[phones] My first year without an iPhone … A practical guide to living without a smartphone. ‘Some of you are absolutists, and that’s not going to work here. We can’t turn back time. You can absolutely live completely and fully without the internet, but you have to really change your life. You can totally live ethically with a smartphone, but you will also face struggles. In my opinion, living ethically in either path requires a lot of self-discipline and intentionality.
I work as an editor and marketer of books, and as long as I get my work done, I am not obligated to carry an iPhone for my job. Sure, there are apps like two-factor authentication that we use, and occasionally there’s social media marketing that I can’t do on a desktop, but those are pretty easy to work around, and I’ll explain how.’
[tv] ‘Partridge is more popular than me – that’s a given!’ Steve Coogan on Alan’s glorious return … An interview with Steve Coogan promoting his new Alan Partridge series. ‘[Coogan] tells a story of arriving in his trailer to find a blue, checked Aubin and Wills shirt to wear while playing Partridge – which was identical to the one he was already wearing. “I did take mine off and put the other one on, even though there was no one to witness me. There was a time when I was writing with Armando and Pete when I’d say something as myself, and they’d just write it down as Partridge and it would irritate me. Now the Gibbons do it all the time. As you get older, you realise it’s all gravy.”’
[war] Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin … The story of an early nuclear accident at Los Alamos. ‘The plutonium pit that killed Daghlian and Slotin was originally nicknamed Rufus, but after the accidents it came to be called the demon core. The pits that killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meanwhile, got no such pejorative monikers. Such is the difference, perhaps, between intended and unintended harm, between the core carefully assembled for the purpose of mass destruction and the core reserved for the realm of experiment.’
47. Being stuck in a cab in New York rush hour traffic – “You don’t understand,… I
have to be there by 4.00!” – “Hey, mac, it’s rush hour, we ain’t gettin’ there til five,
so relax.” – “BUT I HAVE TO BE THERE BY FOUR!!!”
[comics] DC To Actually Publish Rick Veitch’s Final Issues Of Swamp Thing? … OMG. I’ve been waiting 36 years for this! :) ‘[The listing for the final Rick Veitch Swamp Thing collection] claims to include four issues of a comic book that simply does not exist. Swamp Thing/Vertigo Special #1-4. DC has never published such a book. Could… could those four issues be the unpublished and uncompleted Swamp Thing #88-91? If so, will DC Comics publish them outside of the book as well? Will we see Swamp Thing/Vertigo Special #1 from DC Comics in December?’
[moore] Alan Moore's 5 Essential Tips for Screenwriters … ‘Know Your Ending Before You Begin – This is Moore’s most emphatic piece of advice for television writers, especially. “I knew what the last shot in the last episode of the last season was going to be,” he said about an unproduced series he wrote. “In fact, I’d known that since before I’d started the five short films and the feature film that the television series would have been a continuation of. I knew the ending before I started. And I can’t underline how important this is.” Moore warns against the “shapeless narrative drift” that occurs when writers make things up as they go along, calling it “a terrible experience for both the writer and for the viewer.”‘
[truecrime] Can You Ethically Enjoy True Crime? … A look at the ethics of True Crime from Lifehacker of all places. ‘People have always loved a compelling mystery. People love reality TV. Modern true crime essentially combines both of these things, using the addictive format of the latter to explore the former; it’s natural to get sucked in. The issue comes when we as an audience forget that something is not simply a story for our entertainment, but actually a chronicle of the worst–or final–day of a real person’s life.’
[book] Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction … A look at why prisons in America routinely ban books about magic. ‘Looking through the lists of titles prison authorities have gone to the trouble of prohibiting people from reading you find Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing and Magic: An Occult Primer in Louisiana, Practical Mental Magic in Connecticut, all intriguingly for “safety and security reasons.” The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon in Arizona, Maskim Hul Babylonian Magick in California. Nearly every state that has a list of banned titles contains books on magic.’
[space] With Space Junk on the Rise, Is a Catastrophic Event Inevitable? … ‘Several pieces of a SpaceX Dragon trunk (the portion of the rocket just below the capsule) had landed on the property and on nearby farms. “The longest piece was probably eight feet long, and it weighed 80 pounds,” says Lawler, who teaches at the University of Regina. “If that hit your house, it would go right through; it wouldn’t even slow down.” Lawler returned to the farm several weeks later, when two SpaceX employees arrived in a small truck to cart away the debris. “They silently picked up the pieces and loaded them into the U-Haul,” she says. For Lawler, the incident drove home the growing problem of space junk—and left her with a sense of dread that’s never quite gone away. “Actually standing next to the pieces and thinking about them falling at terminal velocity [about 165 feet per second]—that is terrifying.”’
