linkmachinego.com

4 January 2022
[time] COVID Standard Time‘Today is Tuesday, March 674th, 2020.’
5 January 2022
[music] Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin perform Steve Reich’s Clapping Music … brilliantly edited.

7 January 2022
[drink] The Heaviest Drinker in the Animal Kingdom … Today I learned it is very hard to get hamsters drunk. ‘Alcohol goes straight from the gut to the liver, which starts breaking down the mind-altering toxin that is ethanol. Hamster livers are “so efficient” at processing ethanol that very little ends up in their blood, says Tom Lawton, a critical-care doctor in Bradford, England. But when the hamsters got injected with ethanol, the substance could bypass the liver and go into their bloodstream and then their brain—hence much wobbling and falling over. Hamsters’ alcohol tolerance is likely an adaptation to their hoarding lifestyle.’
10 January 2022
[web] Meet the man who accidentally started an assassin hiring website … Buying a internet domain name can have unexpected consequences. ‘Innes had received a message from a woman named Helen. She was stranded in Canada, had lost her passport, and wanted three family members in the UK murdered for screwing her out of her father’s inheritance. He didn’t respond. But she persisted: sending a second email, which included names, addresses and other corroborating information. Innes felt compelled to act…’
11 January 2022
[books] Infographic of Words Invented or Coined by Shakespeare … Shakespeare invented the word fap? Really?

Partial Infographic of Words Shakespeare Invented

12 January 2022
[podcasts] Two podcasts series I’ve listened to recently…

  • Hunting Ghislaine … John Sweeney examines how Ghislaine Maxwell became a convicted sex trafficker.

  • The Coming Storm … An attempt to understand QAnon and it’s history.

14 January 2022
[games] Creating Lode Runner … How the classic 8-bit platformer game Lode Runner was created. ‘The manner in which James’s system worked made the monsters seem to have intelligence – they’d often pause rather than home in on you. “And what made the game really interesting was they ran all this logic to determine if they were going to make this one move, left or right, but you could then jump off a platform and end up falling halfway down the screen. At that point, all bets were off, because your position changed so quickly,” says James, adding that – as you might have guessed – “a lot of the fun for me was applying the logic to different levels and not necessarily playing the game!”’ [More: Looking back at Lode Runner]
17 January 2022
[cummings] Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his £10-a-month blog … A deep dive into the world of Dominic Cummings.

What’s so interesting about Cummings is that although he seems to share some of this deep scepticism about democratic politics and politicians – too slow, too trivial, too easily spooked – he cannot fully embrace it. After all, tracking public opinion in a clear-eyed, unsentimental way is what he does, perhaps better than anyone. He is a genius at it. In the end, his blog reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke: “The food here is terrible!” “Yes, and such small portions!” Cummings thinks that British politics is broken, that the two main parties are ready for the knacker’s yard, and that most of the political class couldn’t strategise their way out of a paper bag. And yet he can’t resist trying to play their game. He wants to abolish the Labour party. He also wants to teach it how to win the next election. He’d like to put quantum physicists in charge of the government. He’d also like to see Rishi Sunak boot Boris (and Carrie) out of Downing Street. He wants to burn it down. He also wants to make it better.

18 January 2022
[moore] Alan Moore’s Top Five: Mystics and Magicians‘Austin Osman Spare: He knew and possibly shagged Aleister Crowley, but regarded Crowley as “an Italian ponce out of work” and utterly rejected Crowley’s lore-bound and formal magical system. Spare was approached sometime in the 1930s by Adolf Hitler with a request that he paint the occult-obsessed fuehrer’s portrait, which he declined, replying “if you, sir, are the superman, then I am proud to remain an ape.” When Spare and his Brixton studio were later bombed during the Blitz, Spare suffered some kind of stroke and was left paralysed down his right side, including his drawing hand, but, being Spare, he simply taught himself to draw with his left hand…’
19 January 2022
[politics] Has Boris Johnson Resigned Yet? … The only single-serving website you need today. ‘No’
20 January 2022
[comics] ‘I read all 27,000 Marvel comics and had a great time. Here’s what I learnt’ … Douglas Wolk’s tour guide to Marvel Comics. ‘The reading stage went on for longer than I thought it would. It turns out my brain can only handle so much gaudily coloured, hyper-violent soap opera in a single day. The high point may have been wrestling with the thoughtful, exquisitely drawn, yet problematic 1974-1983 title Master of Kung Fu, which introduced the character of Shang-Chi, who recently made it to the big screen. A taut, introspective espionage thriller whose antagonist is Fu Manchu, the series became, over time, both more impressive and – for its racist portrayals – more wince-inducing.’
21 January 2022
[worzel] Worzel’s Warning … A remarkably dark Jon Pertwee song warning about stranger danger in the 1970s.

24 January 2022
[lifehacks] 100 Tips for a Better Life … I usually find something helpful in these posts with lists of life hacks. ’23. (~This is not medical advice~). Don’t waste money on multivitamins, they don’t work. Vitamin D supplementation does seem to work, which is important because deficiency is common.’
27 January 2022
[music] The Beach Boys’ 40 greatest songs – ranked!‘’Til I Die (1971) – A stunning piece of songwriting – check out the extended alternative mix on 1998’s Endless Harmony – ’Til I Die is the most emotionally desolate song in the Beach Boys’ catalogue: a howl of resigned despair from a man in terrible distress. Its hopelessness is chilling, its sonic richness cosseting: an incredibly potent, unsettling combination.’
28 January 2022
[tech] A Computer can never be held accountable… (An IBM Slide from 1977.)

A Computer can never be held accountable...

