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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 11 August 2020
[đ] CGI Octopus taking a stroll on the Beach … IĂ€! IĂ€! Cthulhu fhtagn! đ
10 August 2020
[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 clientsâ tracks. Songs purchased came in a PDF; users tapped in a password to play the music. âIâm still trying to understand it even now,â Clarke chuckles. Pre-broadband dial-up internet was so slow that âyouâd plug in a modem to download one track, which could take 15 minutes,â says Clarke. Music33 featured a little robot avatar named Howie, who explained how to use the site. Wilsonâs plan to get Keith Allen to do its voice never came off.’
6 August 2020
[tea] Tea in a microwave? New research says it could be the perfect cuppa … Chinese scientists discover the perfect way to make Tea.
Do they make it in a pot or a mug? They make it in a microwave. 5 August 2020
[internet] Man who claims his freedom of speech is under threat never shuts the f**k up … ‘Bill McKay is so outraged that âLeftwaffe cultural Marxistsâ are stopping him speaking out that he posts about it on Facebook for all the world to read approximately three times an hour…’
4 August 2020
[doom] The Endless Doomscroller … All your Doomscrolling needs in one place. ‘No Safe Path. Recovery Elusive. New Restrictions Coming.’
3 August 2020
[tv] Comfort Viewing: 3 Reasons I Love âColumboâ … ‘Columbo is one of the very few American series fueled by class warfare. Whether they are driven by coldblooded entitlement, delusions of grandeur or simple greed, the murderers treat the self-deprecating, ostentatiously low-grade cop with seething annoyance, willful condescension or hypocritical benevolence. It is hard to overstate how satisfying it is to see smug criminals get caught right now. Imagine the joy of seeing a rebooted Columbo go after hedge-fund managers, big-game hunters, studio chiefs, YouTube influencers, real-estate magnates or celebrity chefs who picked killing as an acceptable problem-solving method.’
24 July 2020
[crime] MARIE KONDO ARRESTED AS A SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER … ‘She said that the people did not âspark joyâ and therefore she drilled holes in their heads and poured in prussic acid.’
23 July 2020
[moon] NASA and the Secrets of Moondust … What can moondust tell us about the origins of the Moon and Earth? ‘In the next year, Sehlke, along with other scientists and their teams, will receive tiny lunar samples, untouched for close to 50 years, that were collected during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. Some were frozen or stored in helium-filled containers shortly after arriving on Earth. One sample has never been exposed to Earthâs atmosphere; it was packed and vacuum-sealed on the moon by the last astronauts to walk on the surface, in 1972. Sehlke and other researchers still have many questions about the workings of the moonâeven about the popular hypothesis for its creation, which doesnât completely add upâand searching for answers within these pristine samples is a thrilling prospect.’
22 July 2020
[apollo] Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer … Using Apollo-era tech for bitcoins. ‘The Apollo Guidance Computer took 5.15 seconds for one SHA-256 hash. Since Bitcoin uses a double-hash, this results in a hash rate of 10.3 seconds per Bitcoin hash. Currently, the Bitcoin network is performing about 65 EH/s (65 quintillion hashes per second). At this difficulty, it would take the AGC 4Ă10^23 seconds on average to find a block. Since the universe is only 4.3Ă10^17 seconds old, it would take the AGC about a million times the age of the universe to successfully mine a block.’
21 July 2020
[apollo] 13 Minutes to the Moon [Series 1 | Series 2] … Outstanding BBC Podcast on the inside story of Apollo 11 and how Apollo 13 was saved.
20 July 2020
[apollo] Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control … The nail-biting story of Apollo 11’s descent to the moon’s surface. ‘ The computer automatically entered the next phase of the descent, followed by another reboot and another go command from Mission Control until finally, at less than 2,000 feet above the lunar surface, the computer had its worst crash yet.The alarm blared and the landerâs readout went dead. For 10 long seconds, the console displayed nothingâno altitude data, no error codes, just three blank fields. Armstrongâs heart began to race, rising to 150 beats per minute, the same as that of a man at the end of a sprint. With the moonscape zipping by outside his window, he was the closest any human had ever been to another world, but, like a distracted driver, his attention was focused on the computer. Finally the console came back on line. Mission Control confirmed: It was another 1202. âI never expected it to come back,â Armstrong later said.’
