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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 23 December 2022
[trump] Donald Trump’s War on Christmas … A look at an attempt Trump made to evict residents from one of his NYC properties in the 1980s. ‘In 1981, Trump bought the apartment building at 100 Central Park South. He then spent a decade trying to push rent-controlled residents out, so he could tear it down and build luxury condos. Part of this effort involved banning all Christmas decorations from the lobby. But tenants fought back…’
21 December 2022
[politics] ‘Everyone calls to say how marvellous I am’ – Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, Digested … A digested read from John Grace. ‘Jonathan Van-Tam invites me to visit a hospital. Says it will improve morale in the NHS. On the nightshift I manage to save the lives of three patients. It is a very humbling moment for the doctors.’
20 December 2022
[herzog] The Infinite Conversation … An AI generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. ‘I think I’m finished with him. He gives me a feeling of decadence. And I don’t want to work with decadence any more. I don’t want to be a decadent. Yes, I remember very well that we talked a lot. I think it was in January 1974, a Sunday.’
19 December 2022
13 December 2022
[blogs] ooh.directory … A 2022 directory of blogs including a recently updated list. How retro. :)
9 December 2022
[xmas] Christmas Links 2022 … Stuart over at Feeling Listless is collecting seasonal links as he did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018,2019, 2020 and 2021. As always, he does a better job than I ever have! :)
8 December 2022
[xmas] ‘Which bit of the turkey is this supposed to be?!’ I ate 12 Christmas dinners in 12 days – here are the best and worst! … ‘Traipsing up another A-road, I feel like a prize turkey for failing to realise many of these chain pubs are attached to Premier Inns in the middle of nowhere. It occurs to me I could be hacked to death outside this Beefeater and not be found for weeks, which might be preferable to its Christmas dinner, which comes with cardboard yorkshire pud, boring boiled carrots, what look like Aunt Bessie frozen roasties and turkey roll seemingly processed by the ghost of Bernard Matthews. Score: 2/5’
5 December 2022
[nihilism] Super Mario Nihilism … What if Werner Herzog designed Super Mario?
2 December 2022
[comics] The Great Swamp Monster Confluence of 1971 … A great look at how three fictional swamp monsters for comics were created around the same time and place in the 1970s. ‘A couple of other odd coincidences involving Len Wein have a bearing on our tale of swampy confluence. Since the age of 14, Len had been best friends with Gerry Conway, the Man-Thing’s first scripter. Not only that-the two young comic book writers were roommates during the few months in which both the first Man-Thing story and the first Swamp Thing story were written.’
28 November 2022
[time] The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time … The story behind the internet’s N.T.P. Protocol. ‘A loose community of people across the world set up their own servers to provide time through the protocol. In 2000, N.T.P. servers fielded eighteen billion time-synchronization requests from several million computers-and in the following few years, as broadband proliferated, requests to the busiest N.T.P. servers increased tenfold. The time servers had once been “well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim,” Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. “Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP.” Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption-it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available. Mills’s little fief was everywhere.’
23 November 2022
[comics] An Appreciation of Kevin O’Neill, 1953-2022 … David Roach remembers Kevin O’Neill. ‘In an industry that could often default to a mass-produced conformity, Kevin was that rarest of things, truly unique, with an artistic voice that was unmistakably his own. In his long career he never once tried to fit in or compromise; indeed, he was seemingly incapable of being anything other than himself. ‘
21 November 2022
[moore] Fantasy Must Be Sharper: An Interview With Alan Moore … ‘Davey Jones is a genius. I’ve only ever had brief contact with him, back in the 80s when he was working with an anarchist concern called, I think, Blast and I was briefly in touch with them and then I noticed his work coming out in Viz where he’s the author of so many of my favourite strips. I’m genuinely impressed that there’s such an incredible standard of craftsmanship throughout Viz, blinding cartoonists, writers, and creators on that book. I must admit that the only problem I have with Jones’ work – and it’s not any fault of his, it’s purely me – it’s Tin Ribs; the ghastly physical torture that is visited on Mr Snodgrass. Every issue he’s having slices of his skin ripped off [laughs] it’s a bit rich even for my blood!’
