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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | March 12, 2020
[blogs] Things not do in April 2020 … Diamond Geezer’s April round-up post in the age of Coronavirus. ‘April 10 – Flight from Heathrow: Join the crowds heading off for a long-promised Easter break, hopefully to a country that’s still mostly virus-free, praying that they don’t introduce an emergency quarantine lockdown while you’re over there trapping you in a hotel room you can’t fly home from. …or, when cancelled, stay at home and check the small print of your cancellation policy.’
March 11, 2020
[comics] Hand Painted Colour Guides for the Death of Gwen Stacy Issue of Spider-Man from 1973 … Some historic comics process art spotted the Bristol Board tumblr.
March 10, 2020
[crime] A Brutal Murder, a Wearable Witness, and an Unlikely Suspect … Fascinating true-crime story about using a heartbeat tracking smartwatch as evidence in a murder case. ‘As Karen’s body was unzipped from the body bag and laid out at the morgue, the coroner took note of a black band still encircling her left wrist: a Fitbit Alta HR—a smartwatch that tracks heartbeat and movement. A judge signed a warrant to extract its data, which seemed to tell the story Karen couldn’t: On Saturday, September 8, five days before she was found, Karen’s heart rate had spiked and then plummeted. By 3:28 in the afternoon, the Fitbit wasn’t registering a heartbeat.’
March 9, 2020
[disease] Fever dreams: did author Dean Koontz really predict coronavirus? … The Guardian has a look at fictional pandemics. ‘[Dean Koontz’s] novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” – eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a “kill‑rate” of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the “perfect” biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe. But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease…’
March 5, 2020
[quote] LMG @ Twenty – The Inevitable Hunter S. Thompson 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 UNSUCCESSFUL 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. March 4, 2020
[lmg] Twenty Years of LinkMachineGo – “I DID IT!”
[quote] LMG is 20 years old: The Inevitable Alan Moore Quote … ‘Anything of any value in our lives, whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the DESIRE of SUCCEEDING. You have to do these things completely purely, without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust of result are the purest actions that we shall ever take.’
March 3, 2020
[disease] The sounds of Covid-19 … the DNA sequence of Coronavirus converted to music notes by Shardcore.
March 2, 2020
[death] 17th Century Death Roulette ☠️ … How would you have died in the 17th Century? ‘In the week of September 12th, 1665 you died from Canker.’
February 28, 2020
[food] British Food Generator … ‘Ploughman’s Egg
Eaten at breakfast time black pudding recipes vary from place to place, some common choices include fried eggs, sausages, bacon, eggs, mushrooms, bread, tomatoes; options include kippers, baked beans.’
February 27, 2020
[web] Microsoft Paint rebuilt for the Web … A classic Windows app recreated in Javascript.
February 26, 2020
[movies] How Bong Joon Ho Built the Houses in Parasite … Fascinating, spoiler filled look at the construction of the sets for Parasite. “The trash can cost like $2,300! It was German,” says Bong. “Me and my crew members were like, What the fuck? What kind of idiot would buy a trash can that’s going to smell anyway?” Still, they picked that trash can not only for its brand value, but because it was telegenic: Bong wanted one with a cinematic lid. “When you step on it to open it, it would open really smoothly, and then when you released your foot, it would quietly close like some sort of computer graphic,” he says.’
February 25, 2020
[movies] Cultural Details You Missed in “Parasite” … Interesting, but spoiler filled. ‘I’m sure most picked up on how food showed the Kims’ class progression, starting with a bag of white bread. Then the Drivers’ Cafeteria (기사식당), which I personally like. They’re cheap but good buffets. Then they’re eating proper rice, egg, and kimchi at home. Then grilling L.A. Beef Galbi at home. When the family is sitting around and drinking the first time in the film, they’re sharing a bag of chips opened like a bowl as “anju” (pub grub). They’re also drinking FiLite, which is the cheapest malt beverage on the market. It’s nasty. When we return to that same get together as the Kims are moving up in income, everyone but the mom has switched to Sapporo, which is considered an expensive import.’
February 24, 2020
[movies] 10 great Lovecraftian horror films … The Thing: ‘In Carpenter’s film, what they encounter when investigating the wreck of a Norwegian exploration base is an otherworldly creature that can assimilate and take the form of any other living organism. The effects, done by pioneer special effects artist Rob Bottin, play a huge part in getting the audience to experience the same abject horror of seeing creatures that defy natural laws, that shouldn’t exist in a physical space. The creature, although seen, is not a single thing; it mutates and adapts. It, and its intentions, are unknowable.’
February 20, 2020
[web] How to Deal with Running Out of iCloud, Google, and Dropbox Space … Useful guide to saving space and money with Cloud apps.
February 19, 2020
[comics] The horror comic that wasn’t: Alan Moore and Bryan Talbot’s Nightjar … Pages from one of Moore’s lost comics.
February 18, 2020
[weird] The Russian Conspiracy Theory That Won’t Die … Interesting summary of the Dyatlov Pass incident. ‘The group began moving toward the slope of Peak 1079, known among the region’s indigenous people as “Dead Mountain.” A photograph showed the lead skiers disappearing into sheets of whipping snow as the weather worsened. Later that night, the nine experienced trekkers burst out of their tent half-dressed and fled to their deaths in a blizzard. Some of their corpses were found with broken bones; one was missing her tongue. For decades, few people beyond the group’s friends and family were aware of the event. It only became known to the wider public in 1990, when a retired official’s account ignited a curiosity that soon metastasized.’
