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1 June 2000
[comics] newsUnlimited talks to Alan Moore. “‘I can remember the exact panel during the writing of From Hell when I became interested in magic,’ he says. ‘Gull says that one place that gods inarguably exist is in the human mind. I wrote that sentence, and noticed the word ‘inarguable’, which is quite a big word, and that was the beginning of the end. I thought, ‘I can’t see why that isn’t true. And if it is true, then I’m probably going to have to change the whole of my life to fit around it.'”
[internet] BBC News reports BT Internet has been having problems with their email server. [ BT Internet are pretty awful compared to Demon or Freeserve, I’ve been having various connection problems since I joined and my flatmate has not been able to download his email for the last couple of days. How do BT manage to reliably run the phone network in the UK?]
[games] John Carmack confirms that ID are working on Doom III. [via DoomWorld] “I discussed it with some of the other guys, and we decided that it was important enough to drag the company through an unpleasant fight over it. An ultimatum was issued to Kevin and Adrian(who control >50% of the company): We are working on DOOM for the next project unless you fire us. Obviously no fun for anyone involved, but the project direction was changed, new hires have been expedited, and the design work has begun.”
2 June 2000
[weird science] Stinkymeat “3 kinds of meat, 19 days, and 1,000,000 maggots, all in the yard of my unwitting neighbor. Science never smelled so bad.” [via Yungee]
[anime] Slashdot discusses essential anime — here’s a list of the best..
[comics] The Grand Comic Book Database — These people take their comic books seriously!
[tory] Tebbit on Hague: “”Something somewhere sparked him off and suddenly he became an interesting politician – having previously been uninteresting,” he says. But he adds, crushingly: “As he gets more interesting, people forget that he’s bald, he’s got an unusual voice and he’s small.”” After the untimely death of Barbara Cartland I think Norman Tebbit may well fill the “mad quote” void on linkmachinego…
3 June 2000
[comics] Alan Moore discusses the plot to the unfinished Big Numbers. [ Part One] [ Part Two]
[phones] newsUnlimited on Text Messaging. “But there seems to be something more than practicality about the appeal of text messaging: something that gives them that brown-paper-packages-tied-up-with-string quality, and qualifies them for life’s range of small, good things. Text messages are like little sugar-rushes of contact, postcards for the people’s cyberspace, the real reason God gave us both thumbs and the capacity for language (alright, alright, I know).”
[weird world] BBC News asks: Was Elvis Welsh? “According to Mr Breverton, his roots are in west Wales – the name Presley is related to Preseli – a hill range in Pembrokeshire. Supporting his theory is the legend of St Elvis of Muster who, it is said, baptised St David. Mr Breverton claims the family could well have had links with a nearby chapel dedicated to St Elvis – the only one known in Britain.”
4 June 2000
[mp3] New version of the MP3 player Winamp available.
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[murder] newsUnlimited covers a nasty murder on a bridge in London last year. “‘We’ll never know what happened that night,’ she said. ‘It seems inexplicable. I believe there was a group dynamic which forced them to do what they did. Peer pressure and a boy shouting “throw them in the river” was enough to create an atmosphere in which there was no going back. It will have been one person who started it and the others would have followed like sheep.'”
[history] People are still looking for lost Nazi treasure. The haul is believed to contain top-secret Nazi documents detailing how assets from the Third Reich were deposited in Swiss bank accounts, as well as art objects, gold and the records of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Documents detailing the assistance of the Vatican in transferring funds to South America, and some gold, are also believed to be concealed there.”
[comics] newsUnlimited profiles Steve Bell. “Steve has the idea, writes the words, does the drawing. He can do leader- page cartoons which – in their infinite detail – look as though they must be condensed versions of a much bigger cartoon. (Not so: what you see is virtually the size you get.) He can do illustrations that can dominate a whole page. And then there are the strips. Then there is If?”
5 June 2000
[news] The story of Sealand continues in the New York Times [ my earlier story] “On Monday, a small international group of computer rebels plans to introduce what they are calling a data haven, perched precariously on a World War II military fortress six miles off England’s coast. They are hoping that the installation, connected to the Internet by high-speed microwave and satellite links, will become a refuge from governments increasingly trying to tame and regulate the Internet.” [via metafilter]
[comics] Yet another Dave Sim Misogyny Page. “Behind this…lies the Greater Void, the Omnivorous Engine which drives every… institutionalised waste of human time and energy, which drives, in point of fact, our entire degraded society. The wife and kids.”
