21 May 2025
[politics] Trump Presidency Countdown… The slow count down to Trump’s end. ‘91.732702% remaining’
16 May 2025
[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.’
15 May 2025
13 May 2025
[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…’
12 May 2025
[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.’
7 May 2025
[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.’
6 May 2025
[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…’
5 May 2025
[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.’
2 May 2025
[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’
1 May 2025
[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?’
30 April 2025
[tech] Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World … ‘The hysterical tinfoil-hat crowd urges you to turn off your phone whenever you’re going to discuss something private—like your political opinions, religious beliefs, or medical conditions—as if the phone is somehow going to “hear” them and tech companies will use that info against you. In reality, they already know all those things because they know what news sources you read, the contents of your emails, what WebMD pages you’ve visited, and how long you’ve spent at which church, synagogue, mosque, or ethical humanist center. So don’t even worry about it.’
28 April 2025
[life] Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project … I always find something useful in these lists of advice and lifehacks. YMMV. ‘Open your mail over the recycling bin.’
25 April 2025
[sushi] Super Sushi … Nicely done gallery of Lego Sushi builds.
23 April 2025
[comics] The John Wagner and Alan Grant Interview … A Comics Journal interview from 1988…. ‘GRANT: I didn’t think at the time that the “Apocalypse War” story worked all that well, but having read it in album form, I think it’s a really good story and that Carlos [Ezquerra]’s art-work suited it down to the ground. We were given him for that story as they wanted to use one artist all the way through it. They’ve got constant art problems on 2000 AD finding people who can keep up the output that they’ve got to have.’
22 April 2025
[microsoft] You Suck at Excel … If you use Excel take a look at this video from Joel Splosky. It has some great tips and demos of powerful, under-used features.
21 April 2025
[chris] Misspelled Acomb sign proclaims 'Chris is Risen' … ‘A church was presented with signs reading “Chris is risen” after a mix up at the printers. Acomb Parish Church, in York, had ordered four banners saying ‘Christ is Risen’ but the ‘T’ was missed off the finished article.’
17 April 2025
[net] Digital hygiene … A post from Andrej Karpathy offering tips on cleaning up and securing your digital life. ‘The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.’
16 April 2025
[netflix] Netflix Codes … Comprehensive list to find categories and genres on Netflix. ‘Why? You probably know that Netflix is using a really strange system to categorize it’s films and tv shows. Indeed, there isn’t any categories tab… We have the solution, with this site, you will be able to find categories by a little code.’
10 April 2025
[tv] Looking for Lise … Dirty Feed investigates whether Lise Mayer, co-writer of “The Young Ones,” made any on-screen appearances in the show. ‘The thing which amuses me about this: everyone really wants Lise Mayer to have had an on-screen role in The Young Ones. Because it would tie a nice little bow on proceedings. Everyone else who wrote the show had an appearance, why not Lise?’
9 April 2025
[maga] Musk Announces All 340 Million Americans Must Strip And Take Turn Pushing The Wheel Of Pain … ‘Of course, not everyone is going to like the fact that they will be expected to push nonstop without food or water until they collapse from exhaustion and are crushed under the wheel. But the point of this is not to make everybody happy. It’s about making the tough decisions and sticking to them. Say what you will, but ultimately we’re all going to have to submit to the terrible Ring of Blood whose cleansing agony none may escape.’
8 April 2025
[space] Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars … Great article arguing why colonizing Mars is impossible. ‘Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?’
7 April 2025
[comics] Shopping for Superman … The trailer for a documentary about the rise and fall of American comic shops.
4 April 2025
[movies] Baby, The Rain Must Fall (The New Yorker) (Archive Link) … Pauline Kael’s 1982 Review of Blade Runner. ‘“Blade Runner” is a suspenseless thriller; it appears to be a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes. At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant; maybe the booming, lewd and sultry score by Chariots-for-Hire Vangelis that seems to come out of the smoke convinced them that the audience would be moved even if vital parts of the story were trimmed.’
3 April 2025
[moore] Alan Moore on Magic … Go listen to Alan in conversation with writer Gary Lachman and artist John Coulthart last year when The Bumper Book of Magic was published.
2 April 2025
[life] What are your beliefs about the nature of reality? … Analyse your beliefs with this quiz. ‘Inflationary Multiverse — You accept the cosmological model where our universe is one bubble in an eternally inflating space, with other universe “bubbles” having potentially different physical laws, constants, and dimensions.’
