LinkMachineGo

[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.’

[useful] One-Page Printable Yearly Calendar … ‘Take in the year all at once. Fold it up and carry it with you. Jot down your notes on it. Plan things out and observe the passage of time. Above all else, be kind to others.’

[space] Go look at 31 Jaw-dropping Space Photos.

[funny] The Poke’s 50 Favourite Funny Bluesky Posts of 2025

[movies] Michael Mann: ‘I make films for a large presentation’ … Michael Mann interviewed on Heat 2 and more. ‘My ambition is to very strongly and effectively impact the audience with the story with all the tools at my disposal to transport them into this world for two, two and a half hours. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do since I was in film school in London and so it’s a diminution for any of my – or any number of other directors I can think of – to have our films be seen 16-by-9 on an iPhone. The full power of performance and expression is what I make films for.’

[xmas] Madeline Horwath on the joy of Twixmas… …

[comics] The Comics Journal Best comics of 2025, Chosen by their Contributors … Tiffany Babb on the Solitary Gourmet manga: ‘As noted by Joe McCulloch in his review, the book is best enjoyed in small bites, something I appreciate. It’s small, it’s quiet, there’s no major drama to be found, it’s beautifully illustrated, and it’s all about food. Maybe I’m having flashbacks to all the time I spent wandering Tokyo by myself, or maybe it says something about my state of mind, but this weird book about a man eating food by himself is my favorite graphic novel of 2025.’

[comics] Happy Christmas from Kev O'Neill … Go look at some Christmas cards designed by the late Kevin O’Neill. He did some stunning Christmas comics covers as well.

[books] “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” … David Allen Green writes about his 40 year quest for a partially-remembered Christmas story he read as a child. ‘I bought books of Christmas stories on the off-chance they would reprint the story I was looking for – a disconcerting number of which appear to have been edited by Gyles Brandreth.’

[batman] Some links on the children’s rhyme “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker got away!”

Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy … A wonderful analysis of the many versions of Batman Smells. ‘As some of you know, I work in lexicography but came to this work via a science background, and it felt very much like what I was looking at was taxonomy: an evolutionary tree if you will, with certain characteristics conserved between different forms of the rhyme, while mutations cause changes which are selected—or not—by the playground troubadours, and die out or spread, to mutate again.’

Batman Slapping Robin Meme … ‘LAY AN EGG BITCH!!!’

The Secret True History Of 'Jingle Bells, Batman Smells' … ‘So, children of the 1960s would’ve been used to hearing several different (and politically charged) versions of “Jingle Bells” by the time Batman had his TV debut. What’s most noteworthy about “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” is that, once invented, it’s persisted in the public consciousness right up to this very day.’

[xmas] The Origin of the British Christmas Sandwich (archive link) … ‘Just one problem remains for our latest Yuletide tradition: its name is arguably a misnomer. “For me, it’s not a Christmas sandwich,” says Halley. “It’s a Boxing Day sandwich. They’re all founded in leftovers, even if that’s been forgotten on the high street. My truly mega sandwich of the year is always on Boxing Day.”’

[books] Heartwarming Christmas TV Advert Plot Generator For Bookshops … by Tom Gauld. ‘A workaholic book shop owner learns the true meaning of community with help from a kindly parsnip.’

[comics] 650 Greatest Comic Books Lists Aggregated … ‘If I were to ask 10 different people what the best comics were, I’d probably get 10 different answers. But if you asked enough people, eventually, you would see some of the usual suspects start to pop up more frequently. So the following isn’t necessarily my ranking of the best graphic novels, but instead, a collection of 655 different “Greatest Comic Books/Graphic Novels/Manga/Bande Desinee/Manhua/Manhwa/Fumetti/Historietas of All Time” lists.’

[games] The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking? … Transcripts from inside the room at the Mastermind board game new cover presentation.

REYNOLDS: Do we want sexual tension on a board game cover for eight-year-olds?

