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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 21 November 2024
[web] Today I learned that Europeans spend 575 million hours clicking cookie banners every year … ‘On average, a user visits about 100 websites per month, totaling 1,200 websites per year. With about 85% of these websites displaying a cookie banner, a user will encounter about 1,020 cookie banners every year. Assuming it takes an average of 5 seconds per interaction with a cookie banner, this amounts to 5,100 seconds per year per user, or roughly 1.42 hours per year.’
18 November 2024
[covid] What’s in your Covid Emergency Kit? Some useful tips in this list. ‘Antihistamines: per NIH, “a number of Covid-19 patients improved significantly when on antihistamines due to their antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties. Moreover, antihistamines have shown to be effective in the management of long term symptoms post-Covid-19 infection.”’
15 November 2024
[london] Why is London’s phone signal so bad? … Excellent reporting by London Centric on one of the great frustrations about living in London. ‘Astonishingly, tests carried out by London Centric found that in several high-profile areas of the capital the best place to find a fast 5G mobile data connection is now hundreds of feet under the capital in deep tube tunnels. This is thanks to new equipment – known as “leaky feeders” – installed in recent years under a contract with Transport for London. In a damning indictment of the capital’s outdoor mobile infrastructure, if you want to tether your laptop to your phone and work remotely you might be better off tapping into the tube network and doing your work while riding around at 40km/hr underneath London.’
14 November 2024
[ambient] A Soft Murmur … Ambient background noise generator to relax with.
12 November 2024
[ronson] 10 Chaotic Questions for Jon Ronson … ‘Q: What is the most dangerous thing you have ever done? A: I think I was in genuine danger going to Aryan Nations. I was walking past all these signs that said “No Jews”, “Jews turn back now”, and I was like, “Oh, they’ll be fine with me!”’
11 November 2024
[comics] Tegan O’Neill reviews Nemesis the Warlock – The Definitive Edition Vol. 1 … ‘Kevin O’Neill was a distinctive and idiosyncratic presence on the page. His understanding of texture was acute like a nightmare: he was good at drawing flesh and metal both, and he could make both human meat and gleaming machinery seem positively putrid with illness. Nemesis is a tightly drawn strip, and the pictures are unerringly nauseating: vast towers of bone and tendon reaching into the sky, indistinguishable from the metallic armor of the Terminators, refulgent in their carapaces. It’s a universe of vast grotesquerie, from the torture pits in the deeps of the Termight empire to the alien lanes haunted by mature Blitzspears. The British mode of production meant that a single six-page Nemesis strip would have all that magic compressed into a series of half- and third-page splash panels, with heaps of didactic narration to carry the reader along the way. Both Mills and O’Neill get to have their say in the finished product here.’
7 November 2024
[horror] If Horror Movies Reflected Your Actual Fears … from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. ‘The Wicker Man – You’re staying in an isolated village. Its only pub is hosting a karaoke night.’
29 October 2024
[london] The inside story of the Transport for London cyberattack … Great report on the impact of a recent cyberattack on TFL. ‘People turning 60 have been unable to apply for Oyster cards giving them free travel. Individuals from all age groups have been unable to apply for legitimate refunds after being charged the maximum fare because they were unable to tap out at the end of a journey. Hundreds of thousands of sixth formers and new university students have been unable to apply for their 16+ Zip Oyster card, with the official TfL guidance being that they should make a note of each full-fare journey then reclaim the difference later in an as-yet-unclear manner.’
28 October 2024
[weird] The Assassin’s Teapot … A nice cup of tea or a murder? You decide. [via]
15 October 2024
[sea] The Sinking of the Estonia … The powerful, human story of the 1994 sinking of a ferry in the Baltic from William Langewiesche.
11 October 2024
[comics] Harvey Kurtzman: Seriously Funny … Drew Friedman fondly reminisces about Harvey Kurtzman. ‘Harvey would slowly unwind, sip beer, and reminisce about Bill Gaines and his days at EC, his continuing dislike of Al Feldstein, Will Elder’s wild practical jokes, his admiration for R. Crumb, his theories about the coke bottle design, current politics (at the time he admired Ronald Reagan) and his assistants at HELP!, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem.’
10 October 2024
[comics] Jack Kirby’s Julius Caesar Costume Designs … Kirby’s designs for a 1969 production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
8 October 2024
[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.’
4 October 2024
[web] 404 – Car not Found
3 October 2024
[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.’
1 October 2024
[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.’
23 September 2024
[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. ‘
18 September 2024
[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’
16 September 2024
[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…’
13 September 2024
[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…’
10 September 2024
[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.’
9 September 2024
[internet] Are you TIRED? LONELY? DEPRESSED? If so, please consider joining a NICHE ONLINE COMMUNITY! …
2 September 2024
[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.’
20 August 2024
[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…’
19 August 2024
[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…’
16 August 2024
[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.’
13 August 2024
[comics] The Funnies Have Gone Down, Down, Down … Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich discuss comics.
12 August 2024
[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.’
8 August 2024
[tech] Dinosaur’s Pen … A nostalgic collection of old technology images.
6 August 2024
[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)
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