linkmachinego.com
5 June 2000
[comics] Yet another Dave Sim Misogyny Page. “Behind this…lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives every… institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids.”
[music] Some crazy Ramones MIDI’sI Wanna Be Sedated is particularly good listening! [via pearls that are his eyes]
[news] The story of Sealand continues in the New York Times [my earlier story] “On Monday, a small international group of computer rebels plans to introduce what they are calling a data haven, perched precariously on a World War II military fortress six miles off England’s coast. They are hoping that the installation, connected to the Internet by high-speed microwave and satellite links, will become a refuge from governments increasingly trying to tame and regulate the Internet.” [via metafilter]
4 June 2000
[comics] newsUnlimited profiles Steve Bell. “Steve has the idea, writes the words, does the drawing. He can do leader- page cartoons which – in their infinite detail – look as though they must be condensed versions of a much bigger cartoon. (Not so: what you see is virtually the size you get.) He can do illustrations that can dominate a whole page. And then there are the strips. Then there is If?”
[history] People are still looking for lost Nazi treasure. The haul is believed to contain top-secret Nazi documents detailing how assets from the Third Reich were deposited in Swiss bank accounts, as well as art objects, gold and the records of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Documents detailing the assistance of the Vatican in transferring funds to South America, and some gold, are also believed to be concealed there.”
[murder] newsUnlimited covers a nasty murder on a bridge in London last year. “‘We’ll never know what happened that night,’ she said. ‘It seems inexplicable. I believe there was a group dynamic which forced them to do what they did. Peer pressure and a boy shouting “throw them in the river” was enough to create an atmosphere in which there was no going back. It will have been one person who started it and the others would have followed like sheep.'”
[mp3] New version of the MP3 player Winamp available.
3 June 2000
[weird world] BBC News asks: Was Elvis Welsh? “According to Mr Breverton, his roots are in west Wales – the name Presley is related to Preseli – a hill range in Pembrokeshire. Supporting his theory is the legend of St Elvis of Muster who, it is said, baptised St David. Mr Breverton claims the family could well have had links with a nearby chapel dedicated to St Elvis – the only one known in Britain.”
[phones] newsUnlimited on Text Messaging. “But there seems to be something more than practicality about the appeal of text messaging: something that gives them that brown-paper-packages-tied-up-with-string quality, and qualifies them for life’s range of small, good things. Text messages are like little sugar-rushes of contact, postcards for the people’s cyberspace, the real reason God gave us both thumbs and the capacity for language (alright, alright, I know).”
[comics] Alan Moore discusses the plot to the unfinished Big Numbers. [Part One] [Part Two]
2 June 2000
[tory] Tebbit on Hague: “”Something somewhere sparked him off and suddenly he became an interesting politician – having previously been uninteresting,” he says. But he adds, crushingly: “As he gets more interesting, people forget that he’s bald, he’s got an unusual voice and he’s small.”” After the untimely death of Barbara Cartland I think Norman Tebbit may well fill the “mad quote” void on linkmachinego…
[comics] The Grand Comic Book Database — These people take their comic books seriously!
[weird science] Stinkymeat “3 kinds of meat, 19 days, and 1,000,000 maggots, all in the yard of my unwitting neighbor. Science never smelled so bad.” [via Yungee]
[anime] Slashdot discusses essential anime — here’s a list of the best..
1 June 2000
[games] John Carmack confirms that ID are working on Doom III. [via DoomWorld] “I discussed it with some of the other guys, and we decided that it was important enough to drag the company through an unpleasant fight over it. An ultimatum was issued to Kevin and Adrian(who control >50% of the company): We are working on DOOM for the next project unless you fire us. Obviously no fun for anyone involved, but the project direction was changed, new hires have been expedited, and the design work has begun.”
[internet] BBC News reports BT Internet has been having problems with their email server. [BT Internet are pretty awful compared to Demon or Freeserve, I’ve been having various connection problems since I joined and my flatmate has not been able to download his email for the last couple of days. How do BT manage to reliably run the phone network in the UK?]
[comics] newsUnlimited talks to Alan Moore. “‘I can remember the exact panel during the writing of From Hell when I became interested in magic,’ he says. ‘Gull says that one place that gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. I wrote that sentence, and noticed the word ‘inarguable’, which is quite a big word, and that was the beginning of the end. I thought, ‘I can’t see why that isn’t true. And if it is true, then I’m probably going to have to change the whole of my life to fit around it.'”
31 May 2000
[film] newsUnlimited reports on the film of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. “His conclusion was “the one thing that could dent the armour-plated cause of Scientology is the sound of global derision.” Indeed, the only subliminal voice I could detect came about 10 minutes into this 121-minute film and it seemed to be saying “Leeeaaave thisssss cinemmmaaa nooo””
[clerks] Kevin Smith talks about the Clerks Animated series. “There’s really no pressure on us because at this point it’s not as if we have to get good ratings to stay on, as we’re not going to be coming back. Having said that, however it does on TV, you have to figure that the worst night would probably reach more people than most of our films have reached theatrically. Potentially, if we let it run on TV and receive some nice feedback, then maybe we can turn it into a feature with a viable box office prospect ahead of it.”
[comics] Dork is one of my very favourite comics. You can find more from Evan Dorkin at the House of Fun. [voice-in-head: must…. buy… Eltingville T-Shirt!!]
[mad world] See mad catapult woman bounce! [Real Audio]
30 May 2000
[film] Media Nugget of the Day covers Out of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.
[comics] Nicely designed comic site: Alex Tam’s Starman Compendium.
[weird science] newsUnlimited reports that the first hand transplant patient has done a runner. “A criminal past is no bar to being a medical pioneer. What frustrates Owen, Hakim, Dubernard and the other doctors involved is their patient’s unpredictability, the mystery of his whereabouts and his conviction that he knows what is best for his hand.”
[entertainment] BBC News reports on a reporter who faked interviews with celebs such as Courtney Love for a German magazine. “… An unrepentant Kummer maintained he had done nothing wrong, describing his work as “montage reporting” – pooling information from other sources – which has also been christened “borderline journalism”. “
29 May 2000
[bbc] Perfect Day? Not if you’re working on a bank holiday!
[comics] Alan Moore in Love. “Oh, Darling? I know it’s difficult for you! It’s difficult for ME, as well! I mean, you ARE married, and English, and you have two lovely daughters my age, and you seem to think you can levitate, and you’re always talking about your birth caul, and you haven’t had a haircut since Elvis was popular, and you produce a ten page book of footnotes after every date, and I have so little to offer a man like you?!” [via Adventures At 50 Feet]
[dando] Interesting thread on the Jill Dando murder suspect Barry Bulsara in uk.local.london. “A man stepped out who looked rather like Freddie Mercury and a buzz went round that it was his cousin. He produced a large, white floral tribute in the shape of an arch, with a gold plaque on the bottom inscribed with a message, and signed from “your cousin, Barry Bulsara” (Bulsara, being Mercury’s real surname). My sister, knowing I had some artwork of Freddie on me ( I had it with me to show somebody I was meeting), went and asked him to sign one of my pictures, which he did.”
28 May 2000
[movies] The Lost Ending to Clerks“I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
[personal shite] Sunday morning would be incomplete without: a cup of tea, The Observer, one slice of cold pizza, Hollyoaks and blogging….