[politics] Aggregating Predictions for the General Election … A website collecting seat-by-seat poll predictions for the 2024 UK General Election.

[travel] Obvious Travel Advice … Useful list of thoughts on travel. ‘Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.’

[politics] The End of the Tories … Tanya Gold sums up the Conservative election campaign. ‘Old hands in British media call this a rolling goat fuck. The question as we reach the end is not who won’t vote for the Tories but who will. Remainers hate them because Brexit happened. Brexiteers hate them because Brexit has failed. Liberals hate them because they are tough on immigration. Right-wingers hate them because they are not tough enough. Those who hate public services think taxes are too high. Those who love public services think they do not work. Young people hate them because they have no housing. Old people hate them because Sunak left ghost troops on the beaches of Normandy. They have no constituency left.’

[comics] The Secret Life of Steve Ditko: Spider-Man Co-Creator’s Family Opens Up … Some insight into Steve Ditko’s life from his family. ‘One crispy Christmas during the early 1960s, Mark, only four or five, asked his uncle to sketch him a picture of a gorilla. Using only a pencil, his uncle cast a spell across the paper, and there he was: Konga, in all his glory. “Uncle Steve,” Mark beamed. “You are really good.”’ (archive link)

[comics] Batman’s Aff His Nut … Possibly the best Scottish poem about Batman ever written. ‘Mate, I’m worried aboot ye I know your ma and da died But everybody’s ma and da dies And we’re no aw runnin aboot Hookin muggers and Kickin psychopaths in the baws.” And that was when Batman went “Aye, but do ye ever feel like it? Do you ever look at the world and feel like it?’

[podcast] Things Fell Apart… A BBC Podcast by Jon Ronson on the many, varied stories behind the culture wars.

[space] Five of Saturn’s Moons in a Group Portrait … ‘On July 29, 2011, Cassini captured five of Saturn’s moons in a single frame with its narrow-angle camera. This is a full-color look at a view that was originally published in September 2011’

[morris] Errol Morris on whether you should be afraid of generative AI in documentaries… Errol Morris interviewed. ‘Film isn’t reality, no matter how it’s shot. You could follow some strict set of documentary rules…it’s still a film. It’s not reality. I have this problem endlessly with Richard Brody, who writes reviews for The New Yorker, and who is a kind of a documentary purist. I guess the idea is that if you follow certain rules, the veritical nature of what you’re shooting will be guaranteed. But that’s nonsense, total nonsense. Truth, I like to remind people — whether we’re talking about filmmaking, or film journalism, or journalism, whatever — it’s a quest.’

[comics] 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain between 2024 and 2034 … ‘Popeye the Sailor (2025) – Popeye first appeared in the “Thimble Theatre” newspaper comic strip in 1929. He soon became the strip’s star, and Olive Oyl’s new boyfriend (replacing her previous beau, one “Harold Hamgravy”). Popeye made the leap to animation in 1933.’

[ai] GANksy — A.I. street artist … ‘We trained a StyleGAN2 neural network using the portfolio of a certain street artist to create GANksy, a twisted visual genius whose work reflects our unsettled times.’

[life] The surprising data behind supercentenarians … Tim Harford sugggests a surprising reason why some people live so long. ‘In the US, Newman finds that the outstanding predictor of longevity is patchy birth records. Introducing proper records in the late 19th century reduced by more than two-thirds the number of babies who would eventually seem to reach the age of 110. That suggests that, until recently, seven out of 10 apparent supercentenarians were, in fact, younger than claimed. This all points to error or outright fraud.’

[life] The Scale of Life … Fascinating real-time statistics about what is happening right now all over the world. ‘Year to date, Number of Hours Worked: 5,224,497,264,667’ [via Andrew Ducker]