[comics] Alan Moore’s Greyshirt “How things work out” with art by Rick Veitch … ‘We’re able to tell, by some quite complicated story gymnastics, quite an interesting little story that is told over nearly sixty years of this building’s life, with characters getting older depending upon which panel and which time period they’re in. There’s something that you couldn’t do in any medium other than comics.’
[podcasts] Time’s 100 Best Podcasts of All Time … ‘The Drop Out – You’re probably familiar with Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who lied to doctors, patients, and investors about her nonfunctioning blood-testing startup. But Holmes’ eccentricities—her decision to style herself like Steve Jobs, her insistence that her un-housebroken dog was actually a wolf, her sheer confidence in the face of some of the most powerful investors in the world—deserve a longform investigation. ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis hosted a riveting 2019 audio documentary that includes deposition tapes that had never before been heard publicly and dispatches from Holmes’ eventual trial. Holmes’ story lends itself well to the audio format, in part because the quixotic entrepreneur had a jarringly low voice. And the crazy yarn of Holmes’ rise and fall is so gripping, you cannot help but press play on the next episode even if you already know the major beats of the story.’
[banksy] Banksy’s Endangered Animals … One year on, Diamond Geezer surveys Banksy’s Concrete Jungle Safari. ‘Pelicans (Walthamstow) – I first saw this when it was fresh, two pelicans necking fish from Bonners chippy just north of Walthamstow High Street. It took a while to be shielded by plastic because the family were on their six week summer break when Banksy came and painted it. They’re abroad again at present, returning Thursday 4th September, but the artwork’s still safely in place and possibly the greatest of the bunch. If you come for a gander in the autumn be aware that a small bag of chips now costs £4.20 because art doesn’t come cheap.’
[comics] The most important British character in US comics … John Constantine is 40. ‘What would Delano, the writer most closely associated with Constantine’s rise, think if he met the character? “My relationship with Constantine is one of both love and hate. I’m grateful for the changes to the course of my life our association enabled, but, undeniably, that debt also engenders some resentment,” he admits. “Constantine is a cranky old bastard, and so am I. We’d probably clash. I imagine any meeting would be affectionate, but we’d soon start to irritate one another.”
[disgust] This article will make you want to wash your hands … I came across this long read on disgust and public health and found it fascinating. It was published a few years ago but definitely worth a read. ‘Because of the way meat is produced, the world, McLagan notes, is “awash” with this excellent source of protein and iron, but most of it gets wasted. Some is dumped into rivers and lakes, which causes pollution, increasing the nitrogen in the water. The key to avoiding this pollution – and getting some cheap nutrients into the bargain – would be eliminating our disgust for cooking with blood. McLagan finds pig’s blood a marvellous substitute for eggs, with half the calories. In her Toronto kitchen, she whips fresh blood into a stable pink foam, which she uses for anything from rich brownies to dark brown blood meringues. I tried some of both. They tasted good, with a slight metallic tang. But most western consumers find the very idea of handling blood too horrifying even to contemplate.’
[comics] The (Lost) Frank Miller ‘Elektra’ Screenplay? … A review of an Elektra: Assassin screenplay from the late 1980s written by Frank Miller. ‘Some familiar names from Elektra Assassin that show up here are Presidente Huevos, Ambassador Reich, Perry and Garrett, Beaker, and of course the Kennedy-style politician Ken Wind. Unfortunately, there is no Chastity or Nick Fury. Garret, a comedic foil who makes the comics very entertaining, is written in a very serious and earnest way into the screenplay and his character is much more standard and ‘cookie cutter.’ The main villain is Kirigi, an unstoppable brute and member of the ninja group The Hand whom Elektra faced more than once in Miller and Klaus Janson‘s original Daredevil run…’
[life] New Evidence Suggests Dinosaurs Would Have Driven Selves To Extinction Through Greed And Complacency Anyway … ‘It appears they were already developing the rudimentary traits for corruption needed to exploit each other. This, combined with a genetic predisposition toward pillaging the earth with no regard for tomorrow, would have derailed the ecosystems that sustained them just as effectively as an extraterrestrial object colliding with the planet and setting in on fire.’
