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6 December 2000
 [comics] Excellent interview with Dan Clowes in Salon. The humdrum life of a cartoonist: ‘Clowes and his wife, Erika, whom he met on a small-scale California signing tour in 1992 (“I had just gone through a depressing separation from my first wife, and was trying to escape from the grim horribleness of Chicago; a beautiful young woman in Berkeley asked me to sign her underwear, and the rest is history”), will soon vacate the house for a larger one not far away.’ [ Related Links: Buy Ghost World. You won’t regret it. Via Robot Wisdom]
5 December 2000
[simpsons] What more do you need from a link? The 50 Greatest Moments in Simpsons History. From Rosebud: ‘Homer: “Mmm… 64 slices of American cheese.” “64… ” [eats a slice] “63… ” [eats another] [Next morning] “Two… “[slowly] “One… “[finished] [Marge walks in] Marge: “Have you been up all night eating cheese?” Homer: [slurred] “I think I’m blind… “ [via LukeLog]
[it must be love] BT’s lastest banner ad for ISDN. ‘If we can still monopolise it, we can still be cack at it.’
[chat] The Barbelith Underground discuss what will be the next name on Madonna’s t-shirt. Saveloy sez: ‘”Your Mum” is what it will say. When you next see your mum, she’ll be wering a t-shirt that says “Yeah, that’s right, ME.” Later, Madonna will play a gig with EVERYBODY’s mum coming on in turn to do an excruciatingly embarrassing dance, and thus the whole world will be united in humiliation and so drawn together and there will be no more war or death.’
4 December 2000
[tags: Blogs][ permalink][ Comments Off on Archive of Articles About Weblogs]
[quote] The Wisdom of Steve Aylett: ‘One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of god’s existence.’
[web] Danny O’Brien discusses web stalking… ‘Over the decades I have been online, it is incredible how many personal tidbits I have let slip onto the net. These days, a determined net stalker, armed with a search engine, could find out where I have lived in the past five years, my previous employers, a summary of my political interests, the names of all of my close family, and three or four of my most recent haircuts.’
3 December 2000
[comics] Jon Katz reviews Unbreakable. A film which improbably casts Samuel L. Jackson as a comic book collector…. ‘The Superhero stories are among the great and most enduring American myths, an often unacknowledged part of this country’s original and unique folklore. One of the distinctive traits of the Superhero genre in comics is the ambivalence of many of the characters. Heroes (Batman, Spiderman, the literal Superheroes themselves) are often innocents. They are ambivalent, reluctant. They are far from indestructible, in fact they are all oddly vulnerable. They never asked for their gifts or reveled in their powers.’ [ Related Links: Unbreakable Trailer, Unbreakable at IMDB]
[weblogs] Meg’s Under.Construction has got off to a good start with a number of interesting posts… ‘Welcome to under.construction. This weblog is intended as a forum for discussion of cyberculture, community, communication and other cultural facets of cyberspace. It’s also intended to be a repository for interesting stories and links – an evolving, collaborative bookmark list.’
2 December 2000
[books] Jorn from Robot Wisdom has a great list of links about Tom Wolfe. Here’s a chapter from The Bonfire of the Vanities. ‘Sherman leaned back in his chair and surveyed the bond trading room. The processions of phosphorescent green characters still skidded across the faces of the computer terminals, but the roar had subsided to something more like locker-room laughter. George Connor stood beside Vic Scaasi’s chair with his hands in his pockets, just chatting. Vic arched his back and rolled his shoulders and seemed about to yawn. There was Rawlie, reared back in his chair, talking on the telephone, grinning and running his hand over his bald pate. Victorious warriors after the fray . . . Masters of the Universe . . . And she has the gall to cause him grief over a telephone call!’
[comics] suck.com talks about ‘the long fruitful death’ of comics…. ‘Why comic books? And why now? Fifty years since their brief flirtation with becoming a widely-read mass medium, seven years into a sales decline that changed comics’ status from a profitable but secondary magazine market to an absolutely marginal feeder industry for television and film, what is so seductive about the comic book that it continues to intrigue so many serious-minded adults and aesthetes?’ [via Barbelith Underground]
1 December 2000
[comics] Warren Ellis releases PR for his latest comic:. ‘MINISTRY OF SPACE is an English science-fictional idyll: a fantasia on the notion of a British space programme that outraced the rest of the world, as found in such as Dan Dare. Now that Britannia rules the waves of space, a utopian green-field England plies ships to the Moon, to Venus, to Victoria Station in low Earth orbit. This is the Ministry that sent a colonisation flotilla to Mars in 1963. The Ministry that destroyed a city and ran an exploration program unseen in human history. A Golden Age – and what it cost.’
[crime] The Jigsaw Man — Interesting profile of the man who inspired Robbie Coltrane’s Cracker… ‘The hearing will concentrate on the role of Britton in the investigation into the killing of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in London. One allegation is that he offered support and advice to the police not backed by accepted scientific practice as they prepared a “honeytrap” for the prime suspect; he is also accused of having exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of his methods.’
