linkmachinego.com

2 March 2025
[pets] Are you the owner of a feckless Unemployed Pet? by Darren Cullen.

Are you the owner of a feckless unemployed pet?

3 March 2025
[movies] Gene Hackman: 20 Best Movies … The French Connection: ‘William Friedkin had planned on pushing Doyle to the outer limits of acceptability; the filmmaker later said that despite the fact Hackman had gone on ride-alongs with Eddie Egan, a.k.a. the real-life Popeye, his lead was so put off by the ugly places he had to go to that Hackman allegedly quit on the second day of production. He was eventually coaxed back, and struggled to find a way in to playing Egan until one day, he noticed the cop “dipping a cruller into a cup of coffee and then pitching it over his head. There was something in his attitude that made everything very clear: This guy doesn’t give a shit about anything except his work.” Bingo! The role won Hackman his first Academy Award. Everyone remembers the famous chase scene — the actor later joked that maybe the car should have won the Oscar — but Hackman is the engine that drives the whole movie.’
4 March 2025
[blogs] 25 Random Thoughts about 25 years of LinkMachineGo:
  1. Does anybody remember E/N “Everything and Nothing” sites? And before E/N there were the early internet diarists and people like Justin Hall and Maggy Donea. Blogging before blogs.
  2. I started LinkMachineGo because I looked at Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog and thought I could do something similar and focus on comics. I wasn’t as good as Jorn but lasted longer. (Jorn’s still active on Twitter.)
  3. I have a very faint memory of the Saturday afternoon in 2000 I sat down and tried to pull together a Blogger template. I did not realise at the time what a life changing moment it was for me.
  4. I was obsessed with Big Brother in the early 2000s!
  5. There are some earlier LMG posts that I find in real poor taste. What was I thinking? I can’t bring myself to remove them.
  6. I do miss classic long-form blog posts. There really was something slightly magical in that format / community of bloggers / moment in time.
  7. There was a really exciting moment early on with blogging where it looked liked it would take over the internet. The Cambrian Explosion of Blogs. Then social media came along and all the exciting variety died off.
  8. In the early years of blogging I always felt terribly old when I met other 20-something bloggers. I was thirty! lol.
  9. I will never forget this Metafilter comment about 911 posted as it was happening. I remember looking at it not grasping the enormity of it.
  10. The magic of the early years of blogging mostly ended when the warblogs came along during the Iraq War. Warbloging seems like patient zero for a lot of what went bad in social media later.
  11. I often wonder how responsible blogs are for social media and everything that came out of it. So many of the different components of social media were trialed on blogs first and it seems unarguable that Mark Zuckerberg came out of the world of blogs.
  12. I try not to think about all the time I’ve spent on blogging or how much I’ve spent on hosting LMG over the years.
  13. Even though I have never blogged professionally I do wonder how much impact blogging has had on my working life. It’s hard to quantify but I do think it’s been a big benefit.
  14. LinkMachineGo spawned Moment of Moore and The Evening Standard Headline Crisis. I got a tweet out of Alan Moore! :)
  15. Three links that have stayed with me: Falling Man / The Sinking of the Estonia / Since 1979, Brian Murtagh has fought to keep convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald in prison
  16. Essential late-stage blogging tools: Firefox. Newsblur RSS Reader, a bunch of bookmarklets (remember those?), some iOS Shortcuts, Notepad++, CLCL, Irfanview, Pinboard.in, WordPress.
  17. I find it really hard to blog on a phone. Fat fingers and the eyesight is not what it was! :(
  18. Favorite quote: “On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.”
  19. When I die I’m pretty sure whoever eulogizes me is going to mention blogging. I’m okay with that.
  20. I’ve published 9000+ posts which is nearly one-a-day over 25 years. Why do I sink so much time and effort into it? I definitely find the process of link blogging soothing. Maybe the simple answer is that I just wanted to record and categorise some of my web browsing.
  21. I sometimes wonder what the blog in gestalt reveals about me. I’m not sure I want to find out.
  22. I apologise if I’ve stolen a link, or posted something annoying or pissed you off over the years. I hope you can forgive me.
  23. I’m pretty sure nobody is reading this anymore really. I’m doing it just for myself.
  24. When I say blogging changed my life, I mean it. It really changed my life.
  25. Ten thousand posts seems pretty achievable. Wish me luck! :)

