[comics] Two Free Crime Comics to Download: Criminal #1 and Cross Bronx #1.

[net] Just Can’t Get E-nough — the New Scientist on unhealthy habits created by technology. On Cheesepodding: ‘In certain circles there is even an ironic cool to be had from out-cheesing your friends. There is a problem, though. As with all addictions, you end up needing bigger and bigger hits to get the same buzz. Once I started downloading Celine Dion power ballads, I knew it was time to stop. Fortunately, I have found a variant that is, if anything, more entertaining. I download songs I know my wife hates and put them onto her iPod while she isn’t looking.’ [via the Guardian’s Technology Blog]

[trivia] 100 Things We Didn’t Know Last Year — from BBC News for 2006 … ‘Flushing a toilet costs, on average, 1.5p.’

[xmas] Attack of the Sprouts — sick of sprouts? Try this game to release some tension… [via Minor 9th]

[xmas] A News of the World Christmas — from Pandemian.

[xmas] Merry Christmas to Everyone … from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. [via Blah Blah Flowers]

[comics] Have A Cosmic Christmas, Earthlets! — a slightly bonkers Kevin O’Neill Christmas Cover for 2000AD.

[media] VLC Version 0.8.6 — New release of the swiss-army knife of Media Players – it will play anything.

[fun] Warning Signs from the Future … [via Warren Ellis]

[comics] For Sale on eBay: Ultimate X-Men, Collected 1-3, 4-8 by Mark Millar and Andy Kubert.

[xmas] Professor Richard Dawkins Speaks at Fair Hills Kindergarten Regarding Santa Claus — a ‘short imagined monologue’ from McSweeneys … ‘I can see that the topic makes many of you uncomfortable. However, this should not be viewed as a bad thing. You may weep now, but your tears are a positive, not a negative. You are now facing the truth, which comes in many forms and is not always comfortable. This is a fact that you will be exposed to again and again throughout your lives. If you wish to live a life that contains only comfortable information and not necessarily the truth, then yours will be a highly deluded existence. Your intellectual maturity depends on whether or not you are capable of accepting the truth at this early age. That is why there is no better place to begin than with the absurdity that is Santa Claus and Christmas Magic.’ [via Kottke’s Remaindered Links]

[itunes] iTunes Power Tips — some useful ideas from Lifehacker … ‘Want to separate your speed metal collection from your spouse’s Broadway tunes fetish? How about your, ahem, grownup movies from your regular collection? Used to be that you had to maintain separate playlists, or log onto the same machine under different usernames to do so. But with iTunes 7, just hold down the Shift key (Option on the Mac) when you launch iTunes to create or choose a separate iTunes library.’

[fun] Where is Jesus? — can you find Jesus in a crowd? [via Meowwcat]

[wikipedia] My Wikipedia Contrail: Larry David … ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm was credited with helping clear a Los Angeles man named Juan Catalan of a first-degree murder charge. Catalan, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, maintained his innocence, saying he was at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game on May 12, 2003, during the time of the slaying. During the game, an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm was being shot in Dodger Stadium which contained footage of Juan Catalan with his daughter. When told that his show had released a wrongfully accused man, Larry David commented in a New Yorker article, “I tell people that I’ve now done one decent thing in my life. Albeit inadvertently.”’

[comics] Eddie Campbell on the murders in Ipswich: ‘I used to think Alan was making too much of the recurrence of names and odd details in the Whitechapel Murder cases, but here it is all over, with a Police Superintendent Gull, and one of the victims named Nicholls.’

[drm] Bill Gates On The Future Of DRM — Some interesting quotes. Gates on DRM: ‘People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.’

[future] Bruce Sterling’s Final Prediction — Sterling’s last column and Prediction for Wired Magazine … ‘The Internet, for instance, crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation. It was not a bolt of destructive lightning; it was the sun breaking through the clouds. Everything we do has unpredicted consequences. It’s good to keep in mind that some outcomes are just fabulous, dumb luck…’

[net] Map of the Internet — neat hand-drawn map of the address space of the internet. [via Waxy’s Links]

[facts] 100 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Year … ’76. The day when most suicides occurred in the UK between 1993 and 2002 was 1 January, 2000.’ [via Linkbunnies.org]

[rumours] The 40 Best Celebrity Rumors Ever … On Richard Gere and Gerbils: ‘…none of Gere’s interviewers have had the guts to go there, or maybe there’s some kind of publicist-issued fatwa, but Gere has never publicly addressed the rumor. Would you?’

