[life] Ask Metafilter: What is a life-changing realization you wish you had sooner? … ‘Worrying does not help.’

[morris] The Truth Is Out There: Errol Morris’ ‘Wormwood’ … Errol Morris discussing his Netflix documentary …

“In its essence, Wormwood is a story about a very, very smart young boy, now a man in his 70s, who has been involved in an epistemological journey into the nature of his father’s death. And I like to think that the movie, in its attempt to examine these questions, matches his own sophistication about these questions. How do we know what we know? How do we know that my father was murdered? What does that murder mean? He asks this question again and again and again, particularly near the end of the film. It’s one of my favorite sections of Wormwood, when he asks, ‘What does it mean?’

“It’s the same question that I’m always asking: What does it mean? And this irony, which I learned from Eric, is not something I imposed on the material—the irony of, How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to know something? Knowledge comes with a cost. And to what extent is knowing something worth the price that we have to pay to know it? The other option is to live in a fantasy, but if you ask me if there’s anything that makes us great, it’s the pursuit of truth. It’s the fact that we attempt to reach outside of ourselves and to know something about the world around us, and ourselves.

[religion] Jesus is… [via Archillect]

[religion] Man On Verge Of Self-Realization Instead Turns To God … ‘For a second there it seemed like he was going to seriously consider the cause-and-effect relationship of his own actions and elevate himself to a new level of compassion and understanding, but then he suddenly changed course and asked God to swoop in and fix everything.’

[comics] Being Chris Ware … Profile of Chris Ware. ‘Ware has a deadpan self-abnegation that is, by all accounts, genuine. But in such an enormous book as this, which is fairly bursting with photographs of his accomplishments and friends, and all the amazing drawings documenting his rise from lonely, fatherless child to fifty-year-old genius, it does seems a terrific struggle to keep the humble pie hot through 275 pages…’

[tech] Wikipedia articles invented by a neural network … ‘Friends and existence. How to draw a coconut. Tree donkey. Category:People who can’t speed.’ [via jwz]

[politics] What Putin Really Wants … Some interesting analysis of Vladimir Putin’s motivations and objectives.

A forgery, a couple of groups of hackers, and a drip of well-timed leaks were all it took to throw American politics into chaos. Whether and to what extent the Trump campaign was complicit in the Russian efforts is the subject of active inquiries today. Regardless, Putin pulled off a spectacular geopolitical heist on a shoestring budget—about $200 million, according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes Putin effective, what makes him dangerous, is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment, to disrupt, and to take big risks.

“They do plan,” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all. But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that Putin is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it. He knows where he wants to end up, he plans the first few moves, and then he figures out the rest later. People ask if he plays chess or checkers. It’s neither: He plays blackjack. He has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it. The election interference—that was pretty risky, what he did. If Hillary Clinton had won, there would’ve been hell to pay.”

[weird] The human feet that routinely wash ashore in the Pacific Northwest, explained … ‘Why feet? It turns out that in water, human bodies naturally disarticulate, or come apart at the joints, so hands and feet often disconnect from corpses after soaking in the ocean for a while. “Feet easily disarticulate and when they are attached to a flotation device such as a running shoe, they are easily washed ashore,” wrote Gail Anderson, co-director of the Center for Forensic Research at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, in an email.’

[life] An Open Letter to the Box of Loose Cables in My Closet … a touching letter between a man and his spare cable box. ‘She looks at you and only sees a knot of ethernet cords gripping the backs of forgotten TiVo remotes, but I see much more. I see USB’s and Firewires commingling with DVI’s and IDE’s. Wax-coated earbuds waiting patiently to be called back into service. Half-drained AAA batteries begging to come out of early retirement and give my beard trimmers that last gasp of life. I see possibility. I see potential. I see my own live-in box of technological understudies with solutions at the ready. What would I do without you?’

[comics] Starlord Cover Gallery … a cover gallery for Starlord – a short-lived science-fiction comic from 1978 with some great art from Kevin O’Neill and Carlos Ezquerra …

[comics] Jim Baikie: An Appreciation by Alan Moore … AM remembers the Scottish comic artist Jim Baikie who died last month. ‘It would have been three or four years after that, while attending the second British Comics Convention as a fifteen-year-old in 1969, that I received a proper introduction to Jim’s art – he’d provided the cover for the convention booklet, a Tolkien-esque fantasy image that mid-period Wally Wood would have been proud of – and, thanks to the agency of his fellow young comics professional Steve Moore, a proper introduction to Jim himself: he was much younger than I’d expected from the accomplishment of his artwork, a good-looking and irrepressible man in his twenties who was bursting with good humour and who, at that age, was already cool enough to have played with the Savoy Brown Blues Band (ask your Dad), but was still happy to chat to an infatuated teenager with a bad pudding-basin haircut and an off-putting regional accent.’