31 January 2022
[comics] “We Get To Do Whatever We Want!”: An Interview with Sean Phillips … Covering Phillips long career. On Vertigo Comics: ‘Looking back I can see Vertigo was something special and changed comics for the better, but I couldn’t see that at the time. When I’m drawing a comic I’m focused on one panel at a time and it’s difficult to see the bigger picture.’
1 February 2022
[tech] Watch an AI Outplay Tetris … There’s something slightly uncanny about watching this AI coolly and efficiently beat NES Tetris. More details here. ‘Like human players, Cannon’s impressive StackRabbit AI gets better at playing Tetris through repeatedly playing and analyzing the game to develop improved strategies. But unlike human players, StackRabbit has nerves of steel and doesn’t start to panic as the ever-growing stack of tetrominoes approaches the top of the play board, which it pairs with lightning-quick reflexes to play one of the most mesmerizing and impressive rounds of Tetris you’ve probably ever seen.’
2 February 2022
[funny] CHMOD 777 and other Systems Administration Writings of Aleister Crowley

CHMOD 777

3 February 2022
[comics] Leo Baxendale: Bash Street UnPlugged … A Radio 4 documentary from 1995 about Leo Baxendale the creator of the Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx and Sweeney Toddler comic strips.
7 February 2022
[tv] The FBI is going crazy-stringboard crazy … Slate takes a look at the Crazy Wall trope often used in TV and movies. ‘Nowadays, some might chalk up the explosion of this trope to prestige television and cinema trying to advance a complicated plotline. This is why journalist Richard Benson in 2015 called our age the “Post-it Procedural.” For example, the Baltimore detectives in The Wire, now almost 20 years old, tried to crack a complicated drug ring using a board to pin up all the photos, press clippings, and index cards with information on the suspects. The board—and the data flowing in from the detectives—became the focal point of the investigation and the show, helping the audience to know who and what was important. If it was on the big board, it mattered.’
8 February 2022
[fb] The end of the metaverse hopefully … Some analysis on the future of Facebook/Meta. ‘Basically, Facebook and Instagram is Squid Game, the algorithm is the big piggy bank, and the last three traumatized contestants in tuxedos armed with knives are an out-of-work magician, an antivax chiropractor, and a QAnon mom from Tuscon who runs a drop-shipping pyramid scheme. Which, of course, is not a platform that users will want to use. But it’s all Facebook has to fall back on now that its attempts to “build the metaverse” have been exposed as an absolutely ridiculous bluster.’
9 February 2022
[experts] Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? … A look at why experts find predicting the future correctly difficult. ‘The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock bestowed nicknames (borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin) on the experts he’d observed: The highly specialized hedgehogs knew “one big thing,” while the integrator foxes knew “many little things.” Hedgehogs are deeply and tightly focused. Some have spent their career studying one problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashion tidy theories of how the world works based on observations through the single lens of their specialty. Foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represent narrowness, foxes embody breadth.’
11 February 2022
[cummings] What Dominic Cummings Gets Wrong … More analysis of Dominic Cummings. ‘Ultimately this is what Cummings gets wrong. Regulation, institutional norms, information transparency, processes, are more important than brilliant people. Because it is only those things that stand in the way of bad actors destroying systems. It is the current absence of these things causing America so many problems because Trump is a really bad actor.’
14 February 2022
[valentines] AI Generated: Love Hearts and Valentines Day Cards … Some good, some Bizarro World. More love hearts here.

Ai Generated Love Hearts

17 February 2022
[radio] Cataloguing BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time using Dewey Decimal Classification … Stuart from Feeling Listless has categorised every episode of In Our Time. ‘Classification is automatically a compromise. You’re applying a numerical label to an object which it wasn’t really designed for, so on some occasions, especially with something like In Our Time which revels in obtuse topics, there isn’t a perfect place for the episode to go. Also I’ve only used the a heading when it pertains to an episode which is why it looks like there are gaps in the sequence. Melvyn and the gang haven’t covered every sub-division in the DDC.’
18 February 2022
[web] Resurrecting the old Wordle for procrastinators … How to avoid NYT Wordle and carry on using the original version.
21 February 2022
[cannonball] Is This the End of the Cannonball Run? … How Covid-19 killed the Cannonball Run. ‘The following March, the world shut down, and the nation’s empty highways looked enticing to potential Cannonballers. Bolian said the record was broken 12 times during the early months of the pandemic. “It was just an unimaginable set of circumstances,” he says.’
22 February 2022
[movies] Alien in 60 Seconds … A wonderfully condensed and low budget version of Alien. [via Kottke]

24 February 2022
[web] The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos … Occasionally the Internet can produce a wonderfully wholesome story. ‘Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart. I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them. So I launched an investigation…’
28 February 2022
[podcasts] Death by Conspiracy? … I’ve really been enjoying this BBC podcast’s deep dive into the death from Covid of a UK man drawn into the web of online conspiracies.
1 March 2022
[comics] Kevin O’Neill’s ‘Mek Memoirs’ … Scans from an obscure, early Kevin O’Neill robot comic. More details on Kev’s early work here.

Kevin O'Neil Mek Memoir Comic Cover

2 March 2022
[comics] “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee” Author Interview by Tegan O’Neil … Abraham Riesman discusses his new biography of Stan Lee.

You can try to glean life lessons from Stan’s arc, but I feel like they’re all relatively obvious: thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, and so on. The harder thing to process is the twofold ambiguity of his life.

There’s the factual ambiguity of who created the Marvel pantheon, which is a dilemma that will probably never be resolved. And then there’s the moral ambiguity of asking whether he was a “good” man or not, which is a similarly unanswerable question, albeit for different reasons. The human mind wants to reject ambiguity; we want to say some things are incontrovertible facts and that the people we like or hate are objectively good or bad. But the reality of existence is uncertainty: constant, chaotic, and infuriating. You can either lie to yourself for certainty—and, to be sure, we all have to do that for certain aspects of life—or you can be honest and confront the answerlessness of the world.

4 March 2022
[watergate] How G. Gordon Liddy Bungled Watergate With an Office-Supply Request … An enjoyable profile of G. Gordon Liddy’s involvement in Watergate. ‘Liddy’s antics worried some in the White House, but rather than shut him down or block his wildest schemes, he was instead foisted on the president’s reelection campaign as 1971 ended, to head up intelligence gathering efforts. There wasn’t a great deal of mystery to Liddy’s new secret mission on the campaign. A few days after he started on the reelection effort, Liddy stopped back at the White House to complain to White House counsel John Dean: The deputy campaign director, Jeb Stuart Magruder, was going around introducing Liddy as the “our man in charge of dirty tricks.” As Liddy said, “Magruder’s an asshole, John, and he’s going to blow my cover.” As Dean later recalled, he, annoyed, called Magruder: If you’ve hired someone to carry out your dirty tricks, it’s best if you don’t advertise that fact.’
7 March 2022
[life] A must-read book? Go on, make me … Why is it when a friend or review recommends something as must read or must watch we often get annoyed and reject the advice. ‘When it comes to, say, TV shows about competitive baking, I resist the pull of the crowd because I’m confident I’m not missing much. In the case of Hamilton or Boyhood, I’m sure my perversity is costing me real enjoyment. So what’s going on? One explanation is what psychologists call “optimal distinctiveness theory” – the way we’re constantly jockeying to feel exactly the right degree of similarity to and difference from those around us. Nobody wants to be exiled from the in-group to the fringes of society; but nobody wants to be swallowed up by it, either. In toddlerhood and teenagerhood, this manifests as a bloody-minded refusal to do what we’re told, precisely to show we can disobey our parents. Perhaps it never entirely goes away.’
8 March 2022
[weird] This Mysterious Computer Could Prove Time Travel Exists … The Dodleston Messages – a crazy story from the 1980s about a haunted, time-travelling BBC Micro!