30 November 2000
[politics] Why I am Eating all the Pies by Chancellor Gordon Brown, MP. ‘I have eaten all the pies. Or rather, I have eaten as many pies as one man can safely eat. The other pies I am saving for later on, in my freezer. To the uneducated man, this may seem greedy. But I can assure you it is not. It is, in fact, essential to the well-being of Britain that I eat as many pies as possible.’ [via Interconnected]
[think really different] The LC Cube ‘Apple’s new G4 Cube inspired me to produce a similar machine, and this is the result – the LC Cube. It even has a vertically mounted floppy drive which spits out disks in the same toaster-like fashion as the G4 Cube. The LC Cube is built around an LC II logic board I salvaged from the rubbish heap of a Mac wrecker. It sports a 16MHz ‘030 CPU and has been maxed out to 10MB of RAM. The front panel has an illuminated electric oven-style On/Off switch and a hard disk activity LED’ [via the Master of Old School Apples]
[hst] Hunter S. Thompson on the US Elections… ‘There are rumors in Washington that Gore’s most trusted advisors have sealed him off so completely that he still firmly believes he Won. … Which is True, on some scorecards, but so what? Those cards don’t count. … George W. Bush is our President now, and you better start getting used to it. He didn’t actually steal the White House from Al Gore, he just brutally wrestled it away from him in the darkness of one swampy Florida night. He got mugged, and the local Cops don’t give a damn.’
29 November 2000
[tags: TV][ permalink][ Comments Off on Free Tickets For TV Shows]
[morrison] Magic for Mutants — Grant Morrison’s column on his new website is well worth checking out… ‘Corporate entities are worth studying. They and other ghosts like them rule our world. So…figure out why the Coca-Cola spirit is stronger than the Doctor Pepper spirit (what great complex of ideas, longings and deficiencies has the Coke logo succeeded in condensing into two words, two colours, taking Orwell?s 1984 concept of Newspeak to its logical conclusion?) Watch their habits, track their movements over time, monitor their repeated behaviours and watch how they react to change and novelty. Learn how to imitate them, steal their successful strategies and use them as your own. Create your own brand, your own logo and see how quickly you can make it spread. Build your own god and set it loose.’
28 November 2000
[books] Books Unlimited has the first chapter of Naomi Klein’s No Logo available… ‘And so the wave of mergers in the corporate world over the last few years is a deceptive phenomenon: it only looks as if the giants, by joining forces, are getting bigger and bigger. The true key to understanding these shifts is to realize that in several crucial ways – not their profits, of course – these merged companies are actually shrinking. Their apparent bigness is simply the most effective route toward their real goal: divestment of the world of things.’
27 November 2000
[celebs] A list of the Top 50 Celebrities of the 20th Century. Unsurprisingly Keith Chegwin is number one… ‘Hyperactive television presenter, whose finest moment was undoubtedly “Cheggers Plays Pop”, the seminal 1980s quiz show aimed at children. Cheggers would question several obnoxious kids, who were split into teams – a typical question would be “Which member of Spandau Ballet hibernates during the winter?” to which the correct answer is, of course, vocalist Tony Handley.’
[weblogs] Tom starts his redesign of Barbelith… ‘Over the next couple of weeks, you can expect several weblog-style columns provided by regular contributors to the Barbelith Underground concentrating on interfering in things that don’t concern us, spouting ludicrous ideas that no one believes in and working for the transformation of the world into a place where there is passion, magic, energy and change.’
[tags: Blogs][ permalink][ Comments Off on Tom on the Redesign of Barbelith] 26 November 2000
[comics] Eddie Campbell has published the first chapter of From Hell online. ‘Now, meself, I come from a working family. We vote Tory, always have done. The working class don’t WANT a revolution Mr. Lees: they just want more money.’ [via Lukelog]
[mobiles] Great article about how awful mobile phones are… ‘What is it about these things that makes us so obedient, and so oblivious to that which lies outside them – such as actual people? I once asked a man who was bellowing into a cell phone in the coffee shop in San Francisco why he was talking so loudly. A bad connection, he said. It had not crossed his mind that anything else mattered at that moment. Like computers and television, cell phones pull people into their own psychological polar field, and the pull is strong.’ [via Guardian Weblog]
25 November 2000
[comics] Warren Ellis writes about his adventures at Garth Ennis’ Stag Weekend… ‘As indicated by other people in previous editions of this column: comics are a first love affair, the one that sinks its teeth into you and won’t let go, because of its freedoms and its glories. The sex is great, but everything else is shit. And I’m reminded of a quote from Neil Gaiman: “I stopped doing comics because I wanted it to continue being fun, I wanted to continue to love and care for comics, and I wanted to leave while I was still in love.”‘
[weblogs] Metafilter blogs the satellite image of Selhurst Park… and someone points out that the image of the football field is probably Jakob Nielsen… ‘But does Jesus support Crystal Palace or Wimbledon?’ — Holgate.
[king] Guardian Unlimited profiles Jonathan King. From the Guardian: ‘King classes veteran TV presenter Jimmy Savile [sic] as one of his closest friends – they have known each other for 25 years. Savile [sic] once said of him: “He’s a sabra. A sabra is an Israeli fruit that’s prickly on the outside and all soft and lovely inside. That’s Jonathan King.”‘ [“Savile” should be spelled “Saville”. Interesting spelling mistake from the Guardian.]
24 November 2000
[comics] Amazon.co.uk picks their ten best comics… It’s no surprise that Watchmen is Number 1: ‘Imagine a future where Nixon is still President, America won the Vietnam War, and the nuclear clock stands at five minutes to midnight.’
[tags: Comics][ permalink][ Comments Off on Amazon.co.uk Picks Their Ten Best Comics]
[movies] Apple have got a quicktime trailer for Requiem for a Dream up…
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