Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
I once described myself as a geek to a lady I was working with.
She reached her arm across the desk, patted my hand and said “don’t say that, I think you’re a very nice person”.
From the comments section of this post.
I know, I know; don’t read the comments. But still.
I look at it like this: we have access to all of information, and yet we’re still separated. I find it fascinating, that people hide behind false names – that’s the only way a lot of young people can communicate with each other. I believe it’s to do with advertising: people are presented as gods and goddesses, beautiful and perfect. We’re just not like that. So how do you communicate with others if they are expecting you to be perfect? You do it in secret.
Terry Gilliam, from an interview with the Guardian.
A genuine motivational poster from 1924, as shared here.
Holy crap. From the Guardian:
Trees burn as firefighters continue to battle the fire, which has encroached on Yosemite national park.
Both beautiful and utterly terrifying. Awe-inspiring and horrific.
COMICS, EVERYONE.
Seriously, Jack Kirby (with inker, D. Bruce Berry, in this case): This is just amazing. Manhunter is something that Kirby did for one issue, an edition of a series called First Series Special, in the 1970s, and it’s this entirely unfinished story filled with melodrama and potential and everything that I love about superhero comics. There’s so much there there.
Plus, that costume design is so, so great.
So, I may have accidentally disappeared from this site a little last week. It wasn’t intentional, I promise; I just found myself entirely snowed under with work as I started writing for the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and realized worryingly quickly that I had underestimated just how much additional work that would actually be in reality (I gave up two other gigs in order to free up enough time, but the workload didn’t translate as I’d initially thought). That it was also a holiday weekend – Huzzah for July 4, which came at the right time to stop me feeling completely overloaded – both helped and didn’t help everything, as it frontloaded things onto the start of a week that was already busy but also gave me some breathing room that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Anyway, I’m sorry for disappearing without notice, and will try not to do it again in future. Well, except for next week, which is Comic-Con which I’m working for Wired.com, and therefore will be crazy and quiet and AIEEEEEE.
(That I am now writing for Wired, Time and the Hollywood Reporter, by the way, is both surreal and slightly scary to me. This has to be the peak, right? It’s all downhill from here on, as I flame out in spectacular fashion.)
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Firefighters spray water on the burning land on the outskirts of Pekanbaru in Indonesia’s Riau province. The haze from fires in Indonesia is currently blanketing Singapore and could persist for some weeks. Photograph: Stringer/Reuters
This is one of those images that looks beautiful on first glance and then you read the description of what is actually happening.
