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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 15 May 2015
[politics] Inside the Milibunker: the last days of Ed … the inside story on Milliband’s downfall … ‘Another Labour insider told of the scene in the press office when Miliband posed with the notorious Ed stone, the 8ft 6in slab of limestone upon which his six key election pledges were inscribed. When it appeared on TV, a press officer ‘started screaming. He stood in the office, just screaming over and over again at the screen. It was so bad they thought he was having a breakdown.”
14 May 2015
[comics] Jon Hamm as Superman by Phil Noto …
13 May 2015
[herzog] Werner Herzog’s memoir Of Walking in Ice, reviewed … a book about that time Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris to visit a friend’s deathbed …
The voice too is the one we know so well from the films and summons the familiar face: lugubrious, disheveled, and beetle-browed, perennially squinting as though against the blinding light of the universe’s final catastrophe. No detail is too small to depress him: “The teenagers on their mopeds are moving toward death in synchronized motion,” he glumly writes. “I think of unharvested turnips but, by God, there are no unharvested turnips around.” 12 May 2015
[politics] Did 1000 People Decide The Outcome Of The General Election? … some analysis of the result of the General Election from Diamond Geezer … ‘The fact remains that there are fewer than 1000 people out there on whose choice the outcome of this election hinged. If you changed your mind in Gower, Croydon Central or Bury North, one of those people could be you. Thank goodness nobody knew who you were before the polls opened, otherwise you’d never have been left alone.’
11 May 2015
[space] How Spaceships Die … a look at how satellites and space probes end their working lives … ‘Every craft that we’ve ever sent to another planet is still there, to a greater or lesser extent. Twenty-one objects on Venus, 13 on Mars (including nine landers/rovers) and a startling 76 different lunar craft are all slowly decaying in their new homeworlds, not to mention the Huygens probe on Titan, Shoemaker on the asteroid Eros, Hayabusa on the asteroid 25143 Itkowa and the Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimnko. In total, there are over 476,000 pounds of Earth objects in alien worlds.’
10 May 2015
[weirdscience] Radio 4 in Four: Robin Ince explores hollow earth… go listen to this clip of Robin Ince on Hollow Earth theory (guest-starring Alan Moore).
9 May 2015
[fractals] Web Mandlebrot … nicely done web-based Mandelbrot generator. [via Kottke]
8 May 2015
[tech] Conversation With a Tech Support Scammer … fascinating transcripts of how a tech support scam happens … ‘“Take a look down here. See where it says processes?” he prompted. “That’s the problem. That’s why you’re getting the message popping-up. You see right here at the bottom?”
“46 processes? So that’s 6 more than normal?” I asked.
“Yes, right. What this means is, your computer is doing 46 different things at the moment,” he explained.’
7 May 2015
[politics] Scarfolk Council: “Watch Out! There’s a Politician About” … Election week posters from Scarfolk … ‘Just before the Scarfolk election of 1975 the ruling party was keen to permanently eradicate all political opposition and set out to smear what it called a ‘hazardous surplus of politicians and others suffering from civic delusional disorders’. The incumbent’s aim was to bring about a state of emergency that would permit a legal postponement of the election, a postponement that could, in theory, become indefinite. The smear campaigns knew no bounds as one politician after another was exposed for corruption, sexual and moral improprieties, and poor table manners…’
6 May 2015
[comics] Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence … annotations for Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrows not yet released Providence comic.
5 May 2015
[life] Quite possibly the greatest Internet comment ever… posted by VoteUKIPforTheKids on a Guardian article on Steve Strange.
These guys were Bohemians? Don’t make me laugh. Do you know where the most bohemian place in this country is – The Church of England! 4 May 2015
[comics] ‘Beano’ reveals Dennis The Menace’s father is actually 1980s Dennis … ‘In the most recent issue of The Beano, it is confirmed for the first time that Dennis’s dad is a grown-up version of the 1980s-era Dennis The Menace. While you may remember Dennis The Menace’s dad in his older, balder, Hitler moustache-sporting incarnation, the comic made a historic shift on 25 August 2012 by introducing a spikey-haired new ‘dad’. The comic also shifted the father-son relationship from its painfully old-fashioned combative (even abusive) tone, to one that was sometimes adversarial, but also friendlier.’
