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26 May 2014
[comics] “Kid… Comics Will Break Your Heart” … Jack Kirby by Dylan Horrocks‘In the 1980s, Romberger met Kirby at a convention in New York. Kirby kindly looked at Romberger’s work and then gave him a piece of advice: “Kid, you’re one of the best. But put your work in galleries. Don’t do comics. Comics will break your heart.”’

"Kid... Comics Will Break Your Heart."

25 May 2014
[comics] MAD #21: Cover by Harvey Kurtzman (1955) … an incredibly dense cover of comic novelty ads … ‘It is one of the most glorious and ludicrous covers in comic book history.’
24 May 2014
[lovecraft] Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

“Fools!” said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. “We must prepare today’s youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods-not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”

23 May 2014
[people] What has been seen cannot be unseen: Here’s Victoria Beckham Looking A Lot Like Cliff Richard.
22 May 2014
[email] How To Free Yourself From Email‘The key point: whenever you email someone you are intruding, stealing time that they could be spending with their family – or without their family. You certainly shouldn’t be blithely asking them for unpaid services. There’s one dreaded email, familiar to every professional writer, known as “Will you read my script?” The correct answer is, “Certainly. My hourly rate is”‰.”‰.”‰.”‰” Probably the best business secret Sir Alex Ferguson, the former Manchester United manager, will have to impart at Harvard Business School is what he once told Tony Blair’s aide Alastair Campbell: don’t let people steal your time with petty requests.’
21 May 2014
[politics] Among a crowd of political automatons, Nigel Farage is like a wacky neighbour in a sitcom … Charlie Brooker on Nigel Farage … ‘Farage says the unsayable. He says things so unsayable they’re said nigh-on constantly, often in large letters, on the front page of a newspaper. The sayable. He says the sayable. ROMANIAN STEALS WAR MEMORIAL. ONE IN THREE FOREIGNERS ISN’T BRITISH. NOW IT’S HALAL SMARTPHONES. That’s what he says. All of which means that, as well as being a bit of sore thumb stunt casting, he simultaneously represents familiarity; specifically the cosy familiarity of a world in which you could walk down an English high street without your ears getting bunged up with foreign accents, unless someone was doing a hilarious Gunga Din voice in order to mock the waiter in a curry house. That world is a corpse, but it’s a corpse that many want to revive…’
20 May 2014
[politics] UKIP is using politics to fight a cultural war … GQ attempts to understand UKIP …

The argument that says the UKIP represents a rebellion against the political elite seems true (aside from its public school-educated/banker/professional politician leader), but even that lends it a sophistication it barely deserves. UKIP is the road rage of a repressed parochialism; the collective panic attack of an introspective minority that has watched a succession of socially and economically liberal governments and their co-religionists in the media promote a world-view that seemed to leave these “outsiders” further and further in the margins.

The margins of culture, that is. Not the margins of the economy. One suspects many of UKIP’s leading figures are businessmen and women who have done rather well out of the post-Thatcher economic consensus. Conversely, UKIP supporters from poorer parts of society are not disadvantaged because of EU red tape, immigration or tolerance towards gays, but because they live in a low-skill, wildly free market economy that has been propagated by every government – to a greater or lesser extent – since 1979, creating an entrenched inequality that is worsening every year.

