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8 August 2013
[wikipedia] Wikipedia:Terminal Event Management Policy … Wikipedia’s amusing protocol for saving the encyclopedia’s data in the event of an apocalypse … ‘Following the implementation of the level 2 warning, editors are expected to commence the transfer of the encyclopedia to other media. As an immediate measure, it is suggested that editors print as many articles as possible, with due regard to any personal safety concerns that may be faced in these extraordinary events.’
7 August 2013
[watchmen] Five More Notes About Before Watchmen … more from Tom Spurgeon on Before Watchmen … ‘I doubt I’ll ever be convinced that Before Watchmen was an awesome project. I don’t think it was evil; I think it was sad. That was a lot of talent aimed at books whose nature allowed only the tiniest chance that remarkable art would result; talent that probably could have gone to bolstering the new superhero comics line or that could have been pushed in the direction of their own, similar achievement. So much of it smacked of parody — they really did a Dollar Bill comic book! With Steve Rude art! — that the whole thing was hard to fathom.’
6 August 2013
[comics] I Am NOT the Beastmaster: Morrison in Glasgow … notes from a keynote lecture Grant Morrison gave at the University of Glasgow last month … ‘Morrison argued that shared-universe, corporate-owned superhero stories ought to be generational, circular, and repetitive—since they cannot be brought to an end, writers might as well play up the mythic angle and retell stories for each new generation of readers. One young guest wanted to know what Morrison’s favorite comics from his own catalogue were. (His answers: The Filth, Doom Patrol, and Superman Beyond 3D.)’
5 August 2013
[people] Steve Coogan: ‘There is an overlap between me and Alan Partridge’ … fascinating profile of Steve Coogan / Alan Partridge …

I follow Coogan’s fast-moving white Dunlops up the cliff and back to the hotel. “It started out not being like me at all. It’s probably got more like me,” puffs Coogan, as the wind buffets his impeccable Partridge hairpiece. “It’s recognising your own vanities and insecurities and turning the volume up on them. Anyone who is creative puts something of themselves in what they do, and I’ve put lots in, but it’s the warped, prejudicial side of myself. It’s not just a mocking caricature. It has to have some degree of humanity. On one level, Alan is very likable because he makes mistakes and vocalises a lot of the insecurities that people feel. He’s also a contemptuous Little Englander, the kind of person who I see as my life to rail against. Part of him is everything I hate about Britain. It’s a bit complicated.”

24 July 2013
[comics] Comics Are Educational, Part One: How to Kill Juggling Nazis‘Yes, Kurt, you are good at juggling apples… But how good are you at juggling — A… A GRENADE?!’
20 July 2013
[comics] Explorers on the Moon 1969 … Tintin and Gang greets Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969 …

Tintin and Gang greet Neil Armstrong on the Moon

18 July 2013
[tv] The Forty-Year Itch … is there a forty year cycle of nostalgia influencing pop culture? … ‘Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create its conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings, and the four-decade interval brings us to a period just before the forty-something was born. Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.’
17 July 2013
[email] What Your Email Sign-off Really Means … looking at the social minefield of choosing the best way to conclude an email… ‘You can sign off with “regards”, which means, quite literally, “I have no regard for you at all”. Or you can use the more extreme “warmest regards”, which means, “never contact me again you insufferable bastard”. Then there’s “yours”, which means, “I don’t even know who you are or what you wrote to me about”, and its cousin, “yours sincerely”, which means, “you owe me money and I will make your life a living hell until I get it”. Some people sign off emails with “best”. Not “best wishes”, which is used when the emailer is for some reason under the impression they’re writing in a Christmas card, but just “best”, which is a slightly creepy sign-off, like writing “be seeing you REALLY soon…”. Best? Best what?’
16 July 2013
[politics] The 10 Most Scandalous Euphemisms … a list of catchphrases generated by political scandals … ‘Hiking the Appalachian Trail – When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford disappeared for six days in 2009, his aides told reporters he had gone for a walking holiday along the US’s most celebrated hiking route. In fact, it soon transpired Sanford had been with his Argentine mistress in Buenos Aires. The phrase quickly ignited the imaginations of the press corps.’
15 July 2013
[batman] A Reader’s Guide To Grant Morrison’s Batman … useful guide to Morrison’s recently concluded long run on Batman … ‘If there is one question I’ve answered more than any other in the past few years in regards to Batman, it is “what is the reading order of Grant Morrison’s run”, or some variation thereof. So I have created this list as a permanent resource and answer to that question.’
14 July 2013
[web] Stop Externalising Your Life … yet another look at why Social Media is bad for you … ‘The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media.’
12 July 2013
[life] Study: Anxiety Resolved By Thinking About It Real Hard … The Onion reports on dealing with Anxiety …

