REYNOLDS: Do we want sexual tension on a board game cover for eight-year-olds?
SMITH: We want adult tension. The tension of brains. If anyone sees sex, that’s on them. We’re not responsible for the public’s imagination. We’re responsible for moving units in Woolworths. Gary, I see what you’re going for… a Cold War posture: mutually assured… embarrassment? You probe, they conceal, you infer, they flinch. Gorgeous.
REYNOLDS: Jesus. All that from colored pegs and a plastic tray?
[xmas] 1970: The Office Christmas Party … A wonderful TV time capsule from the BBC Archive about a Christmas party at a London advertising agency in 1969. It has a real Adam Curtis vibe to it and not surprisingly he wrote about it in 2010. ‘The old patrician world of British advertising was being dismantled and by now much of it had gone from the agency. The only real remnant of that old world in the film is Mary Crowley from Accounts (along with her unnamed friend from Wages). I love Mary Crowley, she is like a ghost from an older Britain haunting the new “on-trend” flash agency.’
[antibiotics] The Penicillin Myth … A fascinating look at competing theories on how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and where the mould spores might have actually came from. ‘More important to Root-Bernstein than the specifics of Fleming’s discovery is the fact that it evidences Pasteur’s principle that “chance favors only the prepared mind.” Whether he was experimenting with staphylococci or lysozyme, Fleming kept his mind open to the possibility of discovering new bacteriolytic substances.’
[london] Four strange places to see London’s Roman Wall … Diamond Geezer visits segments of London’s Roman wall in some unlikely spots. ‘It’s the contrasts that I found most incongruous. A relic from Roman times penned inbetween a speed hump and a futile pedestrian crossing. A fortification from the 3rd century beside an electric van built last year. A defensive structure that helped see off the Peasants Revolt beside a poster warning what to do in the event of fire. A boundary wall once an intrinsic part of the capital now underground illuminated by strip lights. And all this at the very far end of an oppressive bunker preserved for the benefit of hardly any eyes in a parking facility only a few know to use.’
[Viruses] On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world … The story behind the Bulgarian Virus Factory of the late 80s, early 90s. ‘One of Dark Avenger’s nastiest creations was first observed in the House of Commons library in Westminster in October 1990. Research staff were perplexed that some of their regular files were missing and others were corrupted. Since the problem kept getting worse, the library called in an outside specialist. A virus scan came out negative, but the specialist was sure that there had been an infection because the corrupted files grew in size. When he examined the contents of the files, he noticed one word in the jumble of characters: NOMENKLATURA.’
[net] My first months in cyberspace … Phil Gyford describes his first experiences of the Internet in 1995. ‘It’s hard to convey how difficult it was to set things up. So new and alien to me. When reading computer magazines I’d always skipped articles about networking and while the computers at university had been connected together, that was only for the purposes of printing, scanning and transferring files. First there was the issue of getting online at all. The Internet Starter Kit spent 59 pages explaining how to set up MacTCP, and PPP or SLIP, two different methods of connecting to the internet, the differences of which happily escape me now.’
[zx] I am still the greatest computer of all time, insists ZX Spectrum 48k … ‘“Look, I loaded Manic Miner from a cassette tape in under five minutes,” boasted the tiny rubber-keyed legend, flickering proudly in forty shades of grey. “Can your so-called ‘gaming PC’ give you that kind of anticipation? That raw, edge-of-your-seat thrill as you pray the tape doesn’t error out at 99%?”’
[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.’
[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.’
‘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] 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.’
[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.’
[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?’
[life] Wikenigma … An Encyclopedia of the known unknowns. Paracetemol:‘One of the most widely prescribed drugs in history works by mechanisms which have not yet been agreed upon by the medical establishment. It‘s currently thought that paracetamol acts via more than one neurological pathway…’
[war] The Big Baltic Bomb Cleanup… A look at the race to safely remove vast amounts of weaponry dumped in The Baltic after both World Wars. ‘…In their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain. That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives.’
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2 September 2024
[pac-man] Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game … A deep dive into the Pac-Stance – the way people stood playing Pac-Man in an arcade. ‘Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game.’
[tv] Recreating The People’s Poet Badges … Faboulous project to recreate the badges worn by Rik in the Young Ones. ‘So I began my research. I first researched screenshots, episodes, official photographs and portraits, gathering as many references as I could. But there were still some that were unidentified and from what I’d seen, previous cosplayers had filled the unidentified badges with a related badge to The Young Ones or a political badge that they imagined Rick would have…’
[tech] Dinosaur’s Pen … A nostalgic collection of old technology images.