19 May 2014
[movies] The top 30 underappreciated films of 1999 …looks like 1999 was a great year for movies. … ’23. Mystery Men – Years before films like Kick-Ass and Super played around with the staples of the superhero genre, the lavish Mystery Men attempted the same thing – and despite a sterling cast (Ben Stiller, Geoffrey Rush, Greg Kinnear) and some laugh-out-loud moments, it somehow failed to charm critics or audiences. Mystery Men’s main problem, perhaps, was that it came out too early – had it appeared a couple of years later, after X-Men and Spider-Man revitalised the comic book genre, this amiable comedy may have found a more receptive audience. With the superhero blockbuster currently riding high, it’s arguably time that Mystery Men gets the reappraisal it deserves.’
18 May 2014
17 May 2014
[tv] Down with dark: why screen drama needs to lighten up‘Then there is The Good Wife, an ongoing example of fine, female-led drama (see also the much underrated Nurse Jackie) providing an antidote to the overwhelmingly morbid maleness of longform drama (that said, lead character Alicia Florrick has been compared to Walter White). There’s a great scene in the series, as yet unbroadcast in the UK – an ongoing joke about an intense cable drama Alicia occasionally watches. It features a soliloquising male, naked torso lit only by a flickering strobe, about to enjoy some action with a scantily clad female but existentially disdainful of it. “Sex… is a chimera,” he intones. “I saw a crack whore eat her own arm. I saw a baby drown like a cat. Sex… keeps us occupied because reality can’t be endured. Even this will end in smoke.” There is Dark in a nutshell, in all its ball-aching, sexist prattishness.’
16 May 2014
[comics] Great War was world’s first sci-fi war, says Pat Mills … BBC News discusses Charley’s War. Pat Mills: ‘We often imagine that Armageddon is a horror that awaits us sometime in the future. But Armageddon has already happened. It was World War One.’
15 May 2014
[comics] Alan Moore’s unpublished scripts for Youngblood … contains scripts for Youngblood #2 to #7, notes on characters and an overview of Moore’s plan for two years of comics.
14 May 2014
[life] 15 weird things that 9% of Britons say they believe. Including supporting the Lib Dems‘When it comes to foreigners, 9% of Brits would like to see less tourists arriving from China. Which seems an incredibly specific and odd thing to be getting vexed about.’
13 May 2014
[movies] Hollywood’s superhero movie binge explained in four charts‘It has been rare for fewer than six comic-book adaptations to be released in any one year. Despite the glut, audiences don’t seem to be losing interest. US box-office revenue generated by these films has cracked $1 billion on three different occasions. The Avengers, a film that packed as many comic-book favorites onto the screen as possible, made $623 million in the US alone two years ago.’
12 May 2014
[crime] My Roommate, The Diamond Thief … fabulous true-crime story about a man realising his flatmate has a big secret …

I thought about the break-in, his absences, the dead sister, the fingerprinting . . . but what did it all add up to? Was he a victim of circumstance-or a serial killer? Was I his next target? I became obsessed with getting answers. Then I searched the most obvious place of all: Google. I typed in the name “Dino Smith,” and a couple of clicks later, there it was. His mug shot, on the America’s Most Wanted Website. He was a suspect in the biggest jewel heist in San Francisco history. I gaped at the screen in disbelief, then ran in circles, howling obscenities: “Fuck fuck fucking shit fuck fucker! Holy FUCK!”

11 May 2014
[comics] Nemo and All Things “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” with Kevin O’Neill … great interview with one of British comics finest artists … ‘I think with the original League series, it just started with a small Charles Dickens reference, and some older Victorian comic characters. I remember talking about it and we felt, well, if we have a newstand scene, it would be great if all the publications are fictional publications from all over the place – and therein lies the path to complete and total madness, really.’
10 May 2014
[moore] 2048: The Alan Moore Edition … a special version of the 2048 game for fans of Alan Moore.
9 May 2014
[docu] Fail better … another Adam Curtis interview …

After the broadcast of Curtis’s 2007 film The Trap, which traced the influence of game theory – the idea that humans behaved as self-interested individuals – on contemporary economic thought, Prospect magazine’s Max Steuer argued that the series “greatly exaggerates the power of ideas, and at the same time almost wilfully misrepresents them”. Others made similar criticisms of All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, which linked the anti-state philosophy of Ayn Rand with the “techno-utopians” who developed modern computing. At the very least, don’t his films encourage precisely that gloomy feeling – a sense that power is in the hands of an unaccountable elite – that so exercises him?

“Well, I am a creature of my time,” he concedes. We’ve found our way to a café in the shopping centre near Thamesmead, where we can chat at greater length. “What I’ve been trying to do is analyse why progressive ideas failed.

