1 June 2018
[comics] From Hell: Eddie Campbell explains why he’s coloring graphic novel … Includes some examples of coloured pages and talk about the possibility of a new appendix from Alan Moore. ‘The thing with the color is, it gives me another layer of expression to lay over everything. Of all the layers of expression that are already in From Hell, it gives me another layer of suggestion. I can make things more suggestive than you can in black and white. In black and white I do it with the cross-hatching. The cross-hatching is still there, but now I can take it and make it gray, put a dark gray over a light gray, or vice versa. There are all these subtleties and differences, there’s a million choices for everything I’m looking at. For somebody who’s already familiar with it, it’ll be like for seeing it for the first time.’
31 May 2018
30 May 2018
[fiction] Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil? … A look at why the structure of stories has changed over time and the connection to Nationalism. ‘As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s 1795 retelling of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist uprising after the French Revolution. Ritson’s rendering was so popular that modern retellings of Robin Hood, such as Disney’s 1973 cartoon or the film Prince of Thieves (1991) are more centrally about outlaw moral obligations than outlaw hijinks. The Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a simple antagonist to someone who symbolised the abuses of power against the powerless. Even within a single nation (Robin Hood), or a single household (Cinderella), every scale of conflict was restaged as a conflict of values.’
29 May 2018
[books] 25 Best True Crime Books of All Time … Strong list of True Crime books. ‘Skip Fatal Vision, the true crime book written by a journalist who was embedded with a man who was ultimately convicted for killing his pregnant wife and their two other children. Instead, get more meta and read ace cultural critic Janet Malcolm’s study of the relationship between the two men in The Journalist and the Murderer. It’s more thrilling than any book about ethics in crime journalism has any right to be.’
28 May 2018
[cthulu] Sorry, But I Don’t See How Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult Is Negatively Affecting American Discourse … 🙠Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! 🦠… ‘I don’t see any problem with the death cult’s High Priest getting a recurring op-ed in the New York Times. He worked hard to get where he is, and last I checked, this is still the country where, if you put in enough hard work, time, energy – and self-castration to please the abhorrent Anti-God, apparently – you can make it. The cult is a small but troubling percentage of our population, but we can’t just silence them because they call in eerie unison for a “Great Offering.” Yeah, if I was on the editorial board I might see about diversifying with another woman, or perhaps a person of color, or hell, even someone slightly left-of-center, but I imagine it’s pretty hard to quickly turn a ship as large as the USS Gray Lady. These institutions don’t change overnight. Unless Nyarlathotep wills it, I suppose.’
25 May 2018
[comics] Inside the biggest comic book collection in the world … Interview with a man who has the biggest collection of comics in the world. ‘Bretall displays his most valuable and treasured comics and collectibles in a large showcase room in his California home, with the rest in a three-car garage filled with long boxes – 391 at the moment, along with some 50 short boxes, 30 magazine boxes, 45 diamond boxes, 10 bookshelves and two spinner racks.All told, he’s got about 105,000 comics at the moment – over 3,000 more than when his record was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014. Remarkably, he’s assembled the collection largely by purchasing single issues. That said, he has been at it awhile, as the shopping stretches back to 1970, with The Amazing Spider-Man #88.’
24 May 2018
[comics] Steve Oliff’s Hand Painted Colours for 1982 Wolverine art from Frank Miller and Joe Rubinstein … Spotted on The Bristol Board.
23 May 2018
[docu] From ‘Making a Murderer to ‘Evil Genius’: Netflix’s Golden Age of True-Crime … Examining Netflix’s successful approach to True-Crime documentaries. ‘They invite speculation and discussion by pulling at the threads of a mystery rather than defining and/or vilifying its subjects. They benefit from the Netflix model, which has allowed viewers to chart a case in either parceled-out chapters or, thanks to the service’s tendency to dump full seasons in a single bound, to inhale it as one continuous stem-to-stern investigation. They have a tendency to treat the sensationalistic material with a narrative seriousness that’s often missing from the tabloid-style shows. “There’s a lot of true crime content out there, right?” Nishimura told Business Insider. “What made [Making a Murderer] compelling and interesting and for me … was that commitment to the level of storytelling.” And they allow for viewers to get to know the players in these complex stories, and gives them the chance to understand their motivations rather than simply condemn their actions.’