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20 June 2024
[internet] What the Internet Was Like in 2004 … ‘Blogging was still niche in 2004, but it was increasingly where daily conversations online were happening. I started out in 2002 using a desktop app called Radio Userland, but in early May 2004, I switched to a browser-based blog platform called Movable Type. The “blogosphere” was kind of a prototype for social media, because it was where people learned to be opinionated and express ‘takes’ on the internet. The beauty of the blogosphere was that it was truly decentralised.’
[tech] How to Copy a File From a 30-year-old Laptop … A technology archaeology story. ‘While the laptop has no networking software, it does have fax software. We confirmed the modem could dial, so this might just be crazy enough to work. The first question was how to turn the audio file into something faxable. The laptop contains a collection of games. Alongside them is a resource editor, called ResEdit, which had previously been used to inspect and modify the aforementioned games. Let’s see what it can do…’
[tags: Apple, History, Tech][permalink][Comments Off on Faxing a Sound File From a 30-year-old Laptop…]
16 May 2024
[emoji] Emoji history: the missing years … A deep dive into the early history of emojis. ‘I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell…’
[books] Today, I learned… Apparently the Brontë’s all died so early because they spent their lives drinking graveyard water.‘…There was the graveyard-which sat on a hill, right in front of the parsonage where the Brontë’s lived-which Babbage found to be overstuffed, badly laid out, and poorly oxygenated, so much so that the decomposing material from the graves had filtered into the town’s water supply. The long-term exposure to harmful bacteria would have made the Brontë’s weaker, shorter, and more susceptible to other diseases.’
[onions] Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades … The Onion’s parody article about razors and marketing is 20 years old! ‘People said we couldn’t go to three. It’ll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming “Five’s crazy?” Well, perhaps he’d be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary blades, my white ass!’
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[tags: Fun, History, Mac][permalink][Comments Off on Run Flying Toasters in your Browser!]
22 November 2023
[crime] Burke and Hare… and Knox … Today, I learned about Robert Knox, the anatomist who enabled the murderers Burke and Hare. ‘Edinburgh was then a world center of anatomical study. To meet the demand, a number of anatomists lectured outside the university. The most popular of these was one-eyed Robert Knox, renowned for both his lectures and his scathing criticism of his competitors and society at large. Hundreds attended his lectures. It was his school that purchased the victims of Burke and Hare, some still warm, for £8-10 each. (This was big money for the shilling-scant). Knox’s students actually recognized some of Burke and Hare’s victims, including prostitute Mary Paterson and the amiable street wanderer “Daft Jamie” Wilson. Yet no questions were asked about the bodies.’
[spy] Lunik: Inside the CIA’s audacious plot to steal a Soviet satellite … The true story of a Cold War heist. ‘The American and the Mexican made an odd pairing. Dean stood half a foot taller than Silveti, and, while his Mexican counterpart was something of a party animal, the American enjoyed coaching his son’s little league team and doted on Happy, his family’s miniature dachshund, who was heavily pregnant. Yet they needed to work together to ensure the Soviets wouldn’t notice a missing spacecraft.’
[excel] Microsoft Excel v1.00 (san inc crack) … Use the first version of Excel in your browser. Click below but it needs a fast link to download quickly.
[www] Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an internet icon … The inside story behind Snopes – the early internet fact checking site. ‘Mikkelson had adopted a surname of William Faulkner’s creation, a family “of pure sons of bitches,” who appear in a number of Faulkner’s works. Mikkelson was very familiar with their saga: Flem Snopes, the central character, possessed a talent for verisimilitude, which helped him climb from outcast sharecropper to bank president and church deacon. Mikkelson would go on to say that he had chosen snopes “simply because it was short and distinctive,” and he’d only shrug noncommittally when asked if he was a fan of Faulkner’s. But people have often pondered the connection to an alias along the lines of snipe, snicker, sneak, or snake. “We all felt that it was deeply, deeply appropriate,” says Teasley.’
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[cats] Neko: History of a Software Pet … A page about Neko – a cat that ran around the screen chasing the mouse pointers in the 1990s. ‘The original software based on this concept, as far as I’ve been able to trace back, was written in the 1980’s by Naoshi Watanabe (若田部 ç›´). It was called NEKO.COM and ran on the Japanese computer NEC PC-9801 in the MS-DOS command line.’
[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.’