“Secondly, I’m interested in telling stories, because I like telling stories and I think ideas are important. I take particular influences of particular groups of people as a way of showing how that idea spread out. I never say this is where it all came from, this shadowy group of people. I’m telling you a story, like a novelist would, but as a factual story to try and bring it to life to you.”

8 May 2014
[tech] Wat HiFi? … amusing collection of reviews for high-end HiFI equipment … ‘This [$600] USB cable is simply revelatory in its combination of ease and refinement on one hand, and resolution and transparency on the other. Although capable of resolving the finest detail, Diamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement.’
7 May 2014
[tech] How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch‘The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life. But my friend Allen Baum had sent me xerox copies of pages of his texts at MIT about the subject so I could claim that I had an MIT education in it, ha ha. In my second year of college I had sat in a math analysis class trying to teach myself how to start writing a FORTRAN compiler, knowing nothing about the science of compiler writing.’
6 May 2014
[comics] Walt Simonson’s Groovy DC Days … nostalgic mini-gallery of Walter Simonson Covers from 1970s … ‘Please stay away — The love I need can NEVER BE!’

Walt Simonson Young Love #125 Cover

5 May 2014
[politics] Nigel Farage is just Russell Brand for old people … some thoughts on Nigel Farage … ‘Nigel Farage is a phoney. There is a simple solution to everything that ails the United Kingdom: leave the European Union and, to all intents and purposes, close our borders. Then we shall enjoy a new Golden Age. It is an illusion wrapped in a lie inside a fraud. No such solution presents itself. In the unlikely event Mr Farage got his way almost every problem this country faces would remain intact – and remain as impervious to simple solution.’
4 May 2014
[funny] Pope Francis Pursues Sinner Across Vatican City Rooftops‘Reports indicate that the pope lost track of the transgressor against God on top of the Palace of the Canonicate, causing him to pause for several seconds and frantically scan the horizon in all directions before suddenly spying the man on the adjacent roof of the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, at which point the Bishop of Rome is said to have dashed at full speed to the building’s ledge and leapt the 30-foot gap separating the two structures’
3 May 2014
[yewtree] Max Clifford: the rise and fall of the UK’s king of spin … Simon Hatterstone on Max Clifford’s downfall … ‘The trial ranged from Greek tragedy to Carry On farce. At times, it felt too strange to be true – or, as the prosecution argued, too strange not to be true. Max’s Angels, as Clifford’s all-female office team are known, attended on a shift basis, one at a time, sitting loyally in the public gallery as their boss was labelled an exhibitionist and an abuser. They were joined by a handful of civilians (largely retired, portly men), there on a regular basis to enjoy the spectacle. Occasionally, eccentrics walked into court: one man took umbrage when asked by the clerk to stop filming; a drunk woman sidled up to me and whispered that she had a story to sell. The air fizzed with schadenfreude.’
2 May 2014
[security] 4 Simple Changes to Stop Online Tracking … some great tips from the Electronic Frontier Foundation … ‘Get Adblock Plus. After it is installed, be sure to change your filter preferences to add EasyPrivacy.’
1 May 2014
[lost] Lost Your Keys Again? Eight Tips to Find Misplaced Objects‘Check to see if it’s somehow hidden in its proper place. Look carefully and systematically-don’t just rummage around (which is very tempting) Note: objects are usually found within 18 inches of their original location. This sounds impossible, but I’ve found this to be uncannily accurate.’
30 April 2014
[space] SuitSat1: A Spacesuit Floats Free … slightly disturbing picture of a empty spacesuit floating away from the International Space Station … ‘The unneeded Russian Orlan spacesuit filled mostly with old clothes was fitted with a faint radio transmitter and released to orbit the Earth. The suit circled the Earth twice before its radio signal became unexpectedly weak.’
29 April 2014
28 April 2014
[stickers] How much does it cost to fill the Panini 2014 World Cup Sticker book? … it turns out that collecting World Cup team stickers in a pretty expensive hobby … ‘You need 824 packets and that’s a smacking £412.’
27 April 2014
[movies] A View To A Kill: Occasionally Starring Roger Moore … an amusing look at the conclusion to Roger Moore’s run of movies as James Bond… ‘Let’s be honest: Roger Mortis has finally set in. This incarnation of cinema’s favourite secret agent is no more. This is an ex-Bond. It’s not even Rodge’s fault (he graciously noted that he was “only about four hundred years too old for the part”) – the poor bastard had been trying to escape since 1979, but Cubby Broccoli never had the balls to choose another Bond. As a result of that cowardice, and combined with the fact that Moore is nearly three years older than Sean Connery, James Bond went from a prowling, 32-year-old sex puma in 1962 to a shuffling, 57-year-old sex tortoise in 1985 without ever making reference to his own advancing years or behaving accordingly.’
26 April 2014
[tech] Previously Unknown Andy Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985 … another story of digital archeology … ‘It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol’s imagery existed on the floppy disks-nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data. Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognized by any utility. Soon afterwards, however, the Club’s forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol’s style by the AWM’s experts. At least eleven of these images featured Warhol’s signature.’
25 April 2014
[tech] The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos … a wonderful story of digital archeology …

