8 May 2009
[lists] 10 Best Head-Scratching Stories, Explained … ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth: Jimmy relives his granddad’s life. He finally meets his father, who then dies. Superman can’t save him.’
7 May 2009
[politics] Diamond Geezer Calls the 2010 General Election … ‘Go on, see if I’m wrong.’
[windows] Windows Tip: Left Click The Device Removal Notification Icon … another simple Windows tip I can’t believe I’ve never realised. Left Click! Left Click!!! :) ‘…according to the traditional rules for notification icons (and the device removal icon was written back in Windows 95, when the traditional rules were operative), left clicking gives you the simple menu and right clicking gives you the advanced menu. This customer was so accustomed to right-clicking on notification icons that the idea of left-clicking never even occurred to him.’
6 May 2009
[movies] Top 13 Stupidest Decisions In The History Of Horror Films … ‘Building your house on top of that old cemetery.’
5 May 2009
[funny] Let’s Say You’ve Gone Back In Time … useful document for all time travellers …‘Insulin can be extracted from the pancreas of dogs and pigs by tying a string around the pancreatic duct. Inject this extract and it will act as a miraculous treatment. Forget Banting and Best. Take the credit.’
4 May 2009
[comics] Brendan McCarthy finds a lost Doom Patrol Script from Grant Morrison [Page 1 | Page 2] … ‘I found this DOOM PATROL script the other day that I had doodled all over, from Grant Morrison… It was an episode that Grant wrote for me to draw back in 1991/92 or thereabouts: I asked for an old style DC ‘imaginary story’ with Danny The Street as the central character. But by the time the script turned up, I had to do a film so I couldn’t draw it’ …
![]() 3 May 2009
[comics] Steve Bell Interviewed … ‘For all that his politics may be congenial to Guardian readers, there’s something about Bell’s style that doesn’t seem to sit too well with the paper’s generally earnest attitude. “I did used to get quite a number of disapproving letters, though these days I don’t – I get emails slagging me off instead” he says. “It has been said that I’m the kind of Id of the Guardian, running around waving my arms in the air while everyone else is having these deliberations. I don’t know, to be honest”.’ [thanks Phil]
2 May 2009
[books] Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world … more from Nassim Nicholas Taleb … ‘Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).’ [via Metafilter]
1 May 2009
[comics] Dave Sim and Cerebus at Coventry Cathedral in 1989 … by Sim and Gerhard – the front cover to Fantasy Advertiser #115.
30 April 2009
[blogs] Texts from Last Night Blog … ‘my mouth tastes like poor choices’
29 April 2009
[comics] Alan Moore’s Glory Notes … a proposal from Moore on how to revamp one of Rob Liefeld’s Awesome characters … ‘I suppose this as good a time as any to discuss my ideas about how the sexuality in Glory should be handled. As with my notes on Youngblood, my central idea is to prime the story with plenty of open spaces for the readers’ filthy, disgusting thirteen year old minds to inhabit… which is only natural… without doing anything that is anything other than entirely innocent and in keeping with classic comic tradition. I think the word for our best approach is “disingenuous”.’
28 April 2009
[comics] The Ten All-Time Best Long-Running Comics Series … great list from Tom Spurgeon … On Dave Sim: ‘I don’t know yet what I think of it as an artistic achievement, but I greatly enjoyed huge swaths of it. The further away from its published conclusion I get the more I’m convinced that it’s something special in terms of comics history, and the further along I get in my own artistic journey the more I’m certain that even if he doesn’t realize it, Dave won.’
27 April 2009
[funny] Ask Mefi: I would like a comprehensive list of each offense Ferris and his friends commit during the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” … ‘There are many cases of fraud in the movie. For example, when one kid is asked, “Do you know Ferris Bueller,” he responds, “Yeah, he’s getting me out of summer school.” [..]
Oh, and in theory, Cameron’s father could go after both Ferris and Cameron for grand theft auto of the Ferrari.’
26 April 2009
[space] Cassini’s continued mission … The Big Picture on Cassini’s six year voyage around Saturn … ‘The spacecraft continues to operate in good health, returning amazing images of Saturn, its ring system and moons, and providing new information and science on a regular basis.’
