[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.’

[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.’

[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!”’

[ambient] A Soft Murmur … Ambient background noise generator to relax with.

[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.’

[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.”’

[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.’

[books] ‘We live in a climate of fear’: graphic novelist’s Elon Musk book can’t find UK or US publisher … Darryl Cunningham struggles to find a publisher for his latest book about Elon Musk. ‘He charts the rise of Musk to the “billionaire class” through his various business dealings including acquiring Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, which he renamed X. Cunningham said: “Knowing what I know about the man, my conclusion is that it’s incredible that such a mediocre figure can amass such wealth, but it was ever thus.”’

[vaccines] The Impact of Vaccines … Astonishing infographic showing the effectiveness of vaccines against common diseases across time.