18 November 2022
[comics] Neurotic Boy Outsider: An Interview With Grant Morrison 30 years In The Making … Grant Morrison looks back at some of their British comics from the start of their career. ‘But certainly at the end of the eighties and the nineties, it was still that sense of we were there to protest. We were the working class and we’d suddenly got a grasp of these means of expression. We’d got hold of comic books, we could make our own records. It was that punk rock DIY thing that came through the comics.’
17 November 2022
[cats] Neko: History of a Software Pet … A page about Neko – a cat that ran around the screen chasing the mouse pointers in the 1990s. ‘The original software based on this concept, as far as I’ve been able to trace back, was written in the 1980’s by Naoshi Watanabe (若田部 ç›´). It was called NEKO.COM and ran on the Japanese computer NEC PC-9801 in the MS-DOS command line.’
15 November 2022
[life] Are You a Parent of a Toddler or an Assistant to a Male CEO of a Tech Startup? … ‘He refuses to wear shoes.’
14 November 2022
[comics] Alan Moore Remembers Kevin O’Neill … I was very sad to hear of the death of Kevin O’Neill last week. The link above is what Alan wrote for a New York Times Obituary for Kevin. ‘I am going to miss him like I’d miss sunsets.’
10 November 2022
>> I don’t know who need this today but here’s some joyful old clips of Vincent Price riding roller coasters. You’re welcome.
9 November 2022
[vaccines] No One Knows What’s Inside the Smallpox Vaccine … The fascinating mystery story inside our oldest vaccine. ‘Scientists call it vaccinia, and it is pretty much found only in the vaccines. No one knows where vaccinia came from in nature. No one has ever found its animal reservoir. No one knows quite what vaccinia is-even as it has been used to inoculate billions of people and saved hundreds of millions of lives. It is a ghost of a virus that has survived by being turned into a vaccine.’
8 November 2022
[tech] Can a Computer catch a Spy? … The story of an American Spy – Aldrich Ames – and a look at how computers can replace human intuition in the hunt for spies.
7 November 2022
[comics] Ten years of 2000 AD… … Many of Tharg’s art, writing and editorial droids discussing the success of 2000AD in 1986.
4 November 2022
[concentration] The Ultimate White Noise Player ”¢ Design Your Own Color … A website that helps you generate brown noise which can help with mental focus apparently.
31 October 2022
[truecrime] Bible John: Creation of a Serial Killer … An engrossing BBC podcast looking at the Scottish serial killer Bible John.
28 October 2022
26 October 2022
[comics] Marvel’s Miracleman Omnibus shows how Alan Moore paved the road to Watchmen… Slate on Marvel’s reprint of a full collection of Miracleman along with a look at it’s impact. ‘It’s remarkable how powerful the book remains in spite of its occasional unevenness. Moore is easily the medium’s most important just-writer (as opposed to writers who draw their own scripts, which Moore does very rarely), having demonstrated a complete grasp of its intricacies and potential almost from the beginning of his career. He is, in some sense, a composer, and the people working in comics who can match that formidable perfection are cartoonists themselves-no other writer really comes close.’
25 October 2022
[space] Saturn: 1993 – 2022 … Go Look at this visualisation of Saturn’s 22yr Orbit Round the Sun which recently completed. ‘Constructed from individual images made over 29 Earth years, the split panorama is centered along the ecliptic and crossed by the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.’
24 October 2022
>> Glanced at: Trump Betrayed by His Diet Coke Valet, Walt Nauta … BY MY DIET COKE VALET, BETRAYED!!! ‘Donald Trump could ultimately be done in by his Diet Coke habit. Not physically (though drinking 12 diet sodas a day doesn’t seem great for your health) but legally. The Washington Post reports that his former White House valet – the man who had to respond every time the president pressed his famous Oval Office Diet Coke button – provided key evidence that led to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in August.’ [via jwz]
21 October 2022
[retro] Don’t Piss Off Bradley, the Parts Seller Keeping Atari Machines Alive … An amusing story about the cantankerous gatekeeper of a huge collection of ancient Atari hardware. ‘Best’s catalog is only available in print. It costs $7.50 plus shipping, is the size of a small phone book, and is more than 20 years out of date. It needs to be cross-referenced with an “addendum” section on the Best website, where Koda has logged about 65 typewritten pages’ worth of piecemeal price changes and other corrections over the past two decades. Anyone who can’t figure out this system risks being deemed a time-waster. In emails to customers, Koda often laments his busy schedule, and he seems to take distractions personally.’
