linkmachinego.com

3 May 2010
[tv] Performing Don Draper … On the conundrum that is Don Draper‘He cheats on his wife relentlessly, is a workaholic and an absentee father to his children, lies about who he is, abandons his former family (and, arguably, causes his brother to hang himself), is a borderline alcoholic, and is in general awfully prudish, judgmental, and bigoted for a sexually licentious fraud of a man. If this was your OKCupid profile, you would not be attracting Don’s caliber of women. (Or would you?) But we find ways to forgive or excuse him.’
4 May 2010
[politics] Voter Power‘In the UK, the only voters with any real power to choose the government are those who live in marginal constituencies. Less than 20% of constituencies can be considered marginal.The rest of us have little or no power to influence the outcome of the election. Find out the power of your vote in this election.’
5 May 2010
[dailyfail] Labour MP tells constituent: ‘Life can only get better – if you stop reading the Daily Mail’

I remember once I had a woman come in who was really on the edge of a breakdown. She was talking about civil war and chaos, immigrants coming up the lanes of Sunderland with knives between their teeth to murder her. She was really in a terrible state. “I just said to her ‘What paper do you read, love?’ and, of course, it was the Daily Mail. I just said ‘stop reading it and you’ll find life gets better.’ That’s the only advice I could offer.

6 May 2010
[funny] Always Remember: He’s just a rich boy from a rich family…

David Cameron - He's Just A Rich Boy...

[politics] My Moment Is Yours, Ed Balls … Michael Portillo on tonight’s potential “Balls Moment” … ‘My name is now synonymous with eating a bucketload of shit in public.’
7 May 2010
[apple] The Mozzarella Cheese Head of Steve Jobs … file this under things John Gruber will probably never blog … ‘Love mozzarella cheese? Love Steve Jobs? Then you’ll love this.’ [thanks Andy]
[politics] Steve Bell on the Results of the General Election‘Oh Shit!!!’
8 May 2010
[relax] Rainy Mood … a single-serving website that plays the relaxing ambient(ish) sounds of a rain storm.
10 May 2010
Apparently Facebook Considers Your Current IP Address To Be “Public Information” As Well … more privacy issues with Facebook …

See that header in your Facebook notification email that looks like this?

X-Facebook: from zuckmail ([NzYuMTY5LjIzLjU2])

That’s your friend’s IP address…

[funny] Supreme Court Upholds Freedom Of Speech In Obscenity-Filled Ruling‘In short, freedom of speech means the freedom of fucking speech, you ignorant cocksuckers.’
11 May 2010
[funny] Go Look: I’m Pretty Sure I Invented A Time Machine…
[politics] Adam Boulton loses his rag as Nick Clegg coos at Labour … Marina Hyde’s summary of yesterday events is well worth a read … ‘Loosely speaking, then – in fact, speaking with a looseness likely to be matched only by David Cameron’s bowel movements – that is where we are now. It should go without saying that in the time it takes to press the send key we shall be somewhere else entirely. Indeed, given that the cliche of the hour is that “we are in uncharted territory”, the cartographers should surely name these coordinates the Straits of WTF and be done with it.’
[politics] Have The Tories Formed A Government Yet?‘Just about’
12 May 2010
[life] We Stopped Checking For Monsters…

We Stopped Checking For Monsters...

13 May 2010
[comics] Christ, It Works for Everything‘It was recently theorized that all New Yorker cartoons could be captioned with “Christ, what an asshole” without compromising their comedic value. I discovered this is true of virtually all comics, old and new…’
[html] The Origins of the <Blink> Tag … the creation story behind the most annoying HTML tag … ‘I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong. When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet. Then somewhere, somehow the arcane knowledge of blinking leaked into the real world and suddenly everything was blinking. “Look here”, “buy this”, “check this out”, all blinking. Large advertisements blinking in all their glory. It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.’
14 May 2010
[fun] Numbers Station Bingo … Have you been activated? Find out with bingo and Numbers Stations.
17 May 2010
[history] Scott and Scurvy … a long wonderfully written look at the history behind the treatment of scurvy and how the was cure was misunderstood and forgotten at the start of the 20th Century … ‘They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong.’
[politics] The Coalition Government Commemorative Tankard

The Coalition Government Commemorative Tankard

MIDDLE ENGLAND REJOICE!

