linkmachinego.com
24 January 2014
[tv] How should Homeland ‘reset’ for season four? … Stuart Heritage’s ideas for Season four of Homeland … ‘The absolute worst thing that Homeland could do this year is keep Dana around to snarl up a third of every episode by accidentally running over a nun on a Segway or Snapchatting a picture of her pubes to the Queen or whatever.’
23 January 2014
[comics] Stan Lee, The Man And The Myth … Chris Sims on Stan Lee’s legacy… ‘Stan Lee’s greatest talent, for good or ill, was never writing comics, or even editing them. It was promotion. I touched on this in an earlier column, but the real magic of Stan Lee’s contribution to Marvel wasn’t just filling Kirby and Ditko’s panels with five-dollar words and screeds against the commies. It was that brash, aggressive style that put a face (not coincidentally, his own) behind the comics. From very early on, the letters pages were clear to let readers know that “Stan and Jack” were the ones behind the adventures of the Fantastic Four, and again, you can’t really overstate how revolutionary that was. This was a time when creators were rarely if ever credited, but Lee — ironically, given the reputation that would come out over the years for stealing credit and hogging attention — was part of the crowd putting their names right there on page one.’
22 January 2014
[batman] City of Batmans‘I Batlove you.’ … via Forbidden Planet’s Blog.

City Of Batmans

21 January 2014
[books] Tsundoku … the Japanese word for buying books, not reading them and leaving them to pile up.
20 January 2014
[text] Cthuvian Ipsum Generator … A lorem ipsum generator from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos … ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’
19 January 2014
[web] Have I Been Pwned? … a service that allows you to check if any of your usernames or passwords been compromised in recent website security breaches.
18 January 2014
[politics] Why do British prime ministers never wear wedding rings?‘The last married male occupant of 10 Downing Street to wear a wedding ring in public was Harold Wilson, who was PM from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976.’
17 January 2014
[funny] Dread Singles on Twitter … a Lovecraftian singles feed… ‘HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE INFINITE, PEERING INTO THE DYING HEART OF THE LAST TRUE MYSTIC, YOLO THEY HISS, YOLO’
16 January 2014
[comics] Last Alan Moore Interview? … Pádraig Ó Méalóid posts an epic Alan Moore interview – Alan covers criticisms about rape and racism in his comics and provides what is likely to be his final word on Grant Morrison … ‘As for the use of ‘problematic’ figures in the pages of The League, a great number of the literary figures which we’ve appropriated or re-imagined in the course of the book, have been to my mind every bit as problematic as the Galley-Wag. They just haven’t been black. As an example I remain somewhat unsure, in light of these current issues, as to why our use of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in volume one seemed to have passed by without a murmur, given that here we have a character who was actually intended by his original author as a crude racial caricature of the most negative and xenophobic strain, and for whom our only act of rehabilitation was to suggest that Rohmer’s ‘Devil Doctor’ may have been motivated by a hatred of the British justifiably inculcated during his childhood in the years of the bestial and shameful Opium Wars. And yet, hardly a word said, as I recall.’
15 January 2014
[internet] Cicada 3301: I tried the hardest puzzle on the internet and failed spectacularly … more on the mysterious internet puzzle that restarted recently … ‘The image included text hidden with steganography, a technique which lets users bury information in seemingly innocuous files. To get the information out required me to use a program called OutGuess. To install OutGuess, I need to compile the program from source. To do that, I need to install Xcode, the Mac OS X developer tools, create a new command line project based on the source code I downloaded, reconfigure the program for Mac, deal with any dependency issues, build it, and then run it from the terminal. What I actually do is spend the better part of an hour clicking around in Xcode, desperately trying to find a magic button to click which will make everything work without requiring me to learn how to code in an afternoon. There is no such button. This may be harder than I thought.’
14 January 2014
[comics] Wertham was right… Batman and Whitey share a tender moment

Batman and Whitey share a tender moment...

