linkmachinego.com
21 August 2015
[bible] The 14 Weirdest Moments In The Bible‘You call me bald, I will have you killed by a bear: Some children mock a bald man. He curses them, and two female bears come out of the woods, killing 42 of them. He continues on his journey. No one seems to think this is disproportionate.’
20 August 2015
[comics] A promise is a promise! … a letter from Stan Lee to an young comic artist keeping a deal he made 25 years earlier … ‘Your anatomy is still weak– practice it, study it, work on it. Don’t worry too much about inking yet. That can come later. The pencilling is the important thing to begin with. Your layouts are good. You seem to have the ability to tell a story pictorially– which is important in comics, obviously. But, if you really wanna become a pro, you’re kidding around too much. Nobody’s impressed with “Souperman” takeoffs now.’
18 August 2015
[movies] Dressing The Future … fascinating look at Moebius’ influence on the costume design of Alien … ‘The film reunited the Dune creative team, the other artists did not meet Moebius personally this time around – however, even though he was somewhat more removed from the project than Cobb, Foss, Giger, and O’Bannon (who all either worked on the project from its inception, or from the time it was greenlit) Moebius still turned in work that his co-artists found exemplary. “I was in contact with Moebius indirectly,” said Giger, “as he was designing the costumes for Alien. Those astronauts’ clothes and helmets were just like Ridley Scott wanted them. They looked like ancient divers. He did a fantastic job.” “Moebius did the designs for the astronauts,” Giger told Cinefantastique in ’79. “They wear a kind of Japanese armour and helmets which could belong to just about any period of time.”’
17 August 2015
[comics] Did Watchmen Steal From The Outer Limits, Or From Jack Kirby? … a look at the influences on the ending of Watchmen … ‘While I agree that the ending is one of Watchmen‘s weakest points, it’s not because I think it wasn’t original enough. We are, after all, talking about a story filled with thinly disguised reworkings of old Charlton characters (not to mention that Swamp Thing – the Len Wein-created character that he and Alan Moore first worked together on – is awfully similar to ’40s characters It and The Heap). The problem with the ending is how naive it is to think that a single large attack could result in lasting world peace…’
14 August 2015
[moore] Alan Moore’s Speech at Austerity and Advice Conference in Hull … a bit of history, Northampton, politics and austerity from a recent speech by Alan Moore … ‘Imagine if Jeremy Corbyn looked liked this… I think we’d all be a little bit more anxious wouldn’t we?’
13 August 2015
[comics] “It was an ugly birth of an ugly book”: Evan Dorkin on the Disgusting Fan Archetypes in The Eltingville Club‘It’s always been a bleak strip. It’s never been a happy strip. It’s an ugly mirror. Some of it’s based on my life. A lot of it’s based on things I’ve seen, and a lot of it’s exaggeration. It’s satire. It’s scary when I do something that I think is really horrible and then I read about something that’s even worse. Every day, there’s somebody doing something awful in fandom. And a lot of the times, it’s somebody from one of the companies or it’s a creator saying some dumb shit about women or transgender people. This is the audience, and the bizarre opinions that some people have… This attitude that comics or movies or gaming is just for them-it’s so myopic. It’s tunnel vision. The idea that you can’t even put yourself in another person’s place and understand the rampant misogyny of the world. Not just this. And how angry and hateful so many people are. People getting doxxed, people getting death threats.’
12 August 2015
[books] Necronomicon for Children – a lesser known work of Abdul Alhazred …

Necronomicon for Children

11 August 2015
[space] The Sculpture on the Moon… fascinating story of the only work of art on the Moon…

‘At 12:18 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Aug. 2, 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 placed a 3 1/2-inch-tall aluminum sculpture onto the dusty surface of a small crater near his parked lunar rover. At that moment the moon transformed from an airless ball of rock into the largest exhibition space in the known universe. Scott regarded the moment as tribute to the heroic astronauts and cosmonauts who had given their lives in the space race. Van Hoeydonck was thrilled that his art was pointing the way to a human destiny beyond Earth and expected that he would soon be “bigger than Picasso.”