16 July 2020
[apollo] Moon landing 50th anniversary: why people like Steph Curry have supported conspiracy theories … A look at who benefits from moon landing conspiracy theories. ‘The belief that the moon landing was shot in a Hollywood studio actually seems sort of quaint. How cute, a theory that probably wonât end up hurting someone! Perhaps on the 50th anniversary of the NASA moon landing â which definitely happened â we can appreciate the moon landing conspiracy for what it was: a mostly harmless piece of entertainment that possibly also led to the normalization of conspiracies in general, which is harmful.’
15 July 2020
[cthulu] Worm found in tonsil of Japanese woman with sore throat … đ LOVECRAFT WAS RIGHT! IĂ€! IĂ€! Cthulhu fhtagn! đŠ ‘The worm was identified as a nematode roundworm â one of several parasites that can infect people who eat raw fish or meat. The 25-year-old patient confirmed that she had eaten assorted sashimi five days before the worm was removed. According to the journal, doctors said the worm was a fourth-stage larva of the worm, adding that the infection had been caused by its younger incarnation as a third-stage larva that was present in her sashimi dish.’
14 July 2020
[apollo] How a long-gone Apollo rocket returned to Earth … The story of an asteroid that turned out to be a Apollo rocket from 1969. ‘They made a startling discovery: J002E3 appeared to be covered in paint â specifically, white, titaniumoxide (TiO2) paint. According to Kira Jorgensen Abercromby at California Polytechnic State University, who also studied J002E3 while at the Air Force Maui Optical & Supercomputing observatory, âWhat we saw were features in the spectral data that matched other upper-stage rocket bodies launched during a similar time frame [to the Apollo missions] and the data also matched typical features found in organic paints that looked like TiO2.â This information pointed toward a very specific object as the identity of J002E3: a spent third stage from an Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, which were historically covered in this specific kind of paint.’
13 July 2020
[comics] An oral history of Carol Kalish: the most important comic book figure you’ve never heard of … Remembering the influential marketing exec at Marvel. ‘What she did was just bring sensible business practices to an industry that, when she started, largely worked out of cigar boxes. She modernized the comics industry in a lot of ways.’
10 July 2020
[fun] This Meme Does Not Exist… Memes generated by A.I. almost work. Almost.
9 July 2020
[covid] The Coronavirus and Our Future … Kim Stanley Robinson on the Coronavirus. ‘Iâve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly. Schools and borders had closed; the governor of California, like governors elsewhere, had asked residents to begin staying at home. But the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. Weâre getting a different sense of our place in history. We know weâre entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.’
7 July 2020
[scarfolk] Scarfolk Council: Beer Mats of the 1970s … Beer Mats from Scarfolk pubs as they reopen.
6 July 2020
[comics] The Wreckage Part One | Part Two … Engrossing long read on Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. ‘So I guess Iâm talking around the problem, said problem being – these comics donât sit as easily as they might once have, for a number of reasons. They donât seem so radical, for one thing, now that all their best moves have been copied by subsequent generations. It seems like these book have a lot of something that was very, very cool in 1990 and thereabouts, but which really isnât quite the same thing precisely as âcoolâ in 2019. And itâs not like itâs uncool exactly, but nether is it the rather deathless 1960s Batman show, the virtues of which seem more and more enduring with every passing year, as we see that camp silliness was never really something anyone hated but self-righteous nerds. Stuff that purposefully eschews any attempt to be cool often ages better…’
3 July 2020
[comics] Alan Moore’s Supermen…
2 July 2020
[comics] Grant Morrison Batman Reading Order … I’ve been trying to work out the reading order of Grant Morrison run on Batman and Final Crisis – It’s complicated.
