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[politics] ‘If I have a fault, it’s that I’m too honest’… – Boris Johnson’s Unleashed, digested by John Crace. ‘February 2016. I was choked. Blocked. Stuck. Unsure of which way to jump in the referendum. Some have said that I chose to back leave only because that was the best career move. But I can categorically say this is untrue. Never in my life have I taken the selfish path. My life has been one long pilgrimage of self-restraint and uxorious self-denial. The queen once told me that I was a role model for the country.’

[web] 404 – Car not Found

[curtis] Adam Curtis: The Map No Longer Matches the Terrain … Another interview with Adam Curtis … ‘It’s interesting to observe a class that’s losing power and ask yourself where that power is going. The traditional left position is to say that it’s the bankers, but bankers say, “We do arbitrage, we spot gaps and go for it, we’re just chancers.” That’s not power. It has an effect, but it’s not power. The other left position is that we’ve returned to a sort of feudalism, but I’m not convinced by that. My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.’

[war] The Big Baltic Bomb Cleanup… A look at the race to safely remove vast amounts of weaponry dumped in The Baltic after both World Wars. ‘…In their watery graves, the many land and naval mines, U-boat torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, chemical weapons, aerial bombs, and incendiary devices have corroded over almost 80 years. The Germans, like other dumping nations, long assumed that when the casings broke down, the vast ocean would simply dissolve pollutants into harmless fractions. About 25 years ago, scientists discovered that instead, the explosives remain live and are now oozing into the ecosystem and up the food chain. That flounder darting in front of the crawler’s camera from the Alkor’s dry lab? It almost certainly contains traces of TNT, the highly toxic compound used in explosives.’

[tv] Why Was the ‘Miami Vice’ Pilot So Good? … A look at how the 80s crime series was developed. ‘But it wasn’t just the pilot. Miami Vice season one was one of the best freshman seasons of that decade. It churned out one knockout hour after another (including the gemlike perfection of “Evan,” starring a then-baby-faced William Russ as a closeted gay cop). It sparked depiction-vs.-endorsement arguments about its presentation of sex, violence, and drug use. It soon became one of the hippest series in TV history to guest-star on, especially if you were a musician or a real-life political figure. ‘

[funny] Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, as E-mailed by Your Passive-Aggressive Co-Worker … ‘Seriously, I don’t mean to be a dick about this, but we might look into changing our policy. I understand wanting to get the new St. Peter’s built, but have we considered having a bake sale? It concerns me that we’re maybe not serving the public by letting the wealthy buy their way into Heaven, but I don’t know. Best, Martin’

[zines] The BugPowder Zine Archive … Pete Ashton is scanning and cataloging his large collection of zines. Here’s a post on the the story of the project and a timeline. … ‘From 1988 to the mid 2000s I amassed a collection of roughly 4,000 self published comics and zines, mostly from the UK small press comics scenes but also from across the world covering all manner of subjects. Most of them are photocopied or printed in very short runs, usually under 100 copies. Many of them are hand-finished with personal touches. During the 1990s I ran a review zine, TRS, and a mail order distro, BugPowder. This meant that on top of the many zines I was buying for myself, hundreds of people sent me unsolicited copies of their zines for review or sale…’

[comics] Criminal Reading Order, The Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Celebrated Comics … ‘In an interview with Tom Spurgeon at the launch of the series, Brubaker stated “The kinds of stories we’ll be putting all these characters through, though, run the gamut from the heist caper, to the revenge story, to the man on the run story, and even beyond that to the sort of meta-noir innocent man caught in a web of crime story.” That’s exactly what they did. Eighteen years later, we have a collection of books, stories that were not written or published in chronological order, featuring a group of recurring characters whose lives we discover through dark and violent events…’

[onion] Everyone In Restaurant Jealous Of Toddler Who Gets To Wear Pajamas And Watch iPad … ‘“I can’t believe this! He doesn’t even have to talk to anybody or pay attention to what’s going on around him—he gets to just sit and watch Bluey,” said Ray’s Italian Bistro patron Finn Delamore, echoing the sentiment of dozens around him who reportedly couldn’t help but cast longing looks at the 2-year-old whose eyes were glued to the screen in front of him, his hands clasping a bright red toy fire truck.’

[internet] Are you TIRED? LONELY? DEPRESSED? If so, please consider joining a NICHE ONLINE COMMUNITY! …

Are you TIRED? LONELY? DEPRESSED? If so, please consider joining a NICHE ONLINE COMMUNITY!

[pac-man] Pac-Man: The Untold Story of How We Really Played The Game … A deep dive into the Pac-Stance – the way people stood playing Pac-Man in an arcade. ‘Human beings leave physical impressions upon the things they love and use just as much as their do upon the lives of people and the planet they live upon. For every action, there’s a reaction. For every pressure, there’s an affect on mass and volume. And in the impressions left by that combination, particularly if you’re lucky enough to see the sides of a rare, unrestored vintage Pac-Man cabinet, lies the never before told story of how we really played the game.’

