8 April 2013
[comics] 27 Comic Books That Came Out 20 Years Ago … ‘1993 was the biggest-ever year for sales in the comics industry. This is what was on the racks.’
5 April 2013
[ww2] Hitler’s Food Taster: One Bite Away from Death … The remarkable story of one of Hitler’s team of food tasters who survived the war … ‘Hitler’s thugs brought her and the other young women to barracks in nearby Krausendorf, where cooks prepared the food for the Wolf’s Lair in a two-story building. The service personnel filled platters with vegetables, sauces, noodle dishes and exotic fruits, placing them in a room with a large wooden table, where the food had to be tasted. “There was never meat because Hitler was a vegetarian,” Wölk recalls. “The food was good — very good. But we couldn’t enjoy it.” There were rumors that the Allies had plans to poison Hitler. After the women confirmed that the food was safe, members of the SS brought it to the main headquarters in crates.’
4 April 2013
[tech] The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame) … the first computer art was apparently created by an anyonymous IBM employee … ‘A young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now. Using equipment designed to guard against the apocalypse, a pin-up girl had been drawn. She was quite probably the first human likeness to ever appear on a computer screen. She glowed.’
3 April 2013
[london] An Autocomplete Guide To London … Londonist examines what Google searchers think about various London boroughs … ‘Romford is the cruelest of cities.’
2 April 2013
[funny] Dalek Relaxation Tape … according to Peter Serafinowicz the Dalek’s have recently released a new-age relaxation tape … ‘YOUR TENSION HAS BEEN EXTERMINATED! EXTERMINATED!’ [via Feeling Listless]
31 March 2013
[scary] 25 Scary Easter Bunnies Of The Past …
28 March 2013
[life] I Went to the Playboy Mansion (and It Was Kinda Depressing) … what a writer from Vice found when he wandered off around the Playboy Mansion … ‘Wandering through the house gave me a feeling not too dissimilar to when a relative dies and you have to go to their place and figure out what to do with their things. Except for, in this case, that dead relative was the magazine industry. Or something. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But the mansion was really, really sad. And it smelled like old man.’
27 March 2013
[funny] The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense … ‘In my gross over simplification the vast majority of the multitude of evidenced-free beliefs at large in the world can be crudely classified into four basic sets or bollocks. Namely, Religion, Quackery, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.’
26 March 2013
[books] Meanwhile, in Islington Waterstones… ‘Horror’
25 March 2013
[comics] The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Owns The Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval … I missed this when it happened – the rights transferred in 2011 and the code closed down in 2010 … ‘The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund today announces that it has received the intellectual property rights to the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval in an assignment from the now-defunct Comic Magazine Association of America, which administrated the Code since the 1950s.’
22 March 2013
[comics] Go Look: Only A Sub-Normal Human Being Would Buy This.
21 March 2013
[comics] Go Look: An Actor Who Should Have Played Green Arrow.
[email] Time’s Inverted Index … What it’s like to examine your past using your email archive … ‘While right now it’s unusual in general population for a person to have all this history so close, so quickly searchable, obviously the world will go this way. There will be many new forms of art and commerce over time, I think, that allow us to interact with, and share from, our private archives. There is going to be an urgent market need for tiny mechanical historians who can live in our pockets and point out our flaws.’
20 March 2013
[life] Taxis and the shortest route home … ‘When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route -always, I’m ethical- but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove. So, I learned to go their way ending up with a lot less grief and a lot more money. If you’ve ever wondered why a seeming professional cab driver will ask you how to get to your destination, this is why. Going your way means they’ll make more money and they won’t be accused of ripping you off. Not to say that in the beginning, I wasn’t stupid. I’d try to show the customer the route on a map but they’d usually be offended that I was contradicting them. It was to their house, if I’d never been there, how could I possibly know better than they did?’ [via As Above]
19 March 2013
[tech] It’s OK to Be a Hater Because Everything Is Bad … amusing rant about the awfulness of technology … ‘Tablets are a complete luxury item-PURE luxury-and owning one makes you an asshole, instantly, categorically. It’s a wonderful toy. But a toy. A big boy toy. Nobody needs an iPad. Nobody. Not a single person, unless you’re literally so stupid and/or infirm that you can’t use a keyboard and mouse like the rest of the industrialized (or barbaric) world. iPads are a status symbol, a second computer that’s built expressly for convenience. You’re spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make your cushy life even cushier by carrying a beautiful computer you don’t need that you can use while flopped down on the couch or leaning against an airplane window like the bourgeois brat idiot you are. You don’t need this thing, and you know you don’t need it. You need a PC-yes. You need a PC to be part of modern society. But you don’t need an iPad, and the entire notion of the luxury device is noxious and offensive…’
18 March 2013
[funny] How To Get Coments On Your Posts … ‘My post included cute animals, Chuck Norris, open source software, bacon, Ron Paul, the recession, epic failures, cynicism, Apple and a FREAKING NARWHAL!!!’