The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.

They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, but it wasn’t until 2005 that NASA engineer Keith Cowing and space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo were able to bring the materials and the technical know how together.

When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action.

24 April 2014
[comics] A Letter from Denny O’Neill about working at Marvel Comics in 1966‘The notes in the margin are Jack’s — he actually plots the story as he draws it, after an initial, and usually brief, plot conference with our leader. From the marginal comments, Stan does the script.’
23 April 2014
[dailyfail] You’ve seen the sidebar of shame, now check out the Daily Mail *timeline* of shame‘2002 – Claims mouth wash, oral sex, Pringles and Facebook cause cancer.’
22 April 2014
[tv] Danny Trejo: I always just kinda say “Yeah, but did your head crawl across the desert on a tortoise?”
21 April 2014
20 April 2014
[politics] The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 1) … Errol Morris On Donald Rumsfeld … ‘Not just him but the entire building was in denial. Doug Feith – don’t get me started on Doug Feith – told me that they had a Marshall Plan all set to go in terms of rebuilding Iraq. And he pointed to this stack of huge three-ringed binders, all of them black. There must have been about 10 of them stacked up on top of a cabinet. And I asked to see them, and he said, “No, you can’t. It’s classified.” And I said, “Well, O.K., I understand that, I guess.” But I raised it to somebody else within the next couple of weeks. I said, “Well, Doug Feith showed me the Marshall Plan for Iraq.” And this person laughed, and he said, “Mik, that was the Marshall Plan.” It was a copy of the original Marshall Plan, not a plan for Iraq.’
19 April 2014
[movies] Irrational Treasure … a look back at the last ten years of Nicolas Cage movies… ‘The main problem with the notion that Cage squandered his post-Oscar momentum on dumb action movies and thereby lost something irretrievable is that Cage’s sellout movies are more consistently entertaining than just about anybody else’s. His inherent absurdity infects and elevates them; Cage’s own expansive persona fills in the gaps in action-movie characters without qualities.’
18 April 2014
[history] The Last Places … the remarkable story of how Henry VIII’s wine cellar came to be perfectly preserved under the Ministry of Defence Main Building in Whitehall … ‘Writing in a 2010 issue of the AA Files Andrew Crompton describes the design of the poetically named MoD Main Building, which was “so slow in coming out of the ground that it became know as the Whitehall Monster.” In addition to the understandable delay caused by World War Two, Crompton ascribes its astonishing twenty-one year construction to the fact that the MoD Monster has “embedded within it a series of spaces that seem to have more to do with sympathetic magic than functional architecture.” Included among these embedded spaces are a Gothic crypt, a crooked staircase that leads nowhere, “five very fine eighteenth-century interiors” – the first ever preserved outside of a museum – and, of course, Henry VIII’s long-lost wine cellar.’
17 April 2014
[comics] Heads or Tails … a wonderful new comic strip from Chris Ware about the life of a penny.
16 April 2014
[email] The First Emoticon May Have Appeared in… 1648 … Alexis Madrigal attempts to push back the history of the Smiley to the 17th Century … ‘Why would anyone care about a smiley face in a poem from the 17th century? For me, it’s like a wormhole that connects our time with theirs. If you’d been alive in 1648, you might have considered that a colon and a parenthesis form a smiley face. Our ancestors looked upon the same marks on the page and saw the possibilities that we take for granted. While emoticons have probably been independently invented many times-the earliest documented use of the smiley face with a nose, :-), comes in 1982-Herrick very well could have been the first.’