[tv] Recreating The People’s Poet Badges … Faboulous project to recreate the badges worn by Rik in the Young Ones. ‘So I began my research. I first researched screenshots, episodes, official photographs and portraits, gathering as many references as I could. But there were still some that were unidentified and from what I’d seen, previous cosplayers had filled the unidentified badges with a related badge to The Young Ones or a political badge that they imagined Rick would have…’

[tv] A Lunch with Adrian Edmondson … ‘That understanding is really the triumph of Edmondson’s own career. He had some demons to overcome – including intrusive suicidal thoughts, which he was surprised to discover not everyone had. He has been saved – and thrived – as an actor and writer, by the two great love stories of his life. The abiding one is with Saunders. They have kept celebrity at bay, he suggests, partly by living most of the time on the edge of Dartmoor. He tells how one of their daughters came home from school one day in some distress. Kids in the playground had been insisting that her mother was the famous Jennifer Saunders off the telly, and she had been insisting that no, she was Jennifer Edmondson…’

[books] The Later Years of Douglas Adams … A look back at Douglas Adams creative struggles later in his career. ‘This time he had to be locked into a room with not only a handler from his publisher but his good friend Michael Bywater, who had, since doing Bureaucracy for Infocom, fallen into the role of Adams’s go-to ghostwriter for many of the contracts he signed and failed to follow through on. Confronted with the circumstances of its creation, one is immediately tempted to suspect that substantial chunks of Mostly Harmless were actually Bywater’s work. By way of further circumstantial evidence, we might note that some of the human warmth that marked the first four Hitchhiker’s novels is gone, replaced by a meaner, archer style of humor that smacks more of Bywater than the Adams of earlier years.’

[comics] The Funnies Have Gone Down, Down, Down … Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich discuss comics.

BOGDANOVICH: Is there a– I was gonna ask you that– do you think there’s an interesting parallel between movie setups and panels?

WELLES: Yes. I think the panels come out of the movies, and–

BOGDANOVICH: They came out of the movies.

WELLES: Out of the movies, and then have in their turn influenced lesser directors.

BOGDANOVICH: Hmm.

WELLES: But they of course never could have existed without the movies.

[books] What I’ve Learned: Stephen King … Some life lessons from Stephen King. ‘When I have a good idea, I just know. It’s like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you’re hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.’

[tech] Dinosaur’s Pen … A nostalgic collection of old technology images.

[comics] Wallace Wood’s Official Shit List … File under Ancient Comics Gossip. ‘Rick Stoner, who visited Wood’s home in Derby, Connecticut, on the 14th and 15th of April 1978 then went with him to Niagara Falls on the 16th, would give no clues. “I won’t name any names from this list of about twenty or so,” he wrote in his article Remembering Wally Wood, printed in issue 11 of The Journal of Madness in June 2001, “I’m just glad I wasn’t on that one”. Thankfully for us, Stoner took plenty of photographs of Wood’s home on Saturday the 15th April 1978, some of which were reprinted in that same issue of The Journal of Madness, and one of them features a very clear shot of Wood’s Official Shit List. Twenty-one names of important and well-respected members of the comics industry…’ (reblog)

[movies] Uzumaki Teaser … Adultswim’s animated version of Junji Ito’s horror manga arriving late September.

[food] ‘One of the most disgusting meals I’ve ever eaten’: AI recipes tested… A look at the unwelcome rise of the AI Cookbook. ‘I have an even better time with Teresa’s The Ultimate Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook for Beginners. Here I am reminded why proofreaders exist. Something in the AI processing for this book took objection to the word “and”, turning it into “&;” in every instance. It inadvertently leads to beautiful phrases such as “h&ful cori&der” and “using an immersion blender or even by “h&”. We know that AI struggles with hands, but this is ridiculous. The Japanese hotpot I attempt – not obviously anti-inflammatory, like all the other recipes – is one of the most disgusting meals I have ever eaten.’

[life] The Scale of Life … Fascinating real-time statistics about what is happening right now all over the world. ‘Year to date, Number of Hours Worked: 5,224,497,264,667’ [via Andrew Ducker]

[life] The surprising data behind supercentenarians … Tim Harford sugggests a surprising reason why some people live so long. ‘In the US, Newman finds that the outstanding predictor of longevity is patchy birth records. Introducing proper records in the late 19th century reduced by more than two-thirds the number of babies who would eventually seem to reach the age of 110. That suggests that, until recently, seven out of 10 apparent supercentenarians were, in fact, younger than claimed. This all points to error or outright fraud.’