15 March 2013
[weird] Richard Nixon Meets Robocop …
14 March 2013
[weird] So Ben & Jerry’s has an actual Graveyard for their Discontinued Flavours … ‘Surrounded by a white picket fence on a grassy knoll, lie the headstones of especially beloved flavours or particularly despised flavours, some that were introduced as early as the late 1970s when the ice cream company was founded, but sadly met their untimely fate. The folks at Ben & Jerry’s are pretty good at word play and each flavour has its own poetic epitaph…’
13 March 2013
[apple] Abandoned Apples … pictures of long discarded Apple computers that have been left to slowly decay.
12 March 2013
[drink] What Coca-Cola Contains … ‘The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead – the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space.’
11 March 2013
[life] The Godzilla Threshold: ‘Things are at the point where even summoning Godzilla, king of monsters and patron saint of collateral damage, could not possibly make the crisis any worse. The situation has crossed the Godzilla Threshold. Once the Threshold is crossed, ANY plan, with even the smallest possibility of success, no matter how ludicrous, impossible, dangerous or abhorrent, suddenly becomes a valid option.’ [via YMFY]
8 March 2013
[twitter] The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter … Is Twitter being used as a numbers station? … ‘GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the “Region of Khabarovsk.” This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?’ [via @qwghlm]
7 March 2013
6 March 2013
[tech] How Qihoo 360 Won the Browser War in China … a look at how a virus company leveraged it’s position to create China’s most popular web browser … ‘When a user tries to uninstall the 360 browser, they are presented with three choices: Repair, Change to IE9, or uninstall directly. If they choose to change to IE9, after installation another popup occurs and when you click “Next”, it reinstalls the 360 browser and makes it the default.’
5 March 2013
[books] The Book-Writing Machine … What was the first book ever written on a word processor? … ‘It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Len Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned…’
4 March 2013
[comics] Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Nemo: Heart of Ice … more work-in-progress annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘I confess to not understanding the “urine storage scheme” reference.’
1 March 2013
[tech] The Restart Page … Re-experience the thrill of watching your favourite retro operating systems reboot.
28 February 2013
[socialnetworks] An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network … ‘They say that when the costs-the time and effort-associated with being a member of a social network outweigh the benefits, then the conditions are ripe for a general exodus. The thinking is that if one person leaves, then his or her friends become more likely to leave as well and this can cascade through the network causing a collapse in membership. But Garcia and co point out that the topology of the network provides some resilience against this. This resilience is determined by the number of friends that individual users have. So if a big fraction of people on a network have only two friends, it is highly vulnerable to collapse.’
27 February 2013
[blogs] Scarfolk Council … Voted England’s creepiest blog in 1978 … ‘Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever.’
26 February 2013
[guardian] A Comment Generator For The Guardian … ‘Collecting my oak-smoked Salmon and dry-cured Trout direct from the smokehouse led me to a fascinating chat with the proprietor this afternoon. Quinoa is great in a packed lunch but it doesn’t keep Quentin full for his after-school amateur dramatics. We should all go back to living in communes like they did in Sweden in the 70s!’
25 February 2013
[comics] Upcoming: Darryl Cunningham’s Ayn Rand Memoir …Forbidden Planet has some pages from Darryl Cunningham’s latest comic strip.