[tv] The Sopranos to Blackadder – what are the definitive series of the best TV shows? … On Series 4 of Peep Show: ‘The elements that made Peep Show so brilliant are all here: the scene-stealing secondary characters in Super Hans, Sophie and Johnson; dialogue that is clever, funny and contains revelatory human truths. It feels like writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong felt bold enough to push the farce as far as they could. Their skill is making even the most outlandish feat – being an accessory to arson (episode one), eating a dead dog (episode five), urine soaking through the church ceiling on to the hats of wedding goers below (episode six) – feel believable, because we’ve been on the excruciating path that got Mark and Jeremy there.’

[books] Neil Gaiman reads Green Eggs and Ham … ‘I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not like them, Sam-I-am!”

[wormwood] The Bitter Secret of ‘Wormwood’… Another Look at Errol Morris’ Wormwood. ‘If Morris had simply recounted the facts, even in a way that emphasized the real suffering of the victims, that would have shocked nobody. They are the stuff of every spy movie, a genre that has successfully turned state surveillance and assassinations into seductive excitement. But unlike that genre, Wormwood—a word for a bitter poison, used by Hamlet to describe bitter truths—doesn’t produce dramatic tension by exploiting our desire to be in on the secret. It exposes us to the baser side of that desire: the narcissism, mean-spiritedness, and contempt that are so often the psychological realities of secrecy.’

[lsd] A Fateful Hunt for a Buried Stash of the Greatest LSD Ever Made … a wonderful gonzo tale about the history behind a legendary lost stash of LSD – a gentle Breaking Bad set in Wales in the 1970s. ‘Over the years, Smiles hasn’t featured in any of the books or TV documentaries about Operation Julie, so I assumed he didn’t want to speak about those years any more. But I knew he was still around: I’d heard from a good source that he’d recently appeared at the funeral of one of the other men convicted in the 70s, and that he’d got everyone stoned in the smoking area of the wake. If anyone knew whether there was still some mythical LSD buried in the ground, it would be Smiles. In the end, finding him wasn’t too hard at all, and after a day of correspondence he invited us round for tea.’

[onion] Report: Friend Doing Sober January Must Have Really Fucked Shit Up Over Holidays … ‘I don’t know if it was an out-of-control Christmas party or what, but it obviously rattled the hell out of him. When you ask him about it, he just gets quiet and says something vague about ‘just cooling off for a few weeks,’ which you know means it was something pretty fucking scary.’

[comics] Jamie Delano and Neil Gaiman on the 30-year anniversary of Hellblazer … I can’t believe I picked up the first issue of Hellblazer thirty years ago! ‘Jamie Delano is currently exploring a prose fiction career and his latest novels concern a character called Leepus living in a post-apocalyptic landscape known as Inglund. The books have a lot of synergy with his early Hellblazer work. Has he kept up with Constantine since departing? “My relationship with Constantine was a difficult and intense one,” he says. “Consequently I found it hard to maintain a monthly relationship once I’d abandoned him to the imaginations of others. I’ve dipped in now and again across the years, but inevitably we have drifted apart. I do believe one of the beauties of the complex character we have all jointly created, is his ability to represent, through different aspects of his personality, a diversity of intellectual and creative vision.”‘

[pope] The Pope has a bad idea…

[music] Phil – an old friend of the blog – on Mark E. Smith …

In 1978, I worked as a bingo caller. And for a few other summers too.

The only pop record to my knowledge which mentions bingo is The Fall’s “Bingo Master’s Break-Out”. It’s not all that good but it introduced me to the band.

Spplltt. Or sounds like that. I didn’t discover The Fall in 1979 like all the newbies telling their tales in The Guardian. I was listening in 1978 — although I only acquired the original vinyl 45 a few years ago, you know … because … there was so much going on.

That bloke made me laugh so fucking much. And I am not sure why I laughed.

[history] Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace … a fascinating deep-dive blog post on the life of Ada Lovelace from Stephen Wolfram. ‘When Ada wrote about Babbage’s machine, she wanted to explain what it did in the clearest way—and to do this she looked at the machine more abstractly, with the result that she ended up exploring and articulating something quite recognizable as the modern notion of universal computation. What Ada did was lost for many years. But as the field of mathematical logic developed, the idea of universal computation arose again, most clearly in the work of Alan Turing in 1936. Then when electronic computers were built in the 1940s, it was realized they too exhibited universal computation, and the connection was made with Turing’s work.’

[herzog] Werner Herzog: I Killed And Ate Timothy Treadwell In 2003 … ‘Timothy and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were setting up camp by a salmon stream when I approached them, aggressively batted them around, and then tore them limb-from-limb while they screamed. His judgment was perhaps clouded by his optimistic view of nature, which, in the end, sadly led to me picking his bones clean.’

[comics] Amazing Gallery of David Mazzucchelli Original Art … from a 2009 Gallery Exhibition.