[politics] Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier … Profiling Christopher Steele and the Trump Dossier. ‘Steele, on that January night, was stunned to learn that U.S. politicians were calling him a criminal. He told Christopher Burrows, with whom he co-founded Orbis, that the sensation was “a feeling like vertigo.” Burrows, in his first public interview on the dossier controversy, recalled Steele telling him, “You have this thudding headache—you can’t think straight, you have no appetite, you feel ill.” Steele compared it to the disorientation that he had felt in 2009, when his first wife, Laura, had died, after a long illness, leaving him to care for their three young children.’

[movies] 20 Creepiest Movie Nuns … ‘Killer Nun (1978) – Say what you will about “Killer Nun,” it certainly lives up to its title. Following the removal of a pesky brain tumor, Sister Gertrude begins exhibiting signs of odd behavior, including anonymous sex with strangers, fits of psychotic rage, and an obsession with the torture of martyred saints. Things take a turn for the worse when she’s accused of throwing a geriatric patient off the roof of a hospital. Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg gives the deranged title character her all, particularly in the scene where she crushes an old woman’s dentures under her foot while yelling “Disgusting!” over and over again.’

[comics] More from Grant Morrison’s Captain Clyde [Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7] … The remaining scans of Morrison’s earliest work have been posted online.

[media] Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff … A profile of Vice Media. ‘All this left Smith heading into 2017 in a position he hadn’t planned to be in: still owning his company, which was now populated by employees 20-plus years his junior who didn’t care that he’d once been in a punk band called Leatherassbuttfuk.’

[internet] The secret rules of the internet … Fascinating look at the moderation of content on social networks. ‘Joi Podgorny is former vice president at ModSquad, which provides content moderation to a range of marquee clients, from the State Department to the NFL. Now a digital media consultant, she says founders and developers not only resist seeing the toxic content, they resist even understanding the practice of moderation. Typically cast off as “customer-service,” moderation and related work remains a relatively low-wage, low-status sector, often managed and staffed by women, which stands apart from the higher-status, higher-paid, more powerful sectors of engineering and finance, which are overwhelmingly male. “I need you to look at what my people are looking at on a regular basis,” she said. “I want you to go through my training and see this stuff [and] you’re not going to think it’s free speech. You’re going to think it’s damaging to culture, not only for our brand, but in general.” Brian Pontarelli, CEO of the moderation software company Inversoft, echoes the observation. Many companies, he told us, will not engage in robust moderation until it will cost them not to.’

[comics] Interview with Katsuhiro Otomo … The creator of Akira interviewed. ‘I wanted to draw this story set in a Japan similar to how it was after the end of World War II—rebelling governmental factions; a rebuilding world; foreign political influence, an uncertain future; a bored and reckless younger generation racing each other on bikes. Akira is the story of my own teenage years, rewritten to take place in the future. I never thought too deeply about the two main characters as I made them; I just projected how I was like when I was younger. The ideas naturally flowed out from my own memories.’

[comics] Grant Morrison’s Captain Clyde [Part One | Part Two | Part Three] … scans of Grant Morrison’s earliest published work – a Scottish Superhero – appear online.

[life] Urinal protocol vulnerability … The maths behind Urinal Protocol from xkcd. ‘This leads us to a question: what is the general formula for the number of guys who will fill in N urinals if they all come in one at a time and follow the urinal protocol?’

[crime] What’s the single, best piece of true crime writing you’ve read? … Great list of must-read True Crime stories from Reddit.

[life] How Not to Be Stupid … A look at avoiding situational stupidity. ‘When it comes to overloading our cognitive brains, the seven factors are: being outside of your circle of competence, stress, rushing or urgency, fixation on an outcome, information overload, being in a group where social cohesion comes into play, and being in the presence of an “authority.” Acting alone any of these are powerful enough, but together they dramatically increase the odds you are unaware that you’ve been cognitively compromised.’

[books] Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories … Written in 1928 by S.S. Van Dine. ‘A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by house-breakers and bandits are the province of the police department–not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. Such crimes belong to the routine work of the Homicide Bureaus. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.’

[comics] Tintin in Neo-Tokyo … Tintin and Akira Mashed Up.

[games] Bandersnatch: the game that killed a company and inspired a Black Mirror episode … The true story of the never-released ZX Spectrum game Bandersnatch. ‘In fact, according to programmer John Gibson in a 2001 interview, it was looking likely that even with 176K, “[Bandersnatch] was around half finished and we’d already used up all the ROM so a major design rethink would have been necessary to get it finished.” As such, the final package was more likely to cost around £60 – ten times what a normal game would cost. Would you drop £450 on a Switch game? With every passing week, Bandersnatch was growing more arms and legs and was turning into something much bigger than anyone could have anticipated. This was no longer a simple game release: it was suddenly part game, part hardware launch, part box full of merchandise and other tat.’

[moore] Alan Moore Interview from June 1988 … A scan of an interview from the British fanzine FA. Moore is interviewed by Martin Skidmore. It’s contains some interesting comments on how he feels about Killing Joke just after it’s release and also why he stopped doing conventions and his dsyfunctional relationship with fandom at the time. ‘It’s a forty-page Batman story, a forty-page Joker story, that I wrote two or three years ago, around the time I was writing the first couple of issues of Watchmen. Sometimes stories work, sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not so good. You can put a lot of effort into a thing and it just doesn’t work sometimes. You can’t write perfect stories every time. With that particular one, I worked at it as hard as I could, there was something at the end of it that seemed a bit heavy, a bit depressing, but at the same time there were some bits of it I really did like. In terms of Batman stories it wasn’t as good as the story I wrote about Clayface. It wasn’t as good as the story I did with Batman in Swamp Thing. My feeling on it is that if you came across that in a normal, floppy, forty-page DC Batman Annual, I’m sure it’d seem okay.’

