4 March 2010
[lmg] Ten Years Of Link Blogging … Ten years and 5407 posts to be exact – I did it. As we say on the internets: OMFG! w00t! FTMFW!
3 March 2010
[quote] ‘What’ll it be next? Choice extracts from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? Trotting out the Nietzsche and the Shelley to dignify some old costumed claptrap? Probably. Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe, who’s dreaming who? — Grant Morrison.
[quote] ‘Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life.’ — Robert McKee in Adaptation.
[quote] ‘The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.’ — Scott Adams, Crazy or Disciplined?
[quote] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72:
On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.
1 March 2010
[religion] God Watches You Google … a religious blog poses the question of how we should feel about the morality (or lack of) displayed in our search requests …
This woman goes from searching about pregnancy, to realizing that the father does not want to keep the baby, to researching abortion clinics, to researching whether she can, according to her faith, choose abortion, to dealing with a miscarriage. And at the end of it all, life goes on and she seems ready to be married.
What is so amazing about these searches is the way people transition seamlessly from the normal and mundane to the outrageous and perverse. They are, thus, an apt reflection of real life. The user who is in one moment searching for information about a computer game may in the next be looking for the most violent pornography he can imagine. Back and forth it goes…
28 February 2010
[blogs] The Power Of Ten … Meg Pickard celebrates 10 years of blogging. Congratulations Meg! :) … ‘A decade feels like a long time in so many ways – when I look back at my early posts and think about what I was doing back then and where I was in life, I am amazed how far away it feels. But throughout those ten years there have been very few of the 3692 days (more or less) when I haven’t written something on the blog, or scribbled something in draft, or at very least thought about it and felt guilty for not having sufficient time to devote to doing it.’
27 February 2010
[funny] Worth a Look: Unhappy Hipsters … Coming Soon From BBC Worldwide … 10 Reasons To Avoid Talking On The Phone.
26 February 2010
[comics] The 6 Most Realistic Moments In “Kick-Ass” … ‘Completing the Hit Girl Realisim Trifecta, there’s the scene where she–again, a tiny child–accurately shoots a pistol in each hand, scoring headshots on a roomful of bad guys. Issues of recoil are, of course, negated by the littlegirlium factor…’
25 February 2010
[comics] Happy 10th Blogiversary Neilalien! … as far as I know Neilalien’s blog and Doctor Strange / Steve Ditko fan site was the first comic blog. Amazingly, after ten years he still seems to handroll his own blog pages, which proves he’s either old school or an alien – I can’t make up my mind which… Congratulations Neil!
[comics] Jack Kirby’s Visual Interpretations of God … ‘I always found it interesting that of the very few pieces of his own work that Jack Kirby displayed in his home, three of them were his visual interpretations of God.’
24 February 2010
[politics] Glanced At: Steve Bell On The National Bullying Helpline.
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interview [Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five] … huge interview covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics … ‘What Robocop did by beating Judge Dredd to the screen was it stole the best of Judge Dredd, and when they made the Dredd movie, they were then worried about being compared with Robocop! So they took out all the black humor and all the satire, and their emasculated movie was almost a Judge Dredd movie, but not quite. Robocop was a more energetic movie. We did hear there were piles of 2000 ADs in the production offices. That does kind of show, doesn’t it?’ [via Metafilter]
23 February 2010
[war] Lost Nazi nuke-project uranium found in Dutch scrapyard … ‘Forensic nuke scientists at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) traced two pieces of metal – described as a cube and a plate – back to their exact origins and dates. Apparently both came from ores extracted at the “Joachimsthal” mine in what is now the Czech Republic, though the two are from different production batches.The cube, according to specialists at the JRC’s Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU), was produced in 1943 for the Nazi nuclear programme and was used in the lab of famous boffin Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame).’
[politics] Adam Curtis On How All Of Us Have Become Richard Nixon … ‘Just like him we have all become paranoid weirdos.’ (more…)
22 February 2010
[books] Hare-brained: Kit Williams’ Masquerade … The long and engrossing story behind the creation of Kit Williams’ Masquerade treasure hunt and it’s eventual solution … ‘The national newspapers followed up the Thomas story all week, faithfully repeating the version of events he’d given to Williams. They were particularly pleased with the notion that all these eggheads could have been defeated by Masquerade’s puzzle, only to see the hare finally discovered by a dog who stopped to pee on a random stone. This was the single aspect of the story which every newspaper emphasised, and it’s still the one thing which most casual readers know – or think they know – about Masquerade today.’ [via Metafilter]
21 February 2010
19 February 2010
[comics] Paradax: the TV show … according to internet rumours Brendan McCarthy is in Hollywood pitching Paradax as a animated TV Show … ‘Bad Boy Superhero: Smallville meets Entourage’
18 February 2010
[movies] Kosmograd: Why 2010 wont be like ‘2010’ … why the imagery and portrayal of computers in the 1984 film 2010 doesn’t match up to the computers we use today … ‘Unlike the computers of 2010, the computers in ‘2010’ do not create space. The computers of the Leonov, and even HAL 9000 on the Discovery, are little more than tools or automatons, tactile and solid. Whereas HAL looked out into our world, today we look into the world created within the computer.’
