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1 September 2014
[people] Werner Herzog On Chickens‘The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity, is just overwhelming.’
2 September 2014
[books] All About Alienation… Alan Moore discusses H. P. Lovecraft … ‘What Lovecraft seems to be doing in works like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is attempting to embed the cosmic in the regional. He was doing his writing where he loved the New England landscape around him, he loved its history, he loved the way it looked, he loved everything about it. In that sense he was a very provincial person. He found his stay in New York unendurably horrific. But at the same time he was keeping up with the science of the day. And he understood the implications of that science; he understood the implications of relativity; he understood the implications of the quantum physicists; perhaps only dimly, but he understood how this decentralised our view of ourselves; it was no longer a view of the universe where we had some kind of special importance. It was this vast, unimaginably vast expanse of randomly scattered stars, in which we are the tiniest speck, in a remote corner of a relatively unimportant galaxy; one amongst hundreds of thousands, and it was that alienation that he was trying to embody in his Nyarlathoteps and his Yog-Sothoths.’
3 September 2014
[movies] ‎Man On Fire: The Top 10 Films Of Tony Scott … interesting list of essential films directed by Tony Scott‘Day of Thunder – If you call this TOP GUN on the race track I am going to punch you in the face. This has nothing to do with TOP GUN and doesn’t even come close to resembling that story. Cole Trickle doesn’t have anybody really fighting for him outside of Randy Quaid, and if that’s all you have you’re fucked.’
4 September 2014
[loremipsum] Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China … the strange story of finding hidden messages in Google Translate with Lorem Ipsum filler text as input … ‘It all started a few months back when I received a note from Lance James, head of cyber intelligence at Deloitte. James pinged me to share something discovered by FireEye researcher Michael Shoukry and another researcher who wished to be identified only as “Kraeh3n.” They noticed a bizarre pattern in Google Translate: When one typed “lorem ipsum” into Google Translate, the default results (with the system auto-detecting Latin as the language) returned a single word: “China.” Capitalizing the first letter of each word changed the output to “NATO”…’
5 September 2014
[comics] The Unlikely Rise, Fall, And Rise Again Of “Viz” Comic … profile of Viz from Buzzfeed … ‘Some of the best-loved characters have changed in line with society. Student Grant, a nerdy university stereotype, began to feel outdated. (“They’re customers now,” says Dury.) Roger Mellie was just a sweary TV presenter; now he’s a way to satirise recent media scandals (at the time of writing Ian Botham’s Twitter account has recently posted a picture of an erect penis, and Thorp and Dury are going to have Roger’s do the same). Others remain a constant: Sid the Sexist is still yet to lose his virginity, and Fru ‘T’ Bunn remains a sketch about a baker who makes his own sex dolls…’
6 September 2014
[batman] XombieDIRGE: ‘I can take you as far as Blüdhaven, after that your on your own.’

Batman Hitchhiking

7 September 2014
[comics] Bill Sienkiewicz’s Moon Knight … gallery of art from Sienkiewicz’s mid-80’s run on Marvel’s Moon Knight.
8 September 2014
[tech] Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1? … another interesting titbit of Windows history from Raymond Chen.
9 September 2014
[crime] Police vow to stop Jack the Ripper before he kills again‘The investigation has so far interrogated 180,000 suspects, 140,000 of them black, 20,000 Polish, two Frenchman and the Duke of Clarence.’
10 September 2014
[life] Maslow’s Modern Hierarchy of Needs … another addition has been made to Maslow’s pyramid.
11 September 2014
[tv] Warren Ellis’s Heisenberg Theory … Warren Ellis On Walter White … ‘What keeps him alive is being a fictional supervillain. What kills him is being human.’
12 September 2014
[wisdom] The original hand-written Oblique Strategies … by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1974 … ‘Honor thy error as hidden intention.’