14 October 2022
[moore] Watchmen author Alan Moore: ‘I’m definitely done with comics’… … Another interview with Alan Moore in the Guardian and here is a review of Illuminations – his new collection of short stories. ‘He shuns new tech to the extent that we speak down a landline, so I can’t see the lavishly bearded face from which his gentle Northampton burr issues. “When the internet first became a thing,” he says, “I made the decision that this doesn’t sound like anything that I need. I had a feeling that there might be another shoe to drop – and regarding this technology, as it turned out, there was an Imelda Marcos wardrobe full of shoes to drop. I felt that if society was going to morph into a massive social experiment, then it might be a good idea if there was somebody outside the petri dish.” He makes do, instead, with an internet-savvy assistant: “He can bring me pornography, cute pictures of cats and abusive messages from people.”’
7 October 2022
[lauguage] Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from ‘buttface’ to ‘wankpuffin’ … An important study of compounded swearwords on Reddit. ‘As a corpus, Reddit has the virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity, and on the cutting edge of new coinages. For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.’
3 October 2022
[queen] BBC Television Channels – 1830BST 8th September 2022 – Announcing The Death Of Queen Elizabeth II … Grid showing BBC Television channels as they announced the Queen’s death.
30 September 2022
[photos] 5 Unintended Consequences of Photography … ‘Photography Gave Us an Appreciation of Time – The big events of life usually pass too slowly for us to observe. But photographs freeze the instants of change so we can see our child getting older by degrees, or our parents gradually aging across the years. And we can piece together a year from a thousand photographed memories of events our memories consider too minor to keep handy. We take this power of capturing time for granted, but it simply didn’t exist prior to photography.’
23 September 2022
[truecrime] What Serial Gets Wrong … After Adnan Syed’s recent release, an examination (from 2014) of what the Serial podcast got wrong. ‘I have no idea who lied fifteen years ago, and I doubt we’ll ever find out. Lies have a way of burrowing into the brain and reshaping and reforming into truth after awhile. Whatever Adnan and Jay believed then could have changed by now. What does seem clear to me, though, is that there was rampant and serious misconduct by Baltimore law enforcement. It seems impossible that, as a defendant, Adnan got within the realm of a fair shake here. And even if law enforcement’s shady behavior didn’t rise to illegal misconduct, there’s a reasonable possibility that it could have had a tangible effect on the outcome.’
21 September 2022
[moore] Discover Alan Moore’s Surprising First Published Superman Stories … A look at some long-forgotten UK published stories from Alan Moore. ‘That second Superheroes Annual in 1983…There was a two-page text piece by Alan Moore, with illustrations by the brilliant Bryan Talbot. The story was titled “Protected Species,” and it was about an alien who traveled the universe collected endangered species from lost planets that he would then bring to his bosses who would keep the survivors on a sort of zoo…’
19 September 2022
[comics] “Westminster.”
16 September 2022
[queen] The short unhappy life of Elizabeth Windsor … Politico sum up the life of Queen Elizabeth. ‘She knew a lot about the things she had inherited and not much about anything else. She drove – fast – about her estates in a beaten-up Land Rover and dedicated her life to fiercely protecting the promulgation of the family firm. But it was almost as if she was absent from her own story – her legend as rigorously curated and spun as that of any autocrat. To provide her United Kingdom with the monarch she felt it needed, she sacrificed an ordinary life and the other things most of us take for granted. But then the curious nature of hereditary monarchy never offered her another path.’