1 July 2020
[books] We Can’t Ignore H.P. Lovecraft’s White Supremacy … Powerful look at Lovecraft’s racial bigotry, comparing with racism today. ‘But the need to âsaveâ a man dubbed the âhorror storyâs dark and baroque princeâ by Stephen King is itself questionable. His legacy is firmly planted. His cosmology sprawls from popular culture to niche corners of scholasticism. Complaints of a potentially tarnished reputation are more concerned with bolstering the illusion of Lovecraft as a sacrosanct figure. Even further, to divorce his racism from his literary creations would be a pyrrhic victory; what results is a whitewashed portrait of a profound writer. And from a criticism standpoint, whatâs lost is any meaningful grappling with the connection between Lovecraftâs racism and the cosmic anti-humanism that defined his horror.’
30 June 2020
[comics] Milton Glaser and the DC Bullet … Todd Klein analyses the symbol designer Milton Klein created for DC Comics in the 1970s. ‘DC was still using letterpress printing for all their comics. Glaserâs design, with itâs thin lines and thin white spaces, looked great at a larger size, but comics printing wasnât really up to making it work well at the small size used on covers. In the 1980s DC began gradually transitioning away from letterpress to offset printing with much better and more accurate presses, and then the original DC bullet would have worked fine.’
26 June 2020
[space] Happy Little Crater on Mercury … Somewhere else in the solar system for Dr. Manhattan to visit.
24 June 2020
[comics] JAKAâS STORY: What It Was in 1988, and What Cerebus Used to Mean … A melancholy look at Cerebus and the fall of Dave Sim. ‘MELMOTH was spent talking about the illness and slow death of Oscar Wilde, at a time people were still dying regularly from AIDS and little was even being tried to stop it. It was deeply sensitive and empathetic. And I still see nothing insincere in Daveâs empathy and affinity to Oscar Wilde, both in the more fictionalized version of Oscar here, who is never not entertaining, but also MELMOTH where itâs virtually the real man himself. Thatâs what makes later on so baffling.’
23 June 2020
[hertzog] Werner Herzog: ‘I’m fascinated by trash TV. The poet must not avert his eyes’ … Herzog interviewed during lockdown in Los Angeles. ‘The director sits bolt upright inside his book-lined study. His glasses are perched on the bridge of his nose. His fleece is zipped to his chin. âYour face has stuck,â he announces with disgust. âYou will have to hang up and dial the number again.â’
22 June 2020
[mcsweeneys] Just Because Theyâve Turned Against Humanity Doesnât Mean We Should Defund the Terminator Program … ‘Meanwhile, members of the Resistance are gathering support for extreme measures like disbanding the entire Terminator program and then restructuring it so that only Terminators that have been re-programmed to protect rather than harm people are brought back online. But what exactly are we supposed to do in the meantime? Who will keep our country safe if not these beefy robotic soldiers trained in killology (Cyberdyneâs patented split-second decision making murder algorithm) who, admittedly, do sometimes turn against civilians and go on unstoppable rampages of human carnage?’
19 June 2020
[comics] 10 Questions: Chip Zdarsky Interviews Annie Nocenti … Fascinating discussion about Daredevil between the current and former writer of the comic.
18 June 2020
[chernobyl] The Age of Forever Crises … This analysis of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl seems somehow relevant during Covid-19. ‘Chernobyl, in this sense, is a crisis that has never stopped unfolding, or as Brown puts it, it is a calamity âwith no perceptible end.â It is just as much an environmental disaster as a crisis of information; Cold War politics prevented the free exchange of scientific knowledge, making a bad situation infinitely worse. Brown explains how, in 1986, Russian scientists asked UN officials for âprecise informationâ about how the âLife Span Studyâ of Japanese survivors of the nuclear bomb was carried out; they were instead presented with data about a chemical explosion in Italy.’
16 June 2020
[alien] The Horrifying Adventures of Xeno-Morph …
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