7 May 2000
[film] Two interesting links on Kubrick: filmUnlimited looks at Speilberg directing Kubrick’s AI and an interesting website on The Unknown Kubrick — his photography for Look magazine.
[web] I’ve been trying to find the best on-line bookmark manager on the web — blink seems to be the best of the bunch (at least for me).
8 May 2000
[weblogs] USS Catastrophe — a weblog about comics…
[books] booksUnlimited interviews Martin Amis. [Text Only]
[internet] BBC News looks at real.com’s prospects — competition from Microsoft Napster and Shoutcast seem to be the main problems!
[uk weblogs] UK weblogs I’m currently eyeballing: Blue Lines, not so Soft, SK², Vavatch Orbital and Nutlog along with the old stalwards: Barbelith and The Daily Doozer.
[weblogs] Interview with Jorn Barger – Portrait Of The Blogger As A Young Man . “I try to make it my ethic that whenever I see something that I enjoy, I don’t filter. You know, if it’s some silly thing about a TV commercial, I won’t say, well, that’s too frivolous.”
9 May 2000
[conspiracy?] Has anybody noticed that the Doctor from UFO looks just like the Russian President Vladimir Putin?
[comics] Entire run of The Invisibles available on Ebay.
[tech support] It was a bad weekend for technical Support team at Australia’s federal trade commission, Austrade after the ILOVEYOU virus was released last week….
10 May 2000
[my inner turmoil] Do you think your friends, family and colleagues hate you? You can tell! The most common means of doing so were: being reserved by avoiding all intimate topics of conversation; not asking questions, so as to speed up any interaction; treating the other person as a stranger; physically avoiding them; not paying attention to them; and showing excessive politeness. [from newsUnlimited]
[ken4london] Livingstone and Labour close to compromise deal reports newsUnlimited.
[books] Extracts from Martin Amis’s new autobiography Experience: “I’ve been name dropping, in a way, ever since I first said: ‘Dad'” and “Mum, do you think I’m her father? – Definitely”
[tv] Clerks [The Cartoon] — it’s times like these I really wished I lived in America….
[clones] First cloned mouse dies reports BBC News. “Dr Yanagimachi has indicated that Cumulina’s remains will be preserved and mounted in a new permanent exhibit in a new Institute for Biogenesis Research.”
[film] filmUnlimited on trailers being released on the internet. Mat Snow, former editor of the mature gentleman’s rock monthly Mojo, once explained how he had fully enjoyed Godzilla without ever having seen the film. For the months of build-up beforehand, he had the pleasure of getting excited about the film, imagining the monster and the movie in his head, getting off on the hype. By the time the film actually came out, he had been reliably informed that it stank. So he didn’t go to see it. But he didn’t feel cheated – he had had four months of enjoyable anticipation at no cost.
[mp3] Interesting article on Slashdot about my favorite MP3 Encoder — Lame
11 May 2000
[books] Final extract from Amis Autobiography — When darkness met light
[comics] Marvel to abandon comics for videogames and Movies? “The simple paper medium of comic books just isn’t cutting it in the age of video’s flashy special effects, explosive audio and interactive action.” – The Wall Street Journal. [via Ghost in the Machine] SOMEBODY DIES! BY MARVEL BETRAYED!! EVERY BUSINESS EXEC MY ENEMY… COMICS… FIGHTS… ON! I’M BORN AGAIN! A COMIC BOOK WITHOUT HOPE…. IS A COMIC BOOK WITHOUT FEAR!!! MY… SPLEEN… EXPLODES…
[film] newsUnlimited reports that Florence attempts to ban Hannibal [Text Only]
[weblogs] Barbelith reviews top eight weblogs. [Voice in head: Must… find… online… personality…]
12 May 2000
[tech] Embrace, extend, censor — Microsoft goes after Slashdot. Here’s the original article…
[tech] BBC news reports on perks for IT workers … “The more common perks include pensions, healthcare, cars, share options, flexi-time or a corporate box at a football ground. “However, companies such as Oracle provide a benefits cafeteria system in which employees are awarded points with which they can purchase the perks they want. These include extending annual holiday and life assurance for partners.
[tech] It’s Anti-Microsoft Day at Barbelith Towers with excellent coverage of Microsoft Vs. Slashdot and Security issues in Internet Explorer. [Where does Tom find the time and energy to do these great articles?]