SMITH: We want adult tension. The tension of brains. If anyone sees sex, that’s on them. We’re not responsible for the public’s imagination. We’re responsible for moving units in Woolworths. Gary, I see what you’re going for… a Cold War posture: mutually assured… embarrassment? You probe, they conceal, you infer, they flinch. Gorgeous.

REYNOLDS: Jesus. All that from colored pegs and a plastic tray?

LARKIN: Bingo.

[life] Costanzian Logic … A moment from Seinfeld that has lived rent free in my head for many years.

[movies] Grandchildren Politely Decline David Cronenberg’s Bedtime Story Offer … ‘Assuring the 82-year-old filmmaker they could fall asleep perfectly fine without one, David Cronenberg’s grandchildren politely declined their grandfather’s offer to tell them a bedtime story, sources confirmed Monday. “Oh, that’s okay, Pop-Pop—we’re so sleepy already,” said 7-year-old Liam Cronenberg, who forced a yawn and rubbed his eyes as his 4-year-old brother, Mason Cronenberg, nodded vigorously in agreement from the adjacent twin-sized bed…’

[comics] The Beat's Best Comics of 2025 … Just added Noah Van Sciver’s “Beat It, Rufus” to my to buy list: ‘Rufus’s hallucinatory journey through regret, nostalgia, and, frankly, self-deception becomes a meditation on cultural obsolescence and the personal myths we construct to make sense of the harshest of realities. Expressive cartooning and lettering, paired with a color palette that shifts between wistful melancholy and vivid psychedelic chaos heighten every moment. Instead of offering hope for redemption, Beat It, Rufus lingers on the uneasy truth: some dreams inevitably sour but they still merit some kind of understanding.’

[til] 52 things I learned in 2024 … Fifty-two TIL from Tom Whitwell. ‘British Chaos refers to a cluster of TikTok personalities that “once might have just been a local character in a pub in Stevenage but have become international celebrities.”’

[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interviewed in 2010 … Huge interview by Douglas Wolk covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics. ‘A few years later I went up to the DC offices in New York — I was curious to see an actual copy of the Comics Code. I’d never actually seen one. I’d asked Archie Goodwin, and he said he’d look around, but he couldn’t find it — which is pretty funny, actually! Eventually, he found a very old one, it had some stuff like “no werewolves, no vampires” etc. They did have a phone number on it for the Code, and I rang them up, and this woman answered — I said I was a British comic-book artist visiting New York, and I’d heard so much about the Comics Code, could I come up and visit the offices? And she said, “There’s nothing to see here” — and hung the phone up!’

[books] John Coulthart On Creating His Latest H. P. Lovecraft Picture … John Coulthart talks through his latest Lovecraft picture and basically asks, “How do you draw Lovecraft again without drowning him in tentacles?”

[blogs] “Suddenly, Twenty-Two Years Later….” … Happy Blogiversary to Mike at Progressive Ruin. ‘Ah well, What Can You Do™? Well, what I can do is keep educating and entertaining the masses, for certain definitions of the word “mass,” here on my site, as I dump my knowledge and experiences out on the printed webpage for all to see. And I plan on continuing it here on ye olde-fashioned blogge for the foreseeable future. Well, until I finally make the switch to video and you can watch me doing my hair and makeup while explaining what a “splash page” is.’

[politics] Beware the Liz Truss chatshow: viewers will require survivor therapy … John Crace watches Liz Truss’s new YouTube show so we don’t have to. ‘For her new Liz Truss Show, she appeared to have turned her utility room into a makeshift studio. No expense incurred. Though she did have someone to do the filming this time. Albeit a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine. I’ve seen better editing on my dad’s home movies from the 60s. We opened with a montage of Lizzy’s greatest hits. There she was being greeted by the queen at Balmoral. Huge mistake. She doesn’t seem to realise that the entire country holds her responsible for the queen’s death. The last photo we saw of the queen was of Truss being introduced to her on the Tuesday. Two days later she was dead. Case proved. It’s not hard to imagine the queen thinking: “You know what? It’s just not worth it any more. My first prime minister was Winston Churchill. Now it’s come to this…”’

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