7 January 2011
[blogs] Metafilter’s Year in 2010 Infographic … On Ask Metafilter: ‘Just 24 questions slipped through the cracks and were marked as STUMPED.’
6 January 2011
[comics] A Moment Of Meme: A Moment of Ellis / A Moment of Morrison
[phones] Simplest Phones Open to ‘SMS of Death’ … ‘In the worst cases, including the Nokia and Sony Ericsson, the message would disconnect the phone and force it to reboot, without registering the fact of the message’s receipt – in most cases forcing the operator’s network to continue sending the message and triggering the shutdown cycle again. Fixing the problem required putting the SIM card into a new, unsusceptible phone.’
5 January 2011
[blogs] The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words … the state of the blogging art at the beginning of 2011 … ‘Remember the early criticism of Twiter: “No one cares what you had for breakfast!” Who is tweeting about breakfast anymore? They are linking to an Instagram photo of breakfast or an article explaining how few people eat breakfast and why this is so horrible for the world. I’m still not a huge fan of links on Twitter. Most of the time I’m checking it on my phone when I don’t have time to read something more than 140 characters. So I favorite-star the tweet and go back to read it later. But then when I go to check that “awesome must read link” it turns out to be… oh, right, Julian Assange in a santa costume. Thanks! But that’s just me. The rest of the web likes using Twitter as a mass-aggregated link stream or it wouldn’t be operating that way.’
4 January 2011
3 January 2011
[politics] Steve Bell’s Political Cartoons of the Year … On David Cameron: ‘By way of a bonus, Cameron does not favour the depiction. He came up to me at a Spectator party at the Tory conference in October, and asked me how long I was going to carrry on with it, before advising me: “You can only push a condom so far”.’
2 January 2011
[comics] Bill Sienkiewicz speaks about Big Numbers #3 … ‘But with Big Numbers one of the demands – prerequisites – I’d placed upon myself was to work almost exclusively from the model as possible. I was going for as great a degree of illustrative photographic verisimilitude as I could muster. Dammit, I was going to adhere to the accurate reference no matter what. It was, in retrospect, a vain attempt to control everything – everything – completely, as things swirled and collided in midair all around. This was my Stanley Kubrick period. Of course, the more I tried to control everything, the more Real Life kicked my ass. Up and down the Route 95 corridor.’ [thanks @slovobooks]
31 December 2010
[comics] Not A Best Of: Comics In 2010 … Beaucoupkevin’s comic picks for 2010 … ‘I wanted to avoid mentioning reprints, particularly expensive large-format volumes that are already out of print, but reading all of Planetary in one dose reminds us that Ellis believes in people despite his curmudgeonly reputation. While Jakita Wagner kicking the shit out of anything that hoves into her view is my primary fetish when it comes to the title, getting an oversized look at John Cassaday’s development as a sequential artist free of the occasionally-year-long delays between issues is a genuine pleasure.’
30 December 2010
[internet] Yahoo!locaust … Jason Scott’s view on Yahoo and Delicious … ‘Obviously “sunset” got the most attention, because that’s the kind of mealy-mouthed language one would expect out of assholes. It’s the same thinking that took “mass firings” to “downsizing” and then made it “rightsizing” because they thought “downsizing” was too negative. Those sort of assholes. The kind that run Yahoo!, in other words.’
29 December 2010
[email] American Charged With Hacking After Snooping On Wife’s Emails … ‘Walker was charged after opening the Gmail account of his wife, Clara, who was married twice previously. Walker found she was having an affair with her second husband, who had once been arrested for beating her in front of her young son from her first husband. Walker handed the emails over to the boy’s father, saying he was concerned for the child’s safety. The father sought custody.’
28 December 2010
[tech] How I Filled Two Dumpsters And Went Paperless With The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 … ‘Organizing, scanning, and shredding all this paper took me the better part of three weekends over the course of this year, but I think it was worth it. In this post, I’ll cover some of my reasoning, methods, and tools that I used through this process. I should also note that my paperless efforts don’t just stop at recordkeeping; I’ve gotten rid of more than 95% of my books over the last year, replacing the ones I really like with digital versions on my Kindle. My paper books now all fit on one small shelf in my office.’
27 December 2010
[wikileaks] Wikileaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy … ‘Ability to disseminate one’s ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a “quasi-public sphere,” where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent.’
26 December 2010
[tv] Christmas Night Fail From Yesterday TV – Nazi Collaborators All Nighter … a history TV channel’s idea of Christmas entertainment!
25 December 2010
24 December 2010
[comics] Last night The Invisibles Saved My Life (24-Month Countdown Remix) … Remembering The Invisibles (done in the Grant Morrison style) … ‘It’s made me a better person and while there are a lot of comics that have done that, nobody does it better.’
