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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 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
[science] List of scientists who became creationists after studying the evidence … ‘ * ‘
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 …
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.’
20 December 2013
[tech] 11 parental IT support issues you can expect if you go home this Christmas … ‘No, change the screen resolution back, please. I prefer all my windows to be blurry and weirdly elongated.’
19 December 2013
[life] How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood … how Objectivism and family life do not mix …
Our objectivist education, however, was not confined to lectures and books. One time, at dinner, I complained that my brother was hogging all the food. 18 December 2013
[mystery] The Internet Mystery That Has The World Baffled … the fascinating story of a complex internet hunt / puzzle that nobody knows who created. ‘…a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the “darknet”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology. It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called “Wind” who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post in Hawaii. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge – known as Cicada 3301 – is all about or who is behind it.’
17 December 2013
[words] OED birthday word generator: which words originated in your birth year? … ‘1970. Your OED birthday word is: laugh-out-loud, adj. Meaning: Likely to cause one to laugh out loud; hilarious.’
16 December 2013
[funny] 55 Sensational TV Screenshots … … ‘Man With Bizarre Name Arrested: Beezow Doo-doo Zopittybop-bop-bop.’
13 December 2013
[weird] An amazing list of actual reasons for admission into the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum from the late 1800s … ‘Venereal Excesses.’
11 December 2013
[comics] Eddie Campbell on From Hell and The From Hell Companion … interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … ‘From Hell is like a huge big machine with a nice clean orderly front panel. And when you unscrew it and take that off, beneath it you see a complex of wires and cogs and moving parts caked with lubricant. That’s the Companion. After only seeing the front panel for years, this new version of the machine makes the whole thing interesting in ways you never thought of before.’
10 December 2013
[lovecraft] Charlie Stross on what scared H. P. Lovecraft … ‘I believe that Lovecraft’s sense of cosmological dread emerged from the exponential expansion and recomplication of the universe he lived in—it eerily prefigures the appeal of today’s singularitarian fiction, which depends for its dizzying affect on a similar exponential growth curve. Lovecraft interpreted the expansion of his universe as a thing of horror, a changing cosmic scale factor that ground humanity down into insignificance.’
9 December 2013
[mobiles] The Second Operating System Hiding in Every Mobile Phone … all your worst fears about computer/phone security are true … ‘So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you’re connected to. What could possibly go wrong? ‘
6 December 2013
[politics] Ten political assumptions … a list of assumptions that drive much thinking within the political mainstream … ‘Devaluing professional autonomy and ethics. The counterpart of the elevation of management is – in schools, universities and hospitals – a denigration of traditional professional standards and ethics.’
5 December 2013
[cthulhu] Alexis Madrigal on Big Data and H.P. Lovecraft: ‘…data is merciless. It will correlate all its contents. And then what?’
4 December 2013
3 December 2013
[funny] Man Smoking E-Cigarette Must Be Futuristic Bounty Hunter … ‘Sources told reporters that the man, who inhaled deeply on the mechanized smoking apparatus, causing the tip to glow a bright cobalt hue, probably traveled back in time to track down a deadly fugitive hiding in the early 21st century or something. Reports further indicated that the person, who in all likelihood is a futuristic soldier of fortune with off-world military training, stared off into the distance, scanning the building across the street with what must be enhanced optical implants to locate an elusive outlaw’s bio-signature, then exhaled what appeared to be an odorless vapor.’
2 December 2013
[lego] How to build a Lego Monolith Anomaly … a brief guide to building the Monolith from 2001 … ‘A scaled down Lego Monolith Anomaly (LMA) would be 7 1/2 units high but there are no 1/2 height pieces. Flat Lego pieces are 1/3 height. I find coupling 7 standard 1×4 bricks with 2 flat 1×4 pieces to be the most geometrically sound.’
29 November 2013
7 Ways To Be Insufferable On Facebook … the humblebrag, image-crafting, attention craving – a pretty comprehensive list of annoying approaches to Facebook … ‘A Facebook status is annoying if it primarily serves the author and does nothing positive for anyone reading it.’
26 November 2013
[web] Motherfucking Website … a lovely sweary rant on website design … ‘Cross-browser compatibility? Load this motherfucker in IE6. I fucking dare you.’
25 November 2013
[web] 17 Ancient Abandoned Websites That Still Work … I remember CNN’s O.J. Simpson trial website from 1996. I feel old.
20 November 2013
[movies] 10 remarkable things about Superman IV: The Quest For Peace … looking back at the least sucessful of Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies … ‘The film’s most infamous money-saving location, though, is its use of a Milton Keynes bus station as a stand-in for New York’s United Nations Headquarters on 42nd Street. As Christopher Reeve gloomily put it in his autobiography Still Me, “…we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere.” It’s impossible to imagine just how depressing it must have been to set up this particular shot. You’re in Milton Keynes, you have a few dozen extras, and Christopher Reeve walking around in his cape, yet the location still doesn’t look like New York; it looks like a lonely part of a modern British city.’
19 November 2013
[lego] The Lego Pain Scale …
18 November 2013
[german] Toilettenbürstenbenutzungsanweisung … the #1 very long word you’ll only find in a German toilet – it translates as “Toilet brush instructions for use”.
15 November 2013
[lists] Top Nine Things You Need To Know About ‘Listicles’ … a list about Internet lists … ‘A listicle feels more democratic than a hierarchically structured argument, as well as more in tune with a conception of history and the world as just one damn thing after another. The foundational text of Protestantism was a listicle nailed to a church door: Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” posted at Wittenberg. So it makes sense that in our culture, which makes a fetish of anti-authoritarianism, the listicle should have spread everywhere, like mould.’
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