The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes by Jess Nevins — Kickstarter Jess Nevins is crowdfunding his next volume of stupendous cultural research. I own his Encyclopaedia of Fantastic Victoriana, and it is *brilliant*, as well as being large enough and heavy enough to stop a charging rhinoceros. No, I'm serious. I've actually used it to do that. Anyway: you should fund this. And even if it doesn't sound like your sort of thing, you should fund it on my behalf, because I'm sick of not being able to fund things on Kickstarter thanks to amazon's fuckery. Someone pay Jess on my behalf.
I hereby resign – raganwald’s posterous Worth a read, if you're at all concerned about this whole employers-requiring-interview-candidates-to-give-them-access-to-their-Facebook-account business. The short version is that it wil create *far* more trouble for employers that it will solve.
What Lies Beneath: Excavating Crossrail’s tunnels | In-depth | The Engineer This is fascinating reading. Example facts from this piece: tunnel boring machines go at about 100m per week, and have a turning radius of 250m. Inpressive enough, but in places the tunnels these things are cutting are passing with 1m of existing tunnels, which, obviously, it would be very bad if they were to hit. "Lads, we've got to start turning now, so that we're in the right place in 2 weeks time. If we're out by over a foot, were going to cause major damage to something expensive. No do-overs. Everyone ready?"
This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy [Update] | Cult of Mac Yes, yes, I'm going on about on-line privacy again. If you've ever thought that I'm over-egging the pudding in regard to Facebook privacy, then I urge you to read this. It's easy to say "well, they should have been more careful with their profiles" but the truth is that they should have *had* to have been more careful. Building a tool like this simply should not be possible. And on the one hand, hats off to Foursquare for killing it dead already, and on the other, at time of writing this linkpost, Facebook have get to respond to the fact that it's their on-going advertiser-lead drive to get people to share information publicly that enabled this creepy, creepy piece of crap.
FreezePage: Breakdown of potentially illegal payments by national newspapers This page was on the ITV website marked as "do not publish". (The link is to an archive copy saved elsewhere). If this is real, it's a detailed breakdown of exactly which newspapers paid a particular private investigator how much money, and in exchange for what. If it's true, then it would appear that there's proof the Daily Mail was involved in phone hacking, which would I imagine upset Paul Dacre, and therefore please me immensely. The Grauniad does not appear, but sadly The Observer does.
A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing: Presumed Inane This si interesting food for thought – a couterpoint to the usual amazon-is-bad publishing-industry rhetoric. I don't know if I buy it (and I don't know if I don't) but it's certainly made me think about some of the things I've taken for granted as "facts" in the debate.
On Improving iBooks – Connor Tomas O’Brien This is two years old, and I am frustrated that most of the things that are being talked about here are not implemented. At the very least, it seems it ought to be possible to make iBooks-DRMed content available to other apps on the same device, via API. Apple/Publishers still get to make their sales money, while another app could do the work of tracking my reading habits.
Large Bookbag – Henry Tomkins I think I may have found the bag of my dreams. Satchel strap, double buckle, with front pocket. Knocking on the door of 200 quid, as opposed to my current 40 quid effort, but oh, isn't it beautiful? Time to start saving.
Geeklist and a public apology In the spirit of fairness: Geeklist have made a pretty unreserved public apology in the time since I bookmarked that first link. I'm still annoyed that they didn't get it right first time, but then, who among can say that they always do?
Cow magnet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I have absolutely no reason to blog this, except that I did not know these were a thing, and the words "Cow Magnet" make me laugh. I also wish that there was an accepted a alt.fan.warlord syntax for blogging as this comment would have been shorter if I thought more than three of you would understand IHNW IJLTS "Cow Magnets" without having to look anything up.
OH HAI SEXISM · charlesarthur · Storify Short version: woman calls geek men on their sexism. Geek men lash out in a grossly disproportionate and unprofessional manner. This is nothing new, except that these people are in the same industry as me, with a product that is targeted at, well, people exactly like me – well, it's saddening. And pathetic.
Watercolour map of London Stamen design have used OpenStreetMap data to produce full zoomable maps that look like they've been made with watercolours. Beautiful.
The most highlighted passages of all time on Kindle Just 4 books account for the top 10. And I promise you that unless you've already looked at this, you will not expect what 2 of them, that between account for fully 7 of the top 10, are. The first one that is something I might myself have quoted comes in at 14.
Fairytales are all around us. Del spots a fairytale happening on her commute. This morning, I watched 2 JCBs do a mating dance, then wind up hand in hand, the scoop of one left resting inside the scoop of the other. What do you see on yours?
I can’t stop reading this analysis of Gawker’s editorial strategy » Nieman Journalism Lab Here's an interesting insight into the view-economics of web-based journalism. Short version: linkbait trivia attracts more views than serious writing, but not remotely significantly more, and basically, without the more serious stuff, odds are most publications would lose even the linkbaited audience – people will read the daft stuff from a publication they view as at least slightly credible, but not from somewhere that's obviously *just* trolling for eyeballs. Unrelated: welcome to the 21st century, where the utterly absurd phrase "trolling for eyeballs" makes perfect sense. My grandmother would be so confused.
100 Real Tweets from Homophobes Who Would Murder Their Gay Child Here is a dose of bleak for you all. Because I hate you, and want you to despair. Or, perhaps just because I think it does those of us who are decent, tolerant and human to be reminded who the enemy is every so often. (I am aware that some of us find it easier to forget than others.)
The Daily Mirror have use a photo of an innocent young woman as a serial killer Sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? They've thieved a photo from someone's on-line gallery (bad enough in the first place) and used it as a photo to illustrate an article about a real serial killer, as if the person in the picture was the killer. Said person is not even remotely connected with the crimes in question. I'm really just blogging this for the sheer WTF factor….