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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 5 August 2009
[future] How Is America Going To End? The world’s leading futurologists have four theories … ‘For nearly three hours, we run through America-killers that range from the believable to the science fiction-y: rising sea levels, a collapse of entitlement programs, an attack by a foreign power on American soil, a pandemic 10 times worse than the 1918 flu, global domination by a space-faring nation that uses geo-engineering to “turn off” climate change, and the emergence of a transnational class of biologically enhanced supermen and women (“They’re all about 6-2-and that’s the girls,” Schwartz says) who identify more with one another than with any particular nation…’
4 August 2009
3 August 2009
[funny] Go Watch: Straight out of Surrey by Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer ‘…I have a crime record like Charles Hawtrey.’ [more…]
[moon] To the Moon – with extreme engineering … a look at the story behind The Lunar Orbiter programme – a series of missions which mapped the moon’s surface before the Apollo landings … ‘The Lunar Orbiter astonishes even today. It had to take pictures, scan and develop the film on board, and broadcast it successfully back to earth. Naturally, the orbiter had to provide its own power, orient itself without intervention from ground control, and maintain precise temperature conditions and air pressure for the film processing, and protect itself from solar radiation and cosmic rays – all within severe size and weight constraints. This was far beyond the capabilities of the newest spy satellites, which back then returned the film to earth in a canister, retrieved by a specially kitted-out plane. The Orbiter challenge was the Apollo challenge in miniature.’
1 August 2009
[ronson] Jon Ronson on Gary McKinnon … Ronson tries his best to provide a sympathetic profile of McKinnon …
‘His testimony offers a compelling argument against conspiracy theories. He spent between five and seven years roaming the corridors of power like the Invisible Man, wandering into Pentagon offices, rifling through files, and he found no particular smoking gun about anything. He unearthed nothing to suggest a US involvement in 9/11, nothing to suggest a UFO cover-up. Nothing, he told me, except two things…’ 31 July 2009
[books] Forgotten Bookmarks … ‘I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books.’ [via MetaFilter]
30 July 2009
[comics] Recommended First Comics … A bunch of writers from the Onion’s A.V. club discuss which comics to recommend to new readers … ‘Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta is the good book I reach for when preaching to the heathens. Moore’s dense, self-loathing Watchmen seemed to turn off as many people as it turned on, at least when I tried to recommend it to newbies. But V For Vendetta’s mix of comfort-food dystopia, muted humanism, bleak poetry, and technical virtuosity is a far more palatable icebreaker, and one that serves equally as an entree into mainstream and underground comics. And the bottom line? In spite of its grim tone and literary air, it’s still got a guy in a cape and a mask kicking ass.’
29 July 2009
[comics] Charlie Adlard: giving life to the zombies of the Walking Dead … the English artist of fabulous zombie comic The Walking Dead interviewed by The Times … Adlard: ‘The zombies are the easiest thing to draw in the book. I make them up as I go along! The hardest thing I find is doing pages and pages of people just talking to each other. The Walking Dead has lots of that but the challenge is to make it look interesting.’
28 July 2009
[comics] Time is a Four-Lettered Word by Grant T. Morrison … scans of Near Myths #2 from 1978 – some of Grant Morrison’s earliest published work.
 27 July 2009
[tv] My Shags As A Whore – Mitchell and Webb on Belle de Jour … ‘Being a prostitute is brilliant.’ [more…]
[music] How it feels to be sued for $4.5m by the RIAA … ‘I came home from work to find a stack of papers, maybe 50 pages thick, sitting at the door to my apartment. That’s when I found out what it was like to have possibly the most talented copyright lawyers in the business, bankrolled by multibillion-dollar corporations, throwing everything they had at someone who wanted to share Come As You Are with other Nirvana fans.’
[life] Malcolm Gladwell On The Psychology of Overconfidence … ‘Running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years-if at all. Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms. “I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise…’
26 July 2009
[funny] Kemp Folds … Go Look — a blog of folded photos of Ross Kemp.