[comics] Howard’s End? — Journalista takes a look at Howard Chaykin’s career … ‘Armed with a drawing style that owed more to J.C. Leyendecker than Jack Kirby, a storytelling sensibility closer to Raymond Chandler than Chris Claremont, and design chops seemingly on loan from God, Chaykin produced work during the 1980s that in many ways still has yet to be equalled by anyone creating adventure comics to this day. American Flagg!, Time2, Blackhawk, The Shadow: these were graphically challenging works of surprising and lasting storytelling sophistication, capable of entertaining thinking adults like few other works being produced outside the still-embryonic art-comics scene at the time. An implied blowjob scene from Blackhawk, not actually depicted but suggested through clever use of juxtaposition and framing, shocked DC Comics’ readership but signalled that Chaykin was an artist capable of anything…’

[drink] What Happens To Your Body If You Drink A Coke Right Now? … ‘In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.’ [via A Welsh View]

[time] Accurate Time — website which tells you how accurate the time is on your computer … [via Linkbunnies.org]

[film] Hot Fuzz — another trailer this time for the new movie from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright. [via Sore Eyes]

[film] 300 — movie trailer for Frank Miller’s 300. ‘Spartans! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty… For tonight we dine in hell!’

[politics] Dick Cheney’s Google Searches: ‘birdshot pellet removal, quail hunting “involuntary manslaughter”, katherine harris naked, iraq exit strategy, mullah omar MySpace’

[iraq] Steve Bell: I Will Leave Forn Policy to the Grown Ups.

[tv] Imagine Links — nicely annotated link list covering Alan Yentob’s BBC documentary on the Internet. ‘I did try to track down Yentob’s myspace and livejournal but they appear to have been removed.’

[comics] Todd McFarlane on Neil Gaiman and Spawn #9 (from long before the their court case):

[secondlife] Second Life Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians: ‘…an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they’re in the same ballpark.’ [via the Guardian’s Technology Blog]

[google] How Google handles hacked sites — interesting post from the head of anti-webspam at Google on why a website got de-listed from their index and how Google deals with the problem … ‘So talkorigins.org has these porn words and spammy links, and it’s all hidden via sneaky JavaScript. We have pretty good reason to believe that this site was hacked, but it’s still causing problems for regular users, so Google has to take action…’ [via Scobleizer]

[tv] Charlie Brooker: When it comes to Psychics, my Stance is Hardcore: they must Die Alone in Windowless Cells.

[london] Monopoly Map … ‘A geographically accurate map of the elements of standard London Monopoly’ [via qwghlm.co.uk]

[xmas] ‘Tis the Season — an Xmas blog from Anna and Meg. Also worth checking out is Meg’s Mince Pie Mania Flickr Group: ‘This group is all about capturing the ultimate Mince Pie. It’s a Christmas favourite but no-one can agree on what makes it just right. Some argue it’s the deep fill mince, others the shortcrust pastry and others still prefer half and half. I’m on the half and half side but your challenge this Christmas, should you chose to accept, is to get photographing those Mince Pies…’

[life] ‘Our two poos have combined…’ — Jon Ronson reporting from the toilets on a RyanAir Flight. ‘…here in the toilet, I have an epiphany. “If there’s someone waiting outside,” I think, “I’m going to hold the door open for them!” I nod to myself and open the door. There’s a man standing there. “Here you are!” I say cheerfully. Together, we glance at the space I’m welcoming him into – a tiny, brown, disgusting cubicle. He furrows his brow, slightly taken aback, and enters. I cram myself back in my seat. “That was a nice and well-balanced thing for me to do,” I think.’ [Related: Out Of The Ordinary: True Tales Of Everyday Craziness on Amazon]

[games] Asteroids Revenge – amusing Flash sequel to the classic Atari Asteroids computer game. [via Waxy’s Links]

[simpsons] When iPods take over the Earth — screengrabs from a new episode of the Simpsons showing what happens after the iPods become self-aware.

[myspace] Murder”‰on”‰MySpace — Wired documents another murder involving MySpace … ‘In many murders, victims and their killers are acquainted: wife shoots husband, crack dealer stabs customer, pimp strangles streetwalker. So you would expect some interaction among the friends and relatives of the perpetrator and the victim. In fact, typically there’s little. Even after intra-family crimes, relatives tend to choose sides and stay on them. “People distance themselves,” says Charles Figley, head of Florida State University’s Traumatology Institute. “The ties that bind people – births, marriages – split apart because of a catastrophe.” On social network sites, those sides interact. Victims’ buddies can howl at killers’ cousins, and the cousins can scream back. “All the old social relationship models and theories don’t apply anymore,” Figley adds. “We’re rewriting textbooks here.”‘

[comics] Tharg the Mighty’s MySpace Profile … ‘Borag Thungg, Earthlets!’ [via this Metafilter post on Eddie Campbell and 2000AD creators blogging]

[comics] Eddie Campbell has a Blog … ‘In the old days i’d have made a one-page ‘Alec’ out of this, but today we squander our narratives in a blog.’ [via Comics Reporter]

[comics] Scans of The Master Race by Bernie Krigstein … [via Comics Reporter]

[books] Robert Pirsig Interview — a wide-ranging discussion with the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance … ‘He says that ever since he could think he had an overwhelming desire to have a theory that explained everything. As a young man – he was at university at 15 studying chemistry – he thought the answer might lie in science, but he quickly lost that faith. ‘Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even.’ He went to search elsewhere…’

