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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 20 August 2024
[tv] Recreating The People’s Poet Badges … Faboulous project to recreate the badges worn by Rik in the Young Ones. ‘So I began my research. I first researched screenshots, episodes, official photographs and portraits, gathering as many references as I could. But there were still some that were unidentified and from what I’d seen, previous cosplayers had filled the unidentified badges with a related badge to The Young Ones or a political badge that they imagined Rick would have…’
19 August 2024
[tv] A Lunch with Adrian Edmondson … ‘That understanding is really the triumph of Edmondson’s own career. He had some demons to overcome – including intrusive suicidal thoughts, which he was surprised to discover not everyone had. He has been saved – and thrived – as an actor and writer, by the two great love stories of his life. The abiding one is with Saunders. They have kept celebrity at bay, he suggests, partly by living most of the time on the edge of Dartmoor. He tells how one of their daughters came home from school one day in some distress. Kids in the playground had been insisting that her mother was the famous Jennifer Saunders off the telly, and she had been insisting that no, she was Jennifer Edmondson…’
16 August 2024
[books] The Later Years of Douglas Adams … A look back at Douglas Adams creative struggles later in his career. ‘This time he had to be locked into a room with not only a handler from his publisher but his good friend Michael Bywater, who had, since doing Bureaucracy for Infocom, fallen into the role of Adams’s go-to ghostwriter for many of the contracts he signed and failed to follow through on. Confronted with the circumstances of its creation, one is immediately tempted to suspect that substantial chunks of Mostly Harmless were actually Bywater’s work. By way of further circumstantial evidence, we might note that some of the human warmth that marked the first four Hitchhiker’s novels is gone, replaced by a meaner, archer style of humor that smacks more of Bywater than the Adams of earlier years.’
13 August 2024
[comics] The Funnies Have Gone Down, Down, Down … Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich discuss comics.
12 August 2024
[books] What I’ve Learned: Stephen King … Some life lessons from Stephen King. ‘When I have a good idea, I just know. It’s like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you’re hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.’
8 August 2024
[tech] Dinosaur’s Pen … A nostalgic collection of old technology images.
6 August 2024
[comics] Wallace Wood’s Official Shit List … File under Ancient Comics Gossip. ‘Rick Stoner, who visited Wood’s home in Derby, Connecticut, on the 14th and 15th of April 1978 then went with him to Niagara Falls on the 16th, would give no clues. “I won’t name any names from this list of about twenty or so,” he wrote in his article Remembering Wally Wood, printed in issue 11 of The Journal of Madness in June 2001, “I’m just glad I wasn’t on that one”. Thankfully for us, Stoner took plenty of photographs of Wood’s home on Saturday the 15th April 1978, some of which were reprinted in that same issue of The Journal of Madness, and one of them features a very clear shot of Wood’s Official Shit List. Twenty-one names of important and well-respected members of the comics industry…’ (reblog)
5 August 2024
[movies] Uzumaki Teaser … Adultswim’s animated version of Junji Ito’s horror manga arriving late September.
1 August 2024
[food] ‘One of the most disgusting meals I’ve ever eaten’: AI recipes tested… A look at the unwelcome rise of the AI Cookbook. ‘I have an even better time with Teresa’s The Ultimate Anti-Inflammatory Cookbook for Beginners. Here I am reminded why proofreaders exist. Something in the AI processing for this book took objection to the word “and”, turning it into “&;” in every instance. It inadvertently leads to beautiful phrases such as “h&ful cori&der” and “using an immersion blender or even by “h&”. We know that AI struggles with hands, but this is ridiculous. The Japanese hotpot I attempt – not obviously anti-inflammatory, like all the other recipes – is one of the most disgusting meals I have ever eaten.’
30 July 2024
[life] The Scale of Life … Fascinating real-time statistics about what is happening right now all over the world. ‘Year to date, Number of Hours Worked: 5,224,497,264,667’ [via Andrew Ducker]
26 July 2024
[life] The surprising data behind supercentenarians … Tim Harford sugggests a surprising reason why some people live so long. ‘In the US, Newman finds that the outstanding predictor of longevity is patchy birth records. Introducing proper records in the late 19th century reduced by more than two-thirds the number of babies who would eventually seem to reach the age of 110. That suggests that, until recently, seven out of 10 apparent supercentenarians were, in fact, younger than claimed. This all points to error or outright fraud.’
23 July 2024
[ai] GANksy — A.I. street artist … ‘We trained a StyleGAN2 neural network using the portfolio of a certain street artist to create GANksy, a twisted visual genius whose work reflects our unsettled times.’
22 July 2024
[comics] 10 major cartoon characters entering the public domain between 2024 and 2034 … ‘Popeye the Sailor (2025) – Popeye first appeared in the “Thimble Theatre” newspaper comic strip in 1929. He soon became the strip’s star, and Olive Oyl’s new boyfriend (replacing her previous beau, one “Harold Hamgravy”). Popeye made the leap to animation in 1933.’