24 July 2009
[curtis] It Felt Like a Kiss – The Film … Adam Curtis’ new experimental film is available to view for a short time exclusively from his blog … ‘When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future. The stories can be enchanting or frightening. But they make sense of the world. But when that power begins to ebb… the stories fall apart…’
[health] Kill or Cure? … a website analysing The Daily Mail’s cancer coverage… ‘Help to make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.’
23 July 2009
[comics] Grant Morrison Interview By The Onion A.V. Club … On what appeals to him about comics as a storyteller: … ‘The essentially magical qualities of inert words and ink pictures working together with reader consciousness to create a holographic Sensurround emotional experience. What else?’
[comics] Robert Crumb’s Genesis … scans from a preview of Crumb’s latest work taken from the New Yorker … [via Metafilter]
 22 July 2009
[comics] Reinventing The Pencil: 21 Artists Who Changed Mainstream Comics (For Better Or Worse) … On Chris Ware: ‘Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.’
21 July 2009
[comics] After Watchmen, What’s ‘Unfilmable’? These Legendary Texts … Wired looks at some susposedly unfilmable comics and books … On Sandman: ‘Too long. Spanning 74 issues and more than a decade, if you count spinoffs and standalones, Neil Gaiman’s decorated mythopoetic fantasy starring Dream, Death and other revered, abstract personifications is stuck in film limbo. “There is talk of an HBO Sandman,” Gaiman told Wired.com in March, “because no one quite knows what to do with it. But the truth is, if anybody is going to make [it] a movie, it will probably be a kid in film school right now to whom The Sandman was the most important thing ever. It will take the amount of commitment, dedication and madness that Peter Jackson brought to Lord of the Rings to get it on the screen…”‘
[funny] For Sale – Do You Want A Porn Laptop? … ‘It runs internet pretty fast and I already have about 200 favorites of porn sites saved in my favorites for firefox. It works for porn perfectly, but not big or fast enough for music/video editing or any of that. I wouldn’t type any credit card info with it though, like I said it has some viruses and spyware…’
[space] Abandoned Space Technology … photos of neglected earthbound US and Russian Apollo Era hardware … ‘Abandoned Russian Shuttle found in Arabian Desert’ [via more(ish)]
20 July 2009
[comics] Stephen Frears drawn to Tamara Drewe … ‘Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds’s comic strip about a journalist who ruffles feathers in a rural writers’ retreat, is to be turned into a film by Stephen Frears. The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk.’
[apollo] The Giant Apollo 11 Post … Kottke does a big round up of Apollo 11 links of interest on the internet.
19 July 2009
[apollo] How Michael Collins became the forgotten astronaut of Apollo 11 … profile of Michael Collins and his experience of Apollo 11 …‘Minutes later, Columbia swept behind the Moon and Collins became Earth’s most distant solo traveller, separated from the rest of humanity by 250,000 miles of space and by the bulk of the Moon, which blocked all radio transmissions to and from mission control. He was out of sight and out of contact with his home planet. “I am now truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life. I am it,” he wrote in his capsule. […] Such solitude would have unnerved most people. But not Collins. He says the emotion that he experienced most during his day alone in lunar orbit was that of exultation.’
17 July 2009
[funny] So I Had Sex With A Piñata – From Photo’s on TV … (if i had a Tumblr this would have been on it) … [via DYFL!]
[apollo] Remembering Apollo 11 … fantastic – as always – photo gallery from The Big Picture.
16 July 2009
[comics] The Comic-Book Guide to SIM Hacking … report from the Register – you can download the comic here.
[books] An Interview With Michael Lewis …
‘When I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it’s more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I’d hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I’m getting responses to it for months. And I don’t think the journalism has gotten any better. It’s just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it.’
[comics] Go Look: Eight page preview of David Mazzuchelli’s new comic Asterios Polyp and a slideshow of Superheroes Decadence by Donald Soffritti (a look at what happens when comic heroes and villains get old).
15 July 2009
[comics] The X-Men Universe Relationship Map … ‘Dashed Line – Signifies one of the parties is from an alternative reality.’ [via DYFL?]
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