[tv] Binge Watching Contemporary TV — the blog City of Sound on DVD Box Sets … ‘When binge watching really kicks in, the form of the content itself is implicitly involved, as I’d suggest that the tighter the ‘universe’ the show inhabits, the higher the levels of intensity involved. In other words, with a show like ‘The West Wing’ – of which more later – the same set of characters inhabiting largely the same few spaces of the same location over seven seasons creates a gravitational pull which is difficult to escape from. Similarly, ‘Lost’, in being confined by an island, builds up a fictional universe one is immersed for most of the episode, with flashbacks off-island simply a counterpoint to the resolution of returning to that natural prison. Arguably, most successful TV shows have attempted to create a tightly defined universe…’

[books] Digested Read: In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal … ‘Black Forest Gateau has an undeserved reputation as a dessert for chavs. My extensive research, both in Germany and at the Fat Duck development kitchen, has proved that Toscano Black 63 chocolate, when combined with cherries soaked in the urine of adolescent male squirrels, is a feast for the senses.’ [Related: In Search of Perfection on Amazon]

[movies] The Top 10 Movie Spaceships … ‘The Nostromo is little more than a space tugboat, pulling a giant ore refinery through space. Though it has no weapons, when given the (famously complex) command to self-destruct, it really goes off with a bang. An underrated ship, it could land on planets and scope out foreign lifeforms… which turned out to be not such a great idea after all.’

[comics] A Transcript of Alan Moore on Fanboy Radio — you can also download the podcast … Moore on the Simpsons Episode: ‘The episode involves new competition to The Android’s Dungeon that brings in hip comic creators like “my hip self, the hip Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes to their new shop. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone are listening… your South Park DVD distribution here in the UK is shameful! Should they offer to let me on their show, I’d do it. I dunno – if George Clooney can play a gay dog… If there is some other sexually-confused animal, I’d be a natural for it in many ways.’

[books] Creator of a monstrous hit — profile of Thomas Harris the man behind Hannibal Lecter and his new book Hannibal Rising … ‘The profound mystery of the first two Lecter novels, Red Dragon (1981), in which the doctor appears only as a minor character, and in prison at that, and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), was that no psychological explanation was offered for his extreme cruelty. He was beholden to no one and seemed to have come from nowhere. ‘Nothing happened to me,’ he tells Clarice Starling, the investigator whose mission it becomes to trap him. ‘I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.’ But this, it seems, is exactly what Harris is now attempting to do: to reduce Lecter to a set of influences, to show how he became the man he is, without conscience or remorse…’

[rss] I updated LMG to WordPress a couple of months ago. It was pretty painless and I hope no one actually noticed the change but one of the downsides was that I had to redirect my RSS feed. The permanent home of the new feed can be found here:

http://www.timemachinego.com/linkmachinego/feed/
The old feed will still work but if you’re anal about these things you might want to update it. While I’m at it – you can email me via this form if you wish and if you’re stalking me you might find my Del.icio.us Linklog and Flickr Photostream interesting.

[tech] Health fears lead schools to dismantle wireless networks … ‘Michael Bevington, a classics teacher for 28 years at the school, said that he had such a violent reaction to the network that he was too ill to teach. “I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom,” he said. “First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.”’

[film] Who killed Superman? — more from the Guardian on the true story behind the movie Hollywoodland … ‘As with the many theories that swirl around the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short – the tortured and mutilated Black Dahlia – there are too many contradictory pieces to assemble a single coherent jigsaw puzzle of Reeves’ death/murder. Or rather, there are perhaps three jigsaws with not enough pieces to complete any of them.’

[tv] Make Love, Not Warcraft — Southpark animators discuss intergrating World of Warcraft into an episode of the animated TV Show … ‘The Blizzard team gave us a special “friends and family” server to play on. Every once an a while a strange player would walk by and check out group the filming. The programmers could instantly kill a player that got in the way of filming. There’s a player out there wondering what they had stumbled upon just before they were wiped from the location.’

[tv] It’s Like A Jungle Sometimes — Grace Dent on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here … ‘Being in the jungle makes you constipated. Nobody aside from Lauren Booth has had a poo. Oddly enough, living on a diet of boiled muddy water and chargrilled alligator bum doesn’t do much for the bowels. Neither does sitting on the loo praying for movement with David Gest’s ghoulish face against the door clutching a bucket of water asking if you’ve had any luck.’

[comics] Roaring’s Rantin’s: The Tale of Rudcliff and Williams — scans of an obscure Brendan McCarthy and Pete Milligan comic strip from 1987 …

[comics] Chris Weston has a Blog — Chris Weston was the artist on The Filth with Grant Morrison and Ministry of Space with Warren Ellis … ‘One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at me (by the inbred, ingrate scum who pose as my colleagues) is the fact that all my characters look JUST LIKE ME! That’s one if the hazards of using photographic reference when you’ve only got yourself as a model.’ [via BeaucoupKevin]

[books] The Mother Load — another interview with James Ellroy … ‘What I like about the era I am writing about, meaning 1958 to 1972, is that the anti-Communism mandate justified virtually any kind of clandestine activity. I like exploring the mind-set of extreme expediency.’ [via Kottke]