In reality, van Hoeydonck’s lunar sculpture, called Fallen Astronaut, inspired not celebration but scandal. Within three years, Waddell’s gallery had gone bankrupt. Scott was hounded by a congressional investigation and left NASA on shaky terms. Van Hoeydonck, accused of profiteering from the public space program, retreated to a modest career in his native Belgium. Now both in their 80s, Scott and van Hoeydonck still see themselves unfairly maligned in blogs and Wikipedia pages-to the extent that Fallen Astronaut is remembered at all.’

10 August 2015
[comics] Neil Gaiman on His Return to Miracleman‘I think the last issue to have been published was in 1993. Now we’re 22 years on, but I always felt like one day it would happen! The weirdest bit was [recently] pulling out a bunch of pages from the next issue that I’d written and looking at them and going, This is great! I’d completely forgotten this entire sequence of scenes! I wonder what happens next? And now I’m going, Can Mark Buckingham and I at least fake this well enough so that nobody reading it is going to go, “This word balloon is a 1993 word balloon, and the next word balloon on the top of the next page is a 2015 word balloon?”’
31 July 2015
[stories] Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last … edited transcripts of a Neil Gaiman talk on stories. The full version can be found here‘We will do an awful lot for stories – we will endure an awful lot for stories. And stories, in their turn – like some kind of symbiote – help us endure and make sense of our lives. A lot of stories do appear to begin as intrinsic to religions and belief systems – a lot of the ones we have have gods or goddesses in them; they teach us how the world exists; they teach us the rules of living in the world. But they also have to come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and we want to help them propagate.’
30 July 2015
[space] Space missions to look out for … a list of upcoming space exploration missions … ‘Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM): The world was gripped when the Rosetta mission carried out the incredible feat of landing a spacecraft on a comet. Nasa has hatched an, arguably, even bolder plan to send a robotic spacecraft to grab a four-metre chunk of asteroid, tow it along and place it in orbit about the moon.’
29 July 2015
[life] Stanley Kubrick: ‘The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.’ [via Letters of Note]
28 July 2015
[movies] 2001 A Space Odyssey: Unwrapping the Slit Scan sequences‘While watching Kubrick’s “2001 A Space Odyssey”, I thought it would be fun to write some software to unravel the slit scan artwork in the psychedelic sequences of 2001, to see what they were.The technique used to unravel the sequences involved using an SGI’s real time video hardware, with a hacked version of ‘videoin.c’ (from the SGI example programs) to accumulate scanlines from the DVD and concatenate them back into the original artwork. So as the film played, the program ran, unrolling the scanlines in realtime…’