1 April 2025
[history] On this Spot, 1st April 1780…
30 March 2025
[todo] Who Uses To-Do Lists? … Donald Knuth: ‘… my scheduling principle is to do the thing I hate most on my to-do list. By week’s end, I’m very happy.’
28 March 2025
[feet] Your feet are home to billions of bacteria. How often should you wash them? … Life’s important questions. ‘Staphylococcus are the key players when it comes to producing the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) responsible for foot odour. Sweat glands on the skin of the feet release a heady mix of electrolytes, amino acids, urea and lactic acid. The Staphylococcus bacteria consider this a veritable feast and, in the process of feeding, convert amino acids into VFAs. The main chemical culprit is isovaleric acid, which has an unpleasant odour which has been described as having a “distinct cheesy/acidic note”.’
27 March 2025
[music] Vangelis – Dr. Stergios Tegos Tapes Playlist … In 1988 Vangelis composed music for about 11hrs of Microneurosurgery videos created by a surgeon he was friends with. Go listen. [see Metafilter for more detail]
25 March 2025
[world] Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M. … ‘Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.’
24 March 2025
[blogs] What was it like? … Phil Gyford takes a look at what weblogs were like in 2000. ‘So many of these, particularly the Blogger sites, feature short and frequent updates. Several posts a day, each with a timestamp. In retrospect it could be seen as people crying out for something like Twitter – a way to share brief snippets of text frequently and (given how many posts refer to other bloggers) sociably.’
21 March 2025
[comics] Alan Moore’s Five Tips for Would-Be Comics Writers … ‘4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.’
19 March 2025
[web] Barbelith Underground … I came across an archive of the Barbelith Underground web forum last week while working on the 25 Years of LMG post. Rediscovering it intact and online felt like discovering a lost piece of the old internet.
18 March 2025
[covid-19] What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick With Coronavirus … Five years ago, I remember reading Jessica Lustig’s powerful writing about caring for her very sick husband who had Covid-19. It was too much to blog at the time but the article has stayed with me.
I run through possibilities. I’m not so worried about CK getting sick. I can nurse her too. It’s if I get sick. I show her how to do more things, where things go, what to remember, what to do if — What if T is hospitalized? What if I am? Could a 16-year-old be left to fend for herself at home, alone? How would she get what she needed? Could she do it? For how long?
The one thing I know is that I could not send her to my parents, 78 years old and nearby on Long Island. They would want her to come, but she could kill them, their dear grandchild coming forward to their embrace, radioactive, glowing with invisible incubating virus cells. No. Not them. Someone else would have to take her, someone who has a bedroom and a bathroom where she could isolate and be cared for. Someone would. I lie awake at 4 a.m., on the floor, listening, thinking, wide awake with adrenaline.’
17 March 2025
[web] E/N – Everything and Nothing Websites … A look at E/N sites, another early version of blogs. ‘Urban Dictionary definition: it refers to a type of post that means everything to the poster, and nothing to anyone else.’
13 March 2025
[blogs] Early SMS Blogging … Last week I was trying to find a UK Blog that was sending SMS messages to blog posts in 2001. I’ve managed to dig it out of the Wayback Machine, screenshot below. The SMS messages feel like tweets. it’s an early attempt at Twitter in 2001! ’12:41 via SMS: You know the more I think about this SMS blogging lark, the more useful it’s becoming. Blog from a sports game, holiday, your car…’
11 March 2025
[tv] Larry David Age Quiz … Can you guess which are the older pictures of Larry David? ‘When the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm aired in 2000, Larry David was 54 years old. For comparison, that is how old Paul Rudd is right now. But the benefit of looking older when you’re young is that it’s hard for others to tell the difference when you age.’
10 March 2025
[manson] Netflix’s Chaos: The Manson Murders takes on a wild theory. Even Errol Morris isn’t sure he believes it. … Interview with Errol Morris about his new documentary on Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca murders. ‘How do you explain the fact that Manson’s parole officer just let him go again and again and again? He was just free to do whatever he chose to do. Can I explain it? I can’t. It could be meaningful or not. Is it suggestive of something peculiar? It is. But does it tell us that somehow they were all in league with the government? It doesn’t. I think it’s one of the most fascinating stories about investigation and the desire to believe and how hard it is really to investigate anything.’