15 April 2014
[wikipedia] TL;DR Wikipedia … condensed Wikipedia … ‘Ayn Rand was American novelist, best known for developing the philosophy of Objectivism, which apparently states that every college freshmen must get really into Objectivism.’ [via Qwghlm]
14 April 2014
13 April 2014
[bullshit] New-Age Bullshit Generator‘Nothing is impossible. Self-actualization is the driver of aspiration. You and I are entities of the dreamscape. Traveller, look within and enlighten yourself.’
12 April 2014
[2001] 2001: A Space Odyssey (2012 Trailer Recut) … a trailer for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as a modern summer blockbuster. [via Kevin Church]
11 April 2014
[titanic] This is what the menu on the Titanic looked like‘We’re down with roast beef and brown gravy for lunch, but jacket potatoes for breakfast?’
10 April 2014
[ios] The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain… useful guide to dealing with a common issue on iPhones … ‘Step 1: Disable Location and Background App Refresh for Facebook.’
9 April 2014
[comics] The Twelve Best Covers Of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen‘If I could own one piece of original comic book art, this would be it. In one image the entire run of Jimmy Olsen, and the entire Silver Age of DC Comics is encapsulated. The caption on the cover proclaims Jimmy Olsen to be “The Red-Headed Beatle of 1,000 B.C.!” and the screaming girls reinforce it. Everything about this cover is great, but the best bit is Superman declaring that Jimmy has become as popular as Ringo.’
8 April 2014
[london] What is it like to live on Britain’s most expensive street?‘Eskimo Ice services draws up outside one house – the company delivers ice sculptures for parties, and its website shows glassy ice lions and carved statues of the London skyline. Elsewhere, a van – Anglo-Italian marble installation – is delivering bespoke marble, granite, limestone and porcelain tiles. Gardeners arrive in a van marked Siddeley landscape design (a company that also appears to work on mammoth private estates in China and Russia). British Security Technologies is parked outside another mansion, its van promising in italic lettering: “We’ll Keep You Safe ‘n’ Sound Tonight.” A vehicle drives up to provide swimming pool and whirlpool maintenance. There is also a fire-protection services van, an emergency plumbing car and Rentokil pest control – because, it seems, money offers no real protection against fire, rats and plumbing catastrophes.’
7 April 2014
6 April 2014
5 April 2014
[property] Terrible Real Estate Agent Photographs Tumblr‘Jean-Paul Sartre said “hell is other people”. It is not. Hell is this patio.’
4 April 2014
[tide] High Tide / Low Tide Pictures … some pictures of the UK coast contrasting high tide with low tide (by Michael Marten).
3 April 2014
[comics] Twenty-two comic books Alan Moore was looking forward to reading in 1988… Part 1 | Part 2
2 April 2014
[books] Capote’s Co-conspirators in “In Cold Blood” … a look at what’s true and untrue in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood … ‘In his 1988 biography of Capote, Gerald Clarke reveals that the redemptive coda at the end of the book, in which Dewey encounters a friend of Nancy Clutter’s in a cemetery, was fiction: their conversation, which Capote relates in direct quotes, never happened. Even so, Capote is right to suggest that any narrative representation of events is an accumulation of “selected” details, and that the process of selection and arrangement through which a writer converts disparate facts into an absorbing story entails an inevitable measure of artifice.’