7 July 2026
[comics] 'It hasn’t really struck yet that this is my life in a book': Evan Dorkin talks Nerd Inferno … Dorkin interviewed by the Comics Journal. He’s creating a new Milk and Cheese strip: ‘But the main thing is I make some bullet points. I write a bunch of things down on a piece of paper. I draw a couple of houses with faces on them and it’s Milk and Cheese. A Monopoly house and a postage stamp, as I’ve always said. And you put eyes on them and that’s them. I just wing it. Sometimes I’ll have a definite joke that I want in there. I mean, I had an idea for a Tesla strip, but Teslas are old news now. And I still like it, it’s a terrible joke, but it’s dumb funny, of them singing the Spider-Man theme about Teslas. Cybertruck, Cybertruck [sung to the theme of the Spider-Man television theme song]. You can take it from there. But they’re doing stuff to Cybertrucks and to Cybertruck owners and to Teslas. It’s like a children’s show almost [laughs]. Two puppet alcoholics doing a kids show for Canada.’
1 July 2026
[comics] HOLY REAL ESTATE! The BATMAN ’66 WAYNE MANOR Is Up For Sale … Fancy buying Stately Wayne Manor? Here’s the real estate listing. :) ‘The Pasadena, California, mansion famously used as the exterior of Bruce Wayne’s ancestral home on the 1966 Batman TV series is on the market — and the asking price is a mere $32 million.’
30 June 2026
[true-crime] The True Crime Film That Actually Solved The Crime … Examining The Thin Blue Line – the 1988 documentary which literally invented the modern true crime genre and overturned a wrongful death penalty conviction to free an innocent man. (via)
29 June 2026
[comics] WatchmeX … Amusing fan-fiction describing issue-by-issue what might have happened if Watchmen continued after Moore and Gibbons completed their run. ‘The Hall of Souls was a device created by Adrian Veidt shortly after his attack on New York in the original Watchmen. Paranoid and fearful that his scheme would be uncovered, he built himself a secret cloning facility deep under Karnak, with the idea of transferring his consciousness into a new body should anything happen to him. The existence of the device was first mentioned in the “Death of Our Souls” arc in the second volume, where Adrian Veidt (later referred as “Adrian Alpha”) was killed in a fight with a giant gorilla on the Moon.’
26 June 2026
[politics] Britain’s six prime ministers since 2016 – ranked! … On Boris Johnson: ‘He campaigned for the December election under the slogan “get Brexit done”, one an exhausted country fell for, even though his Northern Ireland solution was just another fudge. Boris hoped he was going to be a leader for a good-times Britain, that the UK would fall for his jokes and charm. Instead, the world fell into the chaos of the Covid pandemic that required strong and stable leadership which Johnson was unable to provide. Over the course of the next two years, his government was rocked with the scandals of dodgy PPE contracts and Partygate. Boris was even fined by the police for attending a party given for his own birthday. He tried to claim he had no idea the parties were taking place, even though he was setting the culture inside No 10.’
25 June 2026
[comics] Kieron Gillen Reddit AMA on The Power Fantasy … ‘ We kept broad “types”. I wanted it to feel like a coherent universe, while still taking tropes out to spin. Valentina is the Superman archetype – with a bit of Wonder Woman, obviously. (America Chavez meets Marvel Boy, if I’m sticking to my own books). Masumi is an alternate take on the Hulk archetype, with a bit of Zero from Gen Hope. Magus is Constantine meets Doctor Doom. Heavy is Magneto, but with everything changed, and seeing where it ends up. Etienne was always a telepath, and just digging into that character type in a way few books have even tried. So with that core look, we constructed.’
24 June 2026
23 June 2026
[truecrime] Inside CrimeCon's uneasy mix of fandom and tragedy … BBC News visits a true CrimeCon in Las Vegas. ‘Just steps from an arch welcoming attendees to CrimeCon 2026, there is a wall plastered with missing persons posters and a sign emblazoned with “8 Simple Rules for Being an ETHICAL True Crime Fanatic”. About a five-minute walk away, though, there is a merch store selling CrimeCon-branded gifts, shot glasses and $80 sweatshirts. Employees bark in the hallways, urging attendees to sign up for next year or join the CrimeCon Cruise. Some have really leaned into the theme. One woman wears skin-tight crime-scene-tape leggings, while a pair of best friends proudly show off their crime-scene-tape homemade bags – complete with blood-spatter fabric lining.’
