald Reagan) and his assistants at HELP!, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem.’ 10 October 2024
[comics] Jack Kirby’s Julius Caesar Costume Designs … Kirby’s designs for a 1969 production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. 
8 October 2024
[politics] ‘If I have a fault, it’s that I’m too honest’… – Boris Johnson’s Unleashed, digested by John Crace. ‘February 2016. I was choked. Blocked. Stuck. Unsure of which way to jump in the referendum. Some have said that I chose to back leave only because that was the best career move. But I can categorically say this is untrue. Never in my life have I taken the selfish path. My life has been one long pilgrimage of self-restraint and uxorious self-denial. The queen once told me that I was a role model for the country.’
4 October 2024
3 October 2024
[curtis] Adam Curtis: The Map No Longer Matches the Terrain … Another interview with Adam Curtis … ‘It’s interesting to observe a class that’s losing power and ask yourself where that power is going. The traditional left position is to say that it’s the bankers, but bankers say, “We do arbitrage, we spot gaps and go for it, we’re just chancers.” That’s not power. It has an effect, but it’s not power. The other left position is that we’ve returned to a sort of feudalism, but I’m not convinced by that. My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.’ 1 October 2024
[war] The Big Baltic Bomb Cleanup… A look at the race to safely remove vast amounts of weaponry dumped in The Baltic after both World Wars. ‘…In their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain. That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives.’ 23 September 2024
[tv] Why Was the ‘Miami Vice’ Pilot So Good? … A look at how the 80s crime series was developed. ‘But it wasn’t just the pilot. Miami Vice season one was one of the best freshman seasons of that decade. It churned out one knockout hour after another (including the gemlike perfection of “Evan,” starring a then-baby-faced William Russ as a closeted gay cop). It sparked depiction-vs.-endorsement arguments about its presentation of sex, violence, and drug use. It soon became one of the hippest series in TV history to guest-star on, especially if you were a musician or a real-life political figure. ‘ 18 September 2024
[funny] Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, as E-mailed by Your Passive-Aggressive Co-Worker … ‘Seriously, I don’t mean to be a dick about this, but we might look into changing our policy. I understand wanting to get the new St. Peter’s built, but have we considered having a bake sale? It concerns me that we’re maybe not serving the public by letting the wealthy buy their way into Heaven, but I don’t know. Best, Martin’16 September 2024
[zines] The BugPowder Zine Archive … Pete Ashton is scanning and cataloging his large collection of zines. Here’s a post on the the story of the project and a timeline. … ‘From 1988 to the mid 2000s I amassed a collection of roughly 4,000 self published comics and zines, mostly from the UK small press comics scenes but also from across the world covering all manner of subjects. Most of them are photocopied or printed in very short runs, usually under 100 copies. Many of them are hand-finished with personal touches. During the 1990s I ran a review zine, TRS, and a mail order distro, BugPowder. This meant that on top of the many zines I was buying for myself, hundreds of people sent me unsolicited copies of their zines for review or sale…’
13 September 2024
[comics] Criminal Reading Order, The Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Celebrated Comics … ‘In an interview with Tom Spurgeon at the launch of the series, Brubaker stated “The kinds of stories we’ll be putting all these characters through, though, run the gamut from the heist caper, to the revenge story, to the man on the run story, and even beyond that to the sort of meta-noir innocent man caught in a web of crime story.” That’s exactly what they did. Eighteen years later, we have a collection of books, stories that were not written or published in chronological order, featuring a group of recurring characters whose lives we discover through dark and violent events…’
10 September 2024
[onion] Everyone In Restaurant Jealous Of Toddler Who Gets To Wear Pajamas And Watch iPad … ‘“I can’t believe this! He doesn’t even have to talk to anybody or pay attention to what’s going on around him—he gets to just sit and watch Bluey,” said Ray’s Italian Bistro patron Finn Delamore, echoing the sentiment of dozens around him who reportedly couldn’t help but cast longing looks at the 2-year-old whose eyes were glued to the screen in front of him, his hands clasping a bright red toy fire truck.’ 9 September 2024
[internet] Are you TIRED? LONELY? DEPRESSED? If so, please consider joining a NICHE ONLINE COMMUNITY! … 
2 September 2024
[pac-man] Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game … A deep dive into the Pac-Stance – the way people stood playing Pac-Man in an arcade. ‘Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game.’ 20 August 2024
[tv] Recreating The People’s Poet Badges … Faboulous project to recreate the badges worn by Rik in the Young Ones. ‘So I began my research. I first researched screenshots, episodes, official photographs and portraits, gathering as many references as I could. But there were still some that were unidentified and from what I’d seen, previous cosplayers had filled the unidentified badges with a related badge to The Young Ones or a political badge that they imagined Rick would have…’
19 August 2024
[tv] A Lunch with Adrian Edmondson … ‘That understanding is really the triumph of Edmondson’s own career. He had some demons to overcome – including intrusive suicidal thoughts, which he was surprised to discover not everyone had. He has been saved – and thrived – as an actor and writer, by the two great love stories of his life. The abiding one is with Saunders. They have kept celebrity at bay, he suggests, partly by living most of the time on the edge of Dartmoor. He tells how one of their daughters came home from school one day in some distress. Kids in the playground had been insisting that her mother was the famous Jennifer Saunders off the telly, and she had been insisting that no, she was Jennifer Edmondson…’ 16 August 2024
[books] The Later Years of Douglas Adams … A look back at Douglas Adams creative struggles later in his career. ‘This time he had to be locked into a room with not only a handler from his publisher but his good friend Michael Bywater, who had, since doing Bureaucracy for Infocom, fallen into the role of Adams’s go-to ghostwriter for many of the contracts he signed and failed to follow through on. Confronted with the circumstances of its creation, one is immediately tempted to suspect that substantial chunks of Mostly Harmless were actually Bywater’s work. By way of further circumstantial evidence, we might note that some of the human warmth that marked the first four Hitchhiker’s novels is gone, replaced by a meaner, archer style of humor that smacks more of Bywater than the Adams of earlier years.’13 August 2024
[comics] The Funnies Have Gone Down, Down, Down … Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich discuss comics. BOGDANOVICH: Is there a– I was gonna ask you that– do you think there’s an interesting parallel between movie setups and panels?