14 September 2022
[queen] Inside British newsrooms on the day Queen Elizabeth II died: secret codes, chaos and black ties …
12 September 2022
[queen] Who the hell updated Queen Elizabeth II’s Wikipedia page so quickly? … ‘It’s not as simple as changing “is” to “was.” After Sydwhunte made the initial death edit, Elizabeth II’s article underwent more than 55 edits in the subsequent 15 minutes – adding sources, changing the tense, updating the infobox with the length of her reign, and updating her categories (she’s no longer in the category “living people,” for example). Over on the article for now-King Charles III, there was a frenzy of title changes as editors waited for his regnal name to be announced. Charles’ article changed titles five times while people waited for his official regnal name.’
9 September 2022
[death] [NOTE: Do Not Run Until Fucking Queen Is Dead Or People Will Lose Their Shit] Queen Elizabeth Dead At 96 … The Onion’s top-quality obituary for the Queen. ‘She married Philip Mountbatten in 1947, beginning a [TK ADJECTIVE] royal union that lasted [TK] years until [NOTE: DID HE DIE? CHECK. IF HE DID, WE FORGOT TO RUN AN OBIT], in which they had four children: Prince Charles, the heir apparent, as well as Princess [TK], Prince [TK], and Prince Andrew [NOTE: CHECK ANDREW’S LATEST ROYAL STATUS RE: PEDOPHILIA ALLEGATIONS]. In addition to her children, the queen is survived by [INSERT SOME BULLSHIT HERE ABOUT HER DO-NOTHING PROGENY]. As Britain’s first lady queen [PROBABLY LOOK THIS UP] …’
8 September 2022
7 September 2022
[tv] Casting Columbo: the gargantuan unseen effort … A lot of the magic in Columbo came from casting the right actors for villians, victims and supporting cast. ‘Team Columbo considered up to three dozen different actors for every role in every episode. For a typical 1970s Columbo, the casting started with the producer. Three to four weeks before the scheduled start of filming-about the time he hired his director-the producer would compile a list of actors he thought would be right for each part. He’d also send the script to several talent agencies, to get their suggestions. Executives from Universal Television and from NBC would also weigh in. And, finally, the producer would bounce his options off of the director and Peter Falk.’
6 September 2022
[politics] “He was scum.” … Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.
5 September 2022
[cia] The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge … The astonishing story of how the CIA lost control of it’s arsenal of hacking tools because of an extremely angry, disgruntled employee. ‘Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower. Ayn Rand fanboys are not exactly famous for their doctrinal consistency, and Schulte’s concerns about “Big Brother” don’t appear to have occasioned much soul-searching in the years he spent building surveillance weapons for a spy agency. On an anonymous Twitter account that Schulte maintained, he reportedly expressed the view (in a since-deleted tweet) that Chelsea Manning should be executed. Weber recalled Schulte saying that Snowden deserved the same. Could it be that Schulte had leaked the C.I.A.’s digital arsenal not because of any principled opposition to the policies of the U.S. government but because he was pissed off at his colleagues?’
2 September 2022
[toys] Genuine Thoughts and Prayers Collectible Toy … ‘Perfect for any tragedy.’
25 August 2022
[comics] Neil Gaiman on the Secret History of ‘The Sandman,’ from Giant Mechanical Spiders to the Joker … Long interview with Gaiman on The Sandman comics, TV series, Alan Moore, his history with DC Comics and much more. ‘I love that the House of Secrets and the House of Mystery are on screen. I love that Asim Chaudhry and Sanjeev Bhaskar are respectively Abel and Cain. I love the fact we’ve got Goldie and Gregory the Gargoyle. I look at Gregory and I’m just sad that [artist] Bernie Wrightson is no longer with us, because I wish he’d lived to see Gregory the Gargoyle flying around on the screen, this thing that he made. I love all that. I think that’s so much fun. And I love the fact that if you want to do weird deep dives into DC chronology, you have Lyta Hall, who in some versions of DC Comics existence – not really the one that we were in even by the time we got to the comic – but there is a level in which she’s Wonder Woman’s daughter. And perhaps she is, we’ll never know.’