7 March 2025
[arts] All ifs ands or buts connected by green lines … By Sol Levitt, 1973. [Via Matt Fraction’s Tumblr Archive]
6 March 2025
[comics] An Inside Look at the 13 Pre-Flashpoint Eras of Hellblazer … A great, detailed guide to the many different runs on Hellblazer. ‘Garth Ennis – Illustrated by Will Simpson and Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis’ tenure took Moore’s smug bastard, melded him with Delano’s substance-abusing mystic, and added a love for pubs.’
4 March 2025
[blogs] 25 Random Thoughts about 25 years of LinkMachineGo: 
- Does anybody remember E/N “Everything and Nothing” sites? And before E/N there were the early internet diarists and people like Justin Hall and Maggy Donea. Blogging before blogs.
- I started LinkMachineGo because I looked at Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog and thought I could do something similar and focus on comics. I wasn’t as good as Jorn but lasted longer. (Jorn’s still active on Twitter.)
- I have a very faint memory of the Saturday afternoon in 2000 I sat down and tried to pull together a Blogger template. I did not realise at the time what a life changing moment it was for me.
- I was obsessed with Big Brother in the early 2000s!
- There are some earlier LMG posts that I find in real poor taste. What was I thinking? I can’t bring myself to remove them.
- I do miss classic long-form blog posts. There really was something slightly magical in that format / community of bloggers / moment in time.
- There was a really exciting moment early on with blogging where it looked liked it would take over the internet. The Cambrian Explosion of Blogs. Then social media came along and all the exciting variety died off.
- In the early years of blogging I always felt terribly old when I met other 20-something bloggers. I was thirty! lol.
- I will never forget this Metafilter comment about 911 posted as it was happening. I remember looking at it not grasping the enormity of it.
- The magic of the early years of blogging mostly ended when the warblogs came along during the Iraq War. Warbloging seems like patient zero for a lot of what went bad in social media later.
- I often wonder how responsible blogs are for social media and everything that came out of it. So many of the different components of social media were trialed on blogs first and it seems unarguable that Mark Zuckerberg came out of the world of blogs.
- I try not to think about all the time I’ve spent on blogging or how much I’ve spent on hosting LMG over the years.
- Even though I have never blogged professionally I do wonder how much impact blogging has had on my working life. It’s hard to quantify but I do think it’s been a big benefit.
- LinkMachineGo spawned Moment of Moore and The Evening Standard Headline Crisis. I got a tweet out of Alan Moore! :)
- Three links that have stayed with me: Falling Man / The Sinking of the Estonia / Since 1979, Brian Murtagh has fought to keep convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in prison
- Essential late-stage blogging tools: Firefox. Newsblur RSS Reader, a bunch of bookmarklets (remember those?), some iOS Shortcuts, Notepad++, CLCL, Irfanview, Pinboard.in, WordPress.
- I find it really hard to blog on a phone. Fat fingers and the eyesight is not what it was! :(
- Favorite quote: “On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.”
- When I die I’m pretty sure whoever eulogizes me is going to mention blogging. I’m okay with that.
- I’ve published 9000+ posts which is nearly one-a-day over 25 years. Why do I sink so much time and effort into it? I definitely find the process of link blogging soothing. Maybe the simple answer is that I just wanted to record and categorise some of my web browsing.
- I sometimes wonder what the blog in gestalt reveals about me. I’m not sure I want to find out.
- I apologise if I’ve stolen a link, or posted something annoying or pissed you off over the years. I hope you can forgive me.
- I’m pretty sure nobody is reading this anymore really. I’m doing it just for myself.
- When I say blogging changed my life, I mean it. It really changed my life.
- Ten thousand posts seems pretty achievable. Wish me luck! :)
3 March 2025
[movies] Gene Hackman: 20 Best Movies … The French Connection: ‘William Friedkin had planned on pushing Doyle to the outer limits of acceptability; the filmmaker later said that despite the fact Hackman had gone on ride-alongs with Eddie Egan, a.k.a. the real-life Popeye, his lead was so put off by the ugly places he had to go to that Hackman allegedly quit on the second day of production. He was eventually coaxed back, and struggled to find a way in to playing Egan until one day, he noticed the cop “dipping a cruller into a cup of coffee and then pitching it over his head. There was something in his attitude that made everything very clear: This guy doesn’t give a shit about anything except his work.” Bingo! The role won Hackman his first Academy Award. Everyone remembers the famous chase scene — the actor later joked that maybe the car should have won the Oscar — but Hackman is the engine that drives the whole movie.’
