Includes a deep dive into the importance of underground comics (along with the news-to-me that he edited an 80s anthology called Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy)
Those underground artists, what they were doing was really going far to the boundaries of the acceptable, then crossing over into unacceptable territory and going even further and planting all these flags. That was incredibly useful for those who followed. They showed what was possible, whatever you might think of their work.
(via)
All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky
If Bluesky were like a physical mail delivery service, the way it operates is like dumping all the mail at the post office.
The freedom to move between corporate behemoths - yay.
Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse
“I feel there’s a 5,000-pound mouse breathing down my neck.”
35 years after Maus, a documentary is out soon and he’s working on a comic about Gaza with Joe Sacco. Still as spiky as ever.
Jonathan Chandler interviewed by Hayley Campbell
As a teen I would go into the Ipswich comic shop and was trying to get into superhero comics but was really just forcing myself. Then I gravitated to the dark bit at the back of the shop where the alt stuff was kept. After the miles of surface you’d get in the X-Men books I fell down this other world like a really deep well.
Why are all social networks structured around being either loosely public to the entire world, or only a coven of your blood oath relatives?
a.wholelottanothing.org/meet-mozi…
Mastodon kinda fits this niche for me - there’s enough barriers-to-entry to keep it obfuscated from the wider world - but it’d be nice to have something similar for my normie friends too.
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.
A companion for Audre Lorde’s “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and Stafford Beer’s “the purpose of a system is what it does”.
A beautiful piece of writing, ostensibly about working in a picture framing shop, but about so much more. People bring in their treasures and Wendy carefully puts them behind glass, marvelling all the while. A delight.
I love the art so much I sometimes weep.
(via)
An antidote to the shopping bollocks, internet archaeologist Molly Soda pulls out some of her favourite animated gifs from the sublime to the ridiculous. I loved how she hunts through online archives like they’re charity shops and flea markets, looking for perfect lost gems.
Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome
Not really news, but of note as it starts with a thorough and insightful analysis of the Judge Dredd comics in the Atlantic. If you’d told me that would happen when I was a kid in the 80s… I never know if this is a good or bad thing. (via)
No shade on writers trying to put food on the table by whatever means they can, but shit like this just kills my soul, one tiny cut at a time.
Big Thick Rivers, in map form!
A gorgeous overlay for OpenStreetMap.
The more upstreams a river has, the thicker the line.
I’m a little obsessed with the watershed south/west of Birmingham and it looks great here.
TIL the word lettuce is derived from lac, the Latin for “milk”, due to the milky fluid found in its stem. (via University Challenge or Only Connect, I forget which)
The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won.
About the USA, but it’s notable none of his counter-examples are Britain. Poverty and homelessness are essential the economic system working as it is designed to work, and we who benefit really need to start taking responsibility for that. (via)
Bit torn on the Observer/Guardian strike this week. On the one hand, always support striking workers, no question. On the other, I never liked the Obs as a print newspaper and resent its editorial presence on the G website. They should have retired it years ago. I’ll be glad to see it go.
I’d been hearing that the kids were all into vintage digital cameras these days because they covet the noise and imperfect colours. Back when those cameras were being released (circa 2005 I’d say) the big trend was for expired film. The colours were off and the processing was unpredictable. My friend Gareth even buried his film in the garden for a year to see what would happen to it.
A photo I took in 2007 on a point-and-shoot camera with “very expired Kodak PJ400 film”.
As I traded up my point-and-shoot digital cameras to a decent Nikon DSLR I realised that taking a “perfect” photo was now really easy. The camera would lock in a decent focus, exposure and white balance and the new Adobe Lightroom would finish the job. These weren’t necessarily good photos, of course. But they were technically spot on.
And so I found myself pointing my perfect digital camera through the dirty distorted viewfinder of a cheap 1950s camera for about five years, making digital photos that frankly looked like shit and were all the more interesting for it.
I never did it for nostalgic reasons (I hate nostalgia - it’s a disease that should always be fought). I did it for the same reason I like to put a 1970s manual lens on my current DSLR. It slows me down, forces me to work with the machine, and produces images that can surprise me.
Does it amuse me that the crappy digital camera in my attic are now coveted items? Yes, hugely. But I totally get it. Stuff is too perfect and that makes it boring. Broken, imperfect things are where it’s at.
What does Werner Herzog’s nihilist penguin teach us about life?
The natural world, as we learnt from the horrors of Grizzly Man, is not easily compared with ours. The structures we adopt for our stories – be they tragic, romantic or comedic – do not fit nature quite so tightly.
I rewatched Encounters the other week and this scene remains chilling. (via)
A delightfully rambling interview with Craig Thompson, author of Blankets, about, amongst other things, his new book Ginseng Roots.
The Imminence of the Destruction of the Space Program
Runaway orbital pollution is increasing the likelihood of catastrophic collisions destroying communications infrastructure and making space travel too dangerous to contemplate. Well done everyone.
The computer got quickly took the lead in Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe last night and I resolved to keep playing until I caught up. 160 games later…
(First to 100?)
The “random” flickering of an LED tea light is generated by sound chips from musical gift cards. You can hear them by wiring a speaker to your tea light. (via)
Endocrine management of transgender adolescents
A report from the French Society of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetology that appears (I’m no expert, clearly) to draw markedly different conclusions to the UK’s benighted Cass report, and strikes a much calmer and even tone. Fingers crossed it gets media coverage (lol).
I do not believe long-term illness necessarily makes me uninteresting as a writer, but I worry that a life of fatigue does. I worry it strips me of colour, movement, interaction, humanity. It isn’t just energy or activity that abandons me when I’m particularly fatigued, it’s words, it’s stories. Oh, thoughts remain, plenty of them, but they’re just footprints walked round and round in circles, overlapping, muddied, obsessive, no real use to anyone. I know not to dedicate too much time to them anymore.
100% all of this. Especially the thoughts.
Matt McGorry on having long Covid
As many of you will know, long Covid has fucked me over the last year, both physically and mentally, to the point where even writing about my condition is impossible. So yeah, I’m going to share testimonies from those who can.
After discovering the Prodigy’s Firestarter is built on a Breeders riff I’ve been revisiting the Last Splash album and I’m kinda astonished at how out there it is. Time has softened a lot of 90s stuff - even Big Black is comfort listening now - but Cannonball aside, it’s a very weird album.