23 December 2010
[blogs] When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts? … ‘The best timing advice, however, may actually be around frequency. Last week, I analyzed 1000 of the most popular blogs on the web, according to Technorati. I compared their posting frequency with the number of incoming links and visitors they had attracted (according to Yahoo and Compete). I found that among very popular blogs, publishing multiple times per day led to a huge increase in a blog’s success. This tells us that rather than focusing one perfect day or time, we should aim to publish at many times, and on many days.’
22 December 2010
[comics] Distributing
Your Seed Via Your Peers … ‘Eww! I don’t
date married guys. Too much DRM.’
21 December 2010
[iraq] Qur’an Etched In Saddam Hussein’s Blood Poses Dilemma For Iraq Leaders … ‘Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur’an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight – locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant’s legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with…’ [via @qwghlm]
20 December 2010
[history] Probably The Most Inappropriate Christmas Card Ever Sent … ‘The year is 1938, and you’re looking for a suitably seasonal picture for the front of your Christmas cards. A festive image which will convey seasonal goodwill to all humanity. What could better symbolise those eternal truths than an international peace treaty signed by the two major European powers which had once been at war?’ [thanks Phil]
19 December 2010
[funny] Study: Women Always Answer Their Phones Unless They’re Having Great Sex With Someone Else … ‘The study emphasized that while women who failed to answer the phone were almost unquestionably with someone else enjoying the most volcanic sensual escapade they’d ever had, there was also the possibility that they were busy gazing deeply into another man’s eyes, knowing and feeling a type of love they had never known or felt before.’
18 December 2010
[space] Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express … from Astronomy Picture of the Day … ‘Phobos orbits so close to Mars that from some places it would appear to rise and set twice a day, but from other places it would not be visible at all. Phobos’ orbit around Mars is continually decaying — it will likely break up with pieces crashing to the Martian surface in about 50 million years.’
17 December 2010
[tip] How to Narrow Down Exact Duplicated Music Files in iTunes … ‘To see all Exact Duplicates in iTunes, Click File from the iTunes menu and then hold down the Option key. Display Duplicates should now change to Display Exact Duplicates, which should result in a shorter list of duplicates.’
[tv] Have you been watching… Peep Show? … ‘Mark’s discussion with himself about Kenneth was the highlight of the series so far – when he told Kenneth to “remain at Brize Norton” I actually had Gillian McKeith-style head-swims I laughed so much.’
16 December 2010
[politics] Bob Crow: ‘I couldn’t care less if we had a million strikes’ … interesting interview with the leader of the RMT Union …‘Since he took charge in 2002 the RMT’s membership has grown from 54,000 to 80,000, and has enjoyed substantial annual pay rises, improved conditions, and even the reopening of a final salary pension scheme. “The Evening Standard had it right, it said I was ‘obsessed’ with improving my members’ living standards. Dead right, I actually get pleasure when I see one of my members get a pay rise. That’s another one we’ve had over them. Yeah, I admit to that.” And they get it, according to Crow, because unlike most modern unions they are willing to strike.’ [via @LDN]
15 December 2010
[everest] Abandoned on Everest … powerful blogpost on the numerous dead bodies of climbers left on Everest (contains disturbing images) … ‘An area along the northeast route to the summit has earned the unassuming nickname of “Rainbow Valley”, simply because of the multicolored down jackets of the numerous corpses littering the hillside. Even in the harsh conditions of lethal altitudes, corpses can remain for decades, some appearing frozen in time with climbing gear intact.’ [via @tomcoates]
14 December 2010
[comics] 2000AD Front Covers To Prog 1500 … great time-lapse animation showing the evolution of the cover over the years …
[tv] Jeremy Kyle ‘At The End Of The Day’ Supercut … ‘At the end of the day they don’t know me do they?’ [click for video]
13 December 2010
[comics] “YRUBB ORUTOO DA YREEMB UYON – – KRYPTONIU EWYRR!” … Mike Sterling on Kryptonian: ‘I suppose, once I have a spare decade and a complete collection of Superman comics, I can catalog the different ways Kryptonian has been represented over the years. Then I can finally fulfill my dream of opening a Kryptonian language camp for underprivileged children, and we can compete with the Klingon language camp across the lake… but perhaps I’ve said too much.’
11 December 2010
[gifs] Winnie the Pooh Mental Disorders GIFs … well done but sad animated GIFs … [click for GIF]
10 December 2010
[blogs] Julian Assange’s Blog …hand crafted, written in 2006-2007 and taken down at some point since then but still available using the Internet Archive …
Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink back into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises; everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over whatever gets them though. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenburgs, Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new. |