9 March 2022
[tv] Charlie Brooker: ‘Mr Dystopia? That makes me sound like a wrestler’ … A catch up with Charlie Brooker.

Before he was Mr Interactive, Charlie Brooker was Mr Dystopia, creating disturbing, prescient vistas of the very near future. What if the prime minister had to have sex with a pig, live on air? What if anxious modern parenting turned into 24-hour hyper-surveillance? Even Nathan Barley, his 2005 comedy co-written with Chris Morris, came eerily to pass. That eponymous, portfolio-careered hipster could have been written yesterday. “That makes me sound like a wrestler,” Brooker says, not without satisfaction. “A really mean, horrible wrestler. Here he comes, in the blue corner: Mr Dystopia.”

It’s not so much that he predicted things, and then they happened, he says. Rather, Black Mirror plots were “extrapolations of whatever was already happening”. The pig plot was inspired by Gordon Brown’s Gillian Duffy moment, when he called a Labour voter a bigoted woman and “had to go and apologise, and it became this bizarre circus of calamity. I was just watching it thinking, ‘No one’s in charge here.’”

10 March 2022
[comics] The Lawsuit that Reshaped Sonic the Hedgehog Comics … I’ve always known that Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comics were long-running and complex, but I’ve never heard about the legal case that led to a complete reset of the series. ‘Things started looking grim in late 2012, when Archie suddenly fired its entire legal team. The company had been unable to produce Penders’ work-for-hire contract, which would have given control of his creations to Sega. Penders claimed the contract had never existed. A heavily circulated Tumblr post outlining the case (which has been corroborated as a reliable source by Penders) explains that while Archie did provide a photocopy of a contract allegedly signed by Penders in 1996, Penders claimed that the document was a forgery. That it was neither an original copy nor a contract from the beginning of the writer’s tenure at Archie meant that its validity was questionable. Making things worse, Archie couldn’t produce an original copy of any previous contributor’s contract, meaning that any writer or artist who had worked on the Archie Sonic line could potentially follow in Penders’s footsteps and reclaim their work.’
14 March 2022
[life] UK Lottery Simulator – Playing The Lottery 1,000 Times Per Second … An animation on Reddit showing how little chance you have of winning the UK lottery.
15 March 2022
[tv] Artie Bucco Would Like You To Try Some Food … Mastercut of Artie Bucco from The Sopranos offering people food to try.

16 March 2022
[tv] How tainted is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 25 years on?‘And then there were the show’s gender politics: for while it foregrounded many empowered women, it also featured a problematic male lead in the shape of Xander. There were other examples of toxic and fragile masculinity on the show, like the reprisal of teenage boy villains into The Trio in series six, but the difference was that Xander was positioned as a nice guy – and rewatching the series now, that’s something which leaves a particularly bad taste. A pretty girl couldn’t walk by without Xander oggling or pestering them, and it mostly goes unquestioned, especially where Buffy is concerned. His entitled attitude towards her and animosity towards every guy she dates is nauseating to watch.’
18 March 2022
[tech] His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent. … A really sad, powerful story about how software can die with it’s creator, teaching Torah, loss and about a million other things. ‘I first heard it played to me over the phone from a copy that hadn’t yet ceased to function. It was a voice unlike any I’d ever heard: not human but made by humans, generated by a piece of computer code dating to the 1980s, singing words of a text from the Bronze Age in a cadence handed down, from one singer to another, over thousands of years. TropeTrainer was software that had been taught to sing the words of God. Then it went silent…’
21 March 2022
[comics] Zorro in Arkham: Reflecting on a Legendary Batman Saga With Writer Grant Morrison, Part 1‘Dan asked me to write Batman…. He likely saw more potential in Damian than I did, and he was right. I’d figured out that Batman as a concept was impervious to pretty much any assault. Camp Batman worked, serious Batman worked, Lego Batman worked. Dad Batman? That would work too. There had been a few ‘son of’ stories over the decades, some written by Alfred the butler as literary amuse bouches, imaginary tales of the next generation. I had the title Batman & Son in my head, like a family business, like Steptoe & Son or, for US readers, Sanford & Son. I gambled that having a deadly aristocratic ninja brat for a kid would only make Batman cooler and add some extra complexity to his mythos…’
22 March 2022
[war] “Z” Is the Symbol of the New Russian Politics of Aggression‘Graphically, the “Z” is clearly closer to the swastika than to any prominent Soviet symbol, such as the five-pointed star, the hammer and sickle, or the red flag. Its use seems to require a double inversion: first, the people of Ukraine—a nation that suffered some of the greatest losses at the hands of Nazi Germany and one that is currently led by a Jewish President—are rendered as Nazis; then, the Russians, who claim to be fighting for peace and “de-Nazification,” adopt a visual symbol that appears to reference the swastika.’
23 March 2022
[politics] Manufactured Culture War Outrage Calendar … created by @WebofEvil. ‘Easter Eggs, not Chocolate Eggs. But not Halal Easter Eggs.’