Artwork for 2001's Slit-Screen Sequences

27 July 2015
[comics] The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever … a look back at the reboot that saved Marvel comics … ‘The history of Ultimate Marvel is, in a way, a story about warring approaches to a reboot: Bendis’s and Millar’s. Bendis wanted to polish the old archetypes; Millar wanted to aggressively critique them. Bendis sought timeless stories; Millar craved biting contemporary political critique. Bendis was looking to inspire; Millar aimed to disquiet. As Bendis put it: “I’m writing about hope and he’s writing about nihilism, and I know he doesn’t always think he is, but he is. Constantly.”’
26 July 2015
[odd] An Abandoned Indonesian Church Shaped Like a Massive Clucking Chicken‘Towering above the trees in a densely forested area of Indonesia lies a giant chicken. The gigantic structure has the body, tail, and head of the bird, even holding open its beak in what appears to be mid-squawk. Although the very old bird is quickly decaying, Gereja Ayam (as the locals call it) attracts hundreds of photographers and travelers to its location in Magelang, Central Java each year who are looking to explore the bird’s bizarre interior.’
25 July 2015
[web] Google Photos and the unguessable URL … a look at how the “Open URLs” in Google Photos work … ‘Why is that public URL more secure than it looks? The short answer is that the URL is working as a password. Photos URLs are typically around 40 characters long, so if you wanted to scan all the possible combinations, you’d have to work through 10^70 different combinations to get the right one, a problem on an astronomical scale. “There are enough combinations that it’s considered unguessable,” says Aravind Krishnaswamy, an engineering lead on Google Photos. “It’s much harder to guess than your password.” Because web traffic for Photos is encrypted with SSL, it’s also kept secret from anyone on the network who might be listening in.’
24 July 2015
[google] A Fortnight With Google Photos. … Paul Mison reviews Google Photos‘It took a while, because I have something like a terabyte of photos going back over twelve years, but now I’ve uploaded them all, I can access them on every device. I know there are other services that promise to do that, but Google’s was free even for such a large library (at the cost of resizing some of the images down and converting RAW to JPG). Unlike Apple Photos, the library is available via native apps on Android devices as well as iOS ones, and perhaps unsurprisingly the web version works well too.’
23 July 2015
[comics] 6 Reasons Why Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye Is One of Marvel’s Greatest Comics‘Marvel loves itself an everyman hero-just look at the enduring success of Spider-Man to see reader falling in love with relatable, ordinary people. Fraction and Aja channelled that everyman persona into Clint Barton for Hawkeye, and it highlighted what made the character so important at a time when, thanks to The Avengers movie, many were just mocking him for being “the guy with the bow.” Hawkeye uncovered the man behind the bow, and showed us how interesting he could be.’
22 July 2015
[comics] Farewell, Bro: How Matt Fraction’s ‘Hawkeye’ changed Marvel Comics … a look back at Matt Fraction’s run on Hawkeye … ‘The character never quite made a splash in the same way that other, more popular superheroes did. That all changed in the wake of 2012’s The Avengers, when Fraction-then best known for his work on The Invincible Iron Man-pitched to Marvel an idea that seemed insane and brilliant all at once: Let’s show the world what Hawkeye does when he’s not being an Avenger. Let’s show the world what happens when he saves a stray dog and spills his coffee and oversleeps and misses his divorce anniversary. It was, pun intended, a shot in the dark… and to everyone’s surprise, it worked.’
21 July 2015
[movies] League of Gentlemen Vs. 2001‘Hello Dave!’

20 July 2015
[pluto] The Long, Strange Trip to Pluto, and How NASA Nearly Missed It … the story of how New Horizons got to Pluto … ‘Just after the Jupiter flyby, New Horizons suffered its first computer glitch. For spacecraft outside Earth’s protective atmosphere, high-energy cosmic rays occasionally zip through computer memory, causing a crash and restart. Calculations indicated that there would be one such crash during the nine-and-a-half-year trip to Pluto. Instead, they occurred almost once a year. But none caused lasting damage, and they proved good learning experiences.’
19 July 2015
[space] The inside story of New Horizons’ ‘Apollo 13′ moment on its way to Pluto … the story of the shutdown and restart of the New Horizons spacecraft ten days before it’s Pluto flyby … ‘They ran through the most likely causes of the anomaly. They had two fairly simple scenarios. The first was that, for some reason, the main computer had rebooted itself. That had happened a few times in the past. The second scenario was that the spacecraft sensed something amiss and, as it is programmed to do, powered down the main computer and switched operations to the backup computer. That had never happened before. If the backup computer had, in fact, taken over communications with Earth, it would use a slightly different radio frequency and transmission rate…’
18 July 2015
[space] Pluto at Last … On the discoverery of Pluto… ‘Late one February afternoon, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh was parked in his spot at Lowell Observatory. A transplant from the farm fields of Kansas, Tombaugh had been assigned the task of searching for Lowell’s elusive planet. He had no formal training in astronomy but had developed a skill for building telescopes, sometimes from old car parts and other improbable items. He was also something of a perfectionist. “When I planted the kafir corn and milo maize,” he wrote in his 1980 memoir, “the rows across the field had to be straight as an arrow or I was unhappy. Later, every planet-suspect, no matter how faint, had to be checked out … It was the most tedious work I’d ever done.” Tombaugh spent about a year searching for the missing world, using an instrument called a blink comparator…’
17 July 2015
[space] Well-Aimed and Powerful … more thoughts on the meaning of the Apollo space programme …