22 May 2018
[comics] Go Look at Alan Moore’s Only Judge Dredd Script … Turned down by Alan Grant but later published in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.
12. Smallish panel. Close-up of Judge Curtis’ boots. They are about eight inches above the ground and kicking wildly. Maybe we can see a hint of a tentacle, wrapped around his leg just below the knee… 21 May 2018
[web] I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore … A look at why the Web isn’t fun anymore. ‘And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook. In the decade since I took that computer class, the web browser has taken over the entire computing experience. There is nothing to “learn” about computers, really, except how to use a browser; everything you might want to do is done from that stupid empty address bar. Today, through that web browser, there are movies and TV shows and every song ever recorded; it’s where I do my writing and chatting and messaging; it’s where my notes and calendars and social networks live. It’s everything except fun.’
18 May 2018
[drink] How I let drinking take over my life … powerful long-read from William Leith analysing his heavy drinking. ‘Some people drink, and then they drink more, and at a certain point, they become obsessed with drink. I always used to notice bottles, the shapes of bottles, the labels and coloured glass. Just looking at the bottles would make me feel a rush of desire. I would know which pubs stocked the strongest beers and ciders, just in case. I loved walking around off-licences, and picking up bottles, and holding them. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I’d go into an off-licence for a few minutes and talk about wine or whisky with the person behind the counter. For a year, I took a wine course, because wine seemed civilised. I sat in a classroom, one evening a week, talking about wine, and drinking wine, and taking notes. Afterwards, I’d go off with another member of the class, or perhaps two, for a couple more bottles of wine. There were always bottles in my life, bottles everywhere, more bottles than I could believe.’
17 May 2018
[life] Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful … long list of concepts for explaining things. ‘Unknown Unknowns — “Known unknowns refers to ‘risks you are aware of, such as cancelled flights… .’ Unknown unknowns are risks that ‘come from situations that are so out of this world that they never occur to you.’ (related: Cynefin framework)’
16 May 2018
[cthulhu] Why We’re Here – A Cthulhu Tract … By Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis. ‘Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!’
15 May 2018
[comic] Comixploitation! … Great explainer on the venality of Marvel and DC Comics by Robert Boyd. ‘The contract [Siegel and Shuster] signed with DC promised them “a percentage of the net profits accruing from the exploitation of Superman in channels other than magazines.” It’s vague, but it’s there-Siegel and Shuster should have been getting a cut of everything right from the start. If Siegel and Shuster had had a lawyer on their side, or a business advisor, they probably would have done better. Their youth and naiveté betrayed them, as did their working class background. When faced with slick businessmen like Donenfeld and Liebowitz, they lost every time…’
14 May 2018
[weird] Meeting Their Makers: The Strange Phenomenon of Fictional Characters Turning Up in Real Life … with stories from Alan Moore, William Gibson, Dave McKean and Doug Moench. ‘Authors have reported seeing their fictional creations act in this independent manner not only in their minds, but also ‘in real life’ – especially in the worlds of science fiction and comic books. Alan Moore himself has mentioned in an interview that he once saw one of his creations, the mage John Constantine (from the Hellblazer series), in a sandwich bar in London. “All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine,” Moore revealed. “He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar.” Moore contemplated whether he should go around the corner and double-check if it really was his own character that had walked into the bar, or whether he should just finish his sandwich and leave…’
11 May 2018
[tech] Notepad gets a major upgrade, now does Unix line endings … It’s only taken since 1985 to get this feature into Windows! ‘But in the next update to Windows (likely to arrive in October or thereabouts), Notepad will handle Unix and classic MacOS line endings in addition to the Windows kind. This will make the editor much more useful than it currently is. And if you don’t like the idea, there’s a registry setting to make it stick with its traditional behavior.’
10 May 2018
[tech] Go Watch The First Pizza Ordered by Computer in 1974 … ‘The first call went to Dominos, which hung up. They were apparently too busy becoming a behemoth. Mercifully, a humane pizzeria — Mr. Mike’s — took the call, and history was made.’