[buy stuff!] How much did my flatmate bung me to link to the Gardener’s World website? Nothing! [Note for Chris: Many webloggers stick loads of flatmate angst into their weblogs but not me. I just expect a brown paper bag stuffed with drugs, sweets and cash under the coffee table every month and you get a happy flatmate plus links to Charlie Dimmock screensavers into the bargain!]
6 June 2000
[comics] Bill Clinton tells Russia that he had in the past a used comic book business: “”In my lifetime, I probably had ? earned money doing 20 or 25 different things. I’ve built houses, I’ve cleared land, I’ve worked in a grocery store. I had a used comic book business. Obviously, I was a musician. I made money as a musician. I’ve been a teacher. I’ve done a lot of different things in my life.”” Totally weird if it’s true… [via Ghost in the Machine]
[news] Julie Burchill on Danniella Westbrook’s nose.
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7 June 2000
[THE HORROR!] Sorry for the crudeness but DID I REALLY SEE KEITH CHEGWIN’S KNOB ON TELLY LAST NIGHT? I’m slowly going mad! I’m sure of it… [ Not so Soft and Blogging the Line provide metal relief — they saw it too. It was either a shared hallucination or broadcast as part of Channel 5’s Naked Season]
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[comics] Warren Ellis asks: Why Comics? “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.” — Harvey Pekar.
[THE HORROR!! PART DEUX] Not So Soft provides a link to an image of KEITH CHEGWIN’S KNOB ON TELLY LAST NIGHT!! [He’s the nude guy in the pith helmet.] Plenty of commentary about this from UK Blogs: Blogging The Line, I Just Type and LukeLog.
[comics] Great Steve Bell Cartoon on Elitism and William Hague in the Guardian today. “I, Commonsense Man shall wreak vengence on the Liberal elite”
[music] newsUnlimited profiles the Dandy Warhols. “They put the ease into sleaze. Like the story of one of their label bosses who, Taylor says admiringly, ‘is a sleazy, sleazy man. He’s the coolest guy in corporate rock. If we had 10 of him at Capitol our worries would be over.'”
[church] newsUnlimited asks: Should you trust a Vicar?“In the case of Peter, a young and successful minister, church elders at first told him he must be mistaken when he came out as homosexual: “Don’t be silly, you’re much too hairy,” was one comment.”
8 June 2000
[comics] Grant Morrison issues a call to arms. “This is simple: if you really hate comics so badly you want to see them die, then keep filling the message boards with frustrated, ignorant bile (I’ve been reading some of this stuff and a lot of guys out there really need to get laid or take up meditation). Otherwise, let’s have a momentary ceasefire to figure out ways of rebuilding the profile of the entire comics medium. The responsibility is with us; we all know how awful it is and how crap comics are. We’ve all heard that tired old song of self-loathing long enough and it’s getting to be a real drag. If you think there’s no hope then please f*** off, die quietly and prove yourself right.” [via Barbelith]
[weird science] Two links that prove we have left the 20th. Century: Scientists transplant brain of eel into robot and discover that some things travel faster than light.
[news] Michelangelo’s David has a squint! The trick of perspective – which has taken 500 years to rumble – was a typical stroke of Michelangelo genius, according to Marc Levoy, the computer scientist from Stanford University, California, who made the discovery. He suspects it went unnoticed for so long because David’s more obvious attribute – his genitalia – blinded successive generations to the “flaw”.
9 June 2000
[comics] Yesterday was a good day to visit a comic shop…. The first issue of Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy came out along with Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. “Comics offers a medium of enormous breadth an control for the author — a unique intimate relationship with it’s audience — and a potential so great, so inspiring, yet so brutally squandered, it could bring a tear to the eye.” — Scott McCloud
[books] newsUnlimited reports that christian apocalyptic fundamentalists set to knock Harry Potter off top of the book charts in the US. “In interviews, Mr LaHaye appears to be the more driven member of the successful duo, saying that the books’ message ‘is the greatest message of hope in the world’. Mr Jenkins, by contrast, seems more worldly. ‘There are some times when I think I was born for this project,’ he said recently. ‘Other times I think I was born to play golf.'”
10 June 2000
[comics] Warren Ellis interviews Grant Morrison. “Fans of comics like INVISIBLES and JLA may be interested to know that I was Mr. DeFalco’s unwilling ‘bitch’ for most of the late 80s. Because I was quite young-looking and fairly skinny, I could quickly be done up with a bit of curtain as an ideal ‘visiting niece’ whenever one of Tom’s morbid testosterone build-ups was giving him grief.”