[moore] Alan Moore interviewed on art and magic by Roberto Bartual … ‘All of my magical enterprises, though, since the beginning, have been geared towards public revelation, whether as a published piece, a multi-media performance, a film project or a recorded audio work, which I suppose are all different applications or kinds of magic. These days, however, with diminished mobility and a diminishing tolerance for the role of public figure, I am entirely focussed on writing – the first technology, that makes magic and all other technologies possible. This is not to say that I might not do the occasional tarot reading or offer kabbalistic advice to friends and family, but from my point of view, there is nothing in the conceivable universe that cannot be captured and contained by the couple-of-dozen squiggles in the average alphabet.’
[space] Who Has Jurisdiction for Crimes Committed in Space? … ‘The closest thing to space crime that law enforcement has yet encountered may be crimes committed in Antarctica, the frigid and isolated continent that’s unaffiliated with any country but operates under the Antarctic Treaty signed by 54 nations. The agreement declares that the suspect is likely under their home country’s jurisdiction. In some cases, the country owning the research station where the alleged crime took place steps in. In 2018, a Russian researcher at Bellingshausen Station on King George Island went after his victim with a knife in the station’s dining room. He was charged in Russia.’
[books] 1980s Computer and coding books from Usborne … A nostalgic collection of coding books for kids freely available from the publisher’s website. ‘Many of today’s tech professionals were inspired by the Usborne computing books they read as children. The books included program listings for such iconic computers as the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, and are still used in some computer clubs today.’
[movies] 10 Great Shark Attack Films … Great movie list from the BFI.‘The Shallows contains its narrative within the restricted space of a rocky outcrop where surfing medical student Nancy (Blake Lively) is stranded just 200 yards from the shore following a shark attack. Jaume Collet-Serra’s film realistically plays out the drama in vivid detail, as Nancy steadily dehydrates, sustains blood wounds and gets ever weaker as the great white increases its attempts to attack her. While the narrative of The Shallows is ostensibly Nancy surviving her ordeal, like Jaws it invests its shark with meaning beyond lethal threat, as it functions as both apex predator and major metaphor for the recent loss of her mother. Just as the shark circles Nancy, so does her grief, patrolling her psychological borders, waiting to consume her.’
[life] The Onion: Study: 97% Of Average American’s Day Spent Retrieving 6-Digit Codes … ‘“Our findings suggest that U.S. residents spend roughly 23 hours each day—or 160 hours every week—attempting to log in to online services, being told they need to check their phone for a six-digit code, and then entering that code into the website or app for verification,” said lead researcher Andrew Singh, adding that many Americans have to skip meals and forgo showering in order to find time to read and transfer over the hundreds of codes needed daily to access their medical records, work emails, and food delivery accounts.’
‘As a producer, it was Balson’s job to persuade bereaved families to tell their stories on camera. “The thing about factual TV is that the raw material is just people, and your relationship with those people,” says McKay, who has also worked as a true crime TV producer. “That puts massive stress on the people whose job it is to organise and wrangle them.”
Because his contributors were usually based in the US or the UK, Balson routinely worked 18-hour days across three time zones. “You spend all day looking at photos of dead bodies of people who have been murdered in gruesome ways,” says Rosy Milner, 30, a factual TV producer and former colleague of Balson’s from London. “You read about sexual abuse and crimes against children. And then a contributor in the US texts at 10pm, asking for a phone call. You book the Zoom at midnight and keep going.”’
[web] Digital hygiene … Great set of tips to improve your internet security. ‘Work-life separation. Ideally, do not log in or access any of your personal services on work computers. Most of them have company-operated spyware installed on them to protect the company’s intellectual property. This is all well and good and makes sense, but you should know that any activity on the computer is quite likely extensively logged (networking, keyloggers, screenshots, etc.) and possibly actively monitored by the security department.’
[games] The story of how Boulder Dash was created … Peter Liepa, the creator of Boulder Dash, interviewed. ‘It was a very simple model, and it probably only took a day or two to write. But once I had that, I could sit there for hours. I had a random number generator that would just scatter rocks and earth on the map, and I’d run the joystick through it, destroying earth and watching the rocks fall. Then I realized that, oh my god, this is actually kind of fun. It was like a kid playing in the mud; building little dams and letting water flow through. You had a toy to play with. The more I played with it, the more I realized it led to a fun and addictive experience. Even if all you did was destroy earth and watch rocks fall, that was already entertaining. But then, I could also run into a dense area of rocks and try to make my way through the maze.’
