19 May 2000
[film] Apocalypse Now Tribute Site
[weblogging] Any weblogger who provides lots of links must hit THE WALL at some point… and I’ve been certainly struggling with my own personal weblogging wall the last couple of days… So, it’s time to dig thru the old bookmarks and come up with some gems…
18 May 2000
[dotcom] Slashdot has the answer to why boo.com failed: “My wife never heard of boo.com (Score:5, Insightful)“
[human nature] Slashdot asks: Can you legally lend a friend a DVD?
[mp3] Two amusing links: Kid Rock starves to death – MP3 piracy blamed. Metallica’s new CD [both via Metafilter]
[tech] Vavatch Orbital has a dig at Prince Charles over his Reith Lecture: “I believe that if we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development we will first have to rediscover, or re-acknowledge a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world, and with each other. If literally nothing is held sacred anymore – because it is considered synonymous with superstition or in some other way “irrational” – what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life” with potentially disastrous long term consequences?” — Prince Charles [Update: Unsurprisingly, Stephen Hawkins has entered the debate: “[…] people in 50 years’ time will wonder what all the fuss about GM food was all about”]
17 May 2000
[nasty] BBC News reports that anthrax has been linked to a spate of deaths in Europe of heroin addicts.
[admin] Linkmachinego archives are up: March 2000, April 2000.
[comics] Warren Ellis seems to be doing a lot of little bits of writing for themestream. Of special note: Warren Ellis: Why I Write Comics and England, In The Summertime: LIQUID CITY
[weblogs] Two weblogs that keep me hitting the “F5” key — Not So Soft and Metafilter.
[sport] How Grandstand was cancelled [from newsUnlimited]. “The premier league clubs expect to realise around £2bn from auctioning the various rights packages. By chance £2bn is roughly the BBC reaped in licence fee income last year to fund its two television channels and five radio stations, plus its new digital ventures.”
[tech] newsUnlimited reports on family in Silicon Valley [Text-Only]. “[…] Most revealingly, perhaps, is the way in which the word “family” is slowly turning from a noun, into a verb. Parents in Silicon Valley have been overheard talking about the need for “doing family,” as if it were less of a static unit than one of many activities to be fitted around other obligations. When a parent talks about spending “quality time” with his child, it is not a vague reference to hanging out with him or her on the weekend. It is used as a direct oppositional to “quantity time,” with the belief that, like everything else in Silicon Valley, if you concentrate hard enough you can achieve just as much in a condensed period as across a longer stretch of time.”
16 May 2000
[anarchy] Seen on the tube today — the wisdom of Eric Cartman: “Capitalism sucks ass!” and Moon at the Monarchy 2000.
[football] David Beckham immortalised in Thai temple reports BBC News. “The fan placed his sculpture of the Manchester United player in Bangkok’s Pariwas temple, in a spot normally reserved for minor deities.”
[interview] An interview with John Diamond [Text-Only] in the Observer. Diamond’s columns can be found at The Times Website. [Originally, I’d decided not to link to the John Diamond interview but it stuck in my mind for a couple of days, a friend mentioned it to me and I suddenly realised that columnists in newspapers and webloggers probably have a lot in common…]
[timemachinego, baby!] For some reason Yahoo describe my Grant Morrison Comixography as: “A Digital Shaman spell to summon comics author Grant Morrison for a night of complete debauchery.“ This is totally wrong… but then again who am I to argue with Yahoo? I am a digital shaman! WooHoo!
15 May 2000
[tech] Microsoft plans changes to Outlook in the wake of The Love Bug [via Scripting News]
[tv] Why do I like Friends so much? I have no idea… anyway… the cast of Friends have signed on for another two years!
[mp3] Napster is irrelevant reports Wired News. “The amazing thing about Napster isn’t the program, it’s the idea,” Weekly said. “You can’t litigate the idea. You can’t tell people that they need to stop thinking about the idea. Already we’ve seen commercial alternatives pop up with Scour Exchange (a commercial file-trading exchange), so even if Napster is sued out of existence, there are alternatives popping up everywhere.”
14 May 2000
[tech] Much of the Internet leads nowhere according to a recent mapping project. “If you picked two random pages and tried to click from one to the other, “there’s a 75 percent chance that you will never get there,” LaMore said. If a path did exist, the average click separation would be 16, the researchers said.” Hmmm… I always said you were never more than four clicks away from porn on the Internet… I guess I was wrong!
[comics] Lots of interesting rumours about comics over at Ramblings 2000. Mark Millar talks about his new vampire TV series for Channel 4 called Sikeside: “The big difference between me and Buffy is that Sikeside is going to be the most appalling thing ever seen on TV… and I mean in terms of bad taste. It really, really, really, really is absolutely horrific and a response to all the overseas vampire dross we’ve been subjected to. I promise you won’t have seen this stuff before.”
[books] More profiles of Martin Amis: [BBC] The Martin Amis Experience [Sunday Times] Middle age is drawing the poison from his pen.
[america] America planned to drop a nuke onto the moon! [I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.]
13 May 2000
[quote] “I am myself a Norfolk man.. and glory in being so.” – Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson
[comics] Warren Ellis talks about David Icke. [Icke’s Web Site] “There is an essential piece of this obviously quite decent man’s brain that is missing; the Quality Control function that allows most of us to cross the street when badly deluded people walk towards us waving a matchbox shouting “Do you want to see my bomb?””
