linkmachinego.com
5 June 2011
3 June 2011
[royalty] The Queen Mother’s Little Note“I think that I will take 2 *small* bottles of Dubonnet and Gin with me this morning…”
2 June 2011
[docu] How The ‘Ecosystem’ Myth Has Been Used For Sinister Means … Adam Curtis on the history behind self-organising systems … ‘Field Marshal Smuts was one of the most powerful men in the British empire. He ruled South Africa for the British empire and he exercised power ruthlessly. When the Hottentots refused to pay their dog licences Smuts sent in planes to bomb them. As a result the black people hated him. But Smuts also saw himself as a philosopher – and he had a habit of walking up to the tops of mountains, taking off all his clothes, and dreaming up new theories about how nature and the world worked.’
1 June 2011
[funny] Dr Johnson On Adam Curtis


[web] How The Drudge Report Got Popular and Stayed on Top‘A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking…’
31 May 2011
[flight] What Happened to Air France Flight 447? … a report from the NYT from before the missing flight’s black box recorder was analysed ‘On the Alucia this spring, as Woods Hole scientists scanned the first photos of Flight 447, they saw more than just landing gear, engines and wings. They also saw the bodies of at least 50 passengers sprawled across an abyssal plain at the base of the mountains. As they continued searching the area, they found a section of damaged fuselage not far away, large enough to contain more passengers. Members of the crew told me that a grim silence descended on the ship…’
30 May 2011
[crime] The Lazarus File … fascinating look at the investigation into a murder in Los Angeles from 1986 which has recently been reopened … ‘The detectives went back over the whole investigation-but this time with the assumption that they were looking for a female suspect. When they finished going through the case file, they had a list of five names, among them that of Stephanie Lazarus, who was cited in the original police work as John Ruetten’s ex-girlfriend, with the further notation “P.O.” Nuttall didn’t make anything of the initials until he called Ruetten, who told him that Lazarus had been a Los Angeles police officer.’
29 May 2011
[docu] Adam Curtis: The Rise of the Machines … Andrew Orlowski interviews Adam Curtis … ‘I’ve always wanted to make a film about managerialism. It’s impossible, because with managers nothing really happens. What I’m dealing with here is the ideology behind managerialism. Behind all this, behind the flipchart, is the idea that you’re nodes in a system, and ‘our job’ is to keep things stable.’
28 May 2011
[books] Go Look: Three Len Deighton Book Covers designed by Raymond Hawkey. [thanks Phil]
27 May 2011
[dailyfail] Go Look: Pictures From The Daily Mail … a weird bunch of photos collected from the Daily Mail’s website (or as I prefer to call it now – 4chan for Middle England.)
[life] 9-eyes … A collection of captured moments from Google Streetview.
25 May 2011
[cartoons] Steve Bell On 30 Years Of Political Cartooning At The Guardian‘Nick Clegg, a rather poor clone of Cameron, who in turn is a tribute act to Blair, who is himself channelling Thatcher. And who was she channelling? Her father, Alderman Roberts, the grocer of Grantham town? Winston Churchill? Adolf Hitler? Beelzebub? Who can say?’
[socials] Bradley Manning’s Facebook Page … I can’t help myself but be fascinated by this archive of Bradley Manning’s Facebook Wall … ‘Manning’s Facebook postings are a vivid, if partial, portrait of his life in the military and of the political and social issues that he followed closely. They reflect his commitment to gay rights and defiance of the military’s ban on openly gay or lesbian soldiers. They track the anguish in his personal life. And they conclude with an entry, put up in Manning’s name by his aunt, explaining his arrest with a link to a WikiLeaks website.’
24 May 2011
[comics] The AV Club Interviews Chester Brown

AV Club: Is there some reason so many cartoonists have such idiosyncratic political and social views? Peter Bagge is a libertarian as well, and Steve Ditko is an objectivist, and R. Crumb has his odd open marriage, and then there’s whatever Dave Sim’s got going on.

Chester Brown: [Laughs.]