Manufactured Culture War Outrage Calendar

24 March 2022
[lol] Why We Use “lol” So Much … A deep-dive into LOL. ‘We use lol as a way of downplaying a statement; adding irony, levity, humility, empathy, or commiseration; expressing amusement; or just neutral acknowledgment. No longer simply an internet acronym that’s entered the mainstream, lol is an example of how language evolves over time, adheres to new grammatical rules, and creates community around the people that use it.’
25 March 2022
[life] 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying … I have a theory that you usually find one useful thing in these lists of ways to improve your life. ‘Don’t be weird about how to stack the dishwasher.’
29 March 2022
[elon] Please Like Me … A small request from Elon Musk. ‘I’m sure it seems like I have it all. And maybe I do. Although I’d like to make one simple request: Please like me. Please, for the love of all that is holy, consider me clever and interesting. Honestly, I don’t get why anyone wouldn’t like me. I do cool stuff. I make cars. People like cars, don’t they? I make stonks go to the moon. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t making stonks go to the moon something people like? Seriously, c’mon. Appreciate me. I was on Rick And Morty. Wubba lubba dub dub, right? People love that show!’
30 March 2022
[crime] Charles Graeber’s top 10 true crime books‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry — You can’t deny the all-time bestseller of the genre, or the detail-driven dive into the world of Charles Manson and his addled cult known as “the family”, written by a prosecutor of the Tate-LaBianca murders with access to all the grim details, partnered with a solid historical writer in Gentry.’
1 April 2022
[comics] Creating the Judge Dredd by Brian Bolland Apex Edition: A How-to Guide for the Rash and Enthusiastic … David Roach on the difficult search for Brian Bolland’s 2000AD work for an artist’s edition book. ‘At first the page count was uncertain, as we weren’t sure how many pages it would be possible to find, but ideally it was going to be 96, rising to 144 or higher if possible, though at times that felt like a far-off dream. But what that meant was that we were aiming to include as much as 1/3 of his entire British output, which was quite a sobering thought. One complication in tracking down Brian’s pages was the haphazard way in which these early pages were disseminated among collectors. IPC, 2000 AD’s first publisher, had a blanket policy of not returning artwork, something which only changed in the ‘80s in the face of mounting pressure from its artists. In the intervening years, however, numerous pages were stolen from offices and storage warehouses, often turning up for sale in London comic shops, much to the artist’s frustration. As 2000 AD’s most popular artist, Brian’s art was particularly prized and most persistently stolen, and, to this day, certain strips, including his first Judge Death serial, have never surfaced again.’
4 April 2022
[podcasts] Alan Moore and Brian Catling Discuss The Power of Imagination … A fascinating podcast hosted by Robin Ince.
5 April 2022
[books] What if H.P Lovecraft wrote the Mr Men & Little Miss Children’s Books?

7 April 2022
[books] The novelist who wrote “How to Murder Your Husband” is now on trial for murdering her husband.‘A few years after Nancy Crampton Brophy—a self-published romance novelist—wrote an essay called “How to Murder Your Husband,” her husband was found shot to death in his classroom at the Oregon Culinary Institute in Portland. While that essay might have been a little bit of a red flag to investigators, the trial judge has deemed it inadmissible as evidence on the grounds it might prove prejudicial (you think?).’
8 April 2022
[books] He Was an Ex-FBI Serial Killer Profiler. Then His Lies Caught Up With Him. … Another story (Previously) of a fraudulent serial killer expert this time based in the UK. ‘The relationship between Harrison’s falsehoods and the apparent obliviousness of his audiences and publishers raised a number of still unanswered questions. Why had no one before Robin Perrie bothered to check the claims in such a colourful CV? And what does this web of strange deceit say about the nature of true crime fandom and the cottage industry surrounding it?’
11 April 2022
[life] Fries on the Pier … from False Knees.

12 April 2022
[comics] Incredible photos of S.F.’s legendary first comic book store have surfaced — 50 years after we lost them‘The photos show a tiny store where every square inch from floor to the high ceiling is covered with comic book racks and comics displayed in plastic wrap. Arlington stands like a bird on a perch, looking over his customers on the low rung of one of several ladders. A mix of sullen-looking men and wide-eyed children browse horror comics, Tales of the Green Beret and some of the earliest Marvel X-Men issues.’
13 April 2022
[movies] Hello, I’m Nicolas Cage and welcome to Ask Me Anything … Reddit AMA. ‘A: Who is your favorite character in all of literature and film? Q: That is so hard to answer. I will say that James Dean’s performance as Cal in East of Eden is largely the reason I became a film actor. His role in that is one of my favorite characters in cinema. But then we can go all the way to Rasputin or we can go to Dmitri Karamazov. Dmitri Karamazov is one my favorite characters in literature. I love him so much because he’s so happy and he has no money. He’s just living it up. He spent all his money trying to get the girl. I did the same thing once. I was very Dmitri Karamazov in high school. The most beautiful girl in high school who was a grade older than me invited me to the prom but I had no money. My grandmother gave each of us a little bond. My older brother bought a car. My second oldest brother bought some stereo equipment. And I splashed out on a chauffeur-driven limousine, a tuxedo and a four course meal at Le Dome on Sunset blvd. The car was $2000, the stereo was $2000, and my prom night was $2000 and man, that was money well spent. THAT’s Dmitri Karamazov.’
15 April 2022
[comics] We Apologize For Publishing Darkseid’s Anti-Life Equation … All is one in Darkseid! ‘Naturally, the staff and ownership of Hard Drive don’t encourage anyone to die for Darkseid; we encourage conversation. As the current and eternal ruler of the dread planet-fortress Apokalips, Darkseid is a public figure of note. While we pointedly disagree with cosmic genocide, we considered his perspective on the fabrege egg we call life newsworthy. Now it’s clear that no conversation can take place after cutting out your own tongue. We’ve removed Darkseid’s editorial, at great human cost. Our Opinion editor caught a glimpse of the equation as he deleted the page, snuffing the flame of his mortal soul and replacing it with loyalty to Darkseid.’
19 April 2022
[movies] Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit … I will never tire of this Cage compilation.

20 April 2022
[web] How I Experience Web Today … A really depressing demo of how mainstream websites behave today. ‘We’d like to send you notifications with the latest news and updates from our site.’
25 April 2022
[tv] ‘You Don’t Understand What This Is Doing to Me’ … Remembering James Gandolfini and a deep-dive into the impact that playing Tony Soprano had on him. ‘To say that Gandolfini rose to the occasion would be putting it mildly. His complex, nuanced, and inspired performance demonstrated remarkable range, not just over the course of the series, or any one episode, but often within a scene, a confrontation, even a single moment, that seemed to transcend mere “acting.” No matter how despicable Tony’s behavior appeared on the surface, Gandolfini was so persuasive and affecting —whether conveying Tony’s rage, passion, or some fleeting flash of guilt — that the audience never turned its back on him. In a troubling age of anti-heroes, Tony Soprano was royalty. His eyes told a million tales, and his performance elevated him to the upper echelon of American actors. He adapted handily to the series’ widened scope, its growth from intimate portrait to rich, blood-splattered tapestry, and he was enormously instrumental in making The Sopranos an epochal cultural event — unofficially the start of what some would call television’s “second golden age.” Whether that’s true or not, it was a golden age of Gandolfini.’
26 April 2022
[space] The Hubble Space Telescope Hasn’t Burned Out Yet … How is Hubble doing after 32 years in space? ‘We are closer to the end of Hubble’s mission now than we are to its beginning. Someday, probably at the end of this decade, the space telescope will stop working. The people who manage Hubble’s time are already working with astronomers around the world to make sure they make the most of the years left, Jennifer Wiseman, a senior project scientist on the Hubble mission, told me. They’re asking: “What’s important to do with Hubble while we still have Hubble?”’
28 April 2022
[funny] Grand Theft Alan – North Norfolk Edition … from Jim’ll Paint it on Twitter.

