[comics] Waiting For The Check: In Conversation With Eddie Campbell, Again – The Gutter Review … Interview with Eddie Campbell from 2023. ‘There’s an anger there almost all of the time. Usually it’s an anger about money. Looking back now, now that I’m out of that, I managed to — for two decades — I managed to bring up a family as the breadwinner, somehow. We were never delinquent. Everything came out right and everyone came up right. There was never any embarrassment about the car being repossessed. The bills were paid on time. And I think…why was I so angry all the time? Everything was pretty good. Everything came out alright in the end. I don’t know why I was so angry. I would have been a much happier individual if I had just taken a second to notice that everything was working out. Or as my wife had said — “I don’t know why you worry about this stuff all the time! It always comes right in the end!”’
[tv] Shifty – A new series by Adam Curtis coming to BBC iPlayer in June 2025 … ‘The films tell the story of the rise of that unstable and confusing world from the 1980s to now. They use a vast range of footage to evoke what if felt like to live through an epic transformation. A shift in consciousness among people in how they saw and felt about the world. Hundreds of moments captured on film and video that give a true sense of the crazy complexity and variety of peoples actual lives. Moments of intimacy and strangeness and absurdity. From nuns playing Cluedo and fat-shaming ventriloquists to dark moments – racist attacks, suspicion of others and modern paranoia about conspiracies in Britain’s past.’
[books] Lovecraft was an American William Blake Alan Moore on H.P. Lovecraft. ‘In writing about Lovecraft, as I’m doing at the moment, I want to understand where he was, to become him, as it were. We’re both pulp writers trying to express our vision of the truth. In this current book Yuggoth Cultures, I’m trying to divine that knowledge. You tend to work faster as a pulp writer and you’re absolved of literary obligations and pretensions. Your vision is purer. The obligations of the deadline leave the conscious mind less time to edit the subconscious outpourings and a truer story leaks through, despite what is lost in literary polish.’
[ai] AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships … ‘Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life.’
[comics] Zodiac Killer Revealed by His Love of Comic Books, Author Says … WERTHAM WAS RIGHT! ‘He noted that a “Halloween card” that Zodiac sent on Oct. 27, 1970 included the curious phrase, “By Fire, By Gun, By Knife, By Rope” — four ways the Zodiac planned to kill his victims, in order to make them his slaves in the afterlife. Kobek — like some past Zodiac sleuths — traced the phrase to a 1952 Western comic book, Tim Holt #30. “In the background, on the cover, there was a ‘wheel of death,’ and on the wheel of death is says ‘by knife, by rope, by gun, by fire.’ That is a clear quotation. It’s never existed anywhere else,” Kobek explained…’
[life] What does Werner Herzog’s nihilist penguin teach us about life? … ‘We then see footage of another of these “deranged” penguins, 80 kilometres off course, sliding on its belly towards certain death. These shots of the solitary birds marching to their demise, mere black dots against the white expanse, are perfect in their portrayal of loneliness and desolation.’
[moore] Long London, Magic & the future of Humanity … Recent Alan Moore interview from Smoky Man in Italy. ‘In From Hell we suggested the late Victorian period, 1888, and specifically the Whitechapel murders as, metaphorically, the birth-cries of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in Lost Girls, Melinda and I posited the late Edwardian era, 1913/1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, I think just as legitimately, as the beginning of the modern world. I suppose the ultimate truth is that every decade, every year, potentially every sunrise is the end of one world and the start of a new one, although over the course of the Long London quintet I want to see what happens when that truism comes up against the currently popular adage that the old world refuses to die and so the new world cannot be born.’
[tv] The TV killing spree: why are so many smash-hit shows about women being murdered? … ‘It might sound counterintuitive to find solace in such grisly fare, but I find there is something soothing about following a plotline where someone, usually a woman, comes to harm or tries to outwit a psychopath, leading to an investigation. Clearly I’m not alone…’
[movies] The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey … A look at the creation and destruction of the Space Jockey prop from Alien. ‘It’s how Giger commonly worked: his darkly surreal paintings were rendered spontaneously, as though they were beamed in directly from his own nightmares. The twist was that Giger was also technically gifted enough to understand how these unearthly shapes could then be turned into physical objects.’
[life] 100 Men vs. 1 Gorilla: Primatologists Explain Who Would Win … … ‘Most silverbacks would much rather take a nap, eat some good food, play with the kids, take another nap … gorillas know how to live a pretty good life, and none of it is wasted wondering if they could knock out 100 humans’
[bbc] 1959: The AUDIOPHILE's Quest for PERFECT SOUND … Go watch this wonderful short-film about audiophiles and the technology of sound in 1959. Directed by John Schlesinger for the BBC. ‘Do they like music? Or are they in love with equipment?’
