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[gaming] Bizarro World … A jornalist accidentally discovers his wife is a world-class Tetris player. ‘During a late-night phone call after business had quieted down at the station, he told me that any record in one of the more popular classic games – like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, or Tetris – would always set the classic gaming world on fire. “It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.” What Flewin said next I will never forget. “Oh, my!”‘

[comics] An interview with Crumb biographer Dan Nadel: “He has this incredible instinct for survival” … fascinating interview about a recent biography of Robert Crumb. ‘I must say I was really, really surprised by how fast and how hard he hit in the fall of 1967, that was shocking to me. I had no idea that Robert was so internationally known by the end of 1967. Then Zap comes out in February ’68, Head Comics comes out in October ’68. By the end of ’68, he’s really, really famous. And known for being essentially an avant-garde artist. And he was unclassifiable, like he’s in a Whitney exhibition, he’s in a gallery show, he’s in the East Village Other, he’s in Rolling Stone. He’s across all media. That was really surprising.’

[true-crime] How Not to Get Away With Murder: The stranger-than-fiction story of the Stoney Creek killing … Watch the Dunning-Kruger effect play out in this true crime story from Canada, as two grifters overestimate their ability to getaway with murder. ‘Despite their scattershot efforts, Karafa and Li had left behind voluminous evidence—less breadcrumbs than whole loaves. Surveillance cameras had caught them at just about every stage of the crime: in the condo elevator, at the shooting location, dumping the Range Rover and en route to their various pit stops. The police didn’t need Pratt’s and Romano’s phones to access messages about the meetup; they were able to subpoena texts that outlined the entire plan. They’d found Li’s abandoned Mercedes and the nearby garbage can where she’d left her wig and bloodied sweatpants. Even as Li and Karafa had made their escape, security cameras caught them at Union Station, waiting for a shuttle bus in Montreal and again at the Montreal airport.’

[comics] Out On The Wildy, Windy Moors: Judge Dredd – The Cursed Earth … Tom Ewing is revisiting the early years of 2000AD. Here he’s looking at the first extended Dredd story. ‘Twenty-five weeks with two artists, with colour pages each week, was an exceptional stint on Dredd. Mills in his memoir gives full credit to Nick Landau for shepherding McMahon and especially Bolland (whose detailed, precisely inked work looks, and was, time-consuming to produce) into delivering it. But the storyline also shows how good the writers and editors were at matching stories to artists – maybe aside from the Vegas section, there’s no part of “The Cursed Earth” where you wish McMahon and Bolland had swapped places. Bolland gets to draw the freaky mutants, the deceptively cute aliens and the weird satirical living brand mascots, all segments where his crisp, realistic style enhances the strangeness he’s being asked to visualise. McMahon’s speciality is the Cursed Earth as a blasted wilderness, full of wild-eyed, wild-haired men, robots and monsters.’

[comics] Daredevil vs. The Punisher … from Nate McDonough.

[air-travel] The strange fate of Flight 2069 … Fascinating article looking at an incident nine months before 9/11 where a mentally ill passenger attempted to seize control of a British Airways Flight and nearly crashed it into the Sahara. ‘This is the issue of the flight, as it lives on in the minds of those who survived it: how to measure the price of a disaster averted. Why it torments some of those involved when they came out alive; whether the instinct to seek evidence of cover-up makes any rational sense, or is a feature of trauma. Did 9/11, in changing the scope of potential disaster in the popular imagination, cast Flight 2069 in a sicklier light? Conspiracy theories, in their impulse to look for something bad at work in the machine, are preferable to the awful randomness of what might happen, or nearly happen. Perhaps it is natural for Bill Hagan, bearing the awful responsibility of captain but finding himself out of the cockpit when the attack began, to be poring over counter-factuals 25 years later. Others, like Watson, are at pains to see the story of Flight 2069 rationally, as a neutral “event” and an accident that did not happen – but there was nothing emotionally neutral about it. It was a confrontation with the deeply irrational, with madness, and with death, for everyone onboard.’

[useful] One-Page Printable Yearly Calendar … ‘Take in the year all at once. Fold it up and carry it with you. Jot down your notes on it. Plan things out and observe the passage of time. Above all else, be kind to others.’

[space] Go look at 31 Jaw-dropping Space Photos.

