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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 13 July 2021
[comics] The First Sketch of Wonder Woman … A remarkable look at the earliest design sketches of Wonder Woman from 1941 by H.G. Peter. ‘Dear Dr. Marston, I slapped these two out in a hurry…’ [via Kottke]
12 July 2021
[lifehacks] What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life? | Ask MetaFilter … ‘Good rechargeable batteries and a good charger for them are a fantastic investment in removing obnoxiousness from one’s life, especially now that nobody wants to run to the store for just one thing. Eneloop is the battery brand I settled on, with a Panasonic BQ-CC55 charger because someone who sounded like they knew what they were talking about said it was their favorite.’
9 July 2021
[movies] How They Shot the Wrong-Way Car Chase in To Live and Die in L.A. … How William Friedkin and team created shot an unforgettable car chase for the 1985 movie To Live and Die in L.A. ‘In the narrative of the film, Chance and Vukovich are driving against traffic. But, in reality, the opposite was true. Petersen and Pankow drove in the correct direction. Meanwhile, “traffic” actually flowed backward on the wrong side of the road. This is possible to spot in several brief cuts. According to an interview with Hooker on Shout Factory’s Blu-ray release, one of the reasons Friedkin wanted Petersen and Pankow to drive in that particular direction was “because there were these beautiful oil refineries with all the lights, and it was a dusk shot. [Friedkin] wanted to see that in the background with the cars going and the only way he could do that was to reverse the flow of the traffic.”’
8 July 2021
[web] Photopea … Amazing online photo editor – a free alternative to Photoshop that works in the browser.
7 July 2021
[fractals] Benoît Mandelbrot, The Father of Fractals… Shortly before he died in 2010 Benoît Mandelbrot was interviewed by Errol Morris.
6 July 2021
[retrogaming] In the ’80s, she was a video game pioneer. Today, no one can find her … The search for Vietnamese woman who programmed an Atari 2600 games featuring one of the first female characters in gaming. ‘Firsthand accounts from the few Apollo developers with an online presence don’t even remember who she was, exactly, other than knowing she was Vietnamese and determined to get hired. These developers assume she must be called Ban Tran, because that’s what fan sites say her name was. But they’re not sure; they can’t quite recall. Where did the fan sites get the name in the first place? Like Score before her, Tran’s contribution to video games is hanging by a thread.’
5 July 2021
[podcast] The Great Post Office Trial … A powerful podcast on the British Post Office scandal – the complex story about what is likely to be the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.
1 July 2021
[comics] Tom Frame Interviews Alan Moore … from issue 4 of Deadline, February 1989. Tom was famous for lettering and colouring something in almost every issue of 2000AD for many years.
30 June 2021
[ldn] Why is central London suddenly full of American sweetshops? … ‘If you walk from Kingdom of Sweets towards Marble Arch, you’ll pass American Candy Land, Worldwide Candy: The House of American Candy and, four doors down from that, the words ‘American Candy’ printed on a blue banner covering an old shop name. Look over the road: there’s Candy Surprise. If you walk back towards Tottenham Court Road, you’ll pass Candy Shop, American Candy, American Candy World, and – if you pop round the corner on to Charing Cross Road – Candy World. That’s nine American sweetshops in just two kilometres. More than one every 250 metres…’
29 June 2021
[tech] Ransomware Attacks … Powerful infographic showing the rise of ransomware attacks over the last five years.
28 June 2021
[moore] The Craft: An Interview with Alan Moore by Daniel Whiston … Long interview on writing, comics, magic and much more from 2008. ‘There does come this point when characters start talking to you. They’ll start telling you what they want to do, you’ll know what they would say and what they wouldn’t say. I mean when I started writing Watchmen , I’d got no idea that Rorschach was gonna be dead by the end of it, it was just by about issue three I started to know the character and I thought: “he’s got a death wish”… he’s so self-destructive, he’s clearly… he wants out. There’s no way that he’s gonna live through this, he wouldn’t be able to live with any sort of moral compromises, so he’ll have to die. But it was the character himself who told me that, after two or three issues. I’d got no idea when I started it.’
