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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 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.’
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