‘He recited his current favourite examples of state failure – fugitive terrorists using human rights law to sue the Ministry of Defence, deep-state officials murmuring of riots in the provinces, politicians who hide from responsibility behind the scripts of their civil service administrators. He connected this with his current favourite historical parallel: the crisis of capitalism, technology and ideology of the 1840s, which he compares to the revolutions in AI and “biological engineering” in Silicon Valley about to “smash into all our lives”.
Cassandra in tracksuit bottoms, then. And given the scale of this upheaval, the corresponding Cummings programme is remarkably precise, but limited. His great theme is, to put it facetiously, paperwork management. Government should be narrower, sharper, modelled after the administrations of Pitt the Younger (he speaks as if there is no difference between late-18th-century carronade procurement and modern bureaucracy).’
[comics] Dark They Were And Golden Eyed Adverts … DTWAGE was a sci-fi and comic book retailer based in London in the 1970s. Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alan Moore and many other comics artists created adverts for them.
[comics] Jack Kirby Draws Jack Ruby … Today I discovered that Jack Kirby did a annotated 3-page comic about Jack Ruby for Esquire Magazine in 1967. ‘Ruby looks like a dissipated, angry version of Kirby’s later creation, Goody Rickels. He’s a small man who thinks he’s big, and other than brooding over the president’s assassination and killing Lee Harvey Oswald, he spends most of the three pages doing things such as ordering cold cuts, placing advertising for his club, going for a swim, demonstrating something called a “Twistaboard,” and having a Coke.’
[politics] The race to succeed Sadiq Khan … It’s looking likely that Sadiq Khan will stand down as London major before the next election in 2028. ‘But friends of Khan tell me that he has privately indicated he does not plan to stand for a fourth term. Some attribute this to the strain of being the most heavily guarded person in the country after the King and the Prime Minister. “Hand on heart, had I known when I first began this journey what it involved for my family, I can’t unequivocally say I would have done this,” Khan reflected last year.’
[curtis] Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war. .. Curtis setups the UK history described in his new documentary Shifty. ‘It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.’
[oceangate] So what was Stockton's motivation for his decision? … A thoughtful Reddit posts on the motivations and decisions that led to the Titan submersible implosion. ‘I guess the only thing that makes sense to me is the comment by another redditor that “it HAD to work.” He bet everything on it. Since switching to carbon fibre after the Fosset sub was built (started OG in 2009, and this was sometime around 2011/2012 I believe) – his entire business model revolved around being able to monetize submersibles.’
[tv] 10 Most Shocking Reveals From Netflix's OceanGate Titan Submersible Documentary … Fascinating documentary from Netflix that shows some of Stockton Rush’s movtivations. ‘Although they worked on the Titan, many of the engineers had little to no confidence in the vessel. This is best displayed by the testimony of Tony Nissen, the Director of Engineering, during the Coast Guard investigation. He asserts that Stockton Rush asked him to go into the Titan for a test dive, but he refused to go inside the vessel for a dive. Theoretically, if anyone should have had confidence in a submersible’s efficacy, it would be the head of engineering.’
[history] The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris … Wonderful story about the radioactive traces Marie Curie left behind in Paris where she worked. ‘”The lab was already decontaminated in the 1980s,” says Huynh. At the time, the practice in the museum was to “try and scrub off the contamination with abrasive sponges, and if radioactivity was then still detected, it meant it had sunk into the material, and they’d throw away the whole thing and replace it” with a copy, he says. The lab bench, for example, was replaced with a replica, Huynh explains. Today, weakly radioactive traces such as the ones on the chair and doorknob are allowed to stay in place, he says, and are considered as heritage.’
[comics] Yuggoth: unpublished Lovecraftian tales … Garth Ennis mentions an unseen anthology series with Alan Moore during a 2024 interview. ‘There’s a series called Yuggoth, and it’s based on the work that Alan did – Providence, Neonomicon, and some of the other Avatar books he did based on his love of H. P. Lovecraft. And Yuggoth was going to be an anthology series. I do hope people see it. Alan wrote the first storyline. Mine would have been the second. You also have Kieron Gillen in there and Si Spurrier. All this is written and drawn.’
[tech] Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet … Doctorow discusses enshitification, twiddling and more… ‘A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that “”bill themselves out as ‘Uber for nursing'””. The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to “”play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced””. In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. “”Because, the more desperate you are, the less you’ll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.”” That is horrific on many levels, he said, but “”it is emblematic of ‘enshittification'””, which is one of the reasons he highlighted it.’ [The Keynote can be found on Youtube]
[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.’