[ai] GANksy — A.I. street artist … ‘We trained a StyleGAN2 neural network using the portfolio of a certain street artist to create GANksy, a twisted visual genius whose work reflects our unsettled times.’

[comics] 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain between 2024 and 2034 … ‘Popeye the Sailor (2025) – Popeye first appeared in the “Thimble Theatre” newspaper comic strip in 1929. He soon became the strip’s star, and Olive Oyl’s new boyfriend (replacing her previous beau, one “Harold Hamgravy”). Popeye made the leap to animation in 1933.’

[morris] Errol Morris on whether you should be afraid of generative AI in documentaries… Errol Morris interviewed. ‘Film isn’t reality, no matter how it’s shot. You could follow some strict set of documentary rules…it’s still a film. It’s not reality. I have this problem endlessly with Richard Brody, who writes reviews for The New Yorker, and who is a kind of a documentary purist. I guess the idea is that if you follow certain rules, the veritical nature of what you’re shooting will be guaranteed. But that’s nonsense, total nonsense. Truth, I like to remind people — whether we’re talking about filmmaking, or film journalism, or journalism, whatever — it’s a quest.’

[space] Five of Saturn’s Moons in a Group Portrait … ‘On July 29, 2011, Cassini captured five of Saturn’s moons in a single frame with its narrow-angle camera. This is a full-color look at a view that was originally published in September 2011’

[podcast] Things Fell Apart… A BBC Podcast by Jon Ronson on the many, varied stories behind the culture wars.

[comics] Batman’s Aff His Nut … Possibly the best Scottish poem about Batman ever written. ‘Mate, I’m worried aboot ye I know your ma and da died But everybody’s ma and da dies And we’re no aw runnin aboot Hookin muggers and Kickin psychopaths in the baws.” And that was when Batman went “Aye, but do ye ever feel like it? Do you ever look at the world and feel like it?’

[comics] The Secret Life of Steve Ditko: Spider-Man Co-Creator’s Family Opens Up … Some insight into Steve Ditko’s life from his family. ‘One crispy Christmas during the early 1960s, Mark, only four or five, asked his uncle to sketch him a picture of a gorilla. Using only a pencil, his uncle cast a spell across the paper, and there he was: Konga, in all his glory. “Uncle Steve,” Mark beamed. “You are really good.”’ (archive link)

[politics] The End of the Tories … Tanya Gold sums up the Conservative election campaign. ‘Old hands in British media call this a rolling goat fuck. The question as we reach the end is not who won’t vote for the Tories but who will. Remainers hate them because Brexit happened. Brexiteers hate them because Brexit has failed. Liberals hate them because they are tough on immigration. Right-wingers hate them because they are not tough enough. Those who hate public services think taxes are too high. Those who love public services think they do not work. Young people hate them because they have no housing. Old people hate them because Sunak left ghost troops on the beaches of Normandy. They have no constituency left.’

[travel] Obvious Travel Advice … Useful list of thoughts on travel. ‘Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.’

[politics] Aggregating Predictions for the General Election … A website collecting seat-by-seat poll predictions for the 2024 UK General Election.

[vending] A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world … A wonderfully written profile on the world of vending machines. ‘At 12.45am, a white-chocolate Twix dropped into the well of a machine in Blackfriars in London. At a taxi depot in Belfast, drivers on overnight standby thumbed in coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. Cans of sugar-free Tango slammed down in the surgeons’ staffroom at an Edinburgh hospital. Bottles of Mountain Dew, already long past expiry, turned another hour older inside a Covid-shuttered office in North Carolina. A Japanese accountant, several hours ahead of Europe and the US in a southern prefecture called Ehime, eyed the familiar choices in a cup-noodle machine by his desk…’

[hannibal] I don’t know who needs this today but here is an ASMR cooking video with Hannibal Lecter.

[dads] Trolley Problem Variations for Dads … Another list from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. ‘Dad is given both options of the Trolley Problem. But as he begins to think it over, he keeps saying, “This is exactly like the Kobayashi Maru!” He then spends so much time explaining how Captain Kirk cheated to win the scenario that he never pulls the lever.’

[crime] Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man? … What I learned from this true crime story is that it is very hard to hire a hitman on the dark web. ‘Christopher was an unlikely client in the murder-for-hire trade. He was not violent and had no criminal record. When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children.’

[internet] What the Internet Was Like in 2004 … ‘Blogging was still niche in 2004, but it was increasingly where daily conversations online were happening. I started out in 2002 using a desktop app called Radio Userland, but in early May 2004, I switched to a browser-based blog platform called Movable Type. The “blogosphere” was kind of a prototype for social media, because it was where people learned to be opinionated and express ‘takes’ on the internet. The beauty of the blogosphere was that it was truly decentralised.’