9 May 2018
[books] Roger Moore’s 1973 Book About The Making Of Live And Let Die Is Straight-Up Bonkers … An amusing look at Roger Moore’s warts-and-all account of filming Live and Let Die … ‘B-Day Twenty-two started off on a very black note when in the middle of my knees-bend morning work-out Mike Jones, my hairdresser, telephoned from London to tell me he would not be joining me in Jamaica as a unit hairdresser after all. Mike, who chopped off my locks for Bond, has been with me for several years but out of two hairdressers on the unit list it was decided to bring only one to Jamaica. Harry chose to axe my man which displeased me no end. I finished my work-out in a furious mood and flung my breakfast toast across the room in rage.’
8 May 2018
[life] Report: Putting Head In Hands And Moaning Quietly Still Best Way To Get Through Next Several Seconds … ‘We also discovered that if you follow up this process by leaning forward such that your elbows are positioned on a flat surface, and then push back your hair with both hands while massaging your temples with your thumbs, the next several seconds will all be over soon enough.’
7 May 2018
[space] Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design … ’34. (Roosevelt’s Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.’
4 May 2018
[lifehacks] The Littlest Lifehack … small life improving hacks from Ask Metafilter. ‘You don’t actually need to peel your kiwis at all.’
3 May 2018
[funny] Go Look: Hilariously Disturbing Photos Of Bearded Men Looking Straight Up
2 May 2018
[comics] The 100 Most Influential Pages in Comic Book History … this isn’t a a particularly convincing list – but was worth browsing for the origin of the term “Injury-to-the-eye Motif”.
1 May 2018
[movies] Ghostbusters’ Slimer was created in a cocaine frenzy, artist who made him says
… The surprising creation story of Ghostbusters’ Slimer. ‘He found out that Harold Ramis and Dan Ackroyd had always wanted Slimer in John Belushi’s likeness as a tribute to their deceased friend-something no one had bothered to tell Johnson throughout the six-month process of creating the ghost. (“I said, What the fuck are you talking about?” he adds.) So that night, Johnson took an eight ball of coke, cut up a gram of cocaine on top of a stack of headshots of Belushi, and that’s when things started to get creative…’
30 April 2018
[comics] Frank Miller: ‘I wasn’t thinking clearly when I said those things’ … Revealing interview with Frank Miller. ‘It’s worth noting that whatever his detractors may think of his politics, Miller still happily inveighs against “white, heterosexual family values” and has no interest in defending his views on Occupy Wall Street. “I wasn’t thinking clearly,” he confesses. Does he support Donald Trump? “Real men stay bald,” he says with a grin, lifting his hat to run a hand over his bare scalp.’
27 April 2018
[books] 30 years of Culture: what are the top five Iain M Banks novels? … ‘Three: Consider Phlebas – After almost drowning the hero in sewage in it’s opening scene, the first published Culture novel goes on a rip roaring killing spree across the major sights of the Banksian universe. Space pirates, ringworlds, cannibal cultists, a lethal card game, and a Planet of the Dead… the Culture is shown through the eyes of those who hate and fear this machine lead society, creating by far the darkest of all Banks’s science fiction writing.’ (Previously, Previously, Previously)
25 April 2018
[movies] The Five Types Of Nicolas Cage Movies … Nicely done taxonomy of Nic Cage movies. ‘That get at the heart of what Cage is: a worker. He enjoys being an actor. If given the opportunity to work, he’s gonna do it. Cage is on record as rejecting the idea that selectivity is the hallmark of a successful actor. “Film acting is one of the only industries where you’re criticized for working hard,” he said in 2013. “In any other industry it’s considered a quality and something to behold.” I don’t really see the lie there.’
24 April 2018
[comics] #Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly-and Profitable … Understanding comics offshoot of Gamergate. ‘Meyer’s whole business model, like Milo and Vox Day before him, is predicated on outrage, Farago said. Like many independent comics people, Meyer uses crowdfunding to get his creative projects off the ground. Courting controversy and picking fights with convenient targets-say, with a shadowy cabal of assistant editors, comics critics, and early-career creators-raises his profile, which leads to more followers, which leads to more money for his projects. “The comics industry is small enough to where it’s not that difficult to get yourself known,” Farago said. “I think Meyer saw a niche and realized he could fill it.”’
23 April 2018
[jsw] Reader, it me… Man still knows where all the rooms are in Jet Set Willy … ‘It’s all still there, rotating around in my head, every room, every item, every inch of that marvellous multi-coloured blocky mansion. Even when I’ve forgotten my own name I reckon I’ll still know how to get that tricky item in The Orangery.’
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