[funny] The Poke’s 50 Favourite Funny Bluesky Posts of 2025

[movies] Michael Mann: ‘I make films for a large presentation’ … Michael Mann interviewed on Heat 2 and more. ‘My ambition is to very strongly and effectively impact the audience with the story with all the tools at my disposal to transport them into this world for two, two and a half hours. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do since I was in film school in London and so it’s a diminution for any of my – or any number of other directors I can think of – to have our films be seen 16-by-9 on an iPhone. The full power of performance and expression is what I make films for.’

[xmas] Madeline Horwath on the joy of Twixmas… …

[comics] The Comics Journal Best comics of 2025, Chosen by their Contributors … Tiffany Babb on the Solitary Gourmet manga: ‘As noted by Joe McCulloch in his review, the book is best enjoyed in small bites, something I appreciate. It’s small, it’s quiet, there’s no major drama to be found, it’s beautifully illustrated, and it’s all about food. Maybe I’m having flashbacks to all the time I spent wandering Tokyo by myself, or maybe it says something about my state of mind, but this weird book about a man eating food by himself is my favorite graphic novel of 2025.’

[comics] Happy Christmas from Kev O'Neill … Go look at some Christmas cards designed by the late Kevin O’Neill. He did some stunning Christmas comics covers as well.

[books] “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” … David Allen Green writes about his 40 year quest for a partially-remembered Christmas story he read as a child. ‘I bought books of Christmas stories on the off-chance they would reprint the story I was looking for – a disconcerting number of which appear to have been edited by Gyles Brandreth.’

[batman] Some links on the children’s rhyme “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker got away!”

Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy … A wonderful analysis of the many versions of Batman Smells. ‘As some of you know, I work in lexicography but came to this work via a science background, and it felt very much like what I was looking at was taxonomy: an evolutionary tree if you will, with certain characteristics conserved between different forms of the rhyme, while mutations cause changes which are selected—or not—by the playground troubadours, and die out or spread, to mutate again.’

Batman Slapping Robin Meme … ‘LAY AN EGG BITCH!!!’

The Secret True History Of 'Jingle Bells, Batman Smells' … ‘So, children of the 1960s would’ve been used to hearing several different (and politically charged) versions of “Jingle Bells” by the time Batman had his TV debut. What’s most noteworthy about “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” is that, once invented, it’s persisted in the public consciousness right up to this very day.’

[xmas] The Origin of the British Christmas Sandwich (archive link) … ‘Just one problem remains for our latest Yuletide tradition: its name is arguably a misnomer. “For me, it’s not a Christmas sandwich,” says Halley. “It’s a Boxing Day sandwich. They’re all founded in leftovers, even if that’s been forgotten on the high street. My truly mega sandwich of the year is always on Boxing Day.”’

[books] Heartwarming Christmas TV Advert Plot Generator For Bookshops … by Tom Gauld. ‘A workaholic book shop owner learns the true meaning of community with help from a kindly parsnip.’

[comics] 650 Greatest Comic Books Lists Aggregated … ‘If I were to ask 10 different people what the best comics were, I’d probably get 10 different answers. But if you asked enough people, eventually, you would see some of the usual suspects start to pop up more frequently. So the following isn’t necessarily my ranking of the best graphic novels, but instead, a collection of 655 different “Greatest Comic Books/Graphic Novels/Manga/Bande Desinee/Manhua/Manhwa/Fumetti/Historietas of All Time” lists.’

[games] The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking? … Transcripts from inside the room at the Mastermind board game new cover presentation.

REYNOLDS: Do we want sexual tension on a board game cover for eight-year-olds?

SMITH: We want adult tension. The tension of brains. If anyone sees sex, that’s on them. We’re not responsible for the public’s imagination. We’re responsible for moving units in Woolworths. Gary, I see what you’re going for… a Cold War posture: mutually assured… embarrassment? You probe, they conceal, you infer, they flinch. Gorgeous.

REYNOLDS: Jesus. All that from colored pegs and a plastic tray?

LARKIN: Bingo.

[life] Costanzian Logic … A moment from Seinfeld that has lived rent free in my head for many years.