24 June 2021
[fun] Vincent Price rides some rolly-coasters … Go watch some small clips of Vincent Price having fun riding Roller Coasters. They are taken from a documentary called America Screams about the history of amusement parks and roller coasters in the US.
23 June 2021
[health] The Super-Soldier Cells Hiding in Your Pus … The Atlantic takes a look at one of our immune system’s most potent weapons. ‘Neutrophils are more Cylons than stormtroopers. While other immune cells creep by at speeds of just a couple micrometers per minute, neutrophils can barrel through vessels 10 times as fast, and are flexible enough to squeeze themselves through spaces that span less than an eighth of their width. They are healers that can help stitch torn tissues back together; they can wrangle tumors too, and shape the fate of the immune cells that follow them. Neutrophils also harbor one of the immune system’s most terrifying armaments: They can unspool the genetic material that’s normally packed into a tight wad at their center, freckle it with toxic proteins and compounds, and then spew it out their side like a lethal sneeze—a weaponization of their own DNA.’
22 June 2021
[books] Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30: ‘Generational trashing is eternal’ … ‘This discussion of brains and generations is important because around 2010 my own brain started feeling truly different. I realised that I was never going to go back to my old, pre-internet brain: I’d been completely rewired. Ten years later I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like. I find comfort in the fact that brains all over the planet have been rewired similarly to mine. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that our species has never been as neurally homogenised as it is now.’
21 June 2021
[people] Be Glad You’re Neurotic Contents … Amusing book contents spotted via Twitter. ‘Your Compulsions Are Calls For Help’
18 June 2021
[people] Stewart Lee Interviewed — 1996/2021… Fascinating Stewart Lee interview – He’s asked the same questions 25 years apart. ‘I hope when I’m picking on people or things to laugh at, there’s always an element of me being the twat for bothering to express the wrong/mad/obsessional opinion I am – I hope it works both ways, with me as a kind of ignorant victim of myself, maybe not.’
17 June 2021
[politics] Vladimir Putin’s most unforgettable quotes. … Vladimir Putin used a Tolstoy quote after meeting Joe Biden yesterday: ‘At the press conference after the meeting, a journalist asked Putin whether the summit had helped build trust between the two men. In response, he turned mysterious. Putin quoted Russian writer Leo Tolstoy: “There’s no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon.” Putin clarified that there is no “family trust” between Biden and him, but he has seen the “mirage” of it.’
15 June 2021
[gonzo] The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rollicking Novel … An amusing art project / board game that should come with a health warning. ‘Baldwin’s game is not to be taken seriously…or taken orally. It’s actually a one-of-its-kind piece of art that can be purchased for $3,500. Drugs, like batteries, are not included. You must supply your own, possibly through your attorney.’
14 June 2021
[books] Review: Malcolm Gladwell’s New Book Is a Fantasy of War From the Air … A scathing review of Gladwell’s book The Bomber Mafia. ‘The Bomber Mafia is adapted from an audiobook, which means that what sounds conversational and engaging on tape can sound garrulous on the page, but it also allows Gladwell to telegraph his breathless fascination with these men. “I worry that I haven’t fully explained just how radical—how revolutionary—the Bomber Mafia thinking was,” he says at one point, before launching on a long digression about chapel architecture.’
11 June 2021
[curtis] Adam Curtis Hate Matrix … ‘I mean we were just having a lovely time for my nan’s birthday, what does that have to do with nuclear disarmament? – Man whose Butlins holiday footage was played, over-exposed and at half-speed beneath Aphex Twin’s Avril 14th.’
10 June 2021
[family] My [40F] daughter’s [15F] cryptocurrency club is creating problems at our church … Cryptocurrency Club = Ponzi Scheme. ‘I want to guide my daughter towards phasing out the group, but she doesn’t have enough money to pay everyone back. She’s been doing so well with the club that cash has never been a problem, but if she shut down immediately, she’d owe thousands of dollars that she can’t repay.’