[web] newsUnlimited reports that Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t like ads on web sites. “Newspapers insert a line saying an ad is an advertisement when it looks confusing. I want to see something similar on a web page. Perhaps the mouse should change shape when it passes over an ad to alert you to the fact.”
[good links] The Weekend section in todays Guardian has a particularly good week: On The Road Again — good article about young people who take time off to travel round the world and how this type of travelling has changed since the sixties. And Mothers without Men a profile of women who choose to have babies via donor insemitation. “Increasing numbers of heterosexual women in the thirties are deciding to do without a man, and are choosing to have children on their own. Women who don’t find Mr Right no longer have to settle for Mr You’ll Have To Do, nor “accidentally” get pregnant by a lover reluctant to commit. They no longer have to accept that, if they cannot find a suitable partner, they’ll never have children, either.”
[tech] Danny O’Brien on mobile phones in America. “Sometimes, when I’m swearing at the bizarre features of my clunky little American phone, I show engineers my old Virgin Nokia. Everyone coos over the dinky size and curved-form factor. They’re delighted by the cutesy interface. One friend’s jaw physically dropped open when he turned the machine off and a little hand icon waved him goodbye. When I tell them about how kids send text messages to one another during class, they go bug-eyed. It’s as though I’d announced that all Europeans all have their own personal fork-lift trucks.”
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[therapy] I was very tempted not to blog this story about Minogue…. but I decided I just wanted to mention… um…. that Kylie Minogue has tiny deformed ears! Why has nobody else noticed this? Her head is to big for her ears! Why is nobody in the media covering this? I, for one, am not interested in Minogue’s arse!!
[weblogs] Amusing as hell: neighbour sex “uhhhnngghhh…..ahhhhnnghhhh…..pullout, pullout, Pullout, PULLOUT, PULLOUT!!!!” [via Steal This Blog!. It’s being blogged everywhere but I saw the line above and thought: “If that’s not a Linkmachinego quote I don’t know what is!”]
12 June 2000
[kylie] Following on from yesterday’s post — here is photographic proof of Minogue’s tiny deformed ears… and interestingly it took me ages plowing through Kylie fan sites photos to come up with ones showing her ears. Conspiracy?
[tv] Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligans Island. I’ve been interested in Gilligan’s Island for years… but I’ve never seen an episode! As far as I know it has not been shown on British TV in living memory… but Americans seem to refer to it endlessly in comics and on the internet and for ages it has fascinated me — Who were Gilligan and Skipper? What were they all doing on that Island? Eventually, I found out all the details… but I’ve still never seen an episode… and I’m not sure I’d want to! [via pearls that are his eyes]
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[monarchy] Christopher Hitchens on the the British Royal Family in newsUnlimited. “An old English radical slogan has it that the problem is not the will of some to power, but the will of others to obey. I think that it’s literally true that many people can’t imagine life without the Windsors. And my quarrel is with that very mentality, much more than it is with any actual or potential monarch. One doesn’t wish to demolish people’s household gods, or rip away their comfort blankets, but couldn’t they be just as happy as Jacobites once were, cultivating nostalgia and illusion while leaving the rest of us to get on with it?” [via BlueLines]
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13 June 2000
[music] newsUnlimited on the semi-breakup of Oasis. “What’s going on is that I’ve had a major disagreement with monkey boy, the singer[…]”
[weblogs] How can I have missed UberSearch? [yet another weblog search engine]
[MP3] Napster endgame — The US Music Industry moves to close down Napster. Totally pointless, of course, the Net has moved on… check out Gnutella.
[minogue] Charlotte Raven on Kylie’s bottom. “Only clearing the net by a couple of inches, Kylie plainly hasn’t spent the day playing tennis. Her racket is loose in her left hand and the all-over-sheen of her body suggests that she’s spent longer being airbrushed in Photoshop than in the elements.”
14 June 2000
[BOFH] Who wants to marry a SysAdmin? “There’s no time to waste. We’re all getting fatter and paler by the second. Hook up now before we can’t keep track of our processes anymore and our hair forks all to hell.” [via Just Daz]
[tech] UK ADSL Guide. [I have a crazy dream — cheap unmetered internet access in my lifetime… ]
[hells angels] newsUnlimted profiles Sonny Barger. “‘Keith Richards had then threatened to stop playing unless the Angels halted their violence, telling Barger: ‘Either these cats cool it, man, or we don’t play.’ ‘I stood next to him and stuck my pistol in his side and told him to start playing his guitar or he was dead,’ says Barger now. ‘He played like a motherfucker.'”