[movies] Grandchildren Politely Decline David Cronenberg’s Bedtime Story Offer … ‘Assuring the 82-year-old filmmaker they could fall asleep perfectly fine without one, David Cronenberg’s grandchildren politely declined their grandfather’s offer to tell them a bedtime story, sources confirmed Monday. “Oh, that’s okay, Pop-Pop—we’re so sleepy already,” said 7-year-old Liam Cronenberg, who forced a yawn and rubbed his eyes as his 4-year-old brother, Mason Cronenberg, nodded vigorously in agreement from the adjacent twin-sized bed…’

[comics] The Beat's Best Comics of 2025 … Just added Noah Van Sciver’s “Beat It, Rufus” to my to buy list: ‘Rufus’s hallucinatory journey through regret, nostalgia, and, frankly, self-deception becomes a meditation on cultural obsolescence and the personal myths we construct to make sense of the harshest of realities. Expressive cartooning and lettering, paired with a color palette that shifts between wistful melancholy and vivid psychedelic chaos heighten every moment. Instead of offering hope for redemption, Beat It, Rufus lingers on the uneasy truth: some dreams inevitably sour but they still merit some kind of understanding.’

[til] 52 things I learned in 2024 … Fifty-two TIL from Tom Whitwell. ‘British Chaos refers to a cluster of TikTok personalities that “once might have just been a local character in a pub in Stevenage but have become international celebrities.”’

[comics] Kevin O’Neill Interviewed in 2010 … Huge interview by Douglas Wolk covering O’Neill’s 40 year career in comics. ‘A few years later I went up to the DC offices in New York — I was curious to see an actual copy of the Comics Code. I’d never actually seen one. I’d asked Archie Goodwin, and he said he’d look around, but he couldn’t find it — which is pretty funny, actually! Eventually, he found a very old one, it had some stuff like “no werewolves, no vampires” etc. They did have a phone number on it for the Code, and I rang them up, and this woman answered — I said I was a British comic-book artist visiting New York, and I’d heard so much about the Comics Code, could I come up and visit the offices? And she said, “There’s nothing to see here” — and hung the phone up!’

[books] John Coulthart On Creating His Latest H. P. Lovecraft Picture … John Coulthart talks through his latest Lovecraft picture and basically asks, “How do you draw Lovecraft again without drowning him in tentacles?”

[blogs] “Suddenly, Twenty-Two Years Later….” … Happy Blogiversary to Mike at Progressive Ruin. ‘Ah well, What Can You Do™? Well, what I can do is keep educating and entertaining the masses, for certain definitions of the word “mass,” here on my site, as I dump my knowledge and experiences out on the printed webpage for all to see. And I plan on continuing it here on ye olde-fashioned blogge for the foreseeable future. Well, until I finally make the switch to video and you can watch me doing my hair and makeup while explaining what a “splash page” is.’

[politics] Beware the Liz Truss chatshow: viewers will require survivor therapy … John Crace watches Liz Truss’s new YouTube show so we don’t have to. ‘For her new Liz Truss Show, she appeared to have turned her utility room into a makeshift studio. No expense incurred. Though she did have someone to do the filming this time. Albeit a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine. I’ve seen better editing on my dad’s home movies from the 60s. We opened with a montage of Lizzy’s greatest hits. There she was being greeted by the queen at Balmoral. Huge mistake. She doesn’t seem to realise that the entire country holds her responsible for the queen’s death. The last photo we saw of the queen was of Truss being introduced to her on the Tuesday. Two days later she was dead. Case proved. It’s not hard to imagine the queen thinking: “You know what? It’s just not worth it any more. My first prime minister was Winston Churchill. Now it’s come to this…”’

[xmas] Christmas Links 2025 … Once again, Stuart over at Feeling Listless is collecting seasonal links. Here’s last year’s links.

[xmas] 1970: The Office Christmas Party … A wonderful TV time capsule from the BBC Archive about a Christmas party at a London advertising agency in 1969. It has a real Adam Curtis vibe to it and not surprisingly he wrote about it in 2010. ‘The old patrician world of British advertising was being dismantled and by now much of it had gone from the agency. The only real remnant of that old world in the film is Mary Crowley from Accounts (along with her unnamed friend from Wages). I love Mary Crowley, she is like a ghost from an older Britain haunting the new “on-trend” flash agency.’

[moore] Giant of the Attic … A long, deep-dive profile of Alan Moore. [via Kottke]

‘Opinions about everything, really, but you oughta be careful what you ask, because one thing that’s happened with age is he’s lost his grip on “linear time,” as he puts it. He’ll tell a story, some random thing from 30 or 40 years ago, and the telling, itself, is like brain surgery with chopsticks: effortless, fluent, eloquent, detailed, well-paced. It’s got an arc. Inflections are measured. He remembers every detail. Every bliss and triumph. Every resentment.