[comics] Like Colonel Sanders: The Stan Lee Era … A deep dive into the life of Stan Lee via two recent biographies. ‘Lee’s final years were a strange mixture of global fame and outlandish hustling. He enjoyed filming his Hitchcock-like cameos for the MCU movies, but got only token fees for them and avoided sitting through the premieres: ‘Stan hated superhero films,’ his business manager told Riesman. A parade of unreliable associates – including a memorabilia mogul who claimed to be Michael Jackson’s best friend – tried to persuade him they’d found a way to turn his celebrity into cash.’
[life] The Misconception About Baby Boomers and the Sixties … ‘The boomers get tied to the sixties because they are assumed to have created a culture of liberal permissiveness, and because they were utopians-political idealists, social activists, counterculturalists. In fact, it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people. The baby boomers obviously played no substantive role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act, or in the decisions of the Warren Court, which are the most important political accomplishments of the decade. Nor were they responsible for the women’s movement or gay liberation.’ [Thanks Feeling Listless]
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8 November 2021
[space] Unwrapped: Five Decade Old Lunar Selfie … A 1969 selfie of Neil Armstrong captured from the reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s helmet. ‘ The original image captured not only the magnificent desolation of an unfamiliar world, but Armstrong himself reflected in Aldrin’s curved visor. Enter modern digital technology. In the featured image, the spherical distortion from Aldrin’s helmet has been reversed. The result is the famous picture — but now featuring Armstrong himself from Aldrin’s perspective.’
[funny] Gunpowder plotte was ye false flagge, says 17th century conspiracy theorist … ‘A 17th-century conspiracy theorist is convinced the gunpowder plot was a government scheme to justify taking people’s gunpowder away, as it is impossible for mere powder to undo stone and stout oak beams. Simon Williams, esq, Gentleman of the parish of Kettering, has written a hard-hitting pamphlet pointing out that it is not credible that a small group of religious fundamentalists could smuggle thirty-six barrels of gunpowder into Parliament without the government being complicit in some way…’
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2 November 2021
[apple] A Prototype Original iPod … A very yellow testing prototype of the original iPod. ‘Clearly, this revision of the prototype was very close to the internals of the finished iPod. In fact, the date there – September 3rd, 2001 – tells us this one was made barely two months before it was introduced…’
[quacks] James Morrison: The Doctor Who Made His Patients Poop Themselves To Death … ‘The doctor, you’ll be shocked to learn, wasn’t too fussed about figuring out things like dosage, and here’s where things got dangerous. As far as he was concerned, if you fancied ramming down dozens of the laxatives that was fine. He even recommended that you take laxatives for the diarrhea, “so as effectually to carry off the morbid humours”, as well as dysentery. Needless to say, but this is like someone trying to treat your ball pain with successive blows to the testicles. He advised that you were likely to feel worse before you get better, and to not let that stop you from taking his extremely profitable medicine. Of course, the pills began to kill people, including one 15-year-old girl who died “in horrible distress” as a consequence of taking his medicine, as well as a little apprentice boy, among others.’
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1 October 2021
[spy] ‘Havana syndrome’ and the mystery of the microwaves … A beginners Guide to the mystery of Havana Syndrome. ‘One theory is that Havana involved a much more targeted method to carry out some kind of surveillance with higher-power, directed microwaves. One former UK intelligence official told the BBC that microwaves could be used to “illuminate” electronic devices to extract signals or identify and track them. Others speculate that a device (even perhaps an American one) might have been poorly engineered or malfunctioned and caused a physical reaction in some people. However, US officials tell the BBC no device has been identified or recovered.’
[wikipedia] One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia … A fascinating look at how lots of Nazi history on Wikipedia is essentially fanfiction and the difficulties in clearing it up. ‘In the spring of 2016, Coffman goes through hundreds of articles about the winners of various Nazi medals, including one called the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. She removes biased sources and any information based on those sources. When she is done, typically, there is nothing left to the article-nothing to say about the person-other than the fact that he won an award. She then insists that an award isn’t reason enough for a stand-alone Wikipedia article. Without a reliable source telling your life story, you can’t be notable. Poof. Another Nazi legend bites the dust.’
