linkmachinego.com
23 October 2009
[history] Nick Griffin’s Bad Science‘Furthermore, Britain has never had an indigenous population, in the sense of people who evolved here. Every member of Homo sapiens who has ever lived in Britain has been either an immigrant, or the descendent of immigrants. The very first ones, the genetic evidence suggests, came here from an ancestral home in northern Spain or the Basque country.’
[music] The £10,000 playlist … Phil Gyford on iTunes Vs. Spotify… ‘…what I like about my music library is that it’s small. Relatively. I know my way around it. I feel daunted by having to choose between six million tracks on Spotify. Where to start? Option paralysis. My music library is a reflection of me, a reflection of my life since I bought my first CD. As I’ve grown up, the city has also grown, from hamlet to metropolis. It will keep growing, but it still carries my history within.’
22 October 2009
[funny] Watching: Jenga World Record Disaster … ‘Jeez, Brian… I don’t know what to say.’ [more…]
[weird] Take A Weird Break Blog … a blog collecting weird headlines from Take A Break style magazines. [via qwghlm.co.uk]

our GHOST dresses up as WONDER WOMAN!

21 October 2009
[tv] Adam Curtis Uncovers The Secrets Of Helmand … Adam Curtis interviewed by Andrew Orlowski … ‘Documentaries, and a lot of television now, is possessed by the mantra that people will only watch your film, or listen to your program, if it “touches something in them”. So the reporting has to find something in Afghanistan that’s some terrible thing that has happened “to somebody like you, or just like your child”. It’s done with the best intentions, and a certain kind of desperation to keep an audience. But it makes it more and more incomprehensible. Because it becomes a land full of victims and out there in the darkness, dark forces we don’t understand.’
20 October 2009
[media] Michael Wolff on Rupert Murdoch‘Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase-before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology-I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business”.’
19 October 2009
[weird] Left Brain / Right Brain Conflict … Look at the chart and say the COLOUR not the WORD and then get very tongue tied.
[movies] Roger Ebert Reviews Alien

As the sequels (“Aliens,” “Alien 3,” “Alien Resurrection”) will make all too abundantly clear, the alien is capable of being just about any monster the story requires. Because it doesn’t play by any rules of appearance or behavior, it becomes an amorphous menace, haunting the ship with the specter of shape-shifting evil. Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer, calls it a “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility,” and admits: “I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

16 October 2009
[piracy] Worth a look: Everytime You Torrent God Kills A…
[twitter] 10 Things You Need To Stop Tweeting About‘#9 Emotional Breakthroughs’
15 October 2009
[comics] Comic Tools … fascinating blog looking at the craft, tools and skills behind the art on a comic book page.
14 October 2009
[comics] Smilin’ Stan Lee is on Twitter: ‘Uh oh! My appointment just arrived. Gotta get to work. To be continued tomorrow– or tonite if there’s time. Excelsi– whatever!’ [link]
11 October 2009
[bdj] Archbishop of York attacks Belle de Jour for glamourising prostitution‘Dr John Sentamu attacked the books and television programme based on the character Belle de Jour, a high-end London call girl, for misleading the public over the reality of prostitution. He said that the lifestyle portrayed in the works was in stark contrast to the suffering endured by the majority of women involved in the sex trade.’
6 October 2009
[comics] Super-Social Networking: Superhero Facebook Status Updates‘Bruce Wayne is glad to see the new law requiring skylights in all buildings was passed.’ [via Sore Eyes]
5 October 2009
2 October 2009
[comics] Name Five Great Things About Steve Ditko … One of Evan Dorkin’s: ‘I have it on good authority that at a Valiant Comics shindig Ditko got up and went after someone who had taken his photograph, brandishing a chicken leg. No fracas or altercation took place, I just like the image of him shaking a chicken leg at the guy while explaining his reasons for not wishing to be photographed. If I remember correctly, the photograph was “taken care of”. I guess that’s not a reason why Ditko is great, but it is a reason why Ditko is Ditko. And Ditko is great.’
1 October 2009
[comics] Abhay Khosla’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula [Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five]

Dracula's Drycleaner Must Die!

30 September 2009
[comics] A Review Of Big Numbers #3 by Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz‘The opening chapters of his From Hell and Watchmen are compelling, but no one could guess those works’ ultimate richness from those chapters alone. The same would have been all but undoubtedly true of Big Numbers. The third chapter brings a fuller understanding of what was lost by the failure to complete more than a quarter of the book. The failure is beyond a disappointment; it’s about as close to an artistic tragedy as one can imagine.’
29 September 2009
[movies] Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner‘As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions.’ [via @girlonetrack]
28 September 2009
[books] Excerpts From An Interview With James Ellroy‘My dad had another stroke the first week I was at Polk. I got flown home to LA, in my uniform, on emergency leave. Two weeks later, he had yet another stroke. I got flown back again, just in time to see him die. His final words to me were, Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.’
27 September 2009
[funny] 10 Best Things We’ll Say to Our Grandkids‘Our bodies were made of meat and supported by little sticks of calcium.’
25 September 2009
24 September 2009
[space] The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life Gets Weird‘For instance, Leitner said, we can send rovers to Mars carrying antibodies that detect traces of chemicals and bacteria that would indicate life. But because we can only make antibodies to known substances, this method will be limited to finding Earth-like life. “When we try to find a definition for life, in most cases, such a definition is more a summary of the specific properties of terrestrial life,” Leitner said. Because life on Earth requires water, most of the search for extraterrestrial life thus far has focused on the “habitable zone,” or the relatively narrow region around a star where liquid water could exist.’
23 September 2009
[comics] On Writing, Collaboration and Superheroes … interesting look at the dynamics between writers and artists creating comics … ‘If Bendis and Maleev’s take on Daredevil falters at times in its disregard for the formal properties of comics, it is also guilty of rolling out age old tropes for the “revival” of superhero titles. One is left with the impression that mainstream comics writing has not only stagnated but in all likelihood regressed in the last decade becoming competent yet mediocre.’
[funny] Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 PM‘According to the panel, the final event will occur at 3:32 p.m., when a tourist, believing the impressive structure to be a giant mall, will enter Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and, not finding what he is looking for, ask where “the damn Radio Shack is supposed to be.” The man, dressed in Crocs and sweatpants and determined by researchers to be the final catalyst in humanity’s epic downfall, will then loudly expel gas.’
22 September 2009
21 September 2009
[comics] Psychological Violence In Late 1970s/Early 1980s UK Girls Comics … notes from a talk at Interesting 2009‘The huge success of Tammy, which ran from 1971 to 1984, was partially based on some actual research by IPC magazine into what girls enjoyed reading about. Apparently they liked to be made to cry. Vulnerable amnesiacs who avoided multiple, mysterious attempts on their lives to discover their parents had been killed in some kind of transport ‘accident’ sent sales figures of up to a quarter of a million a week…’
18 September 2009
[999] History by numbers … a brief history of of the UK’s emergency number 999 … ‘On June 30, 1937 the Assistant Postmaster General, Sir Walter Womersley, told the House of Commons that the new emergency service would be trialled in London. For reasons now lost to history, MPs burst out laughing at the announcement that the number would be 999 (perhaps because, amid the gathering storm of war, it sounded like a German saying “no” three times).’
17 September 2009
[work] Does your e-mail reveal how productive you are?‘When analyzing managers, Cataphora tries to determine who is passing the digital buck. One tendency of a bad manager is to forward e-mails with questions like What do you think of this? rather than offering specific ideas or meaningful instructions. In contrast, certain people in the organization collect and then answer many of these open-ended queries. They seem to be the people who are really making decisions.’ [via As Above]