2 March 2025
27 February 2025
[gaiman] The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) … Elizabeth Sandifer does a deep dive into Neil Gaiman, his work, and the allegations of sexual assault and abuse. ‘In one of his few public comments about the influence of Scientology, Gaiman noted that he “grew up in a world in which being a science-fiction writer was a good thing. As far as my parents were concerned, that was an incredibly esteemed profession.” And now, as he swept the genre awards for that field, picking up nominations for practically every Best Novel award there was and winning the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards, the engrammatic patterns implicit in the Gaiman family’s vision of being a famous science fiction writer took hold.’
25 February 2025
[comics] Interviewing Alan Moore … A huge collection of scans of Alan Moore interviews over the years with plenty I’ve not seen before. From an early interview in 1981: ‘My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!!’
24 February 2025
23 February 2025
[food] This is my final OFM column. Here’s what I’ve learned about buffets, ‘clean eating’ and what not to serve food on … Some advice on food and dining out from Jay Rayner in his final Happy Eater column. ‘Eating alone in a restaurant is dinner with someone you love and a delicious opportunity for people watching. Great food can be found in the scuzziest of places. Gravy stains down your shirt are not a source of embarrassment; they are a badge of honour. Expensive restaurants are wasted on the people who can afford them. And food should always, always, be served on plates. Not on slates. Not on garden trowels. Not on planks. On plates.’
22 February 2025
[tetris] Apotris … This is the best modern version of Tetris I’ve found – available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch and Gameboy Advance. You can play on your phone if you use an emulator like Delta with the GBA version.
21 February 2025
[politics] Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson & co worship each other in alt-right heaven … John Cace watches a Culture War Conference so we don’t have to. ‘Then Jordan [Peterson] moved on to his favourite subject. What the world needed was more heterosexual couples to get married. Homosexuality was a deviation. There was too much abortion and divorce in the world. You’d be hard pushed to hear a more unpleasant rant all year. It was too much even for Nige, who confessed he had been divorced twice. He looked nervously at Jordan before ending by saying there would be more children under Reform. Trying to win over the audience. Still, at least no one asked him about his admiration of Putin. I’ve never seen Nige more pleased to leave the stage.’
20 February 2025
[history] Distressed 99 Foot Concrete Portrait of Ferdinand Marcos … More details here: The exploded bust of Ferdinand Marcos… ‘The bust was completed in the early 1980s when Mr Marcos was still in power, but fell into disrepair after he was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1986. He died in exile three years later. This is a real modern-era Ozymandias, the broken remnants of a statue to a powerful man who grabbed command by the throat and rode it until he was overthrown.’
19 February 2025
[lists] 25 Dull Lists from Diamond Geezer … ‘Hills in the City of London: Addle, Bennet’s, Cock, College, Dowgate, Fish Street, Garlick, Huggin, Lambeth, Laurence Pountney, Ludgate, Old Fish Street, Peter’s, Primrose, Snow, St Andrew’s, St Dunstans, Tower, White Lion’
18 February 2025
[podcast] The Missing Cryptoqueen… Finally got round to listening to this fascinating podcast on the story of Ruja Ignatova and OneCoin from Jamie Bartlett. Recommended.
14 February 2025
[herzog] Happy Werner Herzog Valentines to those that celebrate … ‘Valentine, in your eyes I see the light, the heat; also chaos, hostility, and murder.’
12 February 2025
[movies] Bad Movies: The 100 Worst Movies of All Time … Following up from yesterday, here’s Rotten Tomatoes list of the worst movies. Jack and Jill (2011): ‘Although it features an inexplicably committed performance from Al Pacino, Jack and Jill is impossible to recommend on any level whatsoever.’
11 February 2025
[film] Splat’s entertainment: I watched Rotten Tomatoes’ 40 lowest-rated films to find out which was worst … Rebecca Liu watched 40 of the worst movies so we don’t have to. ‘While good art can be transcendent and awe-inducing, bad art at its best reminds us of our humility and vulnerability and the inevitability of failure. We all feel the desire to create; we all see grand ambitions fall apart. Plenty of the films in this list were corporate cash-grabs and paint-by-numbers productions that could have been generated by AI. Beyond them, it’s those moments of humanity – funny, absurd, too close to home – that will stay with me. That bizarre piece of dialogue; the performance that tries too hard; Nicolas Cage signing up to a questionable script because it would make his brother happy.’