22 June 2026
[funny] Notes from a Tired Egyptian Guy Whose Job Is Explaining That Humans Built the Pyramids … ‘The workers themselves would be furious hearing these theories. Imagine dedicating twenty years to hauling limestone under desert heat only for somebody in the future to conclude, “Honestly, this feels Martian.” Also, if aliens truly possessed advanced cosmic technology, why would they choose pyramids? Why not invent indoor cooling? Or chairs that support the lower back?’
21 June 2026
[politics] I saw all Reform’s weaknesses on display in Makerfield – Farage should be worried … Guardian reporting the aftermath of the Makerfield by-election. ‘I have sometimes found them a bit standoffish about Farage, tending to see him as too macho and full of himself – one should always remember that undying bit of folk-wisdom, “Nobody likes a smartarse” – and also wary of his leaning into the ultra-right. This forms one half of Farage’s essential dilemma: as one Reform MP quoted in the Times reportedly said of Makerfield voters’ reaction on the doorstep: “We were either too racist or not racist enough.”’
17 June 2026
[blogs] Bubbles.town … A new social link aggregator linking to personal blogs. ‘5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.’ (via)
16 June 2026
[comics] Seth’s Media Diet … A looks at the books, TV and films the comic artist Seth consumes. ‘I collect old TV broadcasts with the commercials and station breaks still in them (there is a weird and obscure market for this out there if you can track it down). The ones I most collect are old broadcasts of movies. Most of this stuff is from the late ’70s or the ’80s or even the ’90s. During the time when people were recording tv on their VCRs (and were too lazy to edit out the commercials — thank goodness). I love the time travel quality these old broadcasts give.’
15 June 2026
[epstein] ‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant. … Examining the role of Jeffrey Epstein’s staff in his crimes, specifically his personal assistant. ‘For [Amos] Guiora, Groff is a classic case. If she was making appointments and booking flights, she was enabling: “All this shit can’t happen without her.” In that sense, she was just like the leaders in the Catholic church or the university administrators who put their loyalty to their institutions over their duty to a victim. The only difference was that in Groff’s case, said Guiora, “her institution was Jeffrey Epstein”.’
12 June 2026
[woke] The Official Woke List … Colin from Portsmouth lists all the work people. ‘The RNLI. Croissants.’
11 June 2026
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Audio Interview: Part 1 | Part 2 … Wide-ranging interview with O’Neill from 2021. In part 1: ‘In this first episode, the artist behind Nemesis the Warlock, Ro-Busters, ABC Warriors, Metalzoic, Marshal Law, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes your host Molch-R through his life and career, from an office boy on Buster in the 1970s to his industry-shaking work with Pat Mills in the 1980s.’ In part 2: ‘Kevin and Molch-R discuss his co-creation of superhero-busting maniac Marshal Law, his work in America, his banning by the Comics Code Authority, and his decades-spanning collaboration with Alan Moore on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Along the way they dive into Kevin’s Roman Catholic upbringing, the seediness of 1960s London, his hatred for dragons, and his electrifying secret superhero origin story!’
10 June 2026
[books] James Ellroy: ‘It’s satanic to me, the dependency people have on computers’ … Novelist James Ellroy interviewed. ‘Whatever gift I have as a novelist derived from the fact that I was just a dipshit kid who loved to read. I assimilated style. I assimilated where to put paragraph breaks. It’s the only education I’ve ever really had.’
9 June 2026
[comics] Electric Soup Comic Archive … Here’s a set of scans of 1990s Scottish underground comic Electric Soup. Notably, it contains early work from Frank Quitely.
8 June 2026
[books] Alan Moore’s 6 favorite books that have shaped his oeuvre … ‘I first read Peake’s Gormenghast books at 14, and although bowled over by them, I’d not realized until I was reading my grandsons the trilogy just how much Peake’s berserk use of language, with its lyric seizures, has affected my own style. So, yes, I’m blaming him for my excesses.’
3 June 2026
[london] Live Tube Map – real-time London Underground Trains … a useful for site for strike days, in particular, the Live Boards viewer.
2 June 2026
[space] How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer … Today I learned that Nasa flies really paranoid computers in space. ‘NASA must still account for common mode failures—software bugs or catastrophic events that could theoretically impact all primary channels simultaneously. To mitigate this, Orion carries a completely independent Backup Flight Software (BFS) system. This is a prime example of dissimilar redundancy. It is implemented on different hardware, runs a different operating system, and utilizes independently developed, simplified flight software.’