Original Oblique Strategies

13 September 2014
[comics] The Moon Knight Portfolio … another gallery of art by Bill Sienkiewicz and Christie Scheele from 1983.
14 September 2014
[people] In conversation with Werner Herzog: ‘Facts do not constitute truth’ … highlights from an evening with the eccentric movie director in Brooklyn …

Holdengräber reminded him of the dictum, attributed to Blaise Pascal, that opens Lessons of Darkness, Herzog’s 1992 documentary: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour.”

Herzog repeated it. He said, “Actually, Pascal didn’t write that. I wrote that.”

Holdengräber said: “But it sounds so very like Pascal.”

“Pascal should have written it,” Herzog said, of the 17th-century philosopher. “That’s why I signed his name.”

15 September 2014
[books] Don Estelle: Sing Lofty (Thoughts of a Gemini) – An important and definitive guide … Scary Duck reads Don Estelle’s autobiography so we don’t have to … ‘If there’s one thing that stands out from Sing Lofty it’s this: Despite his prodigious singing voice, he was certainly no writer. And this comes out in his haphazard style, swinging from one subject to the next, recalling his exact mortgage payment at the time of the Suez Crisis and the name, address and post code of every booking he ever had, to his (probably righteous) rage at his lack of TV work after It Ain’t Half Hot Mum finished. If there’s an alternative title for this book, it’ll be Modern Life Is Shit… ‘
16 September 2014
[gif] The Thin Yellow Line … astounding animated GIF of a crowd leaving Wembley stadium. [via jzw]
17 September 2014
[funny] Werner Herzog’s Note To His Cleaning Lady‘I have conquered volcanoes and visited the bitter depths of the earth’s oceans. Nothing I have witnessed, from lava to crustacean, assailed me liked the caked debris haunting that small plastic soap hammock in the smaller of the bathrooms. Nausea is not a sufficient word.’
18 September 2014
[scotland] This Is What It Will Be Like If Scotland Votes For Independence‘Queen: You lost a whole bloody country, you dishfaced twat.’

Angry Queen Punches PM

19 September 2014
[movies] How ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Went From In-Joke to Blockbuster … on the comic book origins of the TMNT franchise … ‘The Turtles literally started out as a joke. Co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were comic-artist wannabes when they spent a November 1983 evening doodling the masked, weaponized reptiles to entertain themselves. Each adjective in Turtles’ title represented a hot superhero-comic trend at the time — mutants were the stars of Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men; DC’s New Teen Titans had teenage protagonists; and future Sin City impresario Frank Miller had stuffed his groundbreaking run on Daredevil full of ninjas. By throwing it all together atop a funny-animal framework — which, from Carl Barks’ Donald Duck to Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, had long been a route to comic-book gold — Eastman and Laird simply obeyed the Spinal Tap doctrine of cranking it to eleven.’
20 September 2014
[politics] Daily Mash: Government Policy To Be Anecdote-Based‘Some of the anecdotes we’ve gathered are frankly shocking. Apparently there’s a man in Chester who’s signing on but gets a new 52” TV and a massive slap-up curry delivered to his house every day. Yes, every day. Anecdotes have also been helpful in David Cameron’s anti-porn campaign, with one Mumsnet user reporting that her son had stumbled across images of large-breasted milfs after typing ‘GCSE revision guides’ into Google.’
21 September 2014
[tech] These Two Guys Tried to Rebuild a Cray Supercomputer … recreating a 1976 supercomputer as a small computer using modern hardware … ‘The thing that turned out to be tricky, actually, was the software. No one had preserved a copy of the Cray operating system. Not the Computer History Museum. Not the U.S. government. It was just gone. Fenton searched high and low, eventually finding an old disc pack that contained a later version of the Cray OS…’
22 September 2014
[movies] Ghostbusting Lovecraft … great analysis of how the movie Ghostbusters beats back H. P. Lovecraft’s worldview …

…the busters’ typical enemies are ghosts of the Poltergeist persuasion, the Big Bad of the movie, a formless alien god from Before Time summoned by a mad cultist-cum-art deco architect, is basically Lovecraftian. From Gozer’s perspective—or the perspective of the Gozer cultist—human beings are small mammals clustered close to the firelight of their pathetic “reason,” etc. etc. etc. Standard Lovecraftian spiel. The skyscraper (and by extension New York and all human civilization) is the illusion. Scratch its skin and you’ll find a heartless alien reality beneath.