8 June 2021
[funny] Imaginary Friends Reunited 💭👤 … An imaginary friends social network! ‘Chicken in my Pocket – Imagined by Diamondflamer at 2-5 years old: It was a chicken that lived in my pocket, I think it was yellow. When it went in my pocket it was small, when I got it out it could be any size I wanted, sometimes as tall as me!’
4 June 2021
[herzog] Exploring Werner Herzog’s obsession with chickens … ‘In the AMA, Herzog added a more tangible but bleaker insight into the nature of the chicken: “I would note: chickens are living manifestations of death, bred only to be domesticated and killed. When we look into their eyes, we see the part of ourselves of which we are most afraid – our ultimate destination, death.”’
1 June 2021
[life] The Tapeworm That Helps Ants Live Absurdly Long Lives … Oh, dear god, Tapeworms. ‘Down to the molecular level, the parasite is pulling the strings. Sara Beros, Foitzik’s former doctoral student and the paper’s first author, told me she has split open Temnothorax abdomens and counted up to 70 tapeworms inside. From there, the worms can unleash a slurry of proteins and chemicals that futz with the ant’s core physiology, likely impacting their host’s hormones, immune system, and genes. What they achieve appears to be a rough pantomime of how ant queens attain their mind-boggling life span, a feat humans still don’t understand. (The tapeworms’ grasp of ant aging is far more advanced than ours.) The parasites are effectively flash-freezing their host into a preserved state—one that will up their own chances of survival, and help guarantee that their species lives on.’
27 May 2021
[space] The First Interstellar Comet Ever Detected Was Lonely … Understanding sad comet 2I/Borisov. ‘Borisov is unlikely to skim by another star. More than one astronomer told me that the chances are nearly zero. The distances between stars are simply too big. “If you had a collision between the Milky Way and another Milky Way, you could collide the galaxies and no two stars would ever hit,” David Jewitt, an astronomer at UCLA who studies comets, told me. Astronomers believe Borisov coasted alone for hundreds of millions of years, even billions, through space before reaching us. “In that amount of time, you might pass by one star,” Jewitt said. “So for Borisov, maybe this is it.”’
25 May 2021
[virus] Lung Samples From 1918 Show a Pandemic Virus Mutating … ‘The team was able to recover a complete flu-virus genome from the 17-year-old girl’s lung tissue—only the third ever found. The two other full 1918 flu genomes both came from the United States, from the lungs of a woman buried in Alaska and from a paraffin-wax-embedded lung sample of a soldier who died in New York. With another genome in hand, the researchers moved to investigate how they differed. Several changes showed up in the flu’s genome-replication machinery, a potential evolutionary hot spot because better replication means a more successful virus. The team then copied just the replication machinery of the 17-year-old’s virus—not the entire virus—into cells and found it was only half as active as that of the flu virus found in Alaska.’
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.”’
21 May 2021
[life] Where Do Butts Come From? … A look at the the evolutionary history of the anus. ‘The sea cucumber’s posterior is so much more than an exit hole for digestive waste. It is also a makeshift mouth that gobbles up bits of algae; a faux lung, latticed with tubes that exchange gas with the surrounding water; and a weapon that, in the presence of danger, can launch a sticky, stringy web of internal organs to entangle predators. It can even, on occasion, be a home for shimmering pearlfish, which wriggle inside the bum when it billows open to breathe. It would not be inaccurate to describe a sea cucumber as an extraordinary anus that just so happens to have a body around it.’
19 May 2021
[games] Kick the Ball Back 👞⚽️ … Great time wasting web game.
14 May 2021
[books] Today I Learned: The 422 Words That Shakespeare Invented … ‘Compiling a definitive list of every word that Shakespeare ever invented is impossible. But creating a list of the words that Shakespeare almost certainly invented can be done. We generated list of words below by starting with the words that Shakespeare was the first to use in written language, and then applying research that has identified which words were probably in everyday use during Shakespeare’s time. The result are 422 bona fide words minted, coined, and invented by Shakespeare, from “academe” to “zany”…’
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