1 June 2026
[moore] Alan Moore & Steve Moore Interviewed … Recovered audio interview from 1982. ‘Here Alan and Steve discuss their work on Warrior, which was newly launched at the time, and their planned forthcoming work which included Skizz, that appeared the following year, and a movie called Mirrorman, which we can only assume is still in development.’
29 May 2026
[games] Atari’s Superman Game … A deep-dive into an Atari 2600 video game based on Superman. ‘Superman is, as you’d expect, based off of the influential DC Comics character created back in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Superman is not the first licensed video game ever made – that honor goes to Fonz, a 1976 arcade game by Sega – but it is probably the first unique one, given that Fonz was just a rebranded version of Sega’s Road Race game. It’s also an early example of corporate synergy in the game industry. Warner owned both Atari and DC Comics at the time, and had just published the hugely successful Richard Donner Superman movie in December 1978.’
28 May 2026
[tv] How to Escape the 21st Century … A recent Adam Curtis interview. ‘We look back at the Victorians and say that their conformism was going to church and being moral and hypocritical at the same time. Others will look back at us in a hundred years’ time and say that our conformity was self-expression, that everyone believed that the most important part of life was self-expression, which is ridiculous because if everyone is self-expressive, what’s the point?’
27 May 2026
[games] Silverwolf- A Story About Text Adventures and so much more … This article defies classification. It’s about how a commune of women wrote text adventures in rural Ireland in the 1980s but also about mystery, transformation, identity, games as fantasy/alternate worlds, radical feminist separatism, retreating from modernity and then possibly… a milkshake duck plot twist! It’s genuinely extraordinary. Go read…
26 May 2026
[lifehacks] What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life? … From AskReddit … ‘The phonetic or military alphabet. Over the course of my lifetime verbal communication over the phone of strings of numbers and letters has become increasingly common. J310DBM157, for example. D’s sound like B’s when spoken on a phone. M’s sound like N’s and so on. Juliet 31 Zero Delta Bravo Mike 157. It should be taught in high school.’
21 May 2026
[movies] RoboCop (1987) Is an Almost Perfectly Symmetrical Film … A deep dive into the structure of the original Robocop movie. ‘I have no idea if the makers of RoboCop intended for it to be so symmetrical. The fact that they accomplished this feat while still making a fast-paced action film that never feels like it’s repeating itself is simply amazing.’
19 May 2026
[movies] Comic Books seen in the orginal RoboCop … a great analysis of a partially shown rack of comics in 1987’s Robocop movie.
18 May 2026
[politics] Baying electorate demand new mewling fool in Number 10 to loathe and despise … ‘The UK’s furious public are increasingly vocal in their demands for a different thick-witted cretin to be installed in Downing Street so they can enjoy someone new to abhor and despise. “I’m sick of Starmer. I’m running out of things to hate about him,” said Simon Williams, a voter from Essex, frothing with fury.’ (via)
14 May 2026
[funny] We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots … ‘That’s where billionaires like yourself come in. For a mere $10 million gift, you can help us remake the intellectual landscape by endowing a prestigious chair in an underrepresented subfield, such as geocentric astronomy, high-energy phlogiston physics, or patriotic history. Your generosity would enable us to lure academic job seekers who might otherwise scorn our hidebound institution in favor of innovative civics centers, private think tanks, and parents’ basements.’
11 May 2026
[lifehacks] The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ … A look at why multitasking does not lead to good productivity. ‘Multitasking is the act of distracting yourself. It comes with a cost even when tasks feel related, because it requires you to switch the “mental rules of the game,” as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it. Even when people are allowed to switch between tasks at their own discretion, the more they switch, the longer everything takes. As Mark has written: “We find that in real world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end of day assessed productivity.”’ (archive)
7 May 2026
[cia] Timothy Leary—1960s Acid Guru—May Have Been Among the CIA’s Greatest Assets … This article presents a fascinating conspiracy theory the that 1960s Psychedelic era was a CIA-orchestrated operation, with Timothy Leary as its frontman. (via) ‘Leary himself said in an interview with journalist Walter Bowart near the end of his life that he was working as an intelligence agent since 1962. “I was a witting agent of the CIA” which, he claimed, had recognized him as “an important national asset.” Asked by Bowart to elaborate on whether CIA people were involved in his LSD-proselytizing groups in the 1960s, Leary responded: “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.” Leary continued: “I like the CIA!”’