17 July 2024
[morris] Errol Morris on whether you should be afraid of generative AI in documentaries… Errol Morris interviewed. ‘Film isn’t reality, no matter how it’s shot. You could follow some strict set of documentary rules…it’s still a film. It’s not reality. I have this problem endlessly with Richard Brody, who writes reviews for The New Yorker, and who is a kind of a documentary purist. I guess the idea is that if you follow certain rules, the veritical nature of what you’re shooting will be guaranteed. But that’s nonsense, total nonsense. Truth, I like to remind people — whether we’re talking about filmmaking, or film journalism, or journalism, whatever — it’s a quest.’
16 July 2024
[space] Five of Saturn’s Moons in a Group Portrait … ‘On July 29, 2011, Cassini captured five of Saturn’s moons in a single frame with its narrow-angle camera. This is a full-color look at a view that was originally published in September 2011’
11 July 2024
[podcast] Things Fell Apart… A BBC Podcast by Jon Ronson on the many, varied stories behind the culture wars.
10 July 2024
[comics] Batman’s Aff His Nut … Possibly the best Scottish poem about Batman ever written. ‘Mate, I’m worried aboot ye
I know your ma and da died But everybody’s ma and da dies And we’re no aw runnin aboot Hookin muggers and Kickin psychopaths in the baws.” And that was when Batman went “Aye, but do ye ever feel like it? Do you ever look at the world and feel like it?’
5 July 2024
[comics] The Secret Life of Steve Ditko: Spider-Man Co-Creator’s Family Opens Up … Some insight into Steve Ditko’s life from his family. ‘One crispy Christmas during the early 1960s, Mark, only four or five, asked his uncle to sketch him a picture of a gorilla. Using only a pencil, his uncle cast a spell across the paper, and there he was: Konga, in all his glory. “Uncle Steve,” Mark beamed. “You are really good.”’ (archive link)
4 July 2024
[politics] The End of the Tories … Tanya Gold sums up the Conservative election campaign. ‘Old hands in British media call this a rolling goat fuck. The question as we reach the end is not who won’t vote for the Tories but who will. Remainers hate them because Brexit happened. Brexiteers hate them because Brexit has failed. Liberals hate them because they are tough on immigration. Right-wingers hate them because they are not tough enough. Those who hate public services think taxes are too high. Those who love public services think they do not work. Young people hate them because they have no housing. Old people hate them because Sunak left ghost troops on the beaches of Normandy. They have no constituency left.’
2 July 2024
[travel] Obvious Travel Advice … Useful list of thoughts on travel. ‘Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.’
1 July 2024
[politics] Aggregating Predictions for the General Election … A website collecting seat-by-seat poll predictions for the 2024 UK General Election.
27 June 2024
[vending] A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world … A wonderfully written profile on the world of vending machines. ‘At 12.45am, a white-chocolate Twix dropped into the well of a machine in Blackfriars in London. At a taxi depot in Belfast, drivers on overnight standby thumbed in coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. Cans of sugar-free Tango slammed down in the surgeons’ staffroom at an Edinburgh hospital. Bottles of Mountain Dew, already long past expiry, turned another hour older inside a Covid-shuttered office in North Carolina. A Japanese accountant, several hours ahead of Europe and the US in a southern prefecture called Ehime, eyed the familiar choices in a cup-noodle machine by his desk…’
26 June 2024
[hannibal] I don’t know who needs this today but here is an ASMR cooking video with Hannibal Lecter.
24 June 2024
[dads] Trolley Problem Variations for Dads … Another list from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. ‘Dad is given both options of the Trolley Problem. But as he begins to think it over, he keeps saying, “This is exactly like the Kobayashi Maru!” He then spends so much time explaining how Captain Kirk cheated to win the scenario that he never pulls the lever.’
21 June 2024
[crime] Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man? … What I learned from this true crime story is that it is very hard to hire a hitman on the dark web. ‘Christopher was an unlikely client in the murder-for-hire trade. He was not violent and had no criminal record. When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children.’
20 June 2024
[internet] What the Internet Was Like in 2004 … ‘Blogging was still niche in 2004, but it was increasingly where daily conversations online were happening. I started out in 2002 using a desktop app called Radio Userland, but in early May 2004, I switched to a browser-based blog platform called Movable Type. The “blogosphere” was kind of a prototype for social media, because it was where people learned to be opinionated and express ‘takes’ on the internet. The beauty of the blogosphere was that it was truly decentralised.’
19 June 2024
18 June 2024
[tech] How to Copy a File From a 30-year-old Laptop … A technology archaeology story. ‘While the laptop has no networking software, it does have fax software. We confirmed the modem could dial, so this might just be crazy enough to work. The first question was how to turn the audio file into something faxable. The laptop contains a collection of games. Alongside them is a resource editor, called ResEdit, which had previously been used to inspect and modify the aforementioned games. Let’s see what it can do…’
17 June 2024
[q&a] Jon Ronson: ‘It’s getting harder to be optimistic’… A “This Much I Know” Q&A with Jon Ronson. ‘I’m scared of not being able to work. That’s why I wrote You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, because being publicly shamed and prevented from working is the biggest horror I could think of – not so much the shaming part but the being prevented from working part.’
11 June 2024
[comics] Why is the Sonic comic so controversial? … A really fascinating look at the personalities, controversies and lawsuits around Archie’s long-running Sonic The Hedgehog comic.
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