Ah, time to do a post I think. Here’s a collection of things I’ve been looking at this month:

Superb ambient Spot The Difference game. I did this in about 30 minutes, without cheating once! Give it a go.

Next time Brighton and Hove Council do something to get on your nerves just let them know about this story: Brighton and Hove City Council spent nearly £60,000 on mineral water in just a year.

A game! Run your dinosaur away from the exploding volcano using the cursor keys in Dino Run!

Charlie Brooker on Battlestar Gallactica. Probably in my top 5 shows last year.

Want to know how Alan Moore writes a comic script? Well it’s very detailed. Read his full script to Batman: Killing Joke here.

Interview with Ice-T, from The Guardian.

Aphex Twin and others who put images actually into their songs. Bit technical but clever though.

Billy Bragg on A Different Strand of Socialism, from The Guardian.

Looking at The Wire and Modern American Urban Areas. Nice video of this discussion.

Mark Steel’s article on an anti-war protest which wasn’t printed in The Independent because of their lawyers.

And finally some great sound effects. This should follow all my jokes: Instant Rimshot. And this whenever someone makes a mistake: Sad Trombone.

Been a real busy month at King Mansions with some great web projects coming out the door this week.

Here are a few of the things I have been reading and looking at during the month of August.

Easy to follow recipe for Bhindi Gosht. Great Pakistani Okra & Lamb Curry from scratch. You can get half of those ingredients in a packet of Karahi Gosht Masala spice blend available from your local world food outlet.

Short Movie (10 mins) called Flesh which juxtaposes a vision of a pornographic American society with the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. This is NSFW.

“Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.” Superb article in The Nation.

Motorcycle News magazine need to check which ads go with which stories, as can be seen here.

How many times can Superman give his secret identity away without anybody remembering? Lots.

Ooh! Another new episode of Tribe tonight. Read interviews with the presenter Bruce Parry and some of his crew.

Here’s all the online crap I’ve found interesting in July:

The Story of My Sands - A look at the codewords used over tannoy systems. I well remember a Mr Sands on Brighton Pier and Somerfield.

Heavens Above. Calculates where satellites and the ISS will appear in the sky. Apparently you can see Iridium Flares in daylight too if you know exactly where to look.

What The World Eats. Time Magazine photo study of the food consumed by different cultures around the world.

Charlotte Gainsbourg - The Songs That We sing - (listen by choosing ‘5:55 The Album’)

The 12 Master Formats of Advertism. Nice video explaining the 12 main advertising tropes.

Mike Read is backing Boris Johnson. Not the dead cockney one but the dire radio DJ. Not only is his article pure reactionist gold but the comments are hilarious too. I say Mike Read for Mayor!

Trailer for a crazy South Korean movie about dragons with rocket launchers, called D-War.

The iPhone v the Nokia E70. An interesting article (contains comedy and swearing).

With my PC problems taking up most of the time I have neglected to write any entries for a while so here’s some fun links to look at in the meantime:

For your cute animal needs: www.thingsthatmakeyougoaahh.com

Stupid Online Comic: Filth Hole

Was the 2004 US Election Stolen?: Great article in Rolling Stone Magazine

I’m thinking of getting myself a digital camera. Digital Camera Review and Digital Photography Review are the places to check out.

Check out a whole range of optical illusions: www.michaelbach.de

An explaination of everything: www.plaxo.be

Are you with AOL? Try cancelling your account

Think you’re brainy? Do this great online IQ test. I got 140, what a smart arse!

The amazing Russian experiment on pigs in space.

What sports bra do you need? This is somewhat mesmerising (and probably not safe for work).

Read the first issue of Planetary. A fun sci-fi comic (choose the “complete Planetary #1″ download at the bottom).

Go to Aristotle to find out more information on your local MP.

See what the Roman Internet was like. From b3ta.

See a Octopus eat a shark. From Google videos.

God has lost his faith in Blair. A message from God via Terry Jones.

See the first episode of my favourite BBC3 comedy Ideal. Either stream from the BBC site or watch this Tuesday at 10:30. I used to listen to some strange Graham Duff on Brighton radio back in the early nineties. I might have some copies of it somewhere although I’ve probably taped over them. Let me know if his archives are available anywhere.

Oh, and I’ve just upgraded from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.1. This was all done successfully with the click of one button because my host (reliable Docklands company) has Fantastico installed. Just give me a shout if you need some brilliant hosting and I’ll sort something out for you. And let me know if you see any problems.

I’ve not been watching much television since Christmas, there just hasn’t been anything on I’ve really felt the need to stay in and watch. Last night a programme came on that justified the license fee in one 50 minute shot. It was Planet Earth. You can watch some amazing sequences from that link, including the great white shark hunting a seal. Truely amazing televison.

Also this week is Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo (C4 Thursday 21:00) which shows a reconstruction of how the Tipton Three ended up in Cuba. I’m sure they have Mr Bush to thank for that.

And on this week’s Culture Show (BBC2 Thursday 19:00 - repeat 23:20) is an appearance by Alan Moore, the mysterious creator of Watchmen and V For Vendetta. He’s an amazing man and its quite weird to hear his brummie accent after you’ve read his works for so long.

Oh, and I wouldn’t like to advertise that nasty satelite channel which exclusively showed the Oscars last night to about 8 viewers but this real life advert for The Simpsons is very clever.

From AICN: “I was not prepared for V FOR VENDETTA. This is the most intense cinematic cry for Anarchy since A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. They made the comic. Alan Moore is a bitch for even thinking of bitching about this. It is f*cking PERFECT! When you see them promoting it as UNCOMPROMISED VISION. That’s absolutely right. This thing doesn’t give two shakes of a pecker what the modern world is going to think. THEY NAILED IT! You never see V’s face. The voice - PERFECT. Natalie Portman - BRILLIANT. Everybody PERFECT. Adrian Biddle’s last film as DP is a revelation and a revolution! This was my favorite film of the festival. They finally f*cking nailed ALAN MOORE! