[9/11] The Falling Man — a repost of this long, moving essay by Tom Junod.
‘Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end.’
‘…the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves.’
[comics] “Don’t remind people what you aren’t”: DC’s Richard Bruning on prestige, Vertigo, and why Paul Levitz wouldn’t buy a Mac, Part 1 … Bruning, DC’s long-time design/creative director interviewed. ‘Alan [Moore] and Dave [Gibbons] had finished the first couple of issues of Watchmen. I had realized that Watchmen was going to come out like a regular floppy comic with the staples on the side, but it was going to have an ad flat in it. And I said, “You can’t put a fucking ad flat in this book. Every page is just too perfect.” It was so well thought out, and so considered, that on the flight after San Diego Comic Con, I convinced Dick Giordano to take the ad flat out of there. I had to come up with something to do with the back of the book, because now we had eight pages to fill. I got to work with Dave and Alan on creating those back features, which were unique to each issue.’
[gaming] Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Cabinet Production … Go look behind the scenes at an Atari Factory building Battlezone arcade cabinets in 1980. ‘One of the first things that jumps out at me, is just how fluidly the workers are able to move the cabinets around. Anyone who’s ever tried to shift a full‑size Atari cab on their own knows they’re not exactly featherweight. But in the factory environment, you see operators sliding them across the floor, pivoting them into position, and lining them up with a kind of casual confidence that only comes from doing it hundreds of times a week.’
[truecrime] ‘It destroyed me’ – your top true-crime TV shows of all time … Guardian readers pick their favourite true crime shows. The Jinx:‘[Robert] Durst – who was suspected of killing his first wife, and was convicted for the murder of a friend and then a neighbour in 2000-01 – is a remarkable subject: a manipulative Jekyll and Hyde-type figure clearly with a great capacity for violence, but charismatic and vulnerable with it, and who is finally undone by his own entitlement and hubris. Watching him ignore the advice of his lawyers and wander inexorably into self-incrimination is highly entertaining.’
[adam-curtis] The Strange World of… Adam Curtis … The Quietus explores ten key films that define Adam Curtis’ career as a documentarian. (via) ‘Curtis showed he was a master of locating the character, the story arc to talk about important historical developments. A central theme of his output is that power resides in finance and technology which are both opaque and boring. We need to make them interesting through identifiable heroes and villains and hubristic quests. This focus on interesting characters is ironic because another theme of his work is the way life has become all about the individual, not the collective or culture. The aim is to gesture to wider shifts in society, his “powerful forces,” but people are the only thing that can be grasped.’
[mp3] The Lost Joy of Music Piracy: WhatCD, Oink, and Spotify … A look back at the the golden age of downloading music illegally. ‘For highly-sought after releases yet to hit shelves, other users chipped in on the bounty, creating a massive reward for whichever record store employee was willing to “borrow” a copy from the backroom before the release date, resulting in the website frequently becoming the originating source of album leaks online. The largest request on the website was for “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” an unpublished short story by Salinger only known to exist in a locked room of the Princeton Library, where it was available by appointment to read under the strict supervision of staff. “It was basically like a long running joke that it would never get filled,” Brian laughs. “And then somebody fucking did it.” In November of 2013, a What.CD user tracked down one of the 25 copies of the manuscript allegedly printed in 1999 in order to fill the request.’
[funny] Matt Berry reads a truly brutal letter from Robert Crumb … ‘Swedish jazz saxophonist Mats Gustafsson once sent some of his music to legendary illustrator and famed record collector Robert Crumb; Crumb, baffled, pulled no punches and responded with the brutally honest letter you will now hear. In 2014, in honour of this critique, Gustafsson named his next album ‘Torturing the Saxophone’, and proudly reprinted this letter amongst the liner notes. ‘
[life] Radio station accidentally announced King’s death then broadcast 16 minutes of silence as panicked staff member ran away … Rule #1: Don’t play the royal obituary tape live unless the King is dead. ‘An Ofcom ruling said a member of staff carrying out maintenance on the studio computer accessed the pre-recorded sound files and played them out of curiosity, unaware it would lead to the audio being broadcast live. Once they realised what had happened, they stopped the files and “panicked and left the premises”.’
[comics] Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’ … Interview with Art Spiegelman in the Guardian. ‘[Spiegelman] takes me on an impromptu tour, showing me the living room that held Mouly’s huge, 1,000lb Multilith printing press, until they had a toddler and it became too dangerous to keep. There is a mural painted by the cartoonist Gary Panter on the living room wall, and another just above their bed, painted to replace a set of bookshelves that collapsed onto the couple when they were asleep, breaking Mouly’s nose and prompting a big book clear out. “Is this book worth dying for?” Spiegelman says they asked of themselves, a more hardcore alternative to Swedish death cleaning, but even so there are full bookshelves in every room, and pieces of art and curios everywhere.’
[politics] Why Andy Burnham is no ordinary Labour prime minister … TIL, that Andy Burnham is the first Co-operative Party Prime Minister. ‘The Labour Party and the Co-operative Party are distinct organizations — but a pact agreed in 1927 allows candidates to stand on behalf of both parties. In practice, Co-operative MPs tend to follow the Labour line — but the party has a distinct focus on mutual ownership, community businesses, and credit unions. It argues for democratic control of services and businesses by the people who use them — and supporters say this program offers up real hints about how Burnham will now govern. ‘
[everest] Mount Everest, a climber known only as ‘Green Boots’, and the mission to solve a 30-year mystery … The haunting story of a climber who died on Everest and remained unrecovered in the mountain’s death zone. ‘Named after his lime-coloured Koflach boots, Green Boots became a landmark for climbers tackling the tricky north-east ridge route, accessed from the Tibet and China side of the world’s tallest mountain. Curled up as if napping, Green Boots is fully clothed and lies nestled under a small rocky alcove about 8,500 metres above sea level and just 350 metres from the summit. A red fleece is pulled up over his face; perhaps a final act as he succumbed to -30C temperatures and hurricane-force winds in a storm that was documented in Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book Into Thin Air.’
[comics] Jim Shooter Agonistes: A reconsideration of the editor and writer's legacy … ‘The company Shooter inherited was capable of the rare feat of brilliance (Jim Starlin’s Warlock, for instance, or the mad genius of Jack Kirby’s Captain America), but it was bounded by immense, unreadable piles of crap, much of which couldn’t so much as meet its own deadline. Shooter’s Marvel was as dependable as Pittsburgh steel: rarely great yet seldom unreadable. Every so often, a work of real and permanent brilliance could break through: Frank Miller’s Daredevil is the most evident example, and Shooter certainly had sense enough to champion it when it happened. But the archetypical comic of Jim Shooter’s Marvel would have to have been something like Rom: Spaceknight, written by Bill Mantlo, drawn by Sal Buscema; factory comics at their level best.’
[movies] Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail … A deep dive into the tech of the original Jurassic Park movie. (via) ‘The legendary “It’s a Unix system. I know this” sequence was done using an experimental SGI file explorer application named fsn. Lex Murphy takes over Dennis’s SGI Crimson and opens the /usr directory.’
[comics] Logo/Cover Design: Watchmen … Todd Klein analyses Watchmen’s logo and cover design. ‘I can’t say for sure if this was the first time a comic logo had run along the side instead of at the top, but the reasoning is brilliant, and spot on. For decades all comics kept logos at the top for just the reason Dave gives, they were often in racks, with only the top third or so showing. WATCHMEN was one of the early direct-only titles intended mainly for comics specialty shops.’
[space] Astronauts returning from six-month missions describe a persistent 'observer' sensation … A close look at a curious after-effect of extended space missions. ‘NASA’s own post-flight reflections from station crews describe the sensation in plainer language: home feels staged. Smells are too sharp. Gravity feels theatrical. The brain, which spent half a year recalibrating for a world without down, treats the familiar as something to be studied rather than inhabited. Returning astronauts describe walking into their own homes and feeling like they are visiting them. Some talk about being unable to put a glass down without watching their hands do it. The pattern shows up in oral histories, in memoirs, in flight surgeon notes. It is one of the quieter costs of long-duration spaceflight.’
[comics] 'It hasn’t really struck yet that this is my life in a book': Evan Dorkin talks Nerd Inferno … Dorkin interviewed by the Comics Journal. He’s creating a new Milk and Cheese strip: ‘But the main thing is I make some bullet points. I write a bunch of things down on a piece of paper. I draw a couple of houses with faces on them and it’s Milk and Cheese. A Monopoly house and a postage stamp, as I’ve always said. And you put eyes on them and that’s them. I just wing it. Sometimes I’ll have a definite joke that I want in there. I mean, I had an idea for a Tesla strip, but Teslas are old news now. And I still like it, it’s a terrible joke, but it’s dumb funny, of them singing the Spider-Man theme about Teslas. Cybertruck, Cybertruck [sung to the theme of the Spider-Man television theme song]. You can take it from there. But they’re doing stuff to Cybertrucks and to Cybertruck owners and to Teslas. It’s like a children’s show almost [laughs]. Two puppet alcoholics doing a kids show for Canada.’