29 April 2022
[herzog] Werner Herzog Has Never Liked Introspection … A long, powerful interview with Werner Herzog. ‘The deepest of catastrophes was the First World War, and then only twenty years later or so you have the Second World War, and the complete destruction of Germany. Almost every single major city in Germany looked like the World Trade Center after its attack. And that sank in—and it’s in me. My first memory is of my mother ripping my brother and me out of bed in the middle of the winter night, wrapping us in blankets, and taking us up on a slope. In the distance, at the end of the valley, the entire night sky was red and orange and very slowly pulsing. She said the city of Rosenheim was burning. I was only two and a half. Normally, memories do not go back that far, but I know this was my very first memory, and it’s embedded in my soul.’
4 May 2022
[comics] Arena: The Comic Strip Hero… … A look back in 1981 at the success of Superman with interviews from the creators Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster and other comics artists such as Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman.

6 May 2022
[life] 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known … Some advice from Kevin Kelly. ‘Dont believe everything you think you believe.’
10 May 2022
[microsoft] Ewan Dalton’s Tip o’ the Week … If like me, you spend a lot of time working with Microsoft products you might find some useful tips at this blog from Microsoft.
11 May 2022
[watchmen] Yesterday in Parliament… from Fraser Campbell on Twitter.

13 May 2022
[art] My brother the superhero: how the death of comic book legend Steve Dillon inspired a creative awakening … A powerful piece on how Glyn Dillon reacted to the death of his brother Steve. ‘Steve’s death changed his younger brother’s life in all sorts of ways. When it happened, Glyn was working at Pinewood Studios as a costume designer on the latest Star Wars movie. It was work he loved but it also involved long, stressful hours and it had been nagging away at him that what he really wanted to do with his life, ever since he was a teenager, was paint. This family tragedy gave him the push to pursue his dreams. “At first I thought about doing a comic [about Steve’s death], but the feelings felt too big for that medium,” he says. “I needed to do something different, more physical, standing up, climbing a ladder.”’
16 May 2022
[movies] Raise The Titanic and Its $5 Million Replica Liner … The story behind one of the biggest movie failures of all time. ‘In many ways, the removal of the source novel’s melodramatic exclamation mark hints at what really hampered this $40 million confection: it’s all so slow and deathly serious. The book’s pulpy tall tale is flattened out in the film as a terse Cold War thriller. The supporting cast, which includes Sir Alec Guinness, Jason Robards and M Emmet Walsh, all talk with furrowed brows and aching sincerity – even when saying things like, “We’re on a ship that never learned to do anything but sink, that’s distress!” At one point, Dirk Pitt yells at a graphic of the Titanic on a computer screen, “It’s just sitting there. Move, you bastard, move!” By the 100 minute mark, you’d be forgiven for shouting the same thing…’
17 May 2022
[covid] Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’ … An update with Michael Lewis from last year about his latest book on Covid-19. ‘Each December, Dean would write her new year resolutions on the back of a photograph of her grandmother. On 20 December 2019, she wrote down two things. “1) Stay sober. 2) It has started.” She had a kind of sixth sense that the viral pandemic she had long been expecting had begun. By coincidence, and rather oddly, at about the same time, Lewis put forward the idea, in a conversation with the Observer, that the only thing that could wake America up to Donald Trump’s governmental negligence was a pandemic. He now plays down his clairvoyance, explaining that he gave that example simply because it was a situation that would affect everybody. “Rich white people would be scared too,” he says. In the event, many Americans followed Trump’s lead in denying the danger of Covid-19 and the virus has remained a highly divisive and contested subject. “If it had killed twice as many people and killed kids,” says Lewis, “you wouldn’t be seeing these revolts in Oklahoma. You’d be seeing the New Deal.”’
18 May 2022
[web] I’m a fucking webmaster‘People would come to us with a problem, and we would figure out a solution. We couldn’t just search the web because the web was still being written. And you couldn’t just punt a hard question to the engineer in the desk next to you. Why? Because you were sitting alone in a utility closet packed with floppy disks and old tape drives.’
23 May 2022
[comics] Garth Ennis and Kevin O’Neill on Reviving the Infamous Kids Rule OK! for Battle Action Special … Wonderful interview, with lots of British 70s comics history from O’Neill. ‘I was often asked to change little small things in my artwork for ludicrous reasons later on. But the fallout from Action, which the Garth story is built around, was massive at the time because you cannot underestimate the power of the tabloid newspapers when they turned on comics. I believe Action was torn up on a BBC show called Nationwide with Frank Bough, who was disgraced years later for various misdemeanors, but he tore up a copy of Action on-screen as worthless trash. That was the atmosphere. I don’t think 2000 AD could have been canceled before it was launched because too much time and money had been spent developing it, but by God, it probably came close. And nobody knew what was happening.’
24 May 2022
[moore] Alan Moore On ‘From Hell’ – Interviewed In 2002 … Future biographers of Moore, please take note of this quote: ‘I do get some funny phone calls. Nicolas Cage phoned me up a few times because he likes my stuff. He seems nice enough, but he phoned me once to ask for advice on his love life. It must be a lonely existence being a film star…’
25 May 2022
[media] Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly‘So why might people be more open to experiencing the same thing over and over again? As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.’
26 May 2022
[Goat] A 3 1/2-Inch Floppy Disk That Unlocks the Goat Internet