[two random stories] BBC News reports that Malcolm McDowell mellows out and infertile woman gets pregnant after taking viagra.
13 May 2000
[books] Another Amis posting — the Digested Letters of Kingsley Amis.
[comics] Warren Ellis talks about Cerebus. “Dave Sim is more than a little mad, as I think anyone who’s read a great deal of CEREBUS would attest to. Us old lefties instinctively shy away from someone who communicates what is at best gynephobia and at worst pure bloody misanthropy in the way that Sim does, even allowing for the dichotomy between auctorial intent and personal belief. But as a creator I keep coming back to Sim for his masterful, hugely inventive storytelling. Creatively, he’s the mutant bastard child of Will Eisner, The Studio artists (Barry Windsor-Smith and those guys) and Chuck Jones.”
[comics] Warren Ellis talks about David Icke. [Icke’s Web Site] “There is an essential piece of this obviously quite decent man’s brain that is missing; the Quality Control function that allows most of us to cross the street when badly deluded people walk towards us waving a matchbox shouting “Do you want to see my bomb?””
[quote] “I am myself a Norfolk man.. and glory in being so.” – Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson
14 May 2000
[america] America planned to drop a nuke onto the moon! [I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.]
[books] More profiles of Martin Amis: [BBC] The Martin Amis Experience [Sunday Times] Middle age is drawing the poison from his pen.
[comics] Lots of interesting rumours about comics over at Ramblings 2000. Mark Millar talks about his new vampire TV series for Channel 4 called Sikeside: “The big difference between me and Buffy is that Sikeside is going to be the most appalling thing ever seen on TV… and I mean in terms of bad taste. It really, really, really, really is absolutely horrific and a response to all the overseas vampire dross we’ve been subjected to. I promise you won’t have seen this stuff before.”
[tech] Much of the Internet leads nowhere according to a recent mapping project. “If you picked two random pages and tried to click from one to the other, “there’s a 75 percent chance that you will never get there,” LaMore said. If a path did exist, the average click separation would be 16, the researchers said.” Hmmm… I always said you were never more than four clicks away from porn on the Internet… I guess I was wrong!
15 May 2000
[mp3] Napster is irrelevant reports Wired News. “The amazing thing about Napster isn’t the program, it’s the idea,” Weekly said. “You can’t litigate the idea. You can’t tell people that they need to stop thinking about the idea. Already we’ve seen commercial alternatives pop up with Scour Exchange (a commercial file-trading exchange), so even if Napster is sued out of existence, there are alternatives popping up everywhere.”
[tv] Why do I like Friends so much? I have no idea… anyway… the cast of Friends have signed on for another two years!
[tech] Microsoft plans changes to Outlook in the wake of The Love Bug [via Scripting News]
16 May 2000
[timemachinego, baby!] For some reason Yahoo describe my Grant Morrison Comixography as: “A Digital Shaman spell to summon comics author Grant Morrison for a night of complete debauchery.“ This is totally wrong… but then again who am I to argue with Yahoo? I am a digital shaman! WooHoo!
[interview] An interview with John Diamond [Text-Only] in the Observer. Diamond’s columns can be found at The Times Website. [Originally, I’d decided not to link to the John Diamond interview but it stuck in my mind for a couple of days, a friend mentioned it to me and I suddenly realised that columnists in newspapers and webloggers probably have a lot in common…]
[football] David Beckham immortalised in Thai temple reports BBC News. “The fan placed his sculpture of the Manchester United player in Bangkok’s Pariwas temple, in a spot normally reserved for minor deities.”
[anarchy] Seen on the tube today — the wisdom of Eric Cartman: “Capitalism sucks ass!” and Moon at the Monarchy 2000.
17 May 2000
[tech] newsUnlimited reports on family in Silicon Valley [Text-Only]. “[…] Most revealingly, perhaps, is the way in which the word “family” is slowly turning from a noun, into a verb. Parents in Silicon Valley have been overheard talking about the need for “doing family,” as if it were less of a static unit than one of many activities to be fitted around other obligations. When a parent talks about spending “quality time” with his child, it is not a vague reference to hanging out with him or her on the weekend. It is used as a direct oppositional to “quantity time,” with the belief that, like everything else in Silicon Valley, if you concentrate hard enough you can achieve just as much in a condensed period as across a longer stretch of time.”