[web] Why are hyperlinks blue? … a deep-dive into the history of web browser user interfaces. ‘We’ve now been able to narrow down the time frame for the blue hyperlink’s origin. WWW, the first browser, was created in 1987 and was black and white. We know that Mosaic was released on January 23, 1993 and was credited as being the first browser with blue hyperlinks. So far, we have been unable to find blue being used for hyperlinks in any interface before 1987, but as color monitors become more available and interfaces start to support color, things change quickly…’
[retro] Behind the scenes at Atari … A look back at the wild, early days of Atari. ‘It was during the birthday celebration of a VP who shall remain nameless, but it might have been the one who used to keep a canister of nitrous oxide and another of pure oxygen in his office. The nitrous oxide was for getting high and laughing some time away, while the oxygen was used for rapid sobering up in the event a spontaneous meeting was called (which happened regularly at Atari). As the party raged on, a small crew of revellers migrated to the small but accommodating hot tub room…’
[food] Meat-rich diet of 14th-century monks caused digestive issues, research finds … Important historical research into medieval monks laxtative recipes. ‘There is a laxative recipe featuring various fruit extracts. Or a monk can perhaps feel better if they “take a pese of soepe, make hit smale and putt it yn youre fundamewnt and then rest upon your bed”. Carter said he had no intention of trying out the recipes, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were highly effective”.’
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24 May 2021
[adventure] 1982: The Hobbit … A look back at The Hobbit – a ground-breaking adventure game from 8-bit era. ‘But Megler loved the game’s unpredictability. “I didn’t make any attempt to stop that,” she said of unexpected NPC deaths, “because I thought it was cool.” Unlike Adventure, you never knew quite what would happen when you booted up her game. It was exactly the kind of nondeterministic serendipity she had hoped to create: “I was really aiming for something like life, where the outcome is the result of many independent occurrences and decisions by many people, and sometimes things just don’t work out… I actively wanted the unpredictability.”’
[meme] An anniversary for great justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 years later … ‘This video’s 20th anniversary will likely make you feel old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean the video itself aged badly. There’s still something timeless about both the wackiness and innocence of so many early-Internet pioneers sending up a badly translated game.’
[london] A Jack the Ripper mural – are you serious? How the Eastenders hit back … A look at why a Jack the Ripper mural got painted over in Whitechapel. ‘The Duke of Wellington had offered the wall as a “blank canvas” for Zabou – a French-born, London-based street artist – and her spray cans. It’s just a few metres away from a barber called Jack the Clipper, and not too much of a distance from Jack the Chipper. Pre-Covid, there were constant Jack the Ripper tours here, with large groups traipsing round pavements led by theatrical guides acting out the gory details of the murders, stopping at sites where the mutilated bodies of the women were found, at pubs where they drank, flop-houses where they stayed when they could afford it. There’s even a Jack the Ripper museum, which opened in spite of much local protest.’
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9 September 2020
[computers] The 20 greatest home computers – ranked! … Ancient 1980s schoolyard arguments revived for 2020. ‘The people’s choice, the gaming platform of the everyman, Sinclair’s 48K Spectrum, with its rubber keys, strange clashing visuals and tinny sound was absolutely pivotal in the development of the British games industry. From Jet Set Willy and Horace Goes Skiing to Knight Lore and Lords of Midnight it drew the absolute best from coders, many of whom would go on to found the country’s biggest studios.’
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7 September 2020
[comics] “This Was Cultural Genocide”: An Interview With Joe Sacco … Sacco is interviewed about his new book. ‘It’s also a question of what can a comic book do? How far can you push the reader into a very complicated issue. I’m always reading books that are very complex. Just as we all do. As a reader when you’re reading prose you expect a lot from yourself, I think. They have a lot of moving parts. In comics the advantage I think is that you have all these moving parts and illustrations can cement things in a readers head better. I tried to push things as far as complexity goes. Land claims are complex. You have the government of Canada, the government of the Northwest Territories, and then you have the different Dene groups each with its own agenda. You have the complexities within communities, the strains within communities over claims. The tension between communities. It’s all very complex. You’ll have to tell me if I pulled it off. It depends on the readers patience. I guess I’m expecting readers to be patient.’
[mp3] ‘You’ve been smoking too much!’: the chaos of Tony Wilson’s digital music revolution … How Tony Wilson foresaw the digital music business in 1998. ‘Arriving in summer 2000, music33 developed a barmy way of protecting clients’ tracks. Songs purchased came in a PDF; users tapped in a password to play the music. “I’m still trying to understand it even now,” Clarke chuckles. Pre-broadband dial-up internet was so slow that “you’d plug in a modem to download one track, which could take 15 minutes,” says Clarke. Music33 featured a little robot avatar named Howie, who explained how to use the site. Wilson’s plan to get Keith Allen to do its voice never came off.’