[books] Henry Sutton’s top 10 Unreliable Narrators … On The Killer Inside Me: ‘It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he’s in possession of a secret he doesn’t even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.’
17 February 2010
16 February 2010
[internet] A Crime of Shadows .. a really disturbing look at how potential sexual predators are entrapped on the internet by U.S. Police … ‘J was guilty of some things, serious things. He was guilty of saying he wanted to have sex with two imaginary children. He was guilty of being a troubled soul in a bad marriage, of abusing steroids, of a lifelong inability to establish a healthy intimacy with a woman, and of being morally adrift in a netherworld of illicit sexual desire. He was guilty of lacking moral boundaries and good sense…’ [via Metafilter]
15 February 2010
[comics] 50 Grant Morrison Graphic Novels You Should Read … ’46. We3 – Three bioengineered pets just want to find their way home.’
14 February 2010
[comics] 1966 Batman Valentines … Batman obviously is the most romantic of Superheroes … ‘I’m out to get you… Valentine!’ [See Also: Another Batman Valentine]
12 February 2010
[movies] Is Great Cinema Ever The Work Of A Single Man? … how much does a great movie owe to it’s director? … ‘Theoretically, says Loader, it is Âentirely possible for a film to direct Âitself. A solid cast and crew can be Ârelied on to fill in the gaps left by a Âdirector who is either inept or awol. “Oh, it happens all the time,” he says.’
11 February 2010
[art] dvdp … a tumblr of stunning images, animated GIFs and optical illusions.
10 February 2010
[comics] The Batman Digs This Day…
Grant Morrison on Brave and the Bold #102: One of my all-time favourite Batman panels was written by Haney and drawn by Jim Aparo and shows Batman strolling down the sunlit streets of Gotham, checking out the mini-skirted girls and accompanied by the line to end all lines: ‘Yes, Batman digs this day!’
Grant Morrison on Brave and the Bold #102: One of my all-time favourite Batman panels was written by Haney and drawn by Jim Aparo and shows Batman strolling down the sunlit streets of Gotham, checking out the mini-skirted girls and accompanied by the line to end all lines: ‘Yes, Batman digs this day!’
9 February 2010
8 February 2010
[lifehacks] 43 Simple Ways To Simplify Your Life … ‘7. Makebelieve girlfriend chair’
7 February 2010
[moore] A YouTuber Sums Up Alan Moore: ‘Sheesh. I keep trying to read his stuff, but I swear Moore is like the messiah of all who would get beat up in middle school. Thus he is against confident sexy women who flirt, confident athletic men who are badass and don’t need permission to kiss a woman, anyone who can fight or kill, anyone who knows they look good…. He is for anyone who can play the tuba, is gay, has bad hair, has a bad complexion, has frizzy hair, is socialist… it gets old.’
6 February 2010
[internet] The Nine Circles of Dante’s Internet … Part Of the 8th Circle Of Dante’s Internet: ‘People Who Ask For Advice But Don’t Listen.’
5 February 2010
[space] Spectacular Hubble View Of The Aftermath Of An Asteroid Collision … Asteroids collide or spacecraft? You decide…
[comics] High Fever: An interview with Brendan McCarthy … ‘Having done Shade and now Spider-Man and Dr. Strange — all that I’d like to do next is The Creeper! (I have to admit, Hawk and Dove never really did it for me.)’
4 February 2010
[meme] I’ll probably regret this: Ask Me A Question … ‘no, I’ve never kept a secret blog…’
[google] Have you checked out Google’s view of your social circle on the internet? … a long list of links to your friends and acquaintances pulled in automatically from a number of sources (useful for the internet stalker in all of us.)
3 February 2010
[funny] Make Your Own Malcolm Tucker Poster … ‘Eric fucking Bristow’s on the oche throwing a million darts made of human shit right at you.’
2 February 2010
[movies] The Director of Downfall Speaks Out on All Those Angry YouTube Hitlers … ‘As for the idea of such a serious scene being used for laughs, Hirschbiegel thinks it actually fits with the theme of the movie. “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality,” he says.’