[comics] Warren Ellis talks about Cerebus. “Dave Sim is more than a little mad, as I think anyone who’s read a great deal of CEREBUS would attest to. Us old lefties instinctively shy away from someone who communicates what is at best gynephobia and at worst pure bloody misanthropy in the way that Sim does, even allowing for the dichotomy between auctorial intent and personal belief. But as a creator I keep coming back to Sim for his masterful, hugely inventive storytelling. Creatively, he’s the mutant bastard child of Will Eisner, The Studio artists (Barry Windsor-Smith and those guys) and Chuck Jones.”
[books] Another Amis posting — the Digested Letters of Kingsley Amis.
12 May 2000
[two random stories] BBC News reports that Malcolm McDowell mellows out and infertile woman gets pregnant after taking viagra.
[tech] It’s Anti-Microsoft Day at Barbelith Towers with excellent coverage of Microsoft Vs. Slashdot and Security issues in Internet Explorer. [Where does Tom find the time and energy to do these great articles?]
[tech] BBC news reports on perks for IT workers … “The more common perks include pensions, healthcare, cars, share options, flexi-time or a corporate box at a football ground. “However, companies such as Oracle provide a benefits cafeteria system in which employees are awarded points with which they can purchase the perks they want. These include extending annual holiday and life assurance for partners.
[tech] Embrace, extend, censor — Microsoft goes after Slashdot. Here’s the original article…
11 May 2000
[weblogs] Barbelith reviews top eight weblogs. [Voice in head: Must… find… online… personality…]
[film] newsUnlimited reports that Florence attempts to ban Hannibal [Text Only]
[comics] Marvel to abandon comics for videogames and Movies? “The simple paper medium of comic books just isn’t cutting it in the age of video’s flashy special effects, explosive audio and interactive action.” – The Wall Street Journal. [via Ghost in the Machine] SOMEBODY DIES! BY MARVEL BETRAYED!! EVERY BUSINESS EXEC MY ENEMY… COMICS… FIGHTS… ON! I’M BORN AGAIN! A COMIC BOOK WITHOUT HOPE…. IS A COMIC BOOK WITHOUT FEAR!!! MY… SPLEEN… EXPLODES…
[books] Final extract from Amis Autobiography — When darkness met light
10 May 2000
[mp3] Interesting article on Slashdot about my favorite MP3 Encoder — Lame
[film] filmUnlimited on trailers being released on the internet. Mat Snow, former editor of the mature gentleman’s rock monthly Mojo, once explained how he had fully enjoyed Godzilla without ever having seen the film. For the months of build-up beforehand, he had the pleasure of getting excited about the film, imagining the monster and the movie in his head, getting off on the hype. By the time the film actually came out, he had been reliably informed that it stank. So he didn’t go to see it. But he didn’t feel cheated – he had had four months of enjoyable anticipation at no cost.
[clones] First cloned mouse dies reports BBC News. “Dr Yanagimachi has indicated that Cumulina’s remains will be preserved and mounted in a new permanent exhibit in a new Institute for Biogenesis Research.”
[tv] Clerks [The Cartoon] — it’s times like these I really wished I lived in America….
[books] Extracts from Martin Amis’s new autobiography Experience: “I’ve been name dropping, in a way, ever since I first said: ‘Dad'” and “Mum, do you think I’m her father? – Definitely”
[ken4london] Livingstone and Labour close to compromise deal reports newsUnlimited.
[my inner turmoil] Do you think your friends, family and colleagues hate you? You can tell! The most common means of doing so were: being reserved by avoiding all intimate topics of conversation; not asking questions, so as to speed up any interaction; treating the other person as a stranger; physically avoiding them; not paying attention to them; and showing excessive politeness. [from newsUnlimited]
9 May 2000
[tech support] It was a bad weekend for technical Support team at Australia’s federal trade commission, Austrade after the ILOVEYOU virus was released last week….
[comics] Entire run of The Invisibles available on Ebay.
[conspiracy?] Has anybody noticed that the Doctor from UFO looks just like the Russian President Vladimir Putin?
8 May 2000
[weblogs] Interview with Jorn Barger – Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man . “I try to make it my ethic that whenever I see something that I enjoy, I don’t filter. You know, if it’s some silly thing about a TV commercial, I won’t say, well, that’s too frivolous.”
[uk weblogs] UK weblogs I’m currently eyeballing: Blue Lines, not so Soft, SK², Vavatch Orbital and Nutlog along with the old stalwards: Barbelith and The Daily Doozer.
[internet] BBC News looks at real.com’s prospects — competition from Microsoft Napster and Shoutcast seem to be the main problems!
[books] booksUnlimited interviews Martin Amis. [Text Only]
[weblogs] USS Catastrophe — a weblog about comics…
7 May 2000
[web] I’ve been trying to find the best on-line bookmark manager on the web — blink seems to be the best of the bunch (at least for me).
[film] Two interesting links on Kubrick: filmUnlimited looks at Speilberg directing Kubrick’s AI and an interesting website on The Unknown Kubrick — his photography for Look magazine.
[weblogs] Dave goes nuclear on WinerLog. [Update 19.00pm: There’s an interesting thread on Metafilter about WinerLog]
[ken4london] newsUnlimited has an interview with Ken Livingstone — the new mayor of London. “It suddenly dawns on you that all those people have gone out and voted for you, and it was overwhelming and incredibly humbling, and I hadn’t expected to have that feeling…”
6 May 2000
[news] two random, unconnected (but interesting!) links from BBC News: Net sex addiction on the rise and Author [Stephen] King feeling better [after nasty car accident last year].