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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 15 June 2003
[blogs] Beta Standalone Trackback Form — another reason not to listen to the geeky voice at the back of my head telling me blogging would be a lot easier if I upgraded to Movable Type … ‘This form can be used to send a trackback ping to any blog that accepts Trackbacks. You do not need to have a Trackback system on your blog to send pings.’ [Related: Simpletracks | via Anil’s Daily Links]
14 June 2003
[spam] Open Relay Spam is ‘Dying Out’ — Where does the typical Spam come from then? … ‘Spammers traditionally used ‘open relays’ to distribute their spam. Open relays allowed spammers to off load the job of sending thousands of emails to a powerful server with high bandwidth. The practice slows down the processing of legitimate email and clogs up bandwidth, to say nothing of the potential damage to reputation that comes from even innocently sending out spam. Years ago spammers were spoilt for choice for open relays, but now the window for exploitation of corporate mail servers has reduced dramatically…’
13 June 2003
[comics] Fanta Out Of Fire — interview with Gary Groth about the sucessful Fantagraphics appeal … [via Neilalien]
‘GROTH: I caught it about a week or two before we sent out the open letter. Just in the natural course of paying bills and looking over our upcoming list, something triggered this. I realized that things weren’t right, and that’s what did it. I called an emergency meeting with Kim and our accountant, and sat down to empirically verify my gut feeling that this was not good.
[books] Life, the universe and everything — profile of Bill Bryson … Regarding his new book: ‘…the result is 30 chapters of slightly awestruck potted science – cosmology, palaeontology, evolution, cells, oceans, forests, the birth of self-creating life, the rise of man. Sensibly, Bryson leavens the jaw-dropping statistics and atomic physics with some droll stories of scientific endeavour from the last 300 years. Such as the astronomer Percival Lowell, who believed that Mars was covered with water-ferrying canals built by industrious Martians; few sought to disagree with him because he was, after all, endowing the expensive Lowell Observatory (which discovered Pluto in 1930).’
12 June 2003
[bb4] Ebay Auction: johntickle.com — currently at £510 with 3 days to go and it’s misspelt … ‘You are bidding for the complete ownership and management of JOHNTICKLE.COM. Due to a certain persons popularity in a certain Channel 4 production, this domain name is going to be very popular and will attract a LOT of visitors.’
[books] A Beautiful Mind — profile / interview of science writer Paul Broks (“the new Oliver Sacks”) …
‘What would he tell a stranger the book is about? “Without putting them off?” he asks with an uncertain smile. “That’s the difficult thing. Well it’s about how personal identity is fragile, and how at one level we’re basically meat and at another level we’re basically fiction – human beings are storytelling machines, and the self is a story, and we tell a story about ourselves, and we just pick up on the story.” He stops, defeated…’ 11 June 2003
[bb4] Jon’s Geek Army — Jon Tickle fanpage … ‘Chosen by God, Loved by Women.’ [Related: Jontical]
10 June 2003
[blogs] Simple Guide to the A-List Bloggers. On Chris Pirillo: ‘I am everything. I created newsletters. I made them work. Want some of my spammy newsletters? Former TechTV star. I am cool. The size of my ego wouldn’t even fit in Texas. Doncha wish you lived my life? In the Age of Spam, my answer to everything is email newsletters, yes, links to shareware, freeware, thisware, that ware, along with smart comments quips from Super Geek, why I mean me, of course. It is all about branding and my chaotic hyperkinetic personality. Join my Brain Trust and I can tell you how *I* did it, yes, yoooou tooo, can cassssshhhh in on all the Internet Riches out there just waitttting to be found, for onnnnnlllllllyyyyy $97 a month. But waiiiiit thereeeereee’s moooree, we’ll throw in a cool piece of Pocket PC software that I got from my Microsoft buddies. They like me. I like me. I use a Palm now however. But I am Super Geek.’ [via Ben Hammersley]
[web] Drudge Match — Camille Paglia interviews Matt Drudge. [via Anil’s Daily Links]
‘PAGLIA: There’s something retro about your persona. It’s like the pre-World War II generation of reporters — those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they’ve all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds — utterly dull and insipid. 9 June 2003
[weblogs] Blogging’s too Good For Them — from today’s New Media section in the Guardian … ‘Just imagine… no more illiterate teenage wannabes clogging up the world’s most popular search engine with their idiotic “which Sex And The City character are you?” quizzes and incestuous links to their mates. No more American neo-Nazis babbling on about the Dixie Chicks and inciting racial hatred. No more tree-huggers talking about henna tattoos, home schooling and tofu. Just a list of proper sites full of proper information, written by proper journalists and proper academics. Fantastic.’
[books] Excerpt from /usr/bin/god — Two thousand word extract from Cory Doctrow’s new novel … ‘Everyone was a font of creativity and interesting factoids. Conversation was solidly anti-idiotarian, a form of discourse that ran, “Here is a $THING. It is stupid. I am smarter;” “I see! Here is $ANOTHER_THING, it is likewise stupid and I am likewise smarter.” It wasn’t just a fucking stock-market bubble — it was nerdvana.’
7 June 2003
[spam] BT Blocked by Spam Blacklist … ‘BT has been rocked by allegations that its own servers are “dangerously misconfigured, insecure or abuseable” and are exposing email users to the threat of increased levels of unsolicited mail. A number of BT customers attempting to email friends and colleagues have been perplexed by their emails bouncing back with a delivery error message…’
6 June 2003
[web] The Eighties Tarot — tarot cards as pop icons from the Eighties … ‘The serendipitous Ferris Bueller, loved by sportos, motorheads, geeks and sluts alike, is the perfect Fool.’