4 May 2026
[tv] No Context Adam Curtis Documentaries Intertitles … ‘He was filmed by the BBC as part of a programme about unhappiness…’
1 May 2026
[comics] The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books … Reduce anxiety by reading comics. ‘Instead of reaching for my phone in the evenings, I picked up a comic instead. Reading them as an adult restored a sense of childlike wonder that transcended my anxieties. I found my quality of sleep started to improve. My dreams were more fanciful and less marked by the banal terrors of day-to-day life. I began to wake up feeling revitalised, free of the residual negativity from the previous night’s miserable doomscrolling. Inspired by the colourful imagery and ideas I found in comic books, I was able to channel a newfound sense of creativity into my own work as a journalist.’
30 April 2026
[comics] The Complete 2000 AD By Alan Moore: Future Shocks & Other Stories … Review of Alan Moore’s early work … ‘“The Reservable Man” is clever, which is more than could be said for other Future Shock stories at time, but “The Time Machine” is genuinely smart. In the difference between these two tales of unusual time lies the whole of The Complete Alan Moore, a writer who could be so in love with the notion of doing something unusual simply for the sake of doing it, and at the same time a man who could actually marry that technical skill with emotional depth that was, and is, rare in his field.’
27 April 2026
[moore] Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair in conversation … Go watch Moore and Sinclair discuss the Long London series including many of the non-fictional characters and locations within.
24 April 2026
[politics] What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat … How Noah Hawley caught hand, foot, and mouth disease by hanging out with billionaires. (archive link) ‘Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.’
21 April 2026
[time] The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock … Go look at this mind-bending clock. ‘This clock displays the current time alphabetically. In Three-Hand mode, the hours, minutes, and seconds are each independently sorted by their English spelling, with a hand for each.’
20 April 2026
[comics] The Oral History of the Scrapped 'Swamp Thing' Story 40 Years in the Making … The creators of Swamp Thing #88 get to tell the story of how it was cancelled and resurrected. It’s a shame we don’t get to hear from Karen Berger or Jenette Kahn. ‘According to Veitch, one early red flag emerged shortly after he took over as writer of Swamp Thing. “[DC] brought me down [to New York] and wined and dined me and took me to a Broadway play, and I got to meet with [DC President and Publisher] Jenette [Kahn]. This was right at the time when [DC] had tried to institute [their] standards and practices. They were trying to put the brakes on the violence and the sexuality that had been such a success with Dark Knight and Watchmen.” A year into Veitch’s run on the title, it was clear that something would have to give. “I think Jenette Kahn realized that the whole thing had blown up in her face. She wasn’t willing at that point to just get rid of [DC’s content standards], but she was telling people like me that it was not going to be a problem.”’
15 April 2026
[royalty] Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite … More on the venality of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and family. ‘With the Yorks?, a whole new set of rules appear in the royal playbook. Chief among them is that one should seek, when explaining a personal fault, to pay oneself such a large compliment that it effectively kills the perception of the fault as being a fault at all. This was initially crucial for the duchess as part of her rehabilitation journey, or what she calls in one of her many books her attempt ‘to rebuild the brand Sarah’. The duchess blamed her ‘over-generous nature’ for her money troubles (in 2010 she had told the ‘fake sheikh’ she could ‘open any door’ to royalty for 500k with a downpayment of 40k). Her ‘fault’ (if it was one) was to give too much to the people in her life and land herself in hot water (silly old me). Andrew tried to pull off the same trick during his Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019, seeking to explain the reason he’d felt the need to fly to New York and stay with Epstein for three days just to tell him they could no longer be friends. ‘I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable,’ he said, to the disbelief of the entire world.’
14 April 2026
[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”.’
13 April 2026
[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)
10 April 2026
[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.’
7 April 2026
[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.’
5 April 2026
[comics] Simon Bisley’s Jesus … This was a surprise – Bisley has done a range of Bible illustrations — Happy Easter to those that celebrate. (via)
2 April 2026
[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.’
1 April 2026
31 March 2026
[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.’
30 March 2026
[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.’
26 March 2026
24 March 2026
[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.’
23 March 2026
[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…’
17 March 2026
[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.”’
16 March 2026
[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.
13 March 2026
[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.
12 March 2026
[web] Here’s some RSS links and feeds I use everyday:
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