3 May 2015
2 May 2015
[web] Inventing Favicon.ico… the story of how the Favicon was created at Microsoft … ‘I still remember telling my friend Michael Radwin at Yahoo about favicon.ico. He was looking at Yapache logs for fun as he does, and he had noticed an unusual spike in HTTP requests for http://www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico. He said, what the hell is favicon.ico? And I explained it to him. He was so excited that he slammed a favicon.ico onto the server, which might have been one of the first official favicons in existence.’
1 May 2015
[comics] The Best Superman Stories Not Actually About Superman … interesting list of Superman-alike comics to watch out for … ‘Alan Moore’s Supreme was the Silver Age Superman thrown into a blender and it was awesome. I’m listing all of the issues because all of the issues are good: the opening issues, “The Supreme Story of the Year,” all about Supreme being ‘rebooted’ and finding the Supremacy, the place outside time where all previous Supremes live, to the issues where Supreme’s villains escape from the “Hell of Mirrors” and the Televillain kills Monica from Friends (literally), to the issue near the end that is a complete homage to all things Jack Kirby. It’s Alan Moore making Silver Age goodness.’
30 April 2015
[crime] Anatomy of a Hijack … The story of an attempt to fraudulently commandeer a phone and bank account … ‘Check the online banking – I can’t get in. So I call the bank and get immediately routed through to the fraud department and go through an unusually large amount of security. They inform me that yes, something strange is happening, and did I by any chance recently make a large transfer out of my retirement savings? Er, NO.’
29 April 2015
[politics] 15 Malcolm Tucker Quotes That Perfectly Explain The 2015 Election … ‘You Look Like You've Shat A Lego Garage.’ …
28 April 2015
[health] Yes, You Can Catch Insanity: Reviving the debate about the immune system and mental illness. … a look at the connections between the immune system, inflammation and mental health … ‘Nothing cemented the link between body and brain quite like syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Before antibiotics, a syphilis infection could be a slow-motion death sentence. In addition to ravaging the body, late-stage syphilis victims often escalated into what doctors at the time called neurosyphilis, a sort of manic, delusional state, before edging over into paralysis and death. It was a clear, common case of an infection causing psychosis.Syphilis was so common it was called “the disease of the century.” Most patients were middle-class men; according to one estimate, 10 percent of patients in turn-of-the-century asylums were there because of neurosyphilis.’
27 April 2015
[politics] Bye Bye Labour … a depressing look at Labour’s position approaching the General Election … ‘Labour has accepted Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public participation in it. And the British state, and its military commitments, are sacrosanct. In the months leading up to the Scottish independence referendum – the sole recent instance of mass, enthusiastic democratic participation in the UK – Labour found itself campaigning alongside the Conservatives, with the result that in May’s election it will be all but wiped out north of the border. The logic of its position has compelled Labour to attack the SNP far more vehemently than it has the Conservatives. Miliband has been forced, under Tory pressure, to rule out a post-election coalition with the SNP, which may be enough to end any prospect of a viable Labour government.’
26 April 2015
[web] The Failed Promise of Deep Links… a depressing look at how deep linking is becoming an idea for mobiles rather than the Open Web … ‘With mobile’s deep links, everyone seems to have collectively wiped the buzzword slate clean and started fresh”Š-”Šno context, no memory. No depth. It’s as if someone started a new comedy act today and called it “Monty Python” without offering any sign of knowing the name had a history. This cluelessness is extra-ironic because, originally, the exact purpose of links was to make this kind of connection clear. The people who invented the link saw it as a tool for relating ideas in illuminating ways”Š-”Šfor making conceptual leaps and connecting disparate thoughts. If these visionaries had achieved their aim, the kind of tech-cultural amnesia represented by the recycling of the term “deep links” shouldn’t have been possible, two decades into the Web era. The links with true depth that they envisioned would have made sure of that.’