24 August 2022
[life] If You Transplant a Human Head, Does Its Consciousness Follow? … The engrossing real life story of a surgeon obsessed with head transplants. ‘One day, her friend, Cleveland neurologist Michael DeGeorgia, called her to his office. He quietly slid a battered shoebox toward her, inviting her to open it. Schillace obliged, half-worried it might contain a brain. She pulled out a notebook-perhaps from the ‘50s or ‘60s, she says-and started to leaf through it. “There’s all these strange little notes and stuff about mice and brains and brain slices, and these little flecks,” Schillace says. “I was like, ‘What … what are all these marks?’” Probably blood, DeGeorgia told her.’
19 August 2022
[comics] Interview: Joe Colquhoun … Charlie’s War artist Joe Colquhoun interviewed in 1982 by Lew Stringer. ‘I found Roy [of the Rovers] a bit of a boring subject, not being a great fan of football, and after four or five years of drawing those bloody hairy-arsed footballers tearing around morning, noon and night, it got me down a lot.’
17 August 2022
[tech] Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers … ‘One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! What’s going on?’
16 August 2022
[games] Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist … A true-crime story about the robbery of a pristine collection of video games and the emotional cost of losing it. ‘Generations of games had been lost to attics, yard sales, and garbage bins, and enthusiasts like Brassard had become sentimental about finding and possessing them. A culture, and then a market, had bloomed around such wistful longings. It’s fair to assume most humans have played a video game-the emotional capital of playing and loving a game 30 years ago is one of the reasons games that old have become desirable. In the summer of 2021, a sealed copy of the first print of Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold for $2 million at auction. A copy of The Legend of Zelda went for nearly $900,000. A pristine, never-opened copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million.’
15 August 2022
[cancelled] I’m a low-income pensioner and I’m terrified of university cancel culture this winter… ‘Yes, those with conservative views have got the Daily Telegraph, the Mail, Spectator and the Sun if people want to advocate sending Windrush migrants to Rwanda in leaky boats, but if they’re denied the platform of the University of East Anglia you’re literally cutting their tongues out. I don’t know what I’m going to do…’
12 August 2022
11 August 2022
[lovecraft] H.P Lovecraft’s very bizarre hatred of Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights … TL;DR – Lovecraft was racist. ‘He seemed to filter all his untethered anxiety into the very building at 169 Clinton Street. “I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient thing – a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.” Yet Lovecraft saved his greater fantasies for the neighborhood south of here. He eventually funneled all this tortured and deranged hysteria into his horror writing with the publication of “The Horror at Red Hook,” a story that literally depicts the neighborhood as a gateway to Hell.’
10 August 2022
[comics] The definitive guide to the many editions of Sandman … Useful reading order to Sandman along with a guide to the many different editions of the series. ‘The cheapest way to read is at your nearest library. For those willing to splash, there are many different editions to collect the series; Single Issues, TPB, Deluxe, Omnibus, and Absolutes. For non-comic readers, it is recommended that you decide on a format/edition and stick with it to avoid confusion as different editions cover varying amounts of content per volume.’
8 August 2022
[comics] The 100 Most Influential Pages in Comic Book History … A wide ranging look at 100 pages that changed comics. ‘Hawkeye No. 11 (2013): The highlight of the run came in Hawkeye No. 11, an issue told through the eyes of Lucky, a dog that Hawkeye adopted in the first issue of the series. Lucky (or Pizza Dog, as he thinks of himself, due to his taste for pizza) sees the world through a series of nonverbal signifiers (the book’s letterer, Chris Eliopoulos is credited as “production” for the issue, as he delivers a lot more than just lettering in the issue). It’s Chris Ware-esque diagram artwork, but with a great deal more heart behind the experiences of Lucky. This was one of the most acclaimed single issues of the past decade, winning an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue.’
5 August 2022
>> I don’t know who needs this today but here’s an acapella version of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by the Beach Boys. [via]
2 August 2022
[ai] The Kubrick Times 🚨📰 … Using an AI to generate newspaper articles from NYT Headlines used by Kubrick’s 2001. ‘World Population Passes 6 Billion Mark – The world’s population has officially reached 6 billion people, according to the United Nations. This milestone has been both celebrated and met with trepidation, as it highlights the enormous pressure that our planet is under. The population is now evenly split between the northern and southern hemispheres, with 3 billion people living north of the equator and 3 billion living south of it.’
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