[tv] Grace Dent On Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace‘And look at me, I’m so happy. Twitter alone has given me retinal migraine issues, RSI and cajoled me into believing I am a free-thinking revolutionary fanning flames of liberty in Iran, Libya and Syria, when in fact I’m just a woman in pyjamas, hugging an Intel Pentium processor, waiting for Ocado to fetch more olives. Up the revolution … oooh, have these got pimentos in them? Yum, yum, slurp.’
23 May 2011
FaceFacts … Jason Scott on Facebook … ‘[Facebook] is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand.’
20 May 2011
[movies] The Monkees’ Head: ‘Our fans couldn’t even see it’ … The Monkees discuss their disastrous movie Head … ‘In retrospect, the marketing seems suicidal. Posters featured the balding head of the media theorist John Brockman and the slogan: “What is Head all about? Only John Brockman’s shrink knows for sure!” The so-called Monkees movie made no mention of the Monkees.’
19 May 2011
[horoscopes] Horoscoped … the most common words in star sign predictions from Information is Beautiful

Horoscoped by David McCandless

18 May 2011
[space] The Blue Marble Shot … a look back at the first complete photo of a whole round Earth taken from space which might be the most reproduced photo ever … ‘You can’t see the Earth as a globe unless you get at least twenty thousand miles away from it, and only 24 humans ever went that far into outer space. They were the three-man crews of the nine Apollo missions that traveled to the moon between 1968 and 1972, six of which landed there successfully (three men went twice). But only the last three saw a full Earth.’
17 May 2011
[tech] The Art of Endless Upgrades … Kevin Kelly on an issue I’ve noticed too – I spend far to much time maintaining a few simple websites … ‘Keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keep a yacht afloat. It is a black hole for attention. I can kind of understand why a mechanical device would break down after a while — moisture rusts metal, or the air oxidizes membranes, or lubricants evaporate — all of which require repair. But I wasn’t thinking that the intangible world of bits would also degrade. What’s to break? Apparently everything.’
16 May 2011
[people] Five Reasons To Be Concerned Your Husband Is A Psychopath … from Jon Ronson‘In my book “The Psychopath Test,” I meet an enormously wealthy former Fortune 500-type CEO, Al Dunlap, to ask him which of the 20 Hare psychopathic traits he felt most applied to him. He instantly confessed to Grandiose Sense of Self Worth, which would have been a hard one for him to deny as he was at the time standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.’
15 May 2011
[weird] Plague of US preachers falsely claim to be Navy SEALs‘Other common professions who tend to falsely and publicly claim they were once SEALs are politicians and sheriffs, according to Shipley. Sheriffs are typically elected in the USA, and so need popular support. These and clergymen are the kind of people he tends to out, rather than the more common type of commando-impersonator who is simply trying to impress a girl in a bar. “The pastor never thought anyone outside of his small community would see [his false claims],” Shipley said. “He doesn’t understand how the Internet works.” In America is actually a crime to misrepresent or exaggerate one’s military service record.’
14 May 2011
[books] Balancing The Books … Ed Stourton’s Book Storage Crisis … ‘Our dilemma is a middle-aged one but I suspect, on the basis of conversations with like-minded friends, a common one. Our books are taking over our house and, it sometimes seems, our lives…’ [via Feeling Listless]
13 May 2011
[movies] 2001 VHS Tape Monolith … an 8ft tall sculpture by David Herbert