18 May 2010
[fun] Worth A Look: Batman’s Forgotten His SafewordSpoiler AlertMarge Simpson is Europe in disguise
20 May 2010
[comics] The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield … a powerful and concise comic on the MMR Vaccine Controversy from Daryl Cunningham.
21 May 2010
[people] What Was Winston Churchill’s Tattoo? … Churchill Had A Tattoo? Who Knew??
[tv] Eye of the storm: Adam Curtis, the BBC’s in-house provocateur … long engrossing profile / interview of Adam Curtis

‘It can be hard to identify the cinematic progenitors of the Curtis aesthetic because his films sometimes seem like outward manifestations of the world wide web. His projects reorganise and remix previously existing material with new interviews and fieldwork into a new kind of narrative, one that seems analogous to a web browser with 20 tabs open at once. They debunk the utopian ideologies of earlier eras while offering grand, unifying narratives to make sense of our current hyperlinked universe, and succeed to the extent that viewers can keep several complicated arguments in their heads at once. After one emerges from the hypnotic sway of a Curtis film, it can take several days of reflection and research to assess the validity of his arguments.’

23 May 2010
[comics] Abstraction … totally not safe for work WTF weird manga – but worth a look.
24 May 2010
[people] The Reporter Who Time Forgot … Remembering Cornelius Ryan the author of The Longest Day and A Bridge To Far

He had sold, he believed, between 25 and 35 million copies of The Longest Day and 400,000 hardcover copies of The Last Battle in the United States alone. Yet each book had cost him some $150,000 to research. “I have no less than 7,000 books on every aspect of World War II. My files contain some 16,000 different interviews with Germans, British, French, etc,” he wrote. “Then there is the chronology of each battle, 5×7 cards, detailing each movement by hour for the particular work I’m engaged in. You may think this is all a kind of madness, an obsession. I suppose it is.”

25 May 2010
[funny] What have we today? … great collection of green ink letters written to newspapers in the early nineties … ‘My eight-year-old boy is a strange lad. He’s bothered about the planet and interested in butterflies and insects as well as other animals. He never watches football. Do you think he’s going to be gay? (Daily Star)’
26 May 2010
[press] News in Briefs … the wit and wisdom of Page 3 girls …

HOLLIE says there is no need to panic over the Chancellor’s spending cuts. She said: “£6.2billion sounds like a colossal figure. But if you imagine public spending as a giant pizza, we’re talking about barely a few anchovies. And I can’t stand the salty little beggars anyway.”

27 May 2010
[comics] Fuck Yeah Daniel Clowes! … a tumblr on the genius that is Dan Clowes

Panel from Ghost World

28 May 2010
[comics] Cartoonist Daniel Clowes celebrates Oakland with “Wilson” … an interview promoting his latest comic book‘Clowes, an illustrator for the “New Yorker,” is traditional in other ways, too. At a time when print is down and young cartoonists are turning to the Web, Clowes still draws everything by hand – “I’ll never type in a url to look at comics,” he says…’
[comics] Chris's Invincible Super-Blog on Batman and Superman: ‘Morrison’s Superman isn’t defined by his powers, he’s defined by his morality; the defining scene of All Star Superman isn’t Superman fighting Solaris or even Lex Luthor, it’s him stopping the girl from committing suicide. It’s that he cares. And in the same way, Morrison’s Batman is defined by one trait: He is, quite simply, the World’s Greatest Detective. No one, not even a god, can out-think him.’
[tech] Predicting the Present, First Five Years of Wired … interesting selection of quotes from the first five years of Wired …‘In a world where information plus technology equals power, those who control the editing rooms run the show.’ — Hugh Gallagher
29 May 2010
[comics] Favourite Tweets #1: Warren Ellis‘COME AND SIT IN AVANT-THARG’S SPACE LAP NOW, BOOB EARTHLETS’ (more…)
31 May 2010
[movies] Paul Verhoeven: ‘Robocop was a Jesus metaphor’‘The point of Robocop, of course, it is a Christ story. It is about a guy who gets crucified in the first 50 minutes, and then is resurrected in the next 50 minutes, and then is like the supercop of the world, but is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end.’