[xmas] ‘Tis the Season — an Xmas blog from Anna and Meg. Also worth checking out is Meg’s Mince Pie Mania Flickr Group: ‘This group is all about capturing the ultimate Mince Pie. It’s a Christmas favourite but no-one can agree on what makes it just right. Some argue it’s the deep fill mince, others the shortcrust pastry and others still prefer half and half. I’m on the half and half side but your challenge this Christmas, should you chose to accept, is to get photographing those Mince Pies…’

[life] ‘Our two poos have combined…’ — Jon Ronson reporting from the toilets on a RyanAir Flight. ‘…here in the toilet, I have an epiphany. “If there’s someone waiting outside,” I think, “I’m going to hold the door open for them!” I nod to myself and open the door. There’s a man standing there. “Here you are!” I say cheerfully. Together, we glance at the space I’m welcoming him into – a tiny, brown, disgusting cubicle. He furrows his brow, slightly taken aback, and enters. I cram myself back in my seat. “That was a nice and well-balanced thing for me to do,” I think.’ [Related: Out Of The Ordinary: True Tales Of Everyday Craziness on Amazon]

[games] Asteroids Revenge – amusing Flash sequel to the classic Atari Asteroids computer game. [via Waxy’s Links]

[simpsons] When iPods take over the Earth — screengrabs from a new episode of the Simpsons showing what happens after the iPods become self-aware.

[myspace] Murder”‰on”‰MySpace — Wired documents another murder involving MySpace … ‘In many murders, victims and their killers are acquainted: wife shoots husband, crack dealer stabs customer, pimp strangles streetwalker. So you would expect some interaction among the friends and relatives of the perpetrator and the victim. In fact, typically there’s little. Even after intra-family crimes, relatives tend to choose sides and stay on them. “People distance themselves,” says Charles Figley, head of Florida State University’s Traumatology Institute. “The ties that bind people – births, marriages – split apart because of a catastrophe.” On social network sites, those sides interact. Victims’ buddies can howl at killers’ cousins, and the cousins can scream back. “All the old social relationship models and theories don’t apply anymore,” Figley adds. “We’re rewriting textbooks here.”‘

[comics] Tharg the Mighty’s MySpace Profile … ‘Borag Thungg, Earthlets!’ [via this Metafilter post on Eddie Campbell and 2000AD creators blogging]

[comics] Eddie Campbell has a Blog … ‘In the old days i’d have made a one-page ‘Alec’ out of this, but today we squander our narratives in a blog.’ [via Comics Reporter]

[comics] Scans of The Master Race by Bernie Krigstein … [via Comics Reporter]

[books] Robert Pirsig Interview — a wide-ranging discussion with the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance … ‘He says that ever since he could think he had an overwhelming desire to have a theory that explained everything. As a young man – he was at university at 15 studying chemistry – he thought the answer might lie in science, but he quickly lost that faith. ‘Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even.’ He went to search elsewhere…’

[tv] Binge Watching Contemporary TV — the blog City of Sound on DVD Box Sets … ‘When binge watching really kicks in, the form of the content itself is implicitly involved, as I’d suggest that the tighter the ‘universe’ the show inhabits, the higher the levels of intensity involved. In other words, with a show like ‘The West Wing’ – of which more later – the same set of characters inhabiting largely the same few spaces of the same location over seven seasons creates a gravitational pull which is difficult to escape from. Similarly, ‘Lost’, in being confined by an island, builds up a fictional universe one is immersed for most of the episode, with flashbacks off-island simply a counterpoint to the resolution of returning to that natural prison. Arguably, most successful TV shows have attempted to create a tightly defined universe…’

[books] Digested Read: In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal … ‘Black Forest Gateau has an undeserved reputation as a dessert for chavs. My extensive research, both in Germany and at the Fat Duck development kitchen, has proved that Toscano Black 63 chocolate, when combined with cherries soaked in the urine of adolescent male squirrels, is a feast for the senses.’ [Related: In Search of Perfection on Amazon]

[movies] The Top 10 Movie Spaceships … ‘The Nostromo is little more than a space tugboat, pulling a giant ore refinery through space. Though it has no weapons, when given the (famously complex) command to self-destruct, it really goes off with a bang. An underrated ship, it could land on planets and scope out foreign lifeforms… which turned out to be not such a great idea after all.’

[comics] A Transcript of Alan Moore on Fanboy Radio — you can also download the podcast … Moore on the Simpsons Episode: ‘The episode involves new competition to The Android’s Dungeon that brings in hip comic creators like “my hip self, the hip Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes to their new shop. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone are listening… your South Park DVD distribution here in the UK is shameful! Should they offer to let me on their show, I’d do it. I dunno – if George Clooney can play a gay dog… If there is some other sexually-confused animal, I’d be a natural for it in many ways.’