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15 June 2000
[comics] August’s Preview Picks — good list of the best comics out in August.
[stuff] This is kind of site you can waste an afternoon on: 200 Most Entertaining Moments of the Millenium. “#126 Anyone who remembers watching the CNN coverage of the Gulf War, gape-jawed, can’t help but to have been impressed by missiles flying down ventilation shafts. Obviously war is terrible, but buildings blowing up will continue to be cool forever.”
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16 June 2000
[weblogging in the UK] UK blogging gets attention from PCFormat computer magazine…
[london] Feed on London and the London Eye — includes Quicktime panorama view of the Eye. [via Guardian Weblog]
[comics] The art of Dave McKean. Really great looking site.
[weblogging in the UK!] Daily Doozer has more details on the PCFormat article.
17 June 2000
[film / comics] CHRISTOPHER “FUCKING” LEE!! I’m not that interested in Star Wars but that is a nice reference to one of my favourite comics strips so I’m compelled to link to it…
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[books] Media Nugget of the Day covers Enders Game.
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[uk/us] American Xenophobes’ Guide to the British Great Britain is a very old country with many treasures, such as the Millennium Dome and the Diana Museum and the Millennium Dome. Among its contributions to Western civilisation are Mrs Thatcher, mad cow disease and beer. [via Nutlog]
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18 June 2000
[tv] newsUnlimited reports that the Germans are to to remake Fawlty Towers. ‘Basil: “So that’s two eggs mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads … no, wait a moment, I got a bit confused there, sorry … I got a bit confused because everyone keeps mentioning the war, so could you…” German: “Will you stop talking about the war!” Basil: “Me? You started it!” German: “We did not start it.” Basil: “Yes you did, you invaded Poland…”‘
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[music] The Observer takes a look at Eminem. “‘Listening to him is like watching somebody lose their head on Jerry Springer,’ says Harry Allen, self-proclaimed hip-hop activist and one-time member of Public Enemy. In recent years, Allen has testified on behalf of artists such as 2 Live Crew and Tupac Shakur in front of Senate Hearings on rap music. ‘Yes, he is coarse and violent. But he’s also indicative of white American suburban teenagers.'”
[weblogs] Short Term Memory Loss — blogging from India. “Is this the first blog from the Himalayas? Vashisht is the name of this village, and it is all the superlatives you have ever heard about India. Particularly the smelly, dirty hippy ones. But also sun, sights and smells.”
19 June 2000
[weblogging] I Hate Music on Vindaloo by Fat Les. “I could use ‘Vindaloo’ as a springboard for any number of justified rants, but instead I’ll simply say this: FAT LES ARE A SMUG BUNCH OF MEDIA WHORES WHO SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE GROUCHO CLUB KISSING JONATHAN ROSS ON HIS HAIRY ARSE. And I’ll leave it at that.”
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[crime] newsUnlimited on Identity Theft. “You, meanwhile, know nothing of this until – several months later – debt collection agencies begin to harass you. Life becomes Kafkaesque. You inform the police – but they can’t see that you are the victim of any crime. The law holds you liable only for the first $50 on the phoney credit cards and nothing on the other bills. The cops can’t get involved with working out who is the real you. There are drug dealers and paedophiles out there. Take it to Mr Visa and Mr AT&T, they say.”
20 June 2000
[film] Deconstructing Harry — Film Threat on Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News. “GRAFT. One tends to question Harry’s credibility due to the volume of gifts and gratuities he receives from both studios and filmmakers. Not only does he admit it, he begs for it! The only words in a story title that will turn me off faster than “Harry’s Adventure In…” would be “WAAAH! ME WANT PWESANTS!!!” Damn, son. Show some dignity.” [via Ghost in the Machine]
[male struggle!] newsUnlimited reports that a clenched fist is the new image of Old Spice. “Vegas has replaced it with a clenched fist as a mark of resistance against post-feminist man’s weakness for effete eau de Cologne and skin balm. “The fist is also a symbol of men’s struggle to be taken seriously by women,” he said. “I prefer to think of it not as a stopper but as five fingers of angst and frustrated male desire.”