25 April 2009
[film] Go Watch: Carousel … I watched this and wondered… Where’s Batman? … ‘Tribal DDB, Amsterdam commissioned us to create a piece of filmed content that could hold its own with Hollywood’s best. Director Adam Berg responded with an idea for an epic ‘frozen moment’ cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings.’
24 April 2009
[funny] God is on Twitter … ‘I could post 141 characters if I wanted to.’ [via @BeaucoupKevin]
[what-if] Nixon’s Undelivered Moon Disaster Speech … What would Richard Nixon have said if disaster had trapped the Apollo 11 Astronauts on the moon? … ‘In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.’
22 April 2009
[comics] Neil Gaiman Writes a Final ‘Love Letter to Batman’ … Wired on Gaiman and Andy Kubert’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? … ‘Well, the great thing about Batman and Superman, in truth, is that they are literally transcendent. They are better than most of the stories they are in. That’s jut Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.” Can you imagine how many thousands, or millions, of words have been written on Batman? Try to read them and you’re looking at 100,000 pages, perhaps a million, and you can assume that 90 percent of it is crap. Yet the 10 percent, and even better the 1 percent of that 10 perfect, is absolutely glorious. That pays for everything.’
21 April 2009
[funny] Go Look: Escape From Thom Yorke [via David McCandless]
[comics] Brendan McCarthy Art Show at Orbital Comics: ‘Featuring a lost image from the graphic novel SKIN, some drawings from a new comic project, DREAMTREES, a number of published ARTOONS from the CRISIS period of the early 90’s and more pictures from Brendan’s archive of unpublished art. Brendan is currently working on a new Spider-Man/Dr Strange mini series for Marvel Comics, out later this year.’
20 April 2009
[comics] Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will … profile of the designer of Comic Sans … ‘Mr. Connare says he pulled out the two comic books he had in his office, “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Watchmen,” and got to work, inspired by the lettering and using his mouse to draw on a computer screen. Within a week, he had designed his legacy.’ [via More(ish)]
19 April 2009
[tv] Disturbing Strokes … the opening to Different Strokes set to music from a horror film … ‘This has turned out far more creepy than I thought it would.’
16 April 2009
[books] Unspeakable Horrors – H. P. Lovecraft was a Racist … ‘Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
15 April 2009
[funny] Uncomfortable Plot Summaries … from postmodernbarney.com … ‘DAREDEVIL: Blind man pisses off crime boss, gets all his girl-friends killed.’
14 April 2009
[polictics] Slugger O’Toole on Smeargate: ‘… if you pick a fight with someone who has nothing to lose (and you do), you’re the one most likely to end up on the floor. To quote blog sceptic Geert Lovint, ‘blogging is a bleed-to-death strategy’. Mr Draper is a PR professional floundering in a world he barely understands, allowed himself to be entranced by the (what Lovint terms) ‘banal nihilism’ of one particular type of blogging, and now finds himself being bled to death through his own actions.’
[blogs] Nick Denton Quote On Blogging from 2002: ‘People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.’ Nick was certainly right about that wasn’t he?
13 April 2009
[science] Go Watch: What happens when you drop a cannon ball in a bath of mercury? [via Kottke]
12 April 2009
[news] Adam Curtis on the Rise of Oh Dear-ism in Television News … ‘It’s like living in the mind of a depressed hippy.’ [more…]
10 April 2009
[press] Richard Littlejohn Audit 2008: Year Of The Nazi … ‘I have concluded that 2008 for Richard was very much the year of the ‘Nazi’. Littlejohn gave us the: ‘elf ‘n’ safety nazi’, ‘road safety nazi’, ‘anti-smoking nazi’, ‘eco-nazis’, ‘dustbin nazis’, ‘recycling nazis’, ‘diversity nazis’, ‘tinpot nazis’, ‘condiment nazis’, ‘nail-varnish nazis’, ‘noise abatement nazis’ and ‘City of London Corporation safety nazis.’ [via More(ish)]
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