Buzz Aldrin once told me that he envies writers their ability to put things into words. Yet one of his first utterances after stepping out of the lunar module, in an attempt to describe the landscape to Mission Control, was the phrase “magnificent desolation.” This is surprisingly poetic for an astronaut, and it has stayed with me ever since I noticed it in a NASA transcript years ago. Every minute of the astronauts’ time on the moon was planned, and they wore printed copies of their schedules on their wrists to keep them on track. But I have to imagine that, once in a while, Neil and Buzz looked up at the far-off mountains at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility and thought to themselves, I am on the moon. This is all happening, right now, on the surface of the moon. Buzz Aldrin said many years later, “Every step on the moon was a virginal experience. Exploring this place that had never before been seen by human eyes, upon which no foot had stepped, or hand touched-was awe-inspiring.”

Neil, Buzz, and Mike traveled farther than anyone ever had and were gone only eight days. The images they brought back are among the most beautiful ever produced-all the more so, perhaps, because none of it was particularly intended to be beautiful. The jettisoned interstage adapter of the Saturn V tumbling, on fire, in a slow-motion ballet toward the gorgeous blue of faraway Earth. Buzz Aldrin smirking in a shaft of pure sunlight streaking through the command module window. Neil Armstrong overbundled in his space suit like a child dressed for cold, standing on the ladder and cautiously dangling one boot above the dusty surface of the Sea of Tranquility. The three astronauts confined to an Airstream trailer for quarantine after their return, smiling out at the president through a picture window. The perfect blue earth, thumb-sized, hanging in a deep black sky.

16 July 2015
[apple] The Anxious Ease of Apple Music… a look at Apple and the unease around new technology and music … ‘We never cease to be mesmerized by the vessel in which music is contained, whether it’s the piano, the phonograph, the MP3, or the Cloud. We think that machines are saving music or destroying it. Their impact is undoubtedly profound, but we seldom see the complexity of the transformation amid the hysteria of surface change. At the same time, the anxiety around music and technology is deep-seated, however excessive it may seem a century or two down the road. It is rooted in the elemental fear of life slipping away in half-experienced moments.’
15 July 2015
[politics] Frustrated Iranian Scientist Forced To Shut Down Project He Spent 12 Goddamn Years Of His Life On‘”Perfect! Let’s just flush a decade of my life down the drain, then, shall we?” Khatami said as he angrily typed a code into a nearby computer to power down over 8,000 P-2 centrifuges he reportedly squandered countless nights diligently overseeing. “Do those assholes even know how hard it is to enrich uranium? How much I sacrificed? I never married, I’m prematurely gray, and now guess what? The prime of my life is gone forever. Unbelievable. This country’s going to fucking hell, man.”’
14 July 2015
[comics] Bizarro Back Issues: ‘RoboCop vs. The Terminator’ … Chris Sims wonders if RoboCop vs. The Terminator was Frank Miller’s last great comic … ‘All of which is to say that this comic end up blowing up into a scene where an army of RoboCops fights an army of Terminators, and not only is it so awesome, it’s also completely justified by the story being told. Assuming, of course, that you’re the kind of person who requires justification to see Walt Simonson drawing an army of Terminators fighting an army of RoboCops.’
13 July 2015
[funny] Fuck These Six Fish In Particular…

fuck-these-6-fish-in-particular

12 July 2015
[space] Did You Know There are 9 Secret Items Hidden on Pluto Mission New Horizons?‘A portion of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes were put in a container and attached to the underside of the spacecraft. Here’s the inscription on the container: “Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone’ Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997).”’
11 July 2015
[politics] Osborne and his incredibly powerful rabbit bring ecstasy to Tory benches … amusing political sketch of George Osborne by John Grace … ‘As Osborne graciously accepted the standing ovations of gushing Conservatives, the cleaners came in to wipe down the benches. Two people in the gallery remained unmoved; his wife and mother, who took care to sit as far apart from each other as possible and looked on, stony-faced, throughout. Perhaps they know something everyone else doesn’t. The Labour benches just looked stunned. Osborne had got away with nicking some of their best lines while still managing to give some of the most vulnerable members of society a kicking.’