February 17, 2020
[books] Literary Alternatives to “Ghosting” at Parties … ‘EDGAR ALLAN POE-ING – Die in a gutter before the party starts, probably from consumption (with a hint of alcohol poisoning).’
February 14, 2020
[comics] Young Alan Partridge Adventures #1 … ‘Issue 1 – The Poachers of Swaffham Wood!’
February 13, 2020
[life] Was Jeanne Calment the Oldest Person Who Ever Lived—or a Fraud? … A deep dive into the world of Gerontology and the mystery of Jeanne Calment. ‘The passage of time often quells controversy, but, in the Calment case, it only unsettled the dust. As the world’s population continued to grow, the cohort of people living to the age of a hundred and twenty-two did not. More than two decades after Calment’s death, her record still stood, making her a more conspicuous outlier with every year that went by. Either she had lived longer than any human being ever or she had executed an audacious fraud. As one observer wrote, “Both are highly unlikely life stories but one is true.”’
February 12, 2020
[apollo] Apollo 11 vs USB-C Chargers … Comparing the CPU of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs. USB-C wall chargers. ‘I claim that we would only need the compute power of 4 Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 USB-C chargers to get to the moon…’
February 11, 2020
[life] The Octopus: An Alien Among Us … Are Octopuses Conscious? ‘The octopus has a central brain and also an independent, smaller processor in each arm, giving it a unique mixture of centralized and distributed command. The octopus also probably has self models—rich, constantly updated bundles of information to monitor its body and behavior. From an engineering perspective, it would need self models to function effectively. For example, it might have some form of a body schema that keeps track of the shape and structure of its body in order to coordinate movement. (Perhaps each arm has its own arm schema.) In that sense, you could say that an octopus knows about itself. It possesses information about itself and about the outside world, and that information results in complex behavior. But all of these truly wonderful traits do not mean that an octopus is conscious…’
February 10, 2020
[dredd] The Best Comics of the Decade (Are All Judge Dredd) … Some interesting analysis of the last ten years of Judge Dredd comics. ‘With seven pages per chapter there is never much time to overthink things. 2000AD remained the pinnacle of to-the-point presentation – never more than necessary, never less than what you want. These are procedural comics taken to its zenith. Henry Flint, John McCrea, Colin MacNeil, P.J. Holden and (of course) Carlos Ezquerra have all brought their own little touches to the world of the strip, always in service of the story. But, the reason Judge Dredd is the best comics of decade is more than that. It’s more than any single story or creator. It’s not about what it does, it’s about what it is. To me at least, Judge Dredd in the 2010’s is zeitgeist. It’s a story about one of the biggest moral questions in the West – can you be a good man in a bad system?’
February 7, 2020
[tv] ‘Did we work through hangovers? Most definitely!’ The stars of This Life on their era-defining show … Remembering This Life. ‘Jack Davenport: With Miles, I realised that the more I leaned into his essential twatness, the better things would be.’
February 6, 2020
[comics] Image Comics Free First Issues … Huge collection of taster comics. I recommend: Criminal #1, Die #1, Kill, or be Killed #1 and The Fade Out #1.
February 5, 2020
[life] Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue And It Has Ruined My Day … ‘All my life, I could hear my voice in my head and speak in full sentences as if I was talking out loud. I thought everyone experienced this, so I did not believe that it could be true at that time. Literally the first person I asked was a classmate of mine who said that she can not “hear” her voice in her mind. I asked her if she could have a conversation with herself in her head and she looked at me funny like I was the weird one in this situation…’
February 4, 2020
[doom] OK Doomer … A great look at playing Doom in 2020. ‘ Doom’s “2.5D” graphics, though primitive by modern standards, help it pull off things that are far more difficult to do with today’s software tooling. You experience the game as 3D, but the game’s level design and movement patterns are more or less reflective of 2D arcade shooters like Robotron, Geometry Wars, Commando, or Smash TV. You move incredibly fast (50 scale miles per hour!) through non-linear explorable levels that are designed to optimize play rather than look realistic. You fight diverse hordes of slow-moving enemies (compared to you at least!) that are individually weak but collectively quite dangerous. At the higher difficulty levels (Ultraviolence is really the best way to play), your only hope of survival is raw speed and cunning. The stylized abstraction of the game makes it feel like a strange, nightmarish vision you are hallucinating, which gets progressively more terrifying as the early infested techbase levels transition into hell itself.’
February 3, 2020
[web] “Link In Bio” is a slow knife … Anil Dash on Instagram’s war on web links. ‘The ultimate triumph of being anti-web is to make links scarce. The smallest possible number of links a platform could allow is zero, so Instagram gets as close to that theoretical limit as possible, and gives you… one. You can have one link. Aren’t you grateful? One!’
February 2, 2020
February 1, 2020
[comics] 100 of the Best Horror Comics of All Time … ‘Gyo: An undercurrent of black humor runs throughout much of Junji Ito’s work, and nowhere does he play with that contrast as fruitfully as in Gyo. Subtitled The Death-Stench Creeps, Gyo commits dozens of pages to bloated, infected humans essentially farting themselves to death, but any hint of a laugh is dashed when the full scope of Gyo sets in. These gasbags are trapped in mechanical carapaces drudged up from the ocean floor, remnants of some long-ago war effort returned to haunt the living. What at first seems like “only” an invasion of land-bound sea creatures (including the most chilling shark scene to ever take place out of the water) soon turns into an Apocalyptic vision of body horror as only Ito can conjure.’
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