Unlock the Goat Internet

1 June 2022
[life] Your Personality, Explained by Your Annoying Household Habits‘Soaking Dishes in the Sink – Your ability to make life more difficult is unmatchable. If an easy solution is available—and I mean a mind-numbingly obvious one—you decide that maybe the fix can’t be so simple and that you’d better let things marinate for a few days, at which point, yes, they’ve now become the nasty thing that you imagined, seeped in a rancid cesspool of indecision and procrastination (and, literally, rotting food).’
3 June 2022
[brand] Russell Brand’s latest addiction … Tanya Gold on Russell Brand. ‘At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.” But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them.’
7 June 2022
[zuck] The Only Good Thing Left About Facebook … A look at Facebook Groups – It’s best feature? ‘Several Facebook-group administrators and members described to me the conundrum of relying on an imperfect platform to create strong, and for many people invaluable, communities. They understand that their groups exist on a controversial site, but they also say that not many alternatives have the capacity to build fellowship the way that Facebook does. “As someone who really tries to live the most harm-reduced life possible, there’s this almost defeat I find when I think about using Facebook,” Alexx Duvall, a co-founder of “NYC Plant Friends Hangout,” told me over the phone. Even though the group, which plans real-life and virtual events for plant lovers, has an Instagram account and an email listserv, Duvall finds that the community it cultivates on Facebook is ultimately more active.’
8 June 2022
[comics] Ed Brubaker on the Reckless series, L.A. 1980s pulp fiction‘With a slew of Eisner Awards to his name and a reputation as one of the industry’s most popular storytellers, Brubaker set out to do something new not by choice but out of necessity. Comics are created on a tight schedule. When the pandemic hit, not only did comic book shops around the country shut down — so did the printers and distributors. It was a bleak time for the business. “Everybody in comics panicked,” Brubaker said. “How are we going to be able to keep making comics? Are all the stores going to go out of business?”’
9 June 2022
[truecrime] I Think I’m Done with True Crime For Now … Moving On from the True Crime Genre. ‘I remember YouTube’s parodically evil algorithm recommending me far too many ‘body language expert’ reaction videos of Carole Baskin, all of which seemed keen to write her off as a true sociopath. The same thing happened with lawyers (or a bunch of people in suits claiming to have law degrees) offering their own advice on the crimes of the day. TikTok, of course, joined in. This was all familiar stuff when Amber Heard was put on trial for defaming her ex-husband who she accused of domestic abuse. Soon, it was truly impossible to avoid the splurge of ‘true crime’ smearing Heard in the name of justice and journalism. Suddenly, everyone was a body language expert, a psychiatrist, a cop, a lawyer, a domestic abuse expert.’
10 June 2022
[life] Study: Most Americans Now Believe Society Has Gotten Dystopian Enough to Start Adding “Neo” to Names of Cities‘“Most participants also mentioned that they were disappointed that we reached dystopian status without having flying cars, murderous replicants or the ability to have katanas pop out of your arms,” said research assistant Daniel Matthews. “People were pleasantly surprised by a few dystopian traits that are present, such as the plentiful amount of synthwave and neon colored mesh tank tops. Other than that, though, the cyberpunk genre did not prepare Americans for how much scrolling through Reddit they would be doing in the dystopia.”’
14 June 2022
[gaming] Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting … Fascinating forgery story within the world of retro computer game collecting. ‘When Racle made a disk image of his rare find for preservation purposes, that excitement quickly turned to disgust and distrust. With the help of an Apple II preservation expert going by the handle “4am,” Racle found that the disk he received contained a cracked version of the game, complete with a loading screen sporting the message “Presented by the Data Killer.” Needless to say, that message would not appear on an authentic 1981 version of the disk with its original copy protection intact. It does, however, appear on cracked copies of the game that have been floating around the Internet for years.’
15 June 2022
[tech] I’ve locked myself out of my digital life … A cautionary tale about digital identities. ‘In the boring analogue world – I am pretty sure that I’d be able to convince a human that I am who I say I am. And, thus, get access to my accounts. I may have to go to court to force a company to give me access back, but it is possible. But when things are secured by an unassailable algorithm – I am out of luck. No amount of pleading will let me without the correct credentials. The company which provides my password manager simply doesn’t have access to my passwords. There is no-one to convince. Code is law.’
17 June 2022
[crypto] The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto Crashing — a quick map of where we are and what’s ahead‘Whales breaking ranks — Monday’s price collapse looks very like one crypto whale decided to get out while there was any chance of getting some of the ever-dwindling actual dollars out from the cryptosystem. Expect the knives to be out. Who’s jumping next?’
20 June 2022
[life] Why City Life Has Gotten Way More Expensive … A look at why things like Uber are starting to cost more. ‘It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.’
23 June 2022
[speccy] Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum ❤️ 💛 💚 💙 … A look at what’s happening with the ZX Spectrum forty years after it’s creation. ‘Can you believe it still has a large and active community creating new content, archiving old content, and hacking on all sorts of hardware?’
27 June 2022
[books] AIs named by AIs … How good is an AI at naming Iain M. Banks Culture Ships? … ‘Absently Tilting To One Side. ASS FEDERATION. A Small Note Of Disrespect. Third Letter of The Week. Well Done and Thank You. Just As Bad As Your Florist. What Exactly Is It With You? Let Me Just Post This. Protip: Don’t Ask’
28 June 2022
[comics] The Crisis Generation … Garth Ennis, John McCrea and Sean Phillips interviewed about their work on Crisis.

29 June 2022
[watergate] Woodward and Bernstein’s Forgotten Editor … Barry Sussman – the man who got written out of Watergate. ‘[A] stripped-down morality tale, mano a mano, doesn’t leave much narrative space for other characters. The Post’s work required not just creative and dogged reporting by Woodward and Bernstein—it required editors, it required news librarians, it required lawyers, it required an owner, all willing to do their part and able to do it skillfully. It required an institution that could both commit the resources and then stand its ground against Nixon’s threats.’
1 July 2022
[google] Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up? … The Atlantic takes a look at where Google Search is at in 2022. ‘The AI attempts to understand not just what the searcher is typing, but what the searcher is trying to get at,” Haynes told me. “It’s trying to understand the content inside pages and inside queries, and that will change the type of result people get.” Google’s focus on searcher intent could mean that when people type in keywords, they’re not getting as many direct word matches. Instead, Google is trying to scan the query, make meaning from it, and surface pages that it thinks match that meaning. Despite being a bit sci-fi and creepy, the shift might feel like a loss of agency for searchers.’
4 July 2022
[books] Holmes’ sweet home … A literary search for the real 221B Baker Street. ‘Where Holmes and Watson lived was surely in the midst of the grime and bustle of late Victorian London, much closer to Oxford Street. And so it proves. Baker Street in the 1890’s was much shorter than its modern version, and ran south from the junction with Paddington St. The modern section north from Paddington Street to the Marylebone Road was then named York Place. So “221B” – one should discount the actual number, however resonant it has become – was situated on Baker Street somewhere between Paddington Street and Portman Square. The evidence for its whereabouts is secreted in one of the best Holmes short stories…’
7 July 2022
[books] Eric Clapton’s Bookshelf … An amusing forensic examination of Clapton’s bookshelves and what they say about his character.