WELLES: Yes. I think the panels come out of the movies, and–
BOGDANOVICH: They came out of the movies.
WELLES: Out of the movies, and then have in their turn influenced lesser directors.
BOGDANOVICH: Hmm.
WELLES: But they of course never could have existed without the movies.
12 August 2024
[books] What I’ve Learned: Stephen King … Some life lessons from Stephen King. ‘When I have a good idea, I just know. It’s like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you’re hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.’8 August 2024
[tech] Dinosaur’s Pen … A nostalgic collection of old technology images. 
6 August 2024
[comics] Wallace Wood’s Official Shit List … File under Ancient Comics Gossip. ‘Rick Stoner, who visited Wood’s home in Derby, Connecticut, on the 14th and 15th of April 1978 then went with him to Niagara Falls on the 16th, would give no clues. “I won’t name any names from this list of about twenty or so,” he wrote in his article Remembering Wally Wood, printed in issue 11 of The Journal of Madness in June 2001, “I’m just glad I wasn’t on that one”. Thankfully for us, Stoner took plenty of photographs of Wood’s home on Saturday the 15th April 1978, some of which were reprinted in that same issue of The Journal of Madness, and one of them features a very clear shot of Wood’s Official Shit List. Twenty-one names of important and well-respected members of the comics industry…’ (reblog) 5 August 2024
[movies] Uzumaki Teaser … Adultswim’s animated version of Junji Ito’s horror manga arriving late September. 1 August 2024
[food] ‘One of the most disgusting meals I’ve ever eaten’: AI recipes tested… A look at the unwelcome rise of the AI Cookbook. ‘I have an even better time with Teresa’s The Ultimate Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook for Beginners. Here I am reminded why proofreaders exist. Something in the AI processing for this book took objection to the word “and”, turning it into “&;” in every instance. It inadvertently leads to beautiful phrases such as “h&ful cori&der” and “using an immersion blender or even by “h&”. We know that AI struggles with hands, but this is ridiculous. The Japanese hotpot I attempt – not obviously anti-inflammatory, like all the other recipes – is one of the most disgusting meals I have ever eaten.’ 30 July 2024
[life] The Scale of Life … Fascinating real-time statistics about what is happening right now all over the world. ‘Year to date, Number of Hours Worked: 5,224,497,264,667’ [via Andrew Ducker] 26 July 2024
[life] The surprising data behind supercentenarians … Tim Harford sugggests a surprising reason why some people live so long. ‘In the US, Newman finds that the outstanding predictor of longevity is patchy birth records. Introducing proper records in the late 19th century reduced by more than two-thirds the number of babies who would eventually seem to reach the age of 110. That suggests that, until recently, seven out of 10 apparent supercentenarians were, in fact, younger than claimed. This all points to error or outright fraud.’
23 July 2024
[ai] GANksy — A.I. street artist … ‘We trained a StyleGAN2 neural network using the portfolio of a certain street artist to create GANksy, a twisted visual genius whose work reflects our unsettled times.’
22 July 2024
[comics] 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain between 2024 and 2034 … ‘Popeye the Sailor (2025) – Popeye first appeared in the “Thimble Theatre” newspaper comic strip in 1929. He soon became the strip’s star, and Olive Oyl’s new boyfriend (replacing her previous beau, one “Harold Hamgravy”). Popeye made the leap to animation in 1933.’ 17 July 2024
[morris] Errol Morris on whether you should be afraid of generative AI in documentaries… Errol Morris interviewed. ‘Film isn’t reality, no matter how it’s shot. You could follow some strict set of documentary rules…it’s still a film. It’s not reality. I have this problem endlessly with Richard Brody, who writes reviews for The New Yorker, and who is a kind of a documentary purist. I guess the idea is that if you follow certain rules, the veritical nature of what you’re shooting will be guaranteed. But that’s nonsense, total nonsense. Truth, I like to remind people — whether we’re talking about filmmaking, or film journalism, or journalism, whatever — it’s a quest.’ 16 July 2024
[space] Five of Saturn’s Moons in a Group Portrait … ‘On July 29, 2011, Cassini captured five of Saturn’s moons in a single frame with its narrow-angle camera. This is a full-color look at a view that was originally published in September 2011’
11 July 2024
[podcast] Things Fell Apart… A BBC Podcast by Jon Ronson on the many, varied stories behind the culture wars.
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