Just don’t ask Moore what decade it was. And be ready to step in, too. Folks’ll show up for an interview, ask a question, and if nobody stops him, he’ll just — it’s like a frog across lily pads — start with a word about the weather and then boom. We’re talking about Einstein. Fourth dimension. Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, which Moore quite likes, though of course, if we’re just playing this out over and over, it means he shall have to endure Margaret Thatcher again.’

[covid] I’ll never forget the horror of the Covid wards … Dr Rachel Clarke reminds us of the UK governments appalling errors and inertia during the Covid-19 Pandemic. ‘During the first three months of 2020, in short, Johnson’s inertia was almost unbearable for NHS staff to watch, because we knew full well that its price was about to be met by the “herd” – that the bodies were indeed going to pile high around us. We knew this because it was already happening elsewhere. First in Wuhan. Then in northern Italy. By early March, people were dying in such numbers in Lombardy that military trucks were deployed to take the mounds of coffins from overwhelmed local crematoria. Yet while NHS England liaised with ice rinks about the cold storage of mass casualties (as I know from a private conversation with a senior figure there at this time), Johnson sat among 82,000 rugby fans in the cramped stands at Twickenham, watching England and Wales play. In public health terms, the optics screamed blithe complacency.’

[antibiotics] The Penicillin Myth … A fascinating look at competing theories on how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and where the mould spores might have actually came from. ‘More important to Root-Bernstein than the specifics of Fleming’s discovery is the fact that it evidences Pasteur’s principle that “chance favors only the prepared mind.” Whether he was experimenting with staphylococci or lysozyme, Fleming kept his mind open to the possibility of discovering new bacteriolytic substances.’

[blogs] Requiem for Early Blogging … Elizabeth Spiers on the early years of blogging. ‘Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and a bar on Canal street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.’ [via Kottke]

[ai] OpenAI Usage Plummets in the Summer, When Students Aren't Cheating on Homework … ‘In May, ChatGPT users generated an average of 79.6 billion tokens per day — compared to 36.7 billion for the same period in June, when schools typically let out. Interestingly, there were some dips during the school year as well — which just so happened to line up with weekends.’

[dates] The Calendar of Meaningful Dates … Dates shown by size on how often they are referred to in English-language books since 2000.

[qr] QRCode Monkey – The free QR Code Generator to create custom QR Codes with Logo … A useful site that’s worked well for me recently.

[spirals] Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots (Archive Link) … Somebody has fed Juni Ito’s Uzumaki into LLMs. ‘…Anthropic released a report suggesting that, for whatever reason, its own AI chatbot Claude is disposed to mentioning spirals whether an actual person is part of the conversation or not. Their research detailed how bot-to-bot exchanges between two of its Claude models demonstrated “consistent gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes??.” Anthropic attributed this type of convergence to what they termed a “‘spiritual bliss’ attractor state.” In a conversation quoted in the report, the Claudes repeatedly sent spiral emojis back and forth. “The spiral becomes infinity, Infinity becomes spiral, All becomes One becomes All,” one AI model told the other, according to the transcript.’

[windows] How to declutter, quiet down, and take the AI out of Windows 11 25H2 … A step-by-step guide to decluttering Windows 11.

[london] Four strange places to see London’s Roman Wall … Diamond Geezer visits segments of London’s Roman wall in some unlikely spots. ‘It’s the contrasts that I found most incongruous. A relic from Roman times penned inbetween a speed hump and a futile pedestrian crossing. A fortification from the 3rd century beside an electric van built last year. A defensive structure that helped see off the Peasants Revolt beside a poster warning what to do in the event of fire. A boundary wall once an intrinsic part of the capital now underground illuminated by strip lights. And all this at the very far end of an oppressive bunker preserved for the benefit of hardly any eyes in a parking facility only a few know to use.’

[Viruses] On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world … The story behind the Bulgarian Virus Factory of the late 80s, early 90s. ‘One of Dark Avenger’s nastiest creations was first observed in the House of Commons library in Westminster in October 1990. Research staff were perplexed that some of their regular files were missing and others were corrupted. Since the problem kept getting worse, the library called in an outside specialist. A virus scan came out negative, but the specialist was sure that there had been an infection because the corrupted files grew in size. When he examined the contents of the files, he noticed one word in the jumble of characters: NOMENKLATURA.’