11 July 2022
[akira] A Collection of Every Akira Video Game Ever Made‘Akira was one of my favorite films as a teen and I remember hearing rumors of a video game version, but I could never find it. Eventually, I just filed it away as a myth, like the supposed Akira live action film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Not only are these games real though, you can even be able to play them thanks to ROM archivists…’
27 July 2022
[movies] Revisiting the L.A. of ‘Heat’ 24 Years Later with the Iconic Crime Drama’s Location Manager … Visiting the locations of Michael Mann’s Heat in 2019. ‘Though the view from the house that was eventually chosen had an incredible, panoramic view, Balton felt it didn’t seem authentic. “I said to him, ‘You know, Michael, it’s L.A. Not everybody lives in an incredible apartment with a great view. I mean, you know that, right?’ and he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I know that. Now go out and find what I told you to find,’” she said, laughing.’
28 July 2022
[movies] ‘Blade Runner’ at 40: Why It’s Still the Greatest Sci-Fi of All-Time‘Working from a formula he perfected in 1979’s Alien, Scott brought his world of grimy industry and neon-lit shadows, rogue androids and put-upon protagonists to California, swapping Alien’s body horror for the police procedural. Granted, Deckard isn’t Ellen Ripley, but in its portrayal of the battered and bruised detective battling against the system, Blade Runner is a Chinatown of the future. That it was only Scott’s third film as director makes it all the more impressive.’
1 August 2022
[comics] John Wagner and Alan Grant Interviewed in 1988 … I was very saddened to hear of Alan Grant’s passing last week – below is a funny story from him in the linked interview. ‘A freight company hired me to find out where a million and a quarter pounds missing from the books had gone, and I’d not got the slightest idea where it had gone and didn’t even know where to start looking. So I compromised by burning the books. By the time I’d finished they’d no idea what they had or what they didn’t have. The funniest thing about it was that when I eventually told them I couldn’t take it any more and I was leaving to go back to Scotland immediately because my granny had died or something, they said “That’s a great shame. You were doing so well we were going to give you our Heathrow account. There’s 5,000,000 pounds missing there.” And I was travelling home from Tilbury at night ripping up the books and throwing them out of the train window. IPC did eventually take me on for a partwork called “Birds of the World,” and I was there until it closed down after six months.’
2 August 2022
[ai] The Kubrick Times 🚨📰 … Using an AI to generate newspaper articles from NYT Headlines used by Kubrick’s 2001. ‘World Population Passes 6 Billion Mark – The world’s population has officially reached 6 billion people, according to the United Nations. This milestone has been both celebrated and met with trepidation, as it highlights the enormous pressure that our planet is under. The population is now evenly split between the northern and southern hemispheres, with 3 billion people living north of the equator and 3 billion living south of it.’
5 August 2022
>> I don’t know who needs this today but here’s an acapella version of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by the Beach Boys. [via]

8 August 2022
[comics] The 100 Most Influential Pages in Comic Book History … A wide ranging look at 100 pages that changed comics. ‘Hawkeye No. 11 (2013): The highlight of the run came in Hawkeye No. 11, an issue told through the eyes of Lucky, a dog that Hawkeye adopted in the first issue of the series. Lucky (or Pizza Dog, as he thinks of himself, due to his taste for pizza) sees the world through a series of nonverbal signifiers (the book’s letterer, Chris Eliopoulos is credited as “production” for the issue, as he delivers a lot more than just lettering in the issue). It’s Chris Ware–esque diagram artwork, but with a great deal more heart behind the experiences of Lucky. This was one of the most acclaimed single issues of the past decade, winning an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue.’
10 August 2022
[comics] The definitive guide to the many editions of Sandman … Useful reading order to Sandman along with a guide to the many different editions of the series. ‘The cheapest way to read is at your nearest library. For those willing to splash, there are many different editions to collect the series; Single Issues, TPB, Deluxe, Omnibus, and Absolutes. For non-comic readers, it is recommended that you decide on a format/edition and stick with it to avoid confusion as different editions cover varying amounts of content per volume.’
11 August 2022
[lovecraft] H.P Lovecraft’s very bizarre hatred of Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights … TL;DR – Lovecraft was racist. ‘He seemed to filter all his untethered anxiety into the very building at 169 Clinton Street. “I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing — a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.” Yet Lovecraft saved his greater fantasies for the neighborhood south of here. He eventually funneled all this tortured and deranged hysteria into his horror writing with the publication of “The Horror at Red Hook,” a story that literally depicts the neighborhood as a gateway to Hell.’
12 August 2022
[comics] What if Rob Liefeld had drawn Watchmen?

What if Rob Liefeld had drawn Watchmen?

15 August 2022
[cancelled] I’m a low-income pensioner and I’m terrified of university cancel culture this winter‘Yes, those with conservative views have got the Daily Telegraph, the Mail, Spectator and the Sun if people want to advocate sending Windrush migrants to Rwanda in leaky boats, but if they’re denied the platform of the University of East Anglia you’re literally cutting their tongues out. I don’t know what I’m going to do…’
16 August 2022
[games] Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist … A true-crime story about the robbery of a pristine collection of video games and the emotional cost of losing it. ‘Generations of games had been lost to attics, yard sales, and garbage bins, and enthusiasts like Brassard had become sentimental about finding and possessing them. A culture, and then a market, had bloomed around such wistful longings. It’s fair to assume most humans have played a video game—the emotional capital of playing and loving a game 30 years ago is one of the reasons games that old have become desirable. In the summer of 2021, a sealed copy of the first print of Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold for $2 million at auction. A copy of The Legend of Zelda went for nearly $900,000. A pristine, never-opened copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million.’
17 August 2022
[tech] Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers‘One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! What’s going on?’
19 August 2022
[comics] Interview: Joe Colquhoun … Charlie’s War artist Joe Colquhoun interviewed in 1982 by Lew Stringer. ‘I found Roy [of the Rovers] a bit of a boring subject, not being a great fan of football, and after four or five years of drawing those bloody hairy-arsed footballers tearing around morning, noon and night, it got me down a lot.’
24 August 2022
[life] If You Transplant a Human Head, Does Its Consciousness Follow? … The engrossing real life story of a surgeon obsessed with head transplants. ‘One day, her friend, Cleveland neurologist Michael DeGeorgia, called her to his office. He quietly slid a battered shoebox toward her, inviting her to open it. Schillace obliged, half-worried it might contain a brain. She pulled out a notebook—perhaps from the ‘50s or ‘60s, she says—and started to leaf through it. “There’s all these strange little notes and stuff about mice and brains and brain slices, and these little flecks,” Schillace says. “I was like, ‘What … what are all these marks?’” Probably blood, DeGeorgia told her.’
25 August 2022
[comics] Neil Gaiman on the Secret History of ‘The Sandman,’ from Giant Mechanical Spiders to the Joker … Long interview with Gaiman on The Sandman comics, TV series, Alan Moore, his history with DC Comics and much more. ‘I love that the House of Secrets and the House of Mystery are on screen. I love that Asim Chaudhry and Sanjeev Bhaskar are respectively Abel and Cain. I love the fact we’ve got Goldie and Gregory the Gargoyle. I look at Gregory and I’m just sad that [artist] Bernie Wrightson is no longer with us, because I wish he’d lived to see Gregory the Gargoyle flying around on the screen, this thing that he made. I love all that. I think that’s so much fun. And I love the fact that if you want to do weird deep dives into DC chronology, you have Lyta Hall, who in some versions of DC Comics existence — not really the one that we were in even by the time we got to the comic — but there is a level in which she’s Wonder Woman’s daughter. And perhaps she is, we’ll never know.’
2 September 2022
[toys] Genuine Thoughts and Prayers Collectible Toy‘Perfect for any tragedy.’