“The key to beating anxiety is to let yourself become totally consumed with intrusive, irrational thoughts until you actually raise your pulse and blood pressure,” said assistant researcher Dana Kelley, who said that blinding stress headaches were a crucial indicator that one’s anxious feelings were disappearing. “If you can get to a point where you legitimately feel short of breath and begin to perceptibly tremble, that means you’re progressing. In fact, the more tense your neck and shoulders are, the closer you are to moving past your anxiety altogether.”

11 July 2013
10 July 2013
[tea] How to make perfect tea without teabags‘In 1968, only 3% of households in Britain used teabags – a foreign, American invention that went against our love of leaves.’
9 July 2013
[comics] MAD MENTAL CRAZY! The True Life of the Fabulous Zenith Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 … a three-part history of the British super-hero Zenith and a look at the murky legal situation regarding ownership of the character … ‘2000 AD maintain that they own the rights while Grant Morrison contends that they do not have the paperwork to prove that. This is not an argument that Morrison had at the time of initial publication, rather one he put forward in later years in greater understanding of the situation, so early interviews with the writer at the time are not entirely illuminating. There are however other pieces of the jigsaw that help build a larger picture. 2000 AD maintain that they have never sought creator owned work and the implication was always that comics were created on a work for hire basis. However, they also operated without contracts in many cases before the early ’90s, and under UK law a creation belongs to the creator until the rights are signed away – regardless of publication or payment.’
5 July 2013
[funny] Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks … Screenshot Showing Typical Windows 95 Desktop Icons:

Typical Windows 95 Desktop Icons

4 July 2013
[conspiracy] Top 10 Most Hilariously Bonkers Conspiracy Theories‘Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is legendary comic Bill Hicks.’
3 July 2013
[comics] Bryan and Mary Talbot’s Top 10 Graphic Memoirs … great reading list from the creators of Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes — Below, they discuss Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs

Briggs’s loving tribute to his London working-class parents stretches from their first meeting, as a milkman and a lady’s maid, in 1928 to their deaths in 1971. Both moving and funny, Ethel and Ernest is the personal story of a couple in a rapidly changing world that they often struggled to come to grips with. The Great Depression and the second world war were major events impacting on their lives, but so were the arrival in the home of radio, television and the washing machine.

2 July 2013
[jobs] A Matrix of the Worst Jobs in the World … take your pick between the most treacherous, difficult, disgusting or tedious jobs in world history … ‘Bog-Iron Hunter, circa 800AD, Scandinavia: Wade through bogs and lakes year-round, poking at soil with spear to locate lumps or ore.’
1 July 2013
[web] Google Reader Closedown: Find LinkMachineGo’s RSS Feed Here Or Follow LMG On Twitter.
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28 June 2013
[numbers] Pi Versus Information Theory … searching for meaning in Pi… ‘Is all of life written in pi? No. There is nothing there. For every fact you might find, you would also find the exact opposite. For every name of someone you might love, there would be countless other names. Claude Shannon would tell us that a sequence of random numbers contains no information, which he describes as “the removal of uncertainty.” No uncertainty is removed through perusal of the digits of pi.’
27 June 2013
[comics] 60 Comics Everyone Should Read … great list of comics from Buzzfeed highlighting why it’s a great time to be reading comics at the moment … On Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid on Earth: ‘The story is so densely rich, packed with graphic delights and somber realizations, but mostly it’s heartbreaking — so heartbreaking that you’ll occasionally have to put it down, collect yourself, and start reading again as your heart sinks further and further into your gut. A masterpiece, indeed.’
26 June 2013
[people] Tony Blackburn’s Autobiography Compressed … amusing collection of Smashie and Nicey-style quotes from Blackburn’s autobiography …