[books] Creator of a monstrous hit — profile of Thomas Harris the man behind Hannibal Lecter and his new book Hannibal Rising … ‘The profound mystery of the first two Lecter novels, Red Dragon (1981), in which the doctor appears only as a minor character, and in prison at that, and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), was that no psychological explanation was offered for his extreme cruelty. He was beholden to no one and seemed to have come from nowhere. ‘Nothing happened to me,’ he tells Clarice Starling, the investigator whose mission it becomes to trap him. ‘I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.’ But this, it seems, is exactly what Harris is now attempting to do: to reduce Lecter to a set of influences, to show how he became the man he is, without conscience or remorse…’

[rss] I updated LMG to WordPress a couple of months ago. It was pretty painless and I hope no one actually noticed the change but one of the downsides was that I had to redirect my RSS feed. The permanent home of the new feed can be found here:

http://www.timemachinego.com/linkmachinego/feed/
The old feed will still work but if you’re anal about these things you might want to update it. While I’m at it – you can email me via this form if you wish and if you’re stalking me you might find my Del.icio.us Linklog and Flickr Photostream interesting.

[tech] Health fears lead schools to dismantle wireless networks … ‘Michael Bevington, a classics teacher for 28 years at the school, said that he had such a violent reaction to the network that he was too ill to teach. “I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom,” he said. “First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.”’

[film] Who killed Superman? — more from the Guardian on the true story behind the movie Hollywoodland … ‘As with the many theories that swirl around the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short – the tortured and mutilated Black Dahlia – there are too many contradictory pieces to assemble a single coherent jigsaw puzzle of Reeves’ death/murder. Or rather, there are perhaps three jigsaws with not enough pieces to complete any of them.’

[tv] Make Love, Not Warcraft — Southpark animators discuss intergrating World of Warcraft into an episode of the animated TV Show … ‘The Blizzard team gave us a special “friends and family” server to play on. Every once an a while a strange player would walk by and check out group the filming. The programmers could instantly kill a player that got in the way of filming. There’s a player out there wondering what they had stumbled upon just before they were wiped from the location.’

[tv] It’s Like A Jungle Sometimes — Grace Dent on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here … ‘Being in the jungle makes you constipated. Nobody aside from Lauren Booth has had a poo. Oddly enough, living on a diet of boiled muddy water and chargrilled alligator bum doesn’t do much for the bowels. Neither does sitting on the loo praying for movement with David Gest’s ghoulish face against the door clutching a bucket of water asking if you’ve had any luck.’

[comics] Roaring’s Rantin’s: The Tale of Rudcliff and Williams — scans of an obscure Brendan McCarthy and Pete Milligan comic strip from 1987 …

[comics] Chris Weston has a Blog — Chris Weston was the artist on The Filth with Grant Morrison and Ministry of Space with Warren Ellis … ‘One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at me (by the inbred, ingrate scum who pose as my colleagues) is the fact that all my characters look JUST LIKE ME! That’s one if the hazards of using photographic reference when you’ve only got yourself as a model.’ [via BeaucoupKevin]

[books] The Mother Load — another interview with James Ellroy … ‘What I like about the era I am writing about, meaning 1958 to 1972, is that the anti-Communism mandate justified virtually any kind of clandestine activity. I like exploring the mind-set of extreme expediency.’ [via Kottke]

[comics] Seven Soldiers Wrap-Up Interview with Grant Morrison … ‘Remember the first time you picked up an X-Men or Avengers book and it was stuffed to the staples with parallel universes, clones, alternate future versions of characters, and a continuity so dense you could stand a spoon in it? The chaos, confusion and excitement of being thrown without a guidebook into a new world was intoxicating to me and it seems that superhero comics only start to get boring when that sense of anything-can-or-can’t-happen is replaced by familiarity.’ [via Journalista]

[stories] Very Short Stories — some notable writers create six word stories inspired by one from Ernest Hemingway … Alan Moore: ‘Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time’ [via qwghlm.co.uk]

[thisisgood] David Blaine Street Magic Spoof — NSFW, it’s loud with much swearing but laugh-out-loud funny. [via Metafilter]

[blogs] Russell Davies on Blogging: ‘It’s easy to knock blogging as a kind of journalism of the banal but in some ways that’s its strength. Bloggers don’t go out and investigate things (mostly) they’re not in exciting or glamorous places, they’re not given a story, they have to build one out of the everyday lives they lead. And this makes them good at noticing things, things that others might not have seen. And being a blogger, feeling the need to write about stuff makes you pay attention to more things, makes you go out and see more stuff, makes you carry a notebook, keeps you tuned in to the world.’ (from a larger article on “How To Be Interesting“)

[wikipedia] My Wikipedia Contrail: Russell’s Teapot … Bertrand Russell: ‘If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.’

[secondlife] Warren Ellis on Second Life: ‘The laissez-faire nature of SL has turned much of the mainland into a retard’s toybox. Second Life is, by and large, an ugly, stupid-looking place, a riot of bad signage, lurid coloured blocks and constructions that’d embarrass a four-year-old playing with Lego.’

[comics] ‘…and get this Pigeon off my head!’ — goofy old panel from Action Comics #331 spotted on scans_daily.

[tv] Never-Ending Stories — article about how to fix the format of TV Shows like Lost. ‘Puzzles are meant to be solved, not prolonged. You can only tease viewers so long before they feel like they’re being mocked.’ [via City of Sound]