1 February 2010
[comics] Superheroes, villains and everything in between … some wonderful real life superheroes and villains collected by Meg from Flickr.
31 January 2010
[comics] The Ultimate Graphic Novel (in Six Panels) … since this doesn’t contain any autobiography about compulsive masturbation I think it’s safe to conclude the ultimate graphic novel is yet to be written.
30 January 2010
[comics] V for Vendetta in Kinetic Typography … ‘Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.’ (more…)
29 January 2010
[books] Dave Eggers on J. D. Salinger: ‘I wish I’d met the man. I hope he was happy. I worry sometimes that he wasn’t a happy recluse, but I like to think he was. Wouldn’t it be Âwonderful if he actually felt like he said all he needed to say and then just called it a day (for four or five decades?). The strength of his convictions, in any case, serves as a model for us all.’
28 January 2010
[blogs] ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web … we are all Jorn Barger now … ‘If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read – and doing it for free – I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share. More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.’ [via Moreish]
27 January 2010
26 January 2010
[blogs] Right-Wing Flame War! … on the rise and fall of Little Green Footballs … [via Metafilter]
Johnson has always had a geek’s penchant for self-education, and in that spirit he cultivated a side interest, and ultimately an expertise, in writing computer code. His Web log, which he named “Little Green Footballs” (a private joke whose derivation he has always refused to divulge), was begun in February 2001 mostly as a way to share advice and information with fellow code jockeys – his approach was similar in outlook, if vastly larger in its reach, to the guiding spirit in the days of ham radio. His final post on Sept. 10, 2001, was titled “Placement of Web Page Elements.” It read, in its entirety: “Here’s a well-executed academic study of where users expect things to be on a typical Web page.” It linked to, well, exactly what it said. The post attracted one comment, which read, in its entirety, “Fantastic article.”
[conspiracy] Secrets of The Shining … a totally loopy conspiracy theory involving Stanley Kubrick and the Shining … ‘The truth is that The Shining is the story of how Stanley Kubrick cut a deal with the U.S. Government to fake the Apollo moon landings.’ [via Metafilter]
25 January 2010
[useful] Add a “Gmail This” Bookmarklet to Your Browser … if you use Gmail you probably want to use this bookmarklet to quickly send links via email. I use it everyday – it’s a great timesaver.
23 January 2010
[comics[ Walking Dead gets TV Pilot … ‘[Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard] follow in the footsteps of the master, George Romero, to do something horror often does very well, comment on human nature and society by pushing both to the edge, while also drawing you in to a fascinating, often terrifying tale of survival.’
22 January 2010
[comics] CR Holiday Interview Series Wrap-Up … great selection of interviews on comics from the Comics Reporter … ‘It was my great pleasure the last three weeks to interview some but certainly not all of my most valued writing-about-comics colleagues about some but certainly not all of the great books, series and single issues of the last 10 years…’
21 January 2010
[life] Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? … Wired on the story behind the suicides of two artificial intelligence researchers … ‘Singh was convinced that the potential of artificial intelligence was enormous. “I believe that AI will succeed where philosophy failed,” he had written on his MIT homepage. “It will provide us with the ideas we need to understand, once and for all, what emotions are.” According to Bo Morgan, a fellow student at MIT, Singh suggested that giving common sense to computers would solve all the world’s problems. “Even starvation in Africa?” Morgan asked…’
20 January 2010
[books] James Ellroy and David Peace in conversation … On his life between 1968 and 1972: ‘I have a very dim social sense. I recall the time. I recall the specific events. But I didn’t give a rat’s fucking ass. I was self-absorbed. All I wanted to do was drink, use drugs, perv around after women, unsuccessfully. And read. I didn’t give a shit. I was never leftwing. I was never a war protestor. I would just steal and hole up in libraries and sleep in parks and act like an asshole, in a minor way. But I read and nurtured notions of being a great writer. And I sensed history bombing around beside me. I knew I was living through tumultuous history.’
19 January 2010
[tv] What all this Leno/Conan/Late Night Gubbins is about: a primer for friends in the UK … nice crib sheet from Anna Pickard. ‘…it is not often a curtain gets raised like this, and it has been, for a brief time, a remarkable insight on the workings of it all – and the true bitterness, fear and anger present in all parts of the industry (of most similar industries) right now.’
18 January 2010
[retro] A Note on the Word “Zork” … possible origins of the title of one the earliest text adventure games … ‘It’s particularly appealing that this etymology makes zork an altered form of, or an alternative to … work.’