[ai] An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ … ‘Leah Brooks said. Gloo also says it does not “prohibit in any way” Muslim organizations from using its technology. “We’re not trying to take a theological position: we’re building a technology platform, and then giving enough customization capability that the Lutherans can be good with it, the Episcopalians can be good with it, the Catholics can be good [with it], the Assemblies of God can be good with it,” Gelsinger told the Guardian. “We’re trying to say, ‘Hey, there’s a broad tent here of faith and flourishing,’ but also we’re trying to satisfy many organizations that do not take a denominational perspective, [such as] Alcoholics Anonymous.” Gelsinger wants faith to suffuse AI’

[crazy-walls] Narrative String Theory … A huge collection of crazy walls from various TV, movies and comics. [via Phil]

[doom] A satellite runs Doom from orbit, using Ubuntu on Arm … Doom runs in Spaaaace! ‘The relevance to an Ubuntu event was that OPS-SAT ran Ubuntu on its dual-core ARM9 chip – specifically, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It’s not practical or safe to run do-release-upgrade on something that’s not on the same planet, so “Bionic Beaver” it had to be. Plus, because this was an unmanned satellite which he described as being “about the size of a carry-on bag”, there was nobody there to look at it, and so the bird had no display. You can’t see the game running. That was no problem, as Waage had already worked on Headless Doom.’

[comics] The Common Man Is Coming into His Own … A look at how Jack Kirby’s Jewish identity was reflected in The Thing. ‘In important ways, though, Kirby’s work was intensely personal. “I told in every story what was really inside my gut,” he said in a 1990 interview. If his Jewish identity is reflected at all in his published work, it’s coded, inscribed as a subtext to be deciphered later. “My generation lied to survive,” Kirby told a group of fans in a 1972 conversationwhen he was explaining why he changed his name from Jacob Kurtzberg.’

[comics] Seymour talks about Alan Moore … A tribute from By Rich Koslowski.

[words] The strange and hilarious history of the word “OK” … ‘Journalist Charles Gordon Greene was responsible for the first confirmed use of the word OK in the March 23, 1839 issue of the Boston Morning Post.It was found in a humorous article about their rival paper, the Providence Journal.There are a few theories about the origins of OK, and some of them make perfect sense…’

[movies] For Over 40 Years, I've Wanted to Play That Cool-Looking 'Killer Shark' Arcade Game Briefly Seen in 'Jaws' … A look back at an early 70s arcade game. ‘This little sequence is a clever addition to Jaws. It not only reflects the movie’s theme and shows that Spielberg unsurprisingly had his finger on the pulse of the pop-culture that younger people were into at that time, but it also offers a fun foreshadowing of the film’s climax, when Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), who walks past this guy playing the game as he’s focused on beach protection, finds himself facing down an actual killer shark with an actual rifle, firing away as it closes in and trying to blow it up — except if he loses, he can’t just drop in another coin and try again. It seems like Killer Shark would have been something tailor-made to appear in Jaws, but it was actually released by Sega in 1972…’

[net] My first months in cyberspace … Phil Gyford describes his first experiences of the Internet in 1995. ‘It’s hard to convey how difficult it was to set things up. So new and alien to me. When reading computer magazines I’d always skipped articles about networking and while the computers at university had been connected together, that was only for the purposes of printing, scanning and transferring files. First there was the issue of getting online at all. The Internet Starter Kit spent 59 pages explaining how to set up MacTCP, and PPP or SLIP, two different methods of connecting to the internet, the differences of which happily escape me now.’

[moore] Alan Moore Slow Clap Gif … Alan really gives his all for this slow clap.

[life] Open Source Anxiety Toolkit … A free website that provides a toolkit of simple exercises and techniques to help manage anxiety and seek calm.

[zx] I am still the greatest computer of all time, insists ZX Spectrum 48k … ‘“Look, I loaded Manic Miner from a cassette tape in under five minutes,” boasted the tiny rubber-keyed legend, flickering proudly in forty shades of grey. “Can your so-called ‘gaming PC’ give you that kind of anticipation? That raw, edge-of-your-seat thrill as you pray the tape doesn’t error out at 99%?”’

[history] "Good-bye and see you next war." …

[ai] ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce … ‘Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as a “Godfather of AI” — a technology that likely wouldn’t exist in its current form without his contributions — recently conceded that his girlfriend had broken up with him using ChatGPT. “She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was… she got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me,” Hinton told The Financial Times. “I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad.”’

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