[sport] How Grandstand was cancelled [from newsUnlimited]. “The premier league clubs expect to realise around £2bn from auctioning the various rights packages. By chance £2bn is roughly the BBC reaped in licence fee income last year to fund its two television channels and five radio stations, plus its new digital ventures.”
[weblogs] Two weblogs that keep me hitting the “F5” key — Not So Soft and Metafilter.
[comics] Warren Ellis seems to be doing a lot of little bits of writing for themestream. Of special note: Warren Ellis: Why I Write Comics and England, In The Summertime: LIQUID CITY
[admin] Linkmachinego archives are up: March 2000, April 2000.
[nasty] BBC News reports that anthrax has been linked to a spate of deaths in Europe of heroin addicts.
18 May 2000
[tech] Vavatch Orbital has a dig at Prince Charles over his Reith Lecture: “I believe that if we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development we will first have to rediscover, or re-acknowledge a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world, and with each other. If literally nothing is held sacred anymore – because it is considered synonymous with superstition or in some other way “irrational” – what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life” with potentially disastrous long term consequences?” — Prince Charles [Update: Unsurprisingly, Stephen Hawkins has entered the debate: “[…] people in 50 years’ time will wonder what all the fuss about GM food was all about”]
[mp3] Two amusing links: Kid Rock starves to death – MP3 piracy blamed. Metallica’s new CD [both via Metafilter]
[human nature] Slashdot asks: Can you legally lend a friend a DVD?
[dotcom] Slashdot has the answer to why boo.com failed: “My wife never heard of boo.com (Score:5, Insightful)“
19 May 2000
[weblogging] Any weblogger who provides lots of links must hit THE WALL at some point… and I’ve been certainly struggling with my own personal weblogging wall the last couple of days… So, it’s time to dig thru the old bookmarks and come up with some gems…
[film] Apocalypse Now Tribute Site
[old school net] Whatever happened to Geek Cereal?
[weblogs] The Taking of RiotHero 1 2 3: “Way back in the mists of time, there was a country called England, which was known for conquering things, drinking tea and having rural areas where the locals indulged in carnal acts with lesser species (or their close families).” [Tom and Katy have taken over Riothero for the weekend. Should be interesting…]
[another old link] Sam Sloan, ’nuff said… […Good Grief… Dirty Dancing is one of the all time great movies!]
20 May 2000
[film] Fantagraphics covers the Ghost World Movie. The Ghost World film has wrapped shooting and Terry Zwigoff is now spending his time in the editing room, whittling footage down to a managable masterpiece. Editing should be completed by the end of August or beginning of September, at which point MGM will set a release date for the picture, which stars Thora Birch, Scarlet Johanssen, Steve Buscemi, Brad Renfro, David Cross, Teri Garr, Bruce Glover and others.
[comics] How to be cheap by Joe Matt.
[science] newsUnlimited looks at what Prince Charles really believes in after his Reith Lecture: “At the core of Christianity there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings,” he said. “But the west gradually lost this integrated vision of the world with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution.”
[tv] The wisdom of Starsky and Hutch… Everything i ever needed to know i learned from Starsky and Hutch: “There’s got to be more to life than just breathing in and breathing out.” [Starsky and Hutch are on weekdays in the UK on Granada Plus at the moment]
[books] Surprisingly, Julie Burchill likes Kingsley Amis. Wierd!
21 May 2000
[personal shite] I am having trouble sleeping which is not a good thing on a grey Sunday morning. I want to be snoring into my pillow, dammit! Instead I am adding permanent links to my weblog. This is not healthy…
[comics] Adrian Tomine’s diary on Slate explains why cartooning is better than a real job: “Producing an issue of my comic book is a slow, arduous process, and right now I’m a little more than halfway done with Issue 7. Last night I spent more than an hour tinkering with one line of dialogue. I tried five or six different variations, finally settling on the simplest and shortest: “What the hell’s your problem?” Brilliant, huh?”