[comics] HOLY REAL ESTATE! The BATMAN ’66 WAYNE MANOR Is Up For Sale … Fancy buying Stately Wayne Manor? Here’s the real estate listing. :) ‘The Pasadena, California, mansion famously used as the exterior of Bruce Wayne’s ancestral home on the 1966 Batman TV series is on the market — and the asking price is a mere $32 million.’
[true-crime] The True Crime Film That Actually Solved The Crime … Examining The Thin Blue Line – the 1988 documentary which literally invented the modern true crime genre and overturned a wrongful death penalty conviction to free an innocent man. (via)
[comics] WatchmeX … Amusing fan-fiction describing issue-by-issue what might have happened if Watchmen continued after Moore and Gibbons completed their run. ‘The Hall of Souls was a device created by Adrian Veidt shortly after his attack on New York in the original Watchmen. Paranoid and fearful that his scheme would be uncovered, he built himself a secret cloning facility deep under Karnak, with the idea of transferring his consciousness into a new body should anything happen to him. The existence of the device was first mentioned in the “Death of Our Souls” arc in the second volume, where Adrian Veidt (later referred as “Adrian Alpha”) was killed in a fight with a giant gorilla on the Moon.’
[politics] Britain’s six prime ministers since 2016 – ranked! … On Boris Johnson: ‘He campaigned for the December election under the slogan “get Brexit done”, one an exhausted country fell for, even though his Northern Ireland solution was just another fudge. Boris hoped he was going to be a leader for a good-times Britain, that the UK would fall for his jokes and charm. Instead, the world fell into the chaos of the Covid pandemic that required strong and stable leadership which Johnson was unable to provide. Over the course of the next two years, his government was rocked with the scandals of dodgy PPE contracts and Partygate. Boris was even fined by the police for attending a party given for his own birthday. He tried to claim he had no idea the parties were taking place, even though he was setting the culture inside No 10.’
[comics] Kieron Gillen Reddit AMA on The Power Fantasy … ‘ We kept broad “types”. I wanted it to feel like a coherent universe, while still taking tropes out to spin. Valentina is the Superman archetype – with a bit of Wonder Woman, obviously. (America Chavez meets Marvel Boy, if I’m sticking to my own books). Masumi is an alternate take on the Hulk archetype, with a bit of Zero from Gen Hope. Magus is Constantine meets Doctor Doom. Heavy is Magneto, but with everything changed, and seeing where it ends up. Etienne was always a telepath, and just digging into that character type in a way few books have even tried. So with that core look, we constructed.’
[truecrime] Inside CrimeCon's uneasy mix of fandom and tragedy … BBC News visits a true CrimeCon in Las Vegas. ‘Just steps from an arch welcoming attendees to CrimeCon 2026, there is a wall plastered with missing persons posters and a sign emblazoned with “8 Simple Rules for Being an ETHICAL True Crime Fanatic”. About a five-minute walk away, though, there is a merch store selling CrimeCon-branded gifts, shot glasses and $80 sweatshirts. Employees bark in the hallways, urging attendees to sign up for next year or join the CrimeCon Cruise. Some have really leaned into the theme. One woman wears skin-tight crime-scene-tape leggings, while a pair of best friends proudly show off their crime-scene-tape homemade bags – complete with blood-spatter fabric lining.’
[funny] Notes from a Tired Egyptian Guy Whose Job Is Explaining That Humans Built the Pyramids … ‘The workers themselves would be furious hearing these theories. Imagine dedicating twenty years to hauling limestone under desert heat only for somebody in the future to conclude, “Honestly, this feels Martian.” Also, if aliens truly possessed advanced cosmic technology, why would they choose pyramids? Why not invent indoor cooling? Or chairs that support the lower back?’
[politics] I saw all Reform’s weaknesses on display in Makerfield – Farage should be worried … Guardian reporting the aftermath of the Makerfield by-election. ‘I have sometimes found them a bit standoffish about Farage, tending to see him as too macho and full of himself – one should always remember that undying bit of folk-wisdom, “Nobody likes a smartarse” – and also wary of his leaning into the ultra-right. This forms one half of Farage’s essential dilemma: as one Reform MP quoted in the Times reportedly said of Makerfield voters’ reaction on the doorstep: “We were either too racist or not racist enough.”’
[blogs] Bubbles.town … A new social link aggregator linking to personal blogs. ‘5011 independent, personal blogs. One front page. Ranked by votes and freshness, shaped by you.’ (via)
[comics] Seth’s Media Diet … A looks at the books, TV and films the comic artist Seth consumes. ‘I collect old TV broadcasts with the commercials and station breaks still in them (there is a weird and obscure market for this out there if you can track it down). The ones I most collect are old broadcasts of movies. Most of this stuff is from the late ’70s or the ’80s or even the ’90s. During the time when people were recording tv on their VCRs (and were too lazy to edit out the commercials — thank goodness). I love the time travel quality these old broadcasts give.’
[epstein] ‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant. … Examining the role of Jeffrey Epstein’s staff in his crimes, specifically his personal assistant. ‘For [Amos] Guiora, Groff is a classic case. If she was making appointments and booking flights, she was enabling: “All this shit can’t happen without her.” In that sense, she was just like the leaders in the Catholic church or the university administrators who put their loyalty to their institutions over their duty to a victim. The only difference was that in Groff’s case, said Guiora, “her institution was Jeffrey Epstein”.’
[comics] Kevin O’Neill Audio Interview: Part 1 | Part 2 … Wide-ranging interview with O’Neill from 2021. In part 1: ‘In this first episode, the artist behind Nemesis the Warlock, Ro-Busters, ABC Warriors, Metalzoic, Marshal Law, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes your host Molch-R through his life and career, from an office boy on Buster in the 1970s to his industry-shaking work with Pat Mills in the 1980s.’ In part 2: ‘Kevin and Molch-R discuss his co-creation of superhero-busting maniac Marshal Law, his work in America, his banning by the Comics Code Authority, and his decades-spanning collaboration with Alan Moore on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Along the way they dive into Kevin’s Roman Catholic upbringing, the seediness of 1960s London, his hatred for dragons, and his electrifying secret superhero origin story!’
[books] James Ellroy: ‘It’s satanic to me, the dependency people have on computers’ … Novelist James Ellroy interviewed. ‘Whatever gift I have as a novelist derived from the fact that I was just a dipshit kid who loved to read. I assimilated style. I assimilated where to put paragraph breaks. It’s the only education I’ve ever really had.’
[books] Alan Moore’s 6 favorite books that have shaped his oeuvre … ‘I first read Peake’s Gormenghast books at 14, and although bowled over by them, I’d not realized until I was reading my grandsons the trilogy just how much Peake’s berserk use of language, with its lyric seizures, has affected my own style. So, yes, I’m blaming him for my excesses.’
[space] How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer … Today I learned that Nasa flies really paranoid computers in space. ‘NASA must still account for common mode failures—software bugs or catastrophic events that could theoretically impact all primary channels simultaneously. To mitigate this, Orion carries a completely independent Backup Flight Software (BFS) system. This is a prime example of dissimilar redundancy. It is implemented on different hardware, runs a different operating system, and utilizes independently developed, simplified flight software.’
[moore] Alan Moore & Steve Moore Interviewed … Recovered audio interview from 1982. ‘Here Alan and Steve discuss their work on Warrior, which was newly launched at the time, and their planned forthcoming work which included Skizz, that appeared the following year, and a movie called Mirrorman, which we can only assume is still in development.’
[games] Atari’s Superman Game … A deep-dive into an Atari 2600 video game based on Superman. ‘Superman is, as you’d expect, based off of the influential DC Comics character created back in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Superman is not the first licensed video game ever made – that honor goes to Fonz, a 1976 arcade game by Sega – but it is probably the first unique one, given that Fonz was just a rebranded version of Sega’s Road Race game. It’s also an early example of corporate synergy in the game industry. Warner owned both Atari and DC Comics at the time, and had just published the hugely successful Richard Donner Superman movie in December 1978.’
[tv] How to Escape the 21st Century … A recent Adam Curtis interview. ‘We look back at the Victorians and say that their conformism was going to church and being moral and hypocritical at the same time. Others will look back at us in a hundred years’ time and say that our conformity was self-expression, that everyone believed that the most important part of life was self-expression, which is ridiculous because if everyone is self-expressive, what’s the point?’