25 April 2015
[comics] Review of the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Trailer … from Andrew Rilstone … ‘Dark Batman is more interesting than the silly Batman (who never quite existed outside of the KAPOW television series). Dark Batman is more in keeping with the basic premise of a character built of rage. But just because Dark Batman is cool is does not follow that Dark Superman and Dark Spider-Man and Dark Paddington Bear would be equally cool. The darker the dark character is the more he needs a bright character character to stand next to. And the brighter the bright characters the darker and cooler the dark, cool one will look. (This is the point of Robin.)’
24 April 2015
[space] That Time the US Accidentally Nuked Britain’s First Satellite … a fascinating, forgotten fragment of space history … ‘On July 9, 1962, mere weeks after Ariel-1 was put into orbit and had successfully begun transmitting data about the ionosphere back to Earth, British scientists were shocked when the sensors aboard Ariel-1 designed to measure radiation levels suddenly began to give wildly high readings. Initially, they assumed that the satellite’s instruments had failed or were otherwise just malfunctioning. As it turned out, as Ariel-1 was happily free-falling around the Earth, the US military had decided to detonate an experimental 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon named Starfish-Prime in the upper atmosphere…’
23 April 2015
[election] UKIP Royston Vasey Local Election Leaflet … via their Twitter account … ‘We only accept local people in the local party.’
22 April 2015
[google] What does Google need on mobile? … a look at Google’s mobile strategy from Benedict Evans… ‘Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity – a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home – to one of perfect complexity – every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’.’
21 April 2015
[apollo] 45 years after Apollo 13: Ars looks at what went wrong and why… Ars Technica on what caused the explosion on Apollo 13? … ‘For Apollo 13, keeping calm and working the problems as they appeared allowed three astronauts to escape unharmed from a complex failure. The NASA mindset of simulate, simulate, simulate meant that when things did go wrong, even something of the magnitude of the Apollo 13 explosion, there was always some kind of contingency plan worked out in advance. Controllers had a good gut-level feel for the limits of the spacecraft’s systems when trying to work through emergency problems.’
20 April 2015
[web] HTTP Error 447: Gone until I get the attention I deserve … a new type of HTTP error … ‘The 447 response is primarily intended to assist the task of ego maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally but temporarily unavailable and that the server owners desire that people pay more attention to them. Such an event is common for resources belonging to emotionally unstable individuals when they feel the world is no longer going their way. ‘
19 April 2015
[beards] Men seeking plausible beard exit strategies … as reported by the Daily Mash … ’28-year-old Wayne Hayes said: “Mine got stuck in a door, it was a case of pull it out by the roots or starve to death. “As an unreconstructed alpha male who doesn’t give a shit about media-driven style trends and is basically a raw sexy ape I chose the former but purely for survival reasons. “Then I applied moisturiser to the affected area.”’
18 April 2015
[comics] Crossed+ 100 Annotations … work-in-progress collection of annotations for Alan Moore and Gabriel Andrade’s Crossed+ 100 series of comics.
17 April 2015
[comics] Sketches of Naxos & Iraklia, Greece … go look at these amazing sketches of Greece by Simon Gane …
16 April 2015
[comics] The Masterpiece That Helped Transform Comics and Culture – Books … Dan Clowes talks about Eightball At 25… ‘The funny thing about reading all my comics, but especially those old comics-which I usually avoid like the plague, but when I was putting this collection together, I went back and read every single issue-is that it’s really like a record of your life. Almost everything in the comic is based on something, a joke I had with one of my friends or a real-life experience, and all the characters are based vaguely on people I know… It all feels like reading a diary almost, even though it’s entirely fictional.’
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