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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 21 March 2014
[politics] The Conservatives Long-Term Economic Plan For Britain … ‘Click your nearest city to find out what the Conservatives are doing for you…’
20 March 2014
[tv] 27 Reasons Why You’re Still Watching “The West Wing” … ‘R.I.P Dolores Landringham. You were just the best.’
19 March 2014
[internet] How to use the Internet …
18 March 2014
[comics] Katsuhiro Otomo and the Perfect Panels of ‘Akira’ … ‘Otomo takes the basics of comics art and executes them so well that he elevates a scene that could’ve been seen in any comic into something divine.’
17 March 2014
[life] Report: Only 20 Minutes Until Introverted Man Gets To Leave Party … ‘I told myself I’d stay here until 8:30, and I already killed about 15 minutes avoiding conversation by circling repeatedly around the table of hors d’oeuvres to appear occupied, and another cumulative half hour pretending to text friends, so I just need to make it a few more minutes…’
16 March 2014
[comics] It’s Affable Alan Moore… His Stories Never Bore! … Lew Stringer on Alan Moore … ‘Behold! He’s breathing new life into the genre!’
15 March 2014
[histort] The First Ever Selfie … ‘Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist, took this self-portrait 175 years ago in the back of his family’s silver-plating shop in Philadelphia. On the back, Cornelius wrote: “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.” It was one of the first Daguerreotypes to be produced in America…’
14 March 2014
[tech] Good advice from a Fortune Cookie … ‘You will never get back the years of your life you spent pointlessly rolling your own CMS.’
13 March 2014
[www] 25 Things You Might Not Know About The Web On Its 25th Birthday … ‘5 Tim Berners-Lee is Gutenberg’s true heir – In 1455, with his revolution in printing, Johannes Gutenberg single-handedly launched a transformation in mankind’s communications environment – a transformation that has shaped human society ever since. Berners-Lee is the first individual since then to have done anything comparable.’
12 March 2014
[london] Oh shit, say tube drivers … The Daily Mash on the death of Bob Crow… ‘Martin Bishop, a driver from Peckham, said: “I would very much like the RMT to advertise – immediately – for a New Person to Scare the Shit Out of Capitalists. “However, I suspect it may now be time for me to drive a taxi.”’
11 March 2014
[dailyfail] Profits Of Doom … Is the Daily Mail Online as sucessful as it seems? … ‘DMGT also reported that their print advertising was down 2%, bringing in only £53million this year. This figure was kind of brushed over in favour of talk of website growth – played down almost – but it’s worth a quick look. £53 million is £12 million more in ad revenue than the website generates. Yes, the website’s growth has been impressive – it has become the biggest newspaper website in the world – but it’s actually pulling in much less cash than its dead-tree equivalent. The Daily Mail’s circulation is 1.6 million, about 1% of its apparent online audience. So the ad space they’re selling online is actually, relatively, worthless and it appears to be their only major stream of revenue.’
10 March 2014
[columbo] The Case For Making Columbo America’s Doctor Who … a reminder of how great Columbo was … ‘Columbo says things like “Watch my hand, it’s full of grease. This is my dinner. Would you like a piece of chicken?” to suspects. He is deliberate. He moves at the pace of justice. Unflagging, unwearying, unrelenting; he is the Anton Chigurh of goodness. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards Columbo. It is his fundamental goodness, as much as his native intelligence, that make him a good detective. He is not a remote genius; he is not a refined gentleman; he is a good man, and it is this that makes him not just a good detective but my detective. He is America’s detective. A good and a quiet man who brings his own lunch and will not go away until order is restored.’
9 March 2014
8 March 2014
[politics] The Top Five Political Twitter Gaffes … ‘We can’t decide if this is a gaffe or an unintentional stroke of genius. Who knew Ed Balls would become a social media superstar by accidentally tweeting his own name?’
7 March 2014
[comics] League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Nemo: Roses of Berlin annotations … more LOEG annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘Panel 2. “Heil, Hynkel.” As shown in the previous issues of League, there is no Adolph Hitler in the world of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, just as there is no Mussolini and various other major world figures. What we have instead are literary or filmic analogues for these characters. In this case, Hitler is replaced by Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler analogue from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940).’
6 March 2014
[tv] TV palate-cleansers: after Breaking Bad, viewers need Cake Boss … ‘There is only so much of, say, Borgen that one can take before it all gets too much. You find yourself either shuffling around with your brow furrowed as you wrestle with the weighty thematic issues of whatever you’re binge-watching, or trapped in a desperate cycle of increasingly hyperbolic praise for a show that you only really like because a broadsheet newspaper said you should. When this happens, you need crap. You need a palate-cleanser. You know the sort of shows I’m talking about. Cake Boss, for example, is the perfect antidote to Game of Thrones. Sometimes, when you’ve watched 350 different but identically named characters from 200 barely distinguishable regions shout frilly exposition at each other for four straight hours, you just want to watch a man make a cake. Possibly a cake shaped like a Transformer. Possibly while doing all he can to push the limits of New Jersey’s workplace harassment laws.’
5 March 2014
[movies] The Original Robocop Was A Christ Allegory … ‘We could view Robocop as Verhoeven’s response to a kind of mythological or narrative challenge: retell the life, death, and resurrection of Christ (as an historical figure or a religious one, it’s up to you) in a way that’s relevant for our contemporary context. The idea that someone like Verhoeven might respond to that challenge by inventing a murdered cop who is brought back to life by technical wizardry, only to walk the Earth again as a robot, is pure genius, almost hilariously so. It not only suggests an awesomely freewheeling response to an ancient storyline; it also raises the absolutely gonzo interpretive possibility that the machines and devices around us, from police drones to television sets, are able to bear religious, mythic, or theological implications.’