[mp3] Lars Urich and Chuck D talk about Napster. “It’s a parallel world, and a new paradigm is taking shape. You have to adapt to it. This goes beyond Chuck versus Lars. This is about the record industry versus the people. The people have got it on their side, and you’ve got to adapt.” – Chuck D [via Josh Blog]
[bbc] Greg Dyke gets rid of expensive cheese from the BBC Menu. “Dyke’s decrees have been dismissed as daft penny-pinching by staff. ‘When John Birt ran the show there was always cheese – and biscuits – and croissants at meetings,’ one said. ‘What’s next? Will we soon be forced to bring in Thermos flasks of lukewarm tea and garibaldis wrapped in tin foil to keep us going?'” [I am not the most unbiased weblogger on this matter — I work for the BBC — but is this story news? And I’ve got to say that the quote above sounds like utter nonsense to me…. Did a real person say that? It sounds like somebody taking the piss to me…]
[wisdom] The wisdom of Ralph Wiggum: “My cat’s breath smells like cat food.”
[news] Barbara Cartland is dead. The BBC has a tributes page — some of them sound… well, a little critical. I wonder why? “Perhaps her works were ignored by critics because they deserved to be ignored by critics. Dame Barbara blamed women for the permissive society. She blamed women for teen violence. She blamed women for – well, let’s face it: Dame Barbara blamed women for everything. Maybe that attitude was acceptable a century ago, but no longer. We women don’t need pampered millionaires scolding us for running our lives as we see fit. And we don’t need their implausible melodramas, either.”
22 May 2000
[comics] Old Warren Ellis interview. “Hm. Jamie’s one with the monkey was brilliant. The first episode of his FEAR MACHINE sequence was marvellously solid, too. Several of Garth’s issues were standouts, including the Special, “Confessional.” Gaiman’s “Hold Me” was, to my mind, one of the most honest and natural things he’s ever done, certainly among his best work. I’d be hard pressed to choose a single issue.” – what’s his favourite issue of Hellblazer.
[old school web] Browsing the old bookmarks again… I find The Couch. [Unlike Geek Cereal it’s still online but the last entry was in 1997…] We want love, success and power but our neuroses get in the way.
[quote] The wisdom of Barbara Cartland: “The trouble with half the Socialists is they’re suffering from vitamin dificiency”
[sport] newsUnlimited profiles Fat Les — Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James — on their song for Euro 2000 “Jerusalem”. “He also relishes the thought that the fans at Euro 2000, whether they know it or not, will be led by the London Community Gospel Choir and the London Gay Male Voice Choir. ‘The idea of great big white fascist thugs singing along with this, going, “‘ang on – a choir of nonces? What’s this…?” I love that. What an amazing world we live in’.”
[weblogging in the UK!] A list of UK Based Weblogs from Threadnaught.
[books] More strange quotes from Barbara Cartland. “Men have always made a fuss of me. I still have several admirers who send me jewellery and chocolates. So I must be doing something right” – aged 96. [via Adorable]
23 May 2000
[bbc] What kind of person would download and install a Charlie Dimmock screensaver on their computer?
[euro2000] Not So Soft has more links on Fat Les.
[comics] Nicely illustrated Eddie Campbell interview. “[…]but I would say that the impetus to draw these pages derives from an urge to record the world around me, to record a little piece of now and save it for tomorrow. “
[weird science] Potato powered webservers… [this one is going to get blogged everywhere]
24 May 2000
[comics] Frank Miller talks about the sequel to Dark Knight Returns.
[dotcom] newsUnlimited covers how the boo.com staff feel after their redundancy “[..]As for the founders’ alleged profligacy, Thomson is diplomatic. “Getting through £91m in a year is quite lavish,” she says simply.”
25 May 2000
[green] Continuing the gardening theme from earlier in the week…. Gardening is the new sex [stressed-voice-in-my head: What next? Somebody tell me! WHAT NEXT?] Percy Thrower is the new brown?
[tech] I find this hard to believe: Linux is more popular than sex!
[comics] Cool Beans! There’s a new issue of Stray Bullets out…
[mp3] Forget Napster — IRC’s the place for MP3’s reports Wired News. [via Wired MP3 News Archive]
26 May 2000
[dotcom] Scan — impressive e-commerce idea. Basically, bang into your mobile the bar code number of any book or CD you see and send it to Scan as a text message. Within thirty seconds or so you get prices and delivery times from three online retailers back to your mobile and if you are registered you can buy it straight away….
[comics] Excellent Daredevil website [via pearls that are his eyes]
[books] Experience in 400 words. “It is the late 1970s. The gross of condoms that Kingsley gave me and Phillip have long since been used.”
[books] Media Nugget of the Day covers Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker.