[games] Silverwolf- A Story About Text Adventures and so much more … This article defies classification. It’s about how a commune of women wrote text adventures in rural Ireland in the 1980s but also about mystery, transformation, identity, games as fantasy/alternate worlds, radical feminist separatism, retreating from modernity and then possibly… a milkshake duck plot twist! It’s genuinely extraordinary. Go read…
“The Ladies of St. Brides are difficult to understand,” a journalist wrote in 1987. “How much is hype is difficult to assess. …They say Jack the Ripper is serious but are they ever serious about anything?” The group’s former publisher suspects their primary motive was always financial: “I think, basically, St Bride’s were in business: they were doing it on a commercial basis, however un-commercial they may have looked!” But some of the school’s pupils in later years would come to characterize the group as dangerously earnest, with one describing it as a cult. “There was something sinister at the heart of it,” she wrote: “The founder was a remarkable person but was leading a fantasy life—we were living in someone else’s fantasy.” While much about the Games Mistresses would shift across their decades of fronts and personas, disconnection from the everyday world was a constant theme.
[lifehacks] What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life? … From AskReddit … ‘The phonetic or military alphabet. Over the course of my lifetime verbal communication over the phone of strings of numbers and letters has become increasingly common. J310DBM157, for example. D’s sound like B’s when spoken on a phone. M’s sound like N’s and so on. Juliet 31 Zero Delta Bravo Mike 157. It should be taught in high school.’
[movies] RoboCop (1987) Is an Almost Perfectly Symmetrical Film … A deep dive into the structure of the original Robocop movie. ‘I have no idea if the makers of RoboCop intended for it to be so symmetrical. The fact that they accomplished this feat while still making a fast-paced action film that never feels like it’s repeating itself is simply amazing.’
[politics] Baying electorate demand new mewling fool in Number 10 to loathe and despise … ‘The UK’s furious public are increasingly vocal in their demands for a different thick-witted cretin to be installed in Downing Street so they can enjoy someone new to abhor and despise. “I’m sick of Starmer. I’m running out of things to hate about him,” said Simon Williams, a voter from Essex, frothing with fury.’ (via)
[funny] We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots … ‘That’s where billionaires like yourself come in. For a mere $10 million gift, you can help us remake the intellectual landscape by endowing a prestigious chair in an underrepresented subfield, such as geocentric astronomy, high-energy phlogiston physics, or patriotic history. Your generosity would enable us to lure academic job seekers who might otherwise scorn our hidebound institution in favor of innovative civics centers, private think tanks, and parents’ basements.’
[lifehacks] The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ … A look at why multitasking does not lead to good productivity. ‘Multitasking is the act of distracting yourself. It comes with a cost even when tasks feel related, because it requires you to switch the “mental rules of the game,” as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it. Even when people are allowed to switch between tasks at their own discretion, the more they switch, the longer everything takes. As Mark has written: “We find that in real world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end of day assessed productivity.”’ (archive)
[cia] Timothy Leary—1960s Acid Guru—May Have Been Among the CIA’s Greatest Assets … This article presents a fascinating conspiracy theory the that 1960s Psychedelic era was a CIA-orchestrated operation, with Timothy Leary as its frontman. (via) ‘Leary himself said in an interview with journalist Walter Bowart near the end of his life that he was working as an intelligence agent since 1962. “I was a witting agent of the CIA” which, he claimed, had recognized him as “an important national asset.” Asked by Bowart to elaborate on whether CIA people were involved in his LSD-proselytizing groups in the 1960s, Leary responded: “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.” Leary continued: “I like the CIA!”’
[comics] The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books … Reduce anxiety by reading comics. ‘Instead of reaching for my phone in the evenings, I picked up a comic instead. Reading them as an adult restored a sense of childlike wonder that transcended my anxieties. I found my quality of sleep started to improve. My dreams were more fanciful and less marked by the banal terrors of day-to-day life. I began to wake up feeling revitalised, free of the residual negativity from the previous night’s miserable doomscrolling. Inspired by the colourful imagery and ideas I found in comic books, I was able to channel a newfound sense of creativity into my own work as a journalist.’
[comics] The Complete 2000 AD By Alan Moore: Future Shocks & Other Stories … Review of Alan Moore’s early work … ‘“The Reservable Man” is clever, which is more than could be said for other Future Shock stories at time, but “The Time Machine” is genuinely smart. In the difference between these two tales of unusual time lies the whole of The Complete Alan Moore, a writer who could be so in love with the notion of doing something unusual simply for the sake of doing it, and at the same time a man who could actually marry that technical skill with emotional depth that was, and is, rare in his field.’