22 February 2013
[chess] Playing Chess With Kubrick… Jeremy Bernstein reminisces about meeting and playing chess with Stanley Kubrick … ‘The next day Clarke called to say that I was expected that afternoon at Kubrick’s apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a movie mogul and had no idea what to expect. But as soon as Kubrick opened the door I felt an immediate kindred spirit. He looked and acted like every obsessive theoretical physicist I have ever known. His obsession at that moment was whether or not anything could go faster than the speed of light. I explained to him that according to the theory of relativity no information bearing signal could go faster. We conversed like that for about an hour when I looked at my watch and realized I had to go. “Why?” he asked, seeing no reason why a conversation that he was finding interesting should stop.’
21 February 2013
[comics] Antony Johnston on phoning Alan Moore … ‘So this friend of mine, this guy I’ve gotten to know since entering the now-largely-online comics community, asks me if I want Alan Moore’s phone number. Do what, I say. He repeats the offer. Just don’t tell anyone where you got it, he says, or Alan will fucking kill me. Go on then, I reply. Why not? Half a millisecond after I write it down, I realise why not: I can never call this number.’
20 February 2013
[music] Rutherford Chang – We Buy White Albums … fascinating photo-essay on an artist who only collects original vinyl copies of the Beatles White Album … ‘My collection of White Albums is on display at Recess, a storefront art space in SoHo. It’s set up like a record store with the albums arranged in bins by serial number, and visitors are invited to browse and listen to the records. Except, rather than sell the albums, I am buying more. I currently have 693 copies.’
19 February 2013
18 February 2013
[coke] A Brief History Racist Soft Drinks … fascinating look at the racial divide between Coke and Pepsi … ‘Few realize that Coke marketed assiduously to whites, while Pepsi hired a "negro markets" department. Put more bluntly, Coke was made for white people. Pepsi was made for black people. Over the course of the decades and the seemingly limitless growth of the soft drink industry, the companies have expanded their marketing departments and launched myriad campaigns to discourage the idea that either appealed to a specific race…’
15 February 2013
[email] Inbox Zero for Life … a straightforward approach to the Inbox Zero lifehack using Gmail … ‘Triage. Your one and only goal for processing your inbox is to make it empty. Not to actually do anything productive, because processing email is inherently anti-productive. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re doing work here. Just get it over with as quickly as possible.’
14 February 2013
Why Facebook Makes You Feel Miserable … ‘The most common cause of Facebook frustration came from users comparing themselves socially to their peers, while the second most common source of dissatisfaction was "lack of attention" from having fewer comments, likes and general feedback compared to friends.’
13 February 2013
[price] What A Year Of Stuff Costs … the prices of various things if you buy/use them for a year collected by Diamond Geezer … ‘Daily bath (medium depth): £98 (gas boiler), £291 (immersion heater) Daily shower (5 minutes): £44 (electric shower), £200 (power shower)’
12 February 2013
[valentines] The Perfect Valentines Gift: pre-arrange a funeral for yourself and your partner …
11 February 2013
[comics] “Son of Sam” and the Comics Industry … fascinating story of how the detectives investigating Son Of Sam visited DC Comics after it was suggested that Sam’s handwriting was like the lettering in comics … ‘Upon hearing why I’d been called into Sol’s office, a few of my cohorts had their own ideas about who might be the Son of Sam, including a couple of fellow staffers. The most convincing argument, however, was made for a somewhat reclusive artist whose ultra-conservative leanings might have made him a suspect as the killer of “loose” women. We did not, however, share any of this with the NYPD.’ [via Neilalien]
8 February 2013
[conspiracy] Verified Facts About … a conspiracy theory generator … ‘Records indicate that Barack Obama’s ancestors were present at the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II– even those who had died decades earlier. Perhaps there’s more to learn about this event.’
6 February 2013
[batman] An Extensive Discussion Of Batman Punching Animals … ‘I don’t think I actually have a comprehensive list handy, but I can assure you that Batman has gotten into fistfights with dogs, wolves, panthers, lions, tigers, bears (oh my!), gorillas (regular), gorillas (telepathic), gorillas (other), sharks, horses, crocodiles, at least one eagle, and I distinctly remember an ostritch, although the issue number escapes me at the moment.’
5 February 2013
[death] Wikipedia’s list of unusual deaths … ‘1959: In the Dyatlov Pass incident, nine ski hikers in the Ural Mountains abandoned their camp in the middle of the night, some clad only in their underwear despite sub-zero weather. Six died of hypothermia and three by unexplained injuries. The corpses showed no signs of struggle, but one had a fatal skull fracture, two had major chest fractures, and one was missing her tongue. Soviet investigators determined only that “a compelling unknown force” had caused the deaths. During the hikers’ memorials, several witnesses reported that the bodies had an “orangish tint” to them.’