2001 VHS Tape Monolith

12 May 2011
[tv] The Most Stupid Quiz Answer Ever?‘Andrew and Vanessa – the contestants in question – had been doing so well in the Channel 4 game show. But then came the fateful Bannister question. In 1954, did he go into space, run a sub-four minute mile or become the first man ever to put the toilet seat down? Andrew and Vanessa ummed. They ahhed. Then, out of nowhere, Andrew had a breakthrough. Eyes burning with pure knowledge, he shouted “I think I’ve seen ‘Bannister’ written on a toilet!” Vanessa was more cautious, wailing “Who KNOWS this?” before eventually agreeing on the toilet thing as well.’
11 May 2011
[tv] Adam Curtis – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace … promotional trail for Adam Curtis’ latest documentary … ‘WE DREAMED THE SYSTEMS COULD STABILISE THEMSELVES THROUGH FEEDBACK.’
10 May 2011
[comics] Howard Chaykin, Time and Time Again … Douglas Wolk On Howard Chaykin‘Chaykin’s ’80s comics are the work of an artist pushing himself savagely hard–especially Time2, an ambitious, densely packed 1986-1987 project that encompassed a one-shot comic book and a pair of slim graphic novels before vanishing.’
[docu] Have computers taken away our power? … Adam Curtis on his new documetary series “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” …

The central idea [of All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace] leads Curtis on a journey, taking in the chilling über-individualist novelist Ayn Rand, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, the “new economy”, hippy communes, Silicon Valley, ecology, Richard Dawkins, the wars in Congo, the lonely suicide in a London squat of the mathematical genius who invented the selfish gene theory, and the computer model of the eating habits of the pronghorn antelope.

You can see why Zoe Williams once wrote that, while watching one of Curtis’s programmes, “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote.”

9 May 2011
[funny] The Super-injuncted Crossword Puzzle‘6 Across – Shagged his wife’s sister’s former best friend whilst still married to her.’
[email] Legal Disclaimers: Spare Us The E-mail Yada-Yada … Legal disclaimers at the bottom of e-mail’s are useless … ‘They are assumed to be a wise precaution. But they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries. Many disclaimers are, in effect, seeking to impose a contractual obligation unilaterally, and thus are probably unenforceable.’
8 May 2011
[nyc] The Terminal: The Roughest Bar In New York City … a brief and fascinating look with video … ‘I used to poke my head into the Terminal back in the late 70s. Its notoriety drew artists and punks and the curious. But, it wasn’t welcoming to slumming hipsters or bush league Bukowskis. It was an enclosed society with it’s own brutal code, not easily cracked by the voyeuristic aesthete.’
7 May 2011
[blog] I Curate The Internet … brilliantly done image Tumblr. Do check out the archives. (Some NSFW content)
6 May 2011
[comics] How 2000AD artist and MS sufferer John Hicklenton chose to end his life

…he decided to finish the battle on his own terms. Even when we went to Dignitas,” Lavis recalls, “it was, ‘I’m pulling the pin on the hand grenade. I’m murdering MS. It’s not murdering me.’”

5 May 2011
[ObL] For 10 Years, Osama bin Laden Filled A Gap Left By The Soviet Union. Who Will Be The Baddie Now? … Adam Curtis On The Death Of ObL … ‘With Bin Laden’s death maybe the spell is broken. It does feel that we are at the end of a way of looking at the world that makes no real sense any longer. But the big question is where will the next story come from? And who will be the next baddie?’ [via Feeling Listless]
4 May 2011
[life] Suburban woman is sued after elaborate online hoax‘Every decade or so I get a taste to pose as a man (and up to 20 other people simultaneously) and reel me in some juicy middle-aged woman flesh…’
2 May 2011
[obl] Osama bin Laden: It Took Years To Find Him But Just Minutes To Kill Him‘The trail that led the CIA to Osama bin Laden began with his most trusted courier. It had taken the CIA years to discover first his name and then the home where he was hiding the al-Qaida leader. But it took only 40 minutes on Sunday for US special forces to kill both the courier and Bin Laden.’
1 May 2011
30 April 2011
[comics] CR Review: Paying For It … another review of Chester Brown’s latest autobiographical comic this time from Tom Spurgeon‘There’s a jittery undercurrent to Brown’s work that shimmies to the surface at odd and unexpected times, a queasy energy unlike anything else in comics. That noted, it’s always enormously fun to read Brown, and Paying For It proves no exception. There’s little I can write that will ever do justice to the enormous visceral pleasure that can come with spending time in Brown’s version of reality.’
29 April 2011
[comics] Moment Of Moore: A Wedding Blessing From Alan Moore‘I hearby bless your wedding, and all who sail in her.’
28 April 2011
[royals] Friday April 29, 2011: A time to clean the fridge‘It is a moment in history when a nation united by not being at work and a lack of normal television will stand up, chests inflated with pride, and say ‘I might as well have a go at the fridge. Does nan want a cup of tea while I’m up?’ Remember it well, that you might share with future generations the fond memory of its cleaning-based magic.’
[comics] ‘Dark Knight Returns’ Page Up for Auction‘The original artwork for the splash page from issue No. 3, which features Batman leaping through the skyline along with his new Robin, Carrie Kelley, the first female to hold that role, is up for bidding at Heritage Auctions. The bid is currently at $100,000.’
25 April 2011
[life] Born Digital … some anecdotes from Kevin Kelly on what it means to be born in a digital world …