Excerpt from Tony Blackburn's Autobiography

25 June 2013
[security] Anatomy of a Hack: How Crackers Ransack Passwords Like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” … A fascinating look at how easy it is to crack passwords … ‘Even the least successful cracker of our trio—who used the least amount of hardware, devoted only one hour, used a tiny word list, and conducted an interview throughout the process—was able to decipher 62 percent of the passwords. Our top cracker snagged 90 percent of them.’
24 June 2013
[tv] Clive James on The Sopranos‘The abiding complexity of Tony’s character lies in the way he must bring into balance two different considerations. Outside the house, his powers are unlimited. Inside it, he can affect the behaviour of others only to a certain extent, because they know he won’t kill them. Vivid as it is, this is a real conflict, genuinely subtle and complicated, continually surprising. Tony’s wife, Carmela, and his children A. J. and Meadow, are for ever cutting down to size the very man who would take a long knife to them if they were not his property.’
21 June 2013
[people] James Gandolfini, 1961-2013 … David Remnick remembers James Gandolfini …

Gandolfini was the focal point of “The Sopranos,” the incendiary, sybaritic neurotic who must play the Godfather at home and at the Bada Bing but knows that everything—his family, his racket, his way of life—is collapsing all around him.

As the seasons passed, Gandolfini gained weight at an alarming pace. His death, at the age of fifty-one, in Italy, does not come entirely as a shock. But that makes it no less a loss. Gandolfini was not a fantastically varied actor. He played within a certain range. Like Jackie Gleason, he’ll be remembered for a particular role, and a particular kind of role, but there is no underestimating his devotion to the part of a lifetime that was given to him. In the dozens of hours he had on the screen, he made Tony Soprano—lovable, repulsive, cunning, ignorant, brutal—more ruthlessly alive than any character we’ve ever encountered in television.

20 June 2013
[tech] Internet Anonymity Is The Height Of Chic … A look at the plausibility of remaining anonymous from Google and the Internet … ‘In the 1930s, HG Wells wrote of a “world brain” through which “the whole human memory can be … made accessible to every individual”. Today, perhaps we have that world brain, and it is called Google. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, sounds an Orwellian note about this: “Quite literally, Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves.” No wonder some dream of slipping under Google’s radar.’
18 June 2013
[crime] Russian Mafia Tombstones … Live Fast and leave a gravestone to be puzzled over by archaeologists in a 1000 years time … ‘These photos were taken in the cemetery of Dnepropetrovsk, in the Ukraine, a place much like the mafia-infested Yekaterinburg, in Mother Russia. Although the two cities are 2,000 km apart, mafia fashion is very much the same. During the Russian Mafia Wars of the ’90s bosses started commissioning these lavish tombstones for them and their loyal subjects.’
17 June 2013
[dailyfail] What do Daily Mail commenters think about young criminals? … a look into the mind of a commenter on the Daily Mail’s website… ‘The Daily Mail is a newspaper generally catering to a right-leaning audience that mourns the death of England proper. Its website’s commenters fit that mould and there is plenty that they would like government to resurrect. Typing in “bring back” shows some of the things that they are after. Corporal or capital punishment is at the top of their list with some comments stating adamantly that the birch should make a return.’