4 February 2013
[watchmen] Rorschach’s Father: The Lost Tapes … previously little seen Alan Moore interview from 1987 on Watchmen … ‘The Nazis weren’t villains but ordinary human beings who did terrible things. HerÂoes are usually people who, if you happened to be on the opposite side of any battle, would be famous monsters. It is all totally subjective. There aren’t any pure heroes; there aren’t any pure villains; there’s just people. But people like there to be heroes and villains, because if we can say “That person is a monster”, it makes us feel better or not so bad. Or it makes it not our responsibility. Mrs Thatcher isn’t a monster, sh’es just a fairly nondescript intellect, but she’s a greedy and an ambitious woman. It’s too bad that she’s Prime Minister. I mean, if she’d have stayed in her greengrocery business, probably not many peuple would have shopped there an awful lot, but it wouldn’t have done anv great harm. But a lot of the left wing in Britain like to portray Mrs Thatcher as a monster.’
1 February 2013
[guns] The Onion: AR-15 Assault Rifle Beginning To Worry It May Never Get To Kill Innocent Person …
The Colt-manufactured assault rifle confirmed that, given the administration’s intention to advance gun control measures designed to curb the nation’s ready access to deadly firearms such as itself, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the weapon will ever have the opportunity to act on its long-held desire to brutally execute even a single innocent person. 31 January 2013
[tv] Looking Beneath The Waves … another Adam Curtis interview … ‘The great wonder of our time is also a disease of our time: the desire to experience things for ourselves. It’s just the thing at the moment, what we don’t want is to be told stuff. We don’t like elites any longer because we’re all like each other. We want to know it ourselves, we want to feel it. It’s partly due to the rise of individualism. But what we get to is what I call the “duchess paradox”, where everyone is now a duchess in society. The real problem with that is that if you’re all duchesses then what’s the point of being a duchess? Everyone’s a celebrity now. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, they want to be treated like celebrities. They want to go to spas, they want to get married in big, posh houses. People will pay for VIP tickets to concerts. It’s extraordinary. Everyone is desperately searching for where it’s at. The point is there is nowhere it’s at – “it” simply just doesn’t exist. It’s the great tragedy for that generation: they just want to experience something.’
30 January 2013
[batman] Batman Keeps Gotham Tidy …
29 January 2013
[funny] Bad Kids Jokes … amusing collection of nonsensical jokes from children … ‘Why did the cow jump over the moon? Because he wanted to poo all over the moon.’
28 January 2013
[funny] Get Insulted By Martin Luther … ‘We leave you to your own devices, for nothing properly suits you except hypocrisy, flattery, and lies.’
25 January 2013
[health] What Doctors Won’t Do … Doctors discuss which medical treatments they would avoid … ‘I would never avoid having my children vaccinated. Several years ago, I volunteered with Médecins Sans Frontières and spent six months in Angola. I’d expected the poverty, but it was the arrival of kids suffering from severe illnesses that should never have occurred – illnesses easily prevented elsewhere, like measles, or tetanus – that saddened me most. That, and the quiet humility with which families would queue for hours under a scorching sun to receive their vaccines.’
24 January 2013
[tv] How Unrealistic Is Murder On Television? … ‘In a paper printed in the British Medical Journal, Tim Crayford, Richard Hooper and Sarah Evans reported that the mortality rate for characters in the television soap operas Coronation Street and EastEnders exceeded those of bomb disposal experts and racing drivers. Deaths were generally violent, and recently introduced characters had a five-year survival rate.’
23 January 2013
22 January 2013
[comics] Alan and The Mad Reader … a look on the early influence of Mad Magazine on Alan Moore … ‘The chief importance of the Superduperman story to Moore seems to have been the basic idea of a totally fresh way of looking at Superman, a character whose stories at that time were extremely formulaic. Apart from this, one small point worth noticing is the way in which the emblem of the hero’s chest keeps changing – just like that of Dourdevil in Moore’s Daredevil parody “Grit” (The Daredevils #8, 1983).’
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