1 March 2014
[comics] Clintonlovespizza: “Wolverine, bring me a cheese pizza.” …
2 March 2014
[movies] Today is the Day Marty McFly Went to the Future … and tomorrow, yesterday and next week…
3 March 2014
[web] Only 90s Web Developers Remember This … HTML tag nostalgia … ‘The 1×1.gif — or spacer.gif, or transparent.gif — is just a one pixel by one pixel transparent GIF. Just like the most futuristic CSS framework of today but in a billionth of the file size, 1×1.gif is fully optimized for the responsive web.’
4 March 2014
[curtis] Adam Curtis: “We don’t read newspapers because the journalism is so boring” … another interview with Adam Curtis … ‘So much of the way the present world is managed is through – not even systems – its organizations, which are boring. They don’t have any stories to tell. Economics, for example, which is central to our life at the moment … I just drift off when people talk about collateralised debt obligations, and I am not alone. It’s impossible to illustrate on television, it’s impossible to tell a story about it, because basically it’s just someone doing keystrokes somewhere in Canary Wharf in relation to a server in … I dunno … Denver, and something happens, and that’s it. I use the phrase, ‘They are unstoryfiable’. Journalism cannot really describe it any longer, so it falls back onto its old myths of dark enemies out there.’
5 March 2014
[movies] The Original Robocop Was A Christ Allegory … ‘We could view Robocop as Verhoeven’s response to a kind of mythological or narrative challenge: retell the life, death, and resurrection of Christ (as an historical figure or a religious one, it’s up to you) in a way that’s relevant for our contemporary context. The idea that someone like Verhoeven might respond to that challenge by inventing a murdered cop who is brought back to life by technical wizardry, only to walk the Earth again as a robot, is pure genius, almost hilariously so. It not only suggests an awesomely freewheeling response to an ancient storyline; it also raises the absolutely gonzo interpretive possibility that the machines and devices around us, from police drones to television sets, are able to bear religious, mythic, or theological implications.’
6 March 2014
[tv] TV palate-cleansers: after Breaking Bad, viewers need Cake Boss … ‘There is only so much of, say, Borgen that one can take before it all gets too much. You find yourself either shuffling around with your brow furrowed as you wrestle with the weighty thematic issues of whatever you’re binge-watching, or trapped in a desperate cycle of increasingly hyperbolic praise for a show that you only really like because a broadsheet newspaper said you should. When this happens, you need crap. You need a palate-cleanser. You know the sort of shows I’m talking about. Cake Boss, for example, is the perfect antidote to Game of Thrones. Sometimes, when you’ve watched 350 different but identically named characters from 200 barely distinguishable regions shout frilly exposition at each other for four straight hours, you just want to watch a man make a cake. Possibly a cake shaped like a Transformer. Possibly while doing all he can to push the limits of New Jersey’s workplace harassment laws.’
7 March 2014
[comics] League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Nemo: Roses of Berlin annotations … more LOEG annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘Panel 2. “Heil, Hynkel.” As shown in the previous issues of League, there is no Adolph Hitler in the world of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, just as there is no Mussolini and various other major world figures. What we have instead are literary or filmic analogues for these characters. In this case, Hitler is replaced by Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler analogue from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940).’
8 March 2014
[politics] The Top Five Political Twitter Gaffes … ‘We can’t decide if this is a gaffe or an unintentional stroke of genius. Who knew Ed Balls would become a social media superstar by accidentally tweeting his own name?’
9 March 2014
10 March 2014
[columbo] The Case For Making Columbo America’s Doctor Who … a reminder of how great Columbo was … ‘Columbo says things like “Watch my hand, it’s full of grease. This is my dinner. Would you like a piece of chicken?” to suspects. He is deliberate. He moves at the pace of justice. Unflagging, unwearying, unrelenting; he is the Anton Chigurh of goodness. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards Columbo. It is his fundamental goodness, as much as his native intelligence, that make him a good detective. He is not a remote genius; he is not a refined gentleman; he is a good man, and it is this that makes him not just a good detective but my detective. He is America’s detective. A good and a quiet man who brings his own lunch and will not go away until order is restored.’
11 March 2014
[dailyfail] Profits Of Doom … Is the Daily Mail Online as sucessful as it seems? … ‘DMGT also reported that their print advertising was down 2%, bringing in only £53million this year. This figure was kind of brushed over in favour of talk of website growth – played down almost – but it’s worth a quick look. £53 million is £12 million more in ad revenue than the website generates. Yes, the website’s growth has been impressive – it has become the biggest newspaper website in the world – but it’s actually pulling in much less cash than its dead-tree equivalent. The Daily Mail’s circulation is 1.6 million, about 1% of its apparent online audience. So the ad space they’re selling online is actually, relatively, worthless and it appears to be their only major stream of revenue.’
12 March 2014
[london] Oh shit, say tube drivers … The Daily Mash on the death of Bob Crow… ‘Martin Bishop, a driver from Peckham, said: “I would very much like the RMT to advertise – immediately – for a New Person to Scare the Shit Out of Capitalists. “However, I suspect it may now be time for me to drive a taxi.”’
13 March 2014
[www] 25 Things You Might Not Know About The Web On Its 25th Birthday … ‘5 Tim Berners-Lee is Gutenberg’s true heir – In 1455, with his revolution in printing, Johannes Gutenberg single-handedly launched a transformation in mankind’s communications environment – a transformation that has shaped human society ever since. Berners-Lee is the first individual since then to have done anything comparable.’