But Gozer loses. And the shape and consequences of his loss undercut the Lovecraftian dichotomy between apparent reality and actual horrifying reality. In Ghostbusters that horrorscape isn’t the truth either—it’s a mistaken interpretation of an underlying world that’s gross, evolving, playful, social, compassionate, and way more interesting than the dry surface layer.

23 September 2014
[movies] Jamie Zawinski watches all nine Hellraiser movies… ‘Hellblazer #9 – Revelations: Despite the reviews, I must say, I enjoyed this one! Maybe I was a little punch-drunk by the time I made it this far, though. And anything would be a step up from Hellworld. It starts off with some shaky-cam nonsense, but fortunately they didn’t keep that up. A couple of jerky bro teens go to Mexico, murder a hooker, and pick up a Lament Configuration from some dude in a bar, you know, like you do. Most of the movie is told as a flashback at a dinner party with their jerky family, when one of them escapes from hell and shows up skinless on the veranda. Antics ensue.’
24 September 2014
[books] Ten things you should know about HP Lovecraft‘Lovecraft died of cancer of the small intestine in 1937. In keeping with his lifelong fascination with science, he kept a detailed diary of his eventually mortal illness. When he died, Lovecraft was buried in Swan Point Cemetery and listed on his mother’s family’s monument. This wasn’t enough for Lovecraft’s fans: in 1977, a group funded and installed a separate headstone. In 1997, a particularly avid fan attempted to dig up Lovecraft’s corpse under the headstone, but gave up after finding nothing from digging three feet.’
25 September 2014
[life] The Eleven Worst Plants … an amusing list of awful plants … ‘#3 Yucca – Utterly, utterly loathsome. Why is the bottom a hazardous nest of spikes and sticks, while the top is a nauseating puff of white fuzz? Whither so tall? What colors run riot here? Sickly facsimiles of green, pungent half-dead attempts at brown. This is a corpse attempting to revive itself. I would take a flamethrower to the entire San Joaquin valley if I could rid the country of them.’
26 September 2014
[batman] How To Kill The Batman Book … a striking fake book cover.

How To Kill The Batman

27 September 2014
[space] 62 Kilometers above Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko … absolutely stunning picture from the spacecraft Rosetta which continues to orbit the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
28 September 2014
[movies] The 10 Best Quotable Films‘Airplane!, 1980 – It’s not just about “Don’t call me Shirley”, surely. Airplane! made shameless use of repetition (“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking / smoking / sniffing glue”), misunderstandings (“Nervous?” / “Yes” / “First time?” / “No, I’ve been nervous lots of times”), and fnar fnar jokes to create one of the most juvenile films of all times – and one that regularly tops “funniest film of all time” lists. Its rapid-fire wordplay is as cringe-inducing as it is amusing, but the deadpan delivery by Leslie Nielsen and co ensures they don’t seem aware of their own comedy.’
29 September 2014
[comics] Trash! … an early, little-remembered Alan Moore fumetti comic from 1982.
30 September 2014
[comics] Nine Comic Books About Jim Gordon And Gotham City Police … a list highlighting some interesting Batman comics … ‘Gotham Central – While the series has great stories like “Soft Targets” and and “Half a Life” — and while the entire series delivers the gritty-crime-in-a-superhero-universe feel that the show aspires to — Gotham viewers will probably be most interested in checking out “Unresolved” (Gotham Central #19 – 22 and handily available in paperback), a story that focuses on Harvey Bullock. At the time, Bullock had been kicked off the force in disgrace after taking the law into his own hands, but the unfinished business of a brutal case involving the Mad Hatter and the Penguin pulls him back in and shows just how far he’s willing to go in the pursuit of justice.’