[akira] Kaneda’s Bike from Akira in Lego … A wonderful design from Arvo Brothers.

[tech] How to Copy a File From a 30-year-old Laptop … A technology archaeology story. ‘While the laptop has no networking software, it does have fax software. We confirmed the modem could dial, so this might just be crazy enough to work. The first question was how to turn the audio file into something faxable. The laptop contains a collection of games. Alongside them is a resource editor, called ResEdit, which had previously been used to inspect and modify the aforementioned games. Let’s see what it can do…’

[q&a] Jon Ronson: ‘It’s getting harder to be optimistic’… A “This Much I Know” Q&A with Jon Ronson. ‘I’m scared of not being able to work. That’s why I wrote You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, because being publicly shamed and prevented from working is the biggest horror I could think of – not so much the shaming part but the being prevented from working part.’

[comics] Why is the Sonic comic so controversial? … A really fascinating look at the personalities, controversies and lawsuits around Archie’s long-running Sonic The Hedgehog comic.

[polictics] What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?… A powerful look at what years of Tory leadership have done to Britain. ‘In the accident theory of Brexit, leaving the E.U. has turned out to be a puncture rather than a catastrophe: a falloff in trade; a return of forgotten bureaucracy with our near neighbors; an exodus of financial jobs from London; a misalignment in the world. “There is a sort of problem for the British state, including Labour as well as all these Tory governments since 2016, which is that they are having to live a lie,” as Osborne, who voted Remain, said. “It’s a bit like tractor-production figures in the Soviet Union. You have to sort of pretend that this thing is working, and everyone in the system knows it isn’t.” The other view sees Brexit as an unfinished revolution…’

[comics] Greatest Comics Of All Time as Chosen by 45 Writers and Artists… Al Ewing on Dan Clowes Ice Haven: ‘It’s really hard to pick a favorite from Dan Clowes’s work, and I actually like The Death Ray more, but in many ways this is the perfect starting point for a modern Clowes enthusiast-a small town mystery presented as a collection of one-page comic strips. It’s filtered through the various personalities who live there, each with their own voice, which Clowes communicates through shifts in his own style, showing off his absolute mastery of the medium and the comics form. He’s arguably the greatest cartoonist living today, and you owe it to yourself to read his work.’

[music] Hear the Song Written on a Sinner’s Buttock in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights … ‘Several years ago, the Internet became excited when an enterprising blogger named Amelia transcribed, recorded, and uploaded a musical score straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1510. The kicker? Amelia found the score written on a suffering sinner’s butt. The poor, musically-branded soul can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting’s third and final panel, wherein Bosch depicts the various torture methods of hell.’

[space] A Few Notes on the Culture, by Iain M Banks … The Culture explained. ‘The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.’

[politics] Tory Policy Generator … Generate a Tory Policy for Election 2024. ‘Hard Working Common Sense Fox Hunts’

[watchmen] On the Cutting Edge of Innovation: This guy Just Found a New Way to Misinterpret ‘Watchmen’ … ‘Roche sat down in a recent interview to explain his journey of bastardizing Moore’s iconic series. “I started off like everyone else,” Roche explained. “I was like, oh, Rorschach freaking rules. He’s just Batman if he was a normal guy. Like, he’s just rational and everything he does makes perfect sense. Why would you cripple a criminal when you can kill his dogs, chop off his arm and burn his house down?” Roche’s shelf is littered with comic books and a weird shrine to Steve Ditko–which he kept trying to avert our gaze from by aggressively coughing.’

[life] A Billionaire Can Never Be Held Accountable… [via]

[emoji] Emoji history: the missing years … A deep dive into the early history of emojis. ‘I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell…’

[pins] Most Common PIN Codes … A heatmap of the most common 4 digit pin codes.

[life] 101 Additional Advices … More Advice From Kevin Kelly. ‘When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.’

[comics] Every Issue of Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing” Ranked by How Likely They’ll Get a Conservative Book Ban … ‘Swamp Thing #42 (November 1985): “Strange Fruit” – Swamp Thing burns down a plantation haunted by racist ghosts. – They hate this one. They fucking HATE this one.’

[comics] Escape Magazine … Escape Magazine, a British comics anthology magazine from the 1980s has been fully scanned and is online at the Internet Archive.

[pdf] iLovePDF … Great collection of userful PDF tools.

[web] The creepy sound of online trackers … A powerful demonstration of how much we are tracked on the internet – listen in to online trackers sending information home. ‘Even though I personally am acutely aware that this tracking is happening on most sites we visit today, the video and its noise still make me shiver. In case you are hard of hearing, the noise in the second video is almost constant, ongoing even as Bert is just scrolling.’

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