13 January 2014
[tech] Source Code in TV and Films … an amusing look at where the Source Code displayed in TV and movies is really from … ‘In the film Terminator, the HUD shows a listing of 6502 assembly language which appears to have been taken from an Apple II.’
12 January 2014
[moore] Lego Alan Moore‘Your Argument Is Invalid.’
11 January 2014
[politics] The Michael Gove random policy generator‘More latin! More bibles! More bibles in Latin!’
10 January 2014
[comics] The Art of Bill Sienkiewicz … great collection of art showcasing the legendary comic artist.
9 January 2014
[tv] 14 Ways Nathan Barley Predicted The Future‘1. Camera phones with MP3 decks.’
8 January 2014
[science] Scientists Tell Us Their Favourite Jokes‘Sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium Batman!’
7 January 2014
[learning] Lol My Thesis … years of academic research condensed into one sentence. Political Science: ‘Can’t we all just get along? Get along my way, that is, not everyone else’s wrong way.’ [via jwz]
6 January 2014
[moore] Epic Small Talk Fail

Epic Supper Small Talk Fail

5 January 2014
[tv] Homeland – box set review… Why you should be watching Homeland … ‘Season one, aired in 2011, hinges on the question: has Gulf war hero Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), held in an Afghan hole for eight years, been “turned” by al-Qaida? Lewis won an Emmy for his portrayal of the traumatised marine; Danes won two for her role – hunter to Brody’s hunted. As a bipolar intelligence agent Carrie joins a clutch of intense, idiosyncratic female leads in current TV drama (Spiral, The Killing, The Bridge, The Fall). Her judgments are brilliantly unhinged: her CIA mentor, Saul Berenson, calls her “the smartest and the dumbest fucking person I’ve ever known”.’
4 January 2014
[moore] A Moment Of Moore: My name’s Alan Moore. I write comics.‘Goodnight Children, and sweet dreams, wereever you are.’
3 January 2014
[press] 2013 According To The Daily Express Front Page‘You only need to look at four topics – health breakthroughs, weather, immigration and Maddie McCann – before you’ve accounted for half of their lead stories for the entire year.’
2 January 2014
14 kinds of Facebook people you want to block, but you can’t because they’re sort of your friends‘That guy who posts way too much… Get a life! Note that “too much” is defined as “more than you”.’
1 January 2014
31 December 2013
[london] Norman Collier Street Sign‘Adv c d W rning M j r Gas Works’
30 December 2013
[movies] Why we need to re-evaluate the films we once called great … Joe Queenan on films that fail the test of time. ‘…other movies fall into the I-guess-you-had-to-be-there category. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless will no longer leave anyone breathless. In Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson’s maverick loner character now seems like a punk. Warren Beatty is just a bit too goofy in Bonnie and Clyde, and just a bit too goofy in McCabe & Mrs Miller. Three Days of the Condor is hamstrung by one of those nauseating, 70s smooth-jazz soundtracks. 2001: A Space Odyssey simply will not end. Richard Gere’s hair makes it impossible to watch Pretty Woman any more, and Val Kilmer’s obstreperous do has a similarly disruptive effect in the festively homoerotic Top Gun. The Blues Brothers is 133 minutes of unadulterated self-indulgence, and Animal House and Caddyshack now seem more and more like infantile twaddle only frat boys could love.’
27 December 2013
[winter] When’s The Deep Midwinter? … Is it Winter now – around the time of the shortest day? ‘…for most people (away from the highest latitudes), temperature is more an indicator of winter than daylight length, and the Earth has a lot of mechanisms that cause seasonal delay, so the coldest day is a month or so after the shortest. In short, the ground holds on to warmth, and water even more so.’
25 December 2013
[xmas] A Ghost Gave Me Triplets! Xmas Horror! – Epic Christmas Misery from That’s Life! Magazine …

Christmas Misery From That's Life Magazine

24 December 2013
[xmas] Did Coca-Cola Invent the Modern Image of Santa Claus?‘Santa Claus is instead a hybrid, a character descended from a religious figure (St. Nicholas) whose physical appearance and backstory were created and shaped by many different hands over the course of years until he finally coalesced into the now familiar (secular) character of a jolly, rotund, red-and-white garbed father figure who oversees a North Pole workshop manned by elves and travels in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer to deliver toys to children all around the world every Christmas Eve.’
23 December 2013
[tv] Has the internet killed Have I Got News For You? … Stuart Heritage on the long, slow death of HIGNFY … ‘Back in the show’s heyday, you could rely on it to deliver the definitive satirical reaction to the news. But now it’s competing with The Daily Show, humour sites such as The Poke and millions of would-be wags on Twitter who fall over themselves to mine every last microLOL from every single news story a nanosecond after it breaks in a rabid bid for retweets. By the time Friday night rolls around, all Have I Got News For You has left to work with is the chaff.’