[books] Who Are the Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction? … interesting list of overlooked science fiction authors and their books of note. ‘Leigh Brackett (December 7, 1915–March 18, 1978) was lauded for her planetary adventures (she moved her Eric John Stark adventures to the extra-solar world Skaith when space probes rendered her pulp-era Solar System implausible) but that was only one aspect of her work. In addition to writing SF and mysteries, she was a successful script writer. Her credits include The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, and an obscure little film called The Empire Strikes Back. Her planetary adventures tended to be long on action and short on clear moral boundaries. I am particularly fond of her post-apocalyptic The Long Tomorrow.’

[blogs] Go click: jwz’s 50 most popular blog posts from 2018

[retro] Building a Spotify player for my Mac SE/30 … a pretty astounding use for an old Mac!

[funny] Richard Scarry’s 21st Century Busy Town Jobs / More Busy Town Jobs … both from Ruben Bolling.

[til] 52 things I learned in 2018 … Fifty-two TIL from Tom Whitwell. ‘Unicode, the international standard for letters, characters and emojis, has 137,439 entries. It includes a group of ‘ghost characters’ (妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁) which have no known meaning. It’s believed they are errors introduced by folds and wrinkles during a paper-based 1978 Japanese government project to standardise the alphabet, but are now locked into the standard forever.’

[comics] Alan Moore film aims to ‘dispel Northampton’s anonymity’… BBC News on Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins new film “The Show”. ‘I hope to rescue Northampton with a strenuous application of imaginations…’

[comics] Stan Lee’s True Legacy Is a Complicated Cosmic Mystery … Douglas Wolk takes another look at Stan Lee. ‘But of all the characters with whom Lee is associated, his greatest—and the only one he created entirely on his own—was “Stan Lee”: an egomaniac who thought it was funny to pretend he was an egomaniac, a carnival barker who actually does have something great behind the curtain. Artist John Romita, who worked with Lee on Daredevil and Spider-Man, put it nicely in a 1998 interview: “He’s a con man, but he did deliver.”’

[doom] Reflections on DOOM’s Development … John Romero on 25 years of Doom. ‘We couldn’t wait to see what players would do with our game, so we made sure it was open and available to modify all the data we had. We had hoped people would change textures, sounds, and make lots of new levels. We were enabling players to let us play their creations finally. It was a major move that would eventually end up with us releasing the source code. Open your game and your fans will own it, and keep it alive after you’re gone.’

[xmas] The Ambominable Snowman … by b3ta.com user (a)lexistwit.

[movies] 25 Horror Christmas Movies Ranked From Worst To Best According To Rotten Tomatoes … ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) – Tells the tale of Billy Chapmen, orphaned at 5 after witnessing the murder of his parents at the hands of a Santa suit-clad madman on Christmas Eve. Now 18 and out of the brutal grip of orphanage nuns, Billy is forced to confront his greatest fear, sending him on a rampage, leaving a crimson trail in the snow behind him.’ [via Feeling Listless]

[xmas] How drunk can you get on Christmas food? I breathalysed myself to find out … Stuart Heritage eats himself drunk. ‘With a nice buzz going, I crack open a brandy-loaded Frosty Snowflake iced fruit cake. The report says two slices will get me over the limit – so I hack off a quarter and stuff it into my face as fast as I can. My breathalyser reads 1.2% BAC. Booyah! I am hammered, and it is only 9.47am. You know what? Let’s keep this party going.’ [via Feeling Listless]

[movies] Batman Returns, The World’s Greatest Holiday Movie … Amusing list of thoughts on Batman Returns. ‘Oh, Penguin. How preposterous that this gross man with disgusting eating habits, tiny hands, awful hair, repugnant behavior, and no prior political experience could be considered a viable candidate! Oh, wait. Oh GOD.’

[xmas] Scarfolk Council’s Christmas Boy … It’s Christmas in Scarfolk. ‘Family members would often take turns standing in the front windows of their homes where they mimed laughter in the desperate hope that the Christmas Boy would pass them by. He rarely did…’

[music] Of Course You Hear What I Hear — Christmas Music Season Is Totally Data-Driven … How music-streaming services and Radio work out what songs to play at Christmas and when to start. ‘Any half-decent band will cut a quick holiday track every now and again. It was McDonald’s job to develop an algorithm to find that song and make sure nobody hears it on Spotify radio for most of the year. “We actually have a fairly intricate mechanism to try to identify Christmas music,” McDonald said. First, he builds a list of obvious holiday songs. He then identifies the albums those songs appear on. Then his algorithm looks at all the other songs on those albums to see how often they appear elsewhere, and will try to decide if they’re Christmas songs by iterating the process to figure out which songs only appear on other Christmas albums. The process isn’t infallible, but after enough repetitions, McDonald said, “we have a pretty good idea of a fairly complete universe of Christmas songs.”’

[xmas] Christmas Links 2018 … Worth a click – Stuart over at Feeling Listless is collecting seasonal links as he did in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

[comics] Spider-Ham Origin: Who Is Spider-Verse’s Peter Porker … The amusing story of how Marvel came to publish a funny animal version of Spider-man in the 1980s.

“After December 14, we will live in a world where everyone knows Peter Porker,” says comics writer Dan Slott. “Laymen on the street. Kids with their lunch boxes and onesies. Everyone is gonna know who Spider-Ham is.” He pauses. He laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. “What a world.”