Another acquaintance told me this story. He has a son about 8 years old. They were talking about the old days, and the fact that when my friend was growing up they did not have computers. This fact was perplexing news to his son. His son asks, “But how did you get onto the internet before computers?”

14 April 2011
[comics] The Batmen Reclining

Batmen Reclining

[london] A Look at What’s Happening at Tottenham Court Road … a fascinating post describing the work along with many photos …‘A drastic reworking of the station’s sub-surface layout has long been needed and it is this that is now underway. By 2016 the station will have a completely new ticket hall, new access tunnels, lift shafts and escalators. It will also connect through to the new Crossrail Tottenham Court Road. It is a project this is proving a unique challenge. ‘
13 April 2011
[comics] Chester Brown’s Paying For It Reviewed … the first review I’ve seen of what will likely be the most controversial comic of the year‘The social cues he seems unable to pick up on, the rituals he is congenitally incapable of performing, the years and decades of accrued guilt and sense of failure he built up from missing out on potential romantic or sexual relationships, the elaborate and to-him draining emotional quid pro quo of sex within the context of the few relationships he was able to enter into and maintain (that’s the context in which he really “paid for it”) … all of that disappeared the moment he told his first whore “Uh, I’d… like to have vaginal intercourse with you.” (“Yes, that’s what I really said,” he assures us helpfully in the “Notes” section.)’
12 April 2011
11 April 2011
[quote] “When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.” — Mark Twain. (from 7 Life Changing Lessons You Can Learn from Mark Twain)
10 April 2011
[history] The Bayeux Tapestry Archiving Model … interesting view of the Bayeux Tapestry as a medium for archiving data … ‘Our understanding is that the Tapestry features 45 to 48 threads per inch which gives us a resolution approximating 47dpi with a colour depth of 8, ignoring later repairs. Thus, in information terms, the tapestry contains 2.429MB of information, assuming 1-bit per colour, 47dpi, and a 51,678.72 square inch surface area.’
9 April 2011
[comics] A Comic Book Lover’s Guide to Going Digital … some interesting pointers for managing digital comics … ‘For the record, I don’t mean by any of this that you should ditch paper comics altogether. I understand that for many fans, nothing beats the feel of paper, the accumulation of a big collection, and the pride of having gotten that issue “way back when it first came out”. I think both paper and digital comics are great, and have their time and place-and while I have pretty much switched to digital entirely, I in no way think everyone else “should”. I do think maintaining a digital collection, whether replacing or on top of your existing collection, is a great idea.’
7 April 2011
[comics] His Face All Red … I really can’t recommend this scary webcomic enough. Go read it…

His Face All Red Panels

6 April 2011
[weird] Go Look: Jeremy Clarkson For Prime Minister [from Meg]
5 April 2011
[bdj] Sexonomics … Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle de Jour) has a new blog … ‘This is where I write about social & political stuff, mostly relating to sex. Yes, there’s going to be a book. As an ex-sex worker, you can imagine what my bias is. Nevertheless, I am also a scientist, so will do my best to present the evidence base for each post.’
[books] James Ellroy Signs Off From Facebook‘Sayonara Motherfuckers!!!’

James Ellroy's Facebook Sign Off