21 June 2000
[violence] Jeremy Paxman on football violence in This is London. “Perhaps he is as blameless as many of those arrested have claimed. But what seems to have shocked the British authorities is that so many of those accused by the Belgians do not fit the stereotype. “Some of those who have been sent back,” the Home Secretary gulped in a radio interview, “are barristers and engineers.” The shock with which Mr Straw – himself a barrister, as, of course, is our Prime Minister – had received this intelligence was audible in his voice.”
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[old games] I spent a lot of time playing these gentlemens computer games when I was younger: Jeff Minter and Matthew Smith. Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were probably my favourite computer games as a child — they are now available for download in PC versions.
[minogue] The Editor of GQ on Kylie’s bottom. “Kylie, I think, has come out of this rather well, at least as well as GQ. People are talking about her again, stills from her raunchy new video are being used liberally in the tabloids, and Radio 1 have even A-listed her single. So in a way we have been responsible for helping resuscitate the diminutive antipodean’s career. Which is nice.” Three Words: TINY DEFORMED EARS!
22 June 2000
[unabomber] Nice article on the Unabomber at Harvard — where he was psychologically tested (to destruction?). “When, soon after, Kaczynski began to worry about the possibility of mind control, he was not giving vent to paranoid delusions. In view of Murray’s experiment, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in an experiment that had treated human beings as guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally. Here is a powerful logical foundation for Kaczynski’s latterly expressed conviction that academics, in particular scientists, were thoroughly compromised servants of “the system”, employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral control of populations.”
[web] newsUnlimited reports on the-bullet.com’s recent problems. “What advice would they give to other dot.coms? Billam says: ‘The main thing is don’t expect too much from other people and expect everything to take twice as long as you planned. Keep a close eye on what everyone is doing, and if you do trustpeople to do things for you, make sure you have got goals, and assess their progress. Also don’t be afraid to question the experts.'”
[film] Media Nugget of the Day covers Dogma. ‘It’s Mall Rats meets Life of Brian meets Up in Smoke, but it’s definitely not for devout Catholics or anyone who likes their humor measured, mature, or sanitized.’
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23 June 2000
[link dump] Some tech links: MacOS X Weblog, and two applications I use everyday at work — vnc and Security Explorer.
[comics] The Washington Post on Marvel’s new range of comics aimed at kids. ‘Ralph Mathieu first got hooked on the Flash when he was 13 and has read comics the 25 years since. Now the owner of Alternate Reality Comics in Las Vegas, he believes that no matter how good comics are, convincing large numbers of kids and teens is an uphill battle. “Sadly, the number of kids who’ll pick reading for entertainment over video games, renting movies, the countless channels television offers, or the Internet, is a very small fraction,” he says. “I also think that today, more then ever, kids and teens regard superhero comics as geeky.’
24 June 2000
[comics] Warren Ellis talks about the best comics you don’t read. ‘Harvey Pekar is as fucked a human as you’ll find, put bluntly. And he’s honest about it.’
[allergies] newsUnlimited on Nut Allergies — one in 200 children in Britain are allergic to nuts and the number is growing. Nobody knows why… ‘Even if he eats the most minuscule amount, even if he simply inhales the papery dust that puffs out of tens of thousands of packets of peanuts in pubs up and down the country every day, he may become dangerously ill. First, his lips swell like party balloons, then a rash of knobbly hives flush up over his body; his skin goes blotchy, then he might start wheezing and coughing. His tongue might start swelling, his tubes may become constricted – he may start to suffocate and his blood pressure might plummet. He may collapse, lose consciousness and die.’
25 June 2000
[midi] Today’s theme is Dueling Banjo’s [from Deliverance]
[web] Danny O’Brien on time wasting and log watching. ‘I look at the parts of my logs that show users who stumble on my site while searching for pornography (it’s amazing what searching for “hot”, “water”, “Japanese” and a couple of other terms can point you towards); and I don’t have the ability to track down their e-mail addresses, but I do wonder whether they know they have a constant audience for their movements online.’
[reading] Buy this comic: From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Here’s a review from Salon. ‘As ambitious and affecting as anything ever rendered in pictures and word balloons, “From Hell” combines an intricate mystery, insightful social criticism and unflinching brutality capable of unnerving the most desensitized pop audience. It’s publication as a book promises to give it a new lease on life. That’s what happened with Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning “Maus,” which was originally published in installments in the arty comic “Raw.” “From Hell” is the only graphic novel since “Maus” to rival its ambition and historical depth.’
26 June 2000
[spam] Spamcop… for when your Inbox is full of weird porn sites, crap share deals and bad philosophy.