6 March 2025
[comics] An Inside Look at the 13 Pre-Flashpoint Eras of Hellblazer … A great, detailed guide to the many different runs on Hellblazer. ‘Garth Ennis – Illustrated by Will Simpson and Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis’ tenure took Moore’s smug bastard, melded him with Delano’s substance-abusing mystic, and added a love for pubs.’
7 March 2025
[arts] All ifs ands or buts connected by green lines … By Sol Levitt, 1973. [Via Matt Fraction’s Tumblr Archive]

All Ifs Ands Or Buts Connected By Green Lines

10 March 2025
[manson] Netflix’s Chaos: The Manson Murders takes on a wild theory. Even Errol Morris isn’t sure he believes it. … Interview with Errol Morris about his new documentary on Charles Manson and the Tate/LaBianca murders. ‘How do you explain the fact that Manson’s parole officer just let him go again and again and again? He was just free to do whatever he chose to do. Can I explain it? I can’t. It could be meaningful or not. Is it suggestive of something peculiar? It is. But does it tell us that somehow they were all in league with the government? It doesn’t. I think it’s one of the most fascinating stories about investigation and the desire to believe and how hard it is really to investigate anything.’
11 March 2025
[tv] Larry David Age Quiz … Can you guess which are the older pictures of Larry David? ‘When the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm aired in 2000, Larry David was 54 years old. For comparison, that is how old Paul Rudd is right now. But the benefit of looking older when you’re young is that it’s hard for others to tell the difference when you age.’
13 March 2025
[blogs] Early SMS Blogging … Last week I was trying to find a UK Blog that was sending SMS messages to blog posts in 2001. I’ve managed to dig it out of the Wayback Machine, screenshot below. The SMS messages feel like tweets. it’s an early attempt at Twitter in 2001! ’12:41 via SMS: You know the more I think about this SMS blogging lark, the more useful it’s becoming. Blog from a sports game, holiday, your car…’

Blogging using SMS in 2001.

17 March 2025
[web] E/N – Everything and Nothing Websites … A look at E/N sites, another early version of blogs. ‘Urban Dictionary definition: it refers to a type of post that means everything to the poster, and nothing to anyone else.’
18 March 2025
[covid-19] What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick With Coronavirus … Five years ago, I remember reading Jessica Lustig’s powerful writing about caring for her very sick husband who had Covid-19. It was too much to blog at the time but the article has stayed with me.

I run through possibilities. I’m not so worried about CK getting sick. I can nurse her too. It’s if I get sick. I show her how to do more things, where things go, what to remember, what to do if — What if T is hospitalized? What if I am? Could a 16-year-old be left to fend for herself at home, alone? How would she get what she needed? Could she do it? For how long?

The one thing I know is that I could not send her to my parents, 78 years old and nearby on Long Island. They would want her to come, but she could kill them, their dear grandchild coming forward to their embrace, radioactive, glowing with invisible incubating virus cells. No. Not them. Someone else would have to take her, someone who has a bedroom and a bathroom where she could isolate and be cared for. Someone would. I lie awake at 4 a.m., on the floor, listening, thinking, wide awake with adrenaline.’

19 March 2025
[web] Barbelith Underground … I came across an archive of the Barbelith Underground web forum last week while working on the 25 Years of LMG post. Rediscovering it intact and online felt like discovering a lost piece of the old internet.
21 March 2025
[comics] Alan Moore’s Five Tips for Would-Be Comics Writers‘4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.’

24 March 2025
[blogs] What was it like? … Phil Gyford takes a look at what weblogs were like in 2000. ‘So many of these, particularly the Blogger sites, feature short and frequent updates. Several posts a day, each with a timestamp. In retrospect it could be seen as people crying out for something like Twitter – a way to share brief snippets of text frequently and (given how many posts refer to other bloggers) sociably.’
25 March 2025
[world] Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.‘Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.’
27 March 2025
[music] Vangelis – Dr. Stergios Tegos Tapes Playlist … In 1988 Vangelis composed music for about 11hrs of Microneurosurgery videos created by a surgeon he was friends with. Go listen. [see Metafilter for more detail]
28 March 2025
[feet] Your feet are home to billions of bacteria. How often should you wash them? … Life’s important questions. ‘Staphylococcus are the key players when it comes to producing the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) responsible for foot odour. Sweat glands on the skin of the feet release a heady mix of electrolytes, amino acids, urea and lactic acid. The Staphylococcus bacteria consider this a veritable feast and, in the process of feeding, convert amino acids into VFAs. The main chemical culprit is isovaleric acid, which has an unpleasant odour which has been described as having a “distinct cheesy/acidic note”.’
30 March 2025
[todo] Who Uses To-Do Lists? … Donald Knuth: ‘… my scheduling principle is to do the thing I hate most on my to-do list. By week’s end, I’m very happy.’