Genuine Thoughts and Prayers

5 September 2022
[cia] The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge … The astonishing story of how the CIA lost control of it’s arsenal of hacking tools because of an extremely angry, disgruntled employee. ‘Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower. Ayn Rand fanboys are not exactly famous for their doctrinal consistency, and Schulte’s concerns about “Big Brother” don’t appear to have occasioned much soul-searching in the years he spent building surveillance weapons for a spy agency. On an anonymous Twitter account that Schulte maintained, he reportedly expressed the view (in a since-deleted tweet) that Chelsea Manning should be executed. Weber recalled Schulte saying that Snowden deserved the same. Could it be that Schulte had leaked the C.I.A.’s digital arsenal not because of any principled opposition to the policies of the U.S. government but because he was pissed off at his colleagues?’
6 September 2022
[politics] “He was scum.” … Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.

‘If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.’

7 September 2022
[tv] Casting Columbo: the gargantuan unseen effort … A lot of the magic in Columbo came from casting the right actors for villians, victims and supporting cast. ‘Team Columbo considered up to three dozen different actors for every role in every episode. For a typical 1970s Columbo, the casting started with the producer. Three to four weeks before the scheduled start of filming—about the time he hired his director—the producer would compile a list of actors he thought would be right for each part. He’d also send the script to several talent agencies, to get their suggestions. Executives from Universal Television and from NBC would also weigh in. And, finally, the producer would bounce his options off of the director and Peter Falk.’
8 September 2022
[tintin] Fake Tintin – The Horror of LV-426 … I will never tire of fake Tintin/Alien mashups.

Fake Tintin - The Horror of LV-426

9 September 2022
[death] [NOTE: Do Not Run Until Fucking Queen Is Dead Or People Will Lose Their Shit] Queen Elizabeth Dead At 96 … The Onion’s top-quality obituary for the Queen. ‘She married Philip Mountbatten in 1947, beginning a [TK ADJECTIVE] royal union that lasted [TK] years until [NOTE: DID HE DIE? CHECK. IF HE DID, WE FORGOT TO RUN AN OBIT], in which they had four children: Prince Charles, the heir apparent, as well as Princess [TK], Prince [TK], and Prince Andrew [NOTE: CHECK ANDREW’S LATEST ROYAL STATUS RE: PEDOPHILIA ALLEGATIONS]. In addition to her children, the queen is survived by [INSERT SOME BULLSHIT HERE ABOUT HER DO-NOTHING PROGENY]. As Britain’s first lady queen [PROBABLY LOOK THIS UP] …’
12 September 2022
[queen] Who the hell updated Queen Elizabeth II’s Wikipedia page so quickly?‘It’s not as simple as changing “is” to “was.” After Sydwhunte made the initial death edit, Elizabeth II’s article underwent more than 55 edits in the subsequent 15 minutes — adding sources, changing the tense, updating the infobox with the length of her reign, and updating her categories (she’s no longer in the category “living people,” for example). Over on the article for now-King Charles III, there was a frenzy of title changes as editors waited for his regnal name to be announced. Charles’ article changed titles five times while people waited for his official regnal name.’
14 September 2022
[queen] Inside British newsrooms on the day Queen Elizabeth II died: secret codes, chaos and black ties

‘Thirteen minutes after the note came the tweet. “Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision,” wrote Buckingham Palace. “The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral.”

“When the statement dropped about her health it was obvious, and suddenly no MPs would talk,” the Whitehall correspondent says. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs stopped responding to messages.

Across at what was once known as Fleet Street, time stopped.’

16 September 2022
[queen] The short unhappy life of Elizabeth Windsor … Politico sum up the life of Queen Elizabeth. ‘She knew a lot about the things she had inherited and not much about anything else. She drove — fast — about her estates in a beaten-up Land Rover and dedicated her life to fiercely protecting the promulgation of the family firm. But it was almost as if she was absent from her own story — her legend as rigorously curated and spun as that of any autocrat. To provide her United Kingdom with the monarch she felt it needed, she sacrificed an ordinary life and the other things most of us take for granted. But then the curious nature of hereditary monarchy never offered her another path.’
19 September 2022
[comics] “Westminster.”

From Hell - Westminster

21 September 2022
[moore] Discover Alan Moore’s Surprising First Published Superman Stories … A look at some long-forgotten UK published stories from Alan Moore. ‘That second Superheroes Annual in 1983…There was a two-page text piece by Alan Moore, with illustrations by the brilliant Bryan Talbot. The story was titled “Protected Species,” and it was about an alien who traveled the universe collected endangered species from lost planets that he would then bring to his bosses who would keep the survivors on a sort of zoo…’
23 September 2022
[truecrime] What Serial Gets Wrong … After Adnan Syed’s recent release, an examination (from 2014) of what the Serial podcast got wrong. ‘I have no idea who lied fifteen years ago, and I doubt we’ll ever find out. Lies have a way of burrowing into the brain and reshaping and reforming into truth after awhile. Whatever Adnan and Jay believed then could have changed by now. What does seem clear to me, though, is that there was rampant and serious misconduct by Baltimore law enforcement. It seems impossible that, as a defendant, Adnan got within the realm of a fair shake here. And even if law enforcement’s shady behavior didn’t rise to illegal misconduct, there’s a reasonable possibility that it could have had a tangible effect on the outcome.’