4 March 2014
[curtis] Adam Curtis: “We don’t read newspapers because the journalism is so boring” … another interview with Adam Curtis … ‘So much of the way the present world is managed is through – not even systems – its organizations, which are boring. They don’t have any stories to tell. Economics, for example, which is central to our life at the moment … I just drift off when people talk about collateralised debt obligations, and I am not alone. It’s impossible to illustrate on television, it’s impossible to tell a story about it, because basically it’s just someone doing keystrokes somewhere in Canary Wharf in relation to a server in … I dunno … Denver, and something happens, and that’s it. I use the phrase, ‘They are unstoryfiable’. Journalism cannot really describe it any longer, so it falls back onto its old myths of dark enemies out there.’
3 March 2014
[web] Only 90s Web Developers Remember This … HTML tag nostalgia … ‘The 1×1.gif – or spacer.gif, or transparent.gif – is just a one pixel by one pixel transparent GIF. Just like the most futuristic CSS framework of today but in a billionth of the file size, 1×1.gif is fully optimized for the responsive web.’
2 March 2014
[movies] Today is the Day Marty McFly Went to the Future … and tomorrow, yesterday and next week…
1 March 2014
[comics] Clintonlovespizza: “Wolverine, bring me a cheese pizza.” …
28 February 2014
[ships] Russia’s Giant Secret Spy Ship Killed Rats, Ruined Careers and Almost Got Blown Up TWICE … fascinating story of the Russian ship Ural… ‘Ural didn’t just kill turtles. She also became what Russian Navy Blog described as “one of those rare ships free of rats.” When her electronics were all switched on, something-radiation, perhaps-swiftly killed all the rodents aboard. Rats “only reappeared when the ship moored at the pier.”’
27 February 2014
[movies] RoboCop writer Ed Neumeier discusses the film’s origins … ‘In both of the movies I’ve written for Paul, they both seem-and I would say this is mostly my fault-they are often called prescient, in that they seem to predict things that are coming. Certainly Detroit’s decline seems to be predicted very well, but that was already happening. I got to a metric, if you want to call it that, wherein I would say, “If you want to predict the future, just think about how bad it could be and make a joke out of it, and there you go.” And if you look at Starship Troopers that way too, it may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it was a projection of what’s already happening, and where things were going.’
26 February 2014
[people] Ghosting … a long read from Andrew O’Hagan on what it’s like ghostwriting for Julian Assange … ‘ I am sure this is what happens in many of his scrapes: he runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him. Fact is, he was not in control of himself and most of what his former colleagues said about him just might be true. He is thin-skinned, conspiratorial, untruthful, narcissistic, and he thinks he owns the material he conduits. It may turn out that Julian is not Daniel Ellsberg or John Wilkes, but Charles Foster Kane, abusive and monstrous in his pursuit of the truth that interests him, and a man who, it turns out, was motivated all the while not by high principles but by a deep sentimental wound. Perhaps we won’t know until the final frames of the movie.’
25 February 2014
[tv] Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer’s death marked the rebirth of TV drama … Looking back at Twin Peaks after twenty years … ‘It would be wrong to attribute all that’s since taken place to the creative impact of Twin Peaks but Lynch’s legacy can nonetheless be seen in dramas in a whole range of recent TV shows. For a start, Lynch helped make television attractive to film stars. Kyle MacLachlan, who played the other-worldly Special Agent Dale Cooper, had been the lead in Blue Velvet. The message was that television was no longer a Hollywood ghetto. Without Agent Cooper perhaps there would have been no Jack Bauer. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine that JJ Abrams’s high-concept genre-mashing with Lost would have happened if Lynch hadn’t pioneered the way. And in David Chase’s casting in The Sopranos it’s possible to see the influence of Lynch, who used almost forgotten character actors like Richard Beymer.’
24 February 2014
[history] Time travellers: please don’t kill Hitler … Why Killing Hitler is a bad idea … ‘This is overlooked surprisingly often, so it bears repeating: Hitler didn’t win. Whatever you think of the present, we don’t live in some bleak wasteland dominated by a global Reich. Because Hitler and his armies lost. Although it was a costly victory, it was still technically a victory, so why risk going back and interfering with an outcome you favour? And arguably, it was due to Hitler’s incompetence as a strategist that the war panned out the way it did. In a way, Hitler had the perfect combination of drive, charisma, evil and incompetence to unite the world against him and ensure that his forces lost.’
23 February 2014
[weird] The 38 Most Unexplainable Images On The Web … WARNING: Contains traces of Garry Glitter. NSFW. Tasteless.
22 February 2014
[tv] What happens at Netflix when House of Cards goes live … ‘Edberg said the last time House of Cards launched, the engineers figured out that the entire season was about 13 hours. “And we looked to [see] if anybody was finishing in that amount of time,” Edberg said. “And there was one person who finished with just three minutes longer than there is content. So basically, three total minutes of break in roughly 13 hours.”‘
21 February 2014
[power] U.K. National Grid status … Statistics about the UK’s electicity supply in near real time … ‘Gridwatch was born, first of all to scrape the data off the BMreports site every 5 minutes and inject it into an SQL database where it would be easy to perform specific searches and do statistical analysis. Then, in a rather retro and humorous way, to display the data in terms of analogue instruments and moving graphs. This is pure personal amusement, I like dials and graphs.’ [via As Above]
20 February 2014
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