14 March 2014
[tech] Good advice from a Fortune Cookie … ‘You will never get back the years of your life you spent pointlessly rolling your own CMS.’
15 March 2014
[histort] The First Ever Selfie … ‘Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist, took this self-portrait 175 years ago in the back of his family’s silver-plating shop in Philadelphia. On the back, Cornelius wrote: “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.” It was one of the first Daguerreotypes to be produced in America…’
16 March 2014
[comics] It’s Affable Alan Moore… His Stories Never Bore! … Lew Stringer on Alan Moore … ‘Behold! He’s breathing new life into the genre!’
17 March 2014
[life] Report: Only 20 Minutes Until Introverted Man Gets To Leave Party … ‘I told myself I’d stay here until 8:30, and I already killed about 15 minutes avoiding conversation by circling repeatedly around the table of hors d’oeuvres to appear occupied, and another cumulative half hour pretending to text friends, so I just need to make it a few more minutes…’
18 March 2014
[comics] Katsuhiro Otomo and the Perfect Panels of ‘Akira’ … ‘Otomo takes the basics of comics art and executes them so well that he elevates a scene that could’ve been seen in any comic into something divine.’
19 March 2014
[internet] How to use the Internet …
20 March 2014
[tv] 27 Reasons Why You’re Still Watching “The West Wing” … ‘R.I.P Dolores Landringham. You were just the best.’
21 March 2014
[politics] The Conservatives Long-Term Economic Plan For Britain … ‘Click your nearest city to find out what the Conservatives are doing for you…’
22 March 2014
[tech] Spring Cleaning Who Has Access to Your Social Media Data … useful tips for managing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn … ‘Just like the spring cleaning rule that says, “If you haven’t worn it in six months, throw it out,” you should use the same edict with your online data: “If you haven’t logged in to an app or site in six months, revoke its access.”’
23 March 2014
[comics] Script Robot Moore and Art Droid Gibson Celebrate Their Eagle Award For Halo Jones … ‘The celebration’s over! Back to work’
24 March 2014
[crime] What the Kitty Genovese Story Really Means … turns out most of what I knew about the murder of Kitty Genovese is wrong … ‘The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene—precisely because neighbors had called for help—Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled.’
25 March 2014
[comics] Matt Fraction on Batman #405 … interesting analysis of two pages from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s “Year One” arc on Batman … ‘Miller’s still calling shots here more often than not. The longer and longer I’ve written comics the less and less interested in that control I become; besides, if you write your shit the right way the variations of interpretation any artist worth a good goddamn will come at you with will all be what you wanted or better anyway… There are no significant coloring notes at all nor environmental ones — the rain it would appear was entirely Mazzucchelli, the time of night and everything else Lewis, smartly working backwards from the following issue.’
26 March 2014
[comics] Watch Alan Moore Do Magic… … ‘But yes, I can definitely, definitely do like, real magic…’
27 March 2014
[ipsum] Translating Lorem Ipsum … What does the filler text “lorem ipsum” mean? … ‘The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless. The 16th-century printer who came up with it got there by mangling Cicero’s ‘De finibus bonorum et malorum’, an exposition of Stoicism, Epicureanism and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. Though most of the metaphysical subtlety has been wrung out, sense hasn’t completely: the text is haunted, as Derrida might have put it, by the piece of writing it once was.’ [via As Above]
28 March 2014
[suicide] The Woman in 606 … well written investigation into the suicide of a woman in Seatle …
What could she be trying to communicate through all that stuff about being from the future? I asked. What about the flour she poured everywhere?
“A person in a psychotic state is trying to push their reality back into the environment,” the psychologist said, describing a theory from psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. “In a sense, you’re holding it because she pushed it back out of herself. She put it back into your environment—whatever she was trying to express. So you’re left with it as a mystery. Everybody in proximity is left with it. Everybody who witnessed it is holding it. So the cop has to hold it. You have to hold it. Your boyfriend is trying to hold it. And it’s her trauma. It’s her experience of trying to communicate a trauma, while not necessarily being able to process it herself. So when you work with people who are psychotic, the challenging thing is you’re dealing with unspoken, often preverbal trauma that they’re not emotionally processing, so you end up holding it for them. It’s almost like they scattershot their reality at everyone. You’re left with the mystery, right? What was the powder? Why’d she go out the window like that? What’s with the white cat? We’re still in her dream with her. So in a sense”—the psychologist stopped for a moment, watching me take notes—”so in a sense, you’re writing about this because in a way she left you with all these mysteries. She left you with an unfinished dream and you’re trying to finish it for her.”
It’s impossible to know what was happening in her mind, but it’s also impossible not to wonder…
29 March 2014
[books] Meanwhile, on Tumblr… ‘Big hair, one shoe, no knickers. we’ve all been there.’
30 March 2014
31 March 2014
[funny] Bollocks is Britain’s first language … ‘The Institute for Studies found that most Britons were fluent speakers of bollocks, and could talk bollocks on almost any subject without the need for facts or logic. Professor Henry Brubaker said: “Bollocks is a rich and vibrant language that enables the speaker to sound knowledgeable despite being what we linguists call ‘a knob’.’