[comics] According to Ain’t it Cool News Frank Miller may be teaming up with Darren Aronofosky for the next Batman film. [via Ghost in the Machine]
[comics] The New York Times on the problems facing the comics industry. ‘Even the staunchest supporters of comic books say that the industry is facing problems in everything from production to distribution to marketing. There are no hard and fast figures for the industry. Publishers and distributors are secretive about sales. In fact, the only figure that insiders agree upon is the number of comic-book stores. Today, there are fewer than 4,000, down from more than 10,000 during the comic boom in the mid-90’s. “I think people like comics as much as ever, but now it’s very difficult to buy them,” said Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man and an icon in the industry. “There used to be so many places to buy comic books; there used to be a corner store in every city.”‘
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27 June 2000
[comics] Great two part interview of Grant Morrison in Sequential Tart: [ Part One] [ Part Two] ‘It lets your head expand and it also throws you on your mettle. I always travel on my own and you find yourself in the middle of Bangkok and you think ‘what do I do?’ and that’s a great feeling to have – you solve it and you go about the world feeling fantastic because no-one knows who you are and no ones putting any personality on you – you can swam into any place and say ‘I’m James Bond!” (laughs)’ — GM on travel.
[stupidname] Tom at Blue Lines talks about how much he hates his name…. I could rant on about how awful my name is but I won’t…. it speaks for itself…. Fortunately, I went to school with a guy called “Larman Register” who I always think of when somebody takes the piss out of being called S********. You think you’ve got a awful name? Consider the horror of being called Larman! Did his parents hate him or what? I hope for his sake there is a long Norfolk tradition of calling your child Larman…
[books] Interesting interview with Alex Garland author of The Beach. Covers the story’s origins as a comic book… . “He had drawn a 60-page comic book, a noir-ish tale based on his experiences in the Far East. He had a go at translating it into a novel. The origins of The Beach, which is written like a sequence of discrete man-on-a-desert-island cartoons, remain apparent. Its comic-book blueprint helps to account for its storytelling pace, and why even in quite horrific and bloody scenes there is a Pulp Fiction element of slapstick.”
[movie] Media Nugget of the Day covers Being There, an amazing film starring Peter Sellers. Highly recommended.
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28 June 2000
[genome] newsUnlimited on biotech bullshit: We are told that the Book of Life is the most complex sequence of letters ever written, though whoever said that never took One Hundred Years of Solitude on holiday.’
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29 June 2000
[comics] Excellent Sequential Tart interview with Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. “Oh, yeah, why do I hate the Internet. I don’t really hate the Internet. I mean, you’ve got to remember that a lot of people probably see the comments I make on the side in the Preacher letter columns. And, uh, it’s possibly understandable that they take it more seriously than the rest of [what they hear]. I’m sure the Internet is an incredibly useful tool. I’m not likely to use it any time in the immediate future because I don’t have a computer.”
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[lads] newsUnlimited reports on the death of the Lad. “…if [Chris] Evans is no longer deemed fashionable, if a frenzy of blokish bawdy is no longer said to define the moment, what does it mean for the plethora of lads who have swum in his wash? What will become of the pretenders if Evans is no longer reckoned capable of fighting off the attentions of Robot Wars, the show scheduled by BBC2 against his, the programme that exalts the achievements of beardy boffins? Is the news that the actress Amanda Holden has left uber-lad Neil Morrissey to return to her husband, the defiantly unblokeish Les Dennis, a wider indicator of the cultural times?”
[music] Yet another “Death of…” story, this time about CD’s and Cassette’s. ‘Although he sees a time when tangible media disappears altogether, he believes it won’t be for a long time yet. “CDs are a collectable item. People want all the artwork and sleeve notes so they can find out just who it was who played guitar on track three!”‘
30 June 2000
[ukblogs] Daily Doozer went linkcrazy yesterday…
[web] Douglas Rushkoff talks about the “social currency” of the media and internet. Social currency is like a good joke. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure, for a start. But they are also using content – mostly unoriginal content that they’ve heard elsewhere – in order to lubricate a social occasion. And what are most of us doing when we listen to a joke? Trying to memorise it so that we can bring it somewhere else. The joke itself is social currency. Interesting in regards to weblogs — I hope LinkMachineGo provide social currency in the form of interesting/useful links… [via Metafilter]
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[ali g] Ali G Interactive Rapper [Requires Sound Card and Flash]
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