5 June 2003
I’ve been thinking about underpants lately … How many pairs of Underpants should a man own? Is 14 too many or too few? How many pairs of Underpants do you have? Tell Me.
4 June 2003
[comics] Fantagraphics Appeal Paying Off — Team Comics seems to be saving Fantagraphics … Eric Reynolds: ‘This grass roots campaign looks to be a phenomenal success: if orders continue at close to the rate they have for the last five days, we project that by weeks’ end we will have achieved our immediate goal of… $80,000.’
[iraq] Baghdad Blogger — the first Guardian column from Salam Pax … ‘Beside all the papers we now have a TV channel and radio; they are part of what our American minders have called the Iraqi media network. My favourite TV show on it is an old Japanese cartoon (here it is called Adnan wa Lina). It is about what happens after a third world war when chaos reigns the earth. Bad choice for kids’ programming if you ask me.’ [Related: Salam Pax is Real]
3 June 2003
[blogs] Mission Fullfilled — Warbloggers feel sad and unsatisfied after wargasm … ‘I myself did notice something rather odd about a week after combat ended in Iraq. I was relieved that we finally attacked, and even more relieved that the war was quick and that our military suffered as few casualties as they did in winning it. But I also felt, oddly, a kind of let-down, an emptiness, something missing.’
2 June 2003
[blogs] Downhill — six degrees of
1 June 2003
[blogs] If You Really Want To Know, Ask A Blogger — The Observer’s John Naughton on Blogs …
‘[…] the whole point of the web is full and comprehensive linking, and Google ranks pages by the numbers of other pages that link to them, it is hardly surprising that blogs are winning over established media. Nobody in his right mind would link to a mere abstract. A few Big Media outlets understand this elementary fact. The Guardian and The Observer sites are exemplary in this regard – which is why they are beginning to outrank their competitors (for example, the London Times and the New York Times) in web searches.’ 31 May 2003
[bb4] Jon’s Website (of rather interesting things and little known facts) … ‘The universe is like, well big and is made up of loads of galaxies. Galaxies contain stars which are rather like our sun. Molecular structure differs but their intrinsic function is very often similar. Stars can die. Like people, but with less crying. It is my ambition to be an inter-galactic Jedi.’
30 May 2003
[iraq] Salam’s Story — the Guardian interviews Salam Pax ahead of them publishing his new fortnightly column. ‘…in the final weeks before the impending conflict, he became increasingly anxious that the men of the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence agency, were on to him. “They were not only paranoid, they were going crazy,” he says. At one point the regime blocked access to the website on which he was posting his writing, blogspot.com. “There was the possibility that they knew. I spent a couple of days thinking this is the end. And then you wait for a couple of days and nothing happens and you say, ‘OK, let’s do it again.’ Stupid risks, one after another.”‘
[comics] Fantagraphics Needs Your Help — Fantagraphics (publisher of Dan Clowes, Joe Sacco, Robert Crumb and Chris Ware) is in deep trouble … ‘Inexperience with the book trade resulted in our erring on the side of overprinting our books too heavily throughout 2002, so that our anticipated profit is in fact sitting in our warehouse in the form of books. Loans must be paid in cash, not books. The only way to get out of this hole we’ve dug ourselves into is to sell those books. Which is where, we hope, you come in.’
29 May 2003
[bb4] Anouska-isms — On Death: ‘It’s just another transformation… granted a bit more radical than puberty.’
28 May 2003
[gm] Grant Morrison wonders if Justin Timberlake is a Mutant: ‘Definitely a pure mutation – and he’s trying to push his powers in a more evil direction. I think they inject all of those Disney kids, like Britney, with something when they’re young. One minute, they’re singing about mice, and the next, they’re riding motorcycles and fisting each other.’
27 May 2003
[bb4] Jon Tickle on Women: ‘You have only one prize to pick — and you know there are, let’s say, 30 prizes on the conveyor belt. They are coming through one at a time. But what makes you stop the conveyor belt and say you want a prize? The mathematical way is to look at the first ten items — the first third. Then the first thing you see out of the next two thirds is better than anything you have seen before. Because if the first ten items are spread evenly on the good or bad scale, you will get a few things in the 90 per cent area. It’s unlikely you are going to get the 100 per cent best item in your first third. So pick the best thing in the next two thirds. Then you’re going to get something pretty good.’
[comics] Timeline for the 2000AD Universe — it manages to tie together the histories of Judge Dredd, The A.B.C Warriors, Sam Slade and Strontium Dog … ‘The robotics revolution is not without its difficulties. The mark one war droid cannot discriminate between enemy soldiers and civilians. The mark two war droid is programmed with genuine moral values, but becomes a pacifist and surrenders to the enemy. The mark three war droid, named Hammerstein, is created at the University of Wisconsin in a project funded by Rover. The first emotion ever experienced by a machine is jealousy and results in the accidental death of the creator…’ [via scribot]
26 May 2003
[paranoia] Spam Anxiety… what are the Spammers trying to tell me?! …
 25 May 2003
[web] LJDrama Files — all the drama of LiveJournal distilled into a weblog … ‘There are many lessons to be learned in your life. chief among them is “don’t go sending people pictures of your tits while you’re drunk and then get mad when they post them online!”‘ [via scribot]
[bb4] Earlier, in the Girls Bedroom at the Big Brother House …
‘”I’ve got a big bed and no-one to share it with me” [Anouska] says. They then started mentioning “Follow The Van“. |