27 May 2000
[comics] Rich Johnson on The Cult of Warren Ellis. “And the thin and wiry Our Lord Warren Ellis was no longer thin and wiry, and started to buy Armani suits and some of his followers thought to themselves, hang on, he’s raking it in with this Excalibur lark.”
[only in america] Texas prisoner attempts to sell seats to his own execution on ebay reports newsUnlimited. “Years ago Bob Dylan wrote in his song Desolation Row that “they’re selling postcards of the hanging”. Toney might concede that that still has more of a ring to it than “they’re selling tickets to the lethal injection”. “
[mp3] Lars from Metallica talks (at length) about Napster and MP3 on Slashdot.
[exams] The Daily Doozer reminds me why I’m glad I’m not a student any more. [tedious autobiography: I still have a regular dream where I’ve got one of my finals and have not been to any lectures or revised for it… seven years after I did them!]
28 May 2000
[comics] Alan Moore asks “What is reality?“
[history] BBC News reports on the myth of Dick Turpin. “Michelle Petyt, assistant curator of social history at the museum, said research suggested he was a “quiet and dour man” and that stories of his good looks were definitely untrue. Professor James Sharpe, criminal history lecturer at York University – who is preparing a book about Turpin – said Turpin’s crimes were equally unappealing. He said: “Any ideas that he is a romantic, dashing figure are a nonsense. He had a quick temper and a violent streak.””
[personal shite] Sunday morning would be incomplete without: a cup of tea, The Observer, one slice of cold pizza, Hollyoaks and blogging….
[movies] The Lost Ending to Clerks — “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
29 May 2000
[dando] Interesting thread on the Jill Dando murder suspect Barry Bulsara in uk.local.london. “A man stepped out who looked rather like Freddie Mercury and a buzz went round that it was his cousin. He produced a large, white floral tribute in the shape of an arch, with a gold plaque on the bottom inscribed with a message, and signed from “your cousin, Barry Bulsara” (Bulsara, being Mercury’s real surname). My sister, knowing I had some artwork of Freddie on me ( I had it with me to show somebody I was meeting), went and asked him to sign one of my pictures, which he did.”
[comics] Alan Moore in Love. “Oh, Darling? I know it’s difficult for you! It’s difficult for ME, as well! I mean, you ARE married, and English, and you have two lovely daughters my age, and you seem to think you can levitate, and you’re always talking about your birth caul, and you haven’t had a haircut since Elvis was popular, and you produce a ten page book of footnotes after every date, and I have so little to offer a man like you?!” [via Adventures At 50 Feet]
[bbc] Perfect Day? Not if you’re working on a bank holiday!
30 May 2000
[entertainment] BBC News reports on a reporter who faked interviews with celebs such as Courtney Love for a German magazine. “… An unrepentant Kummer maintained he had done nothing wrong, describing his work as “montage reporting” – pooling information from other sources – which has also been christened “borderline journalism”. “
[weird science] newsUnlimited reports that the first hand transplant patient has done a runner. “A criminal past is no bar to being a medical pioneer. What frustrates Owen, Hakim, Dubernard and the other doctors involved is their patient’s unpredictability, the mystery of his whereabouts and his conviction that he knows what is best for his hand.”
[comics] Nicely designed comic site: Alex Tam’s Starman Compendium.
[film] Media Nugget of the Day covers Out of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.
31 May 2000
[mad world] See mad catapult woman bounce! [Real Audio]
[comics] Dork is one of my very favourite comics. You can find more from Evan Dorkin at the House of Fun. [voice-in-head: must…. buy… Eltingville T-Shirt!!]
[clerks] Kevin Smith talks about the Clerks Animated series. “There’s really no pressure on us because at this point it’s not as if we have to get good ratings to stay on, as we’re not going to be coming back. Having said that, however it does on TV, you have to figure that the worst night would probably reach more people than most of our films have reached theatrically. Potentially, if we let it run on TV and receive some nice feedback, then maybe we can turn it into a feature with a viable box office prospect ahead of it.”
[film] newsUnlimited reports on the film of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. “His conclusion was “the one thing that could dent the armour-plated cause of Scientology is the sound of global derision.” Indeed, the only subliminal voice I could detect came about 10 minutes into this 121-minute film and it seemed to be saying “Leeeaaave thisssss cinemmmaaa nooo””
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
[anime] Slashdot discusses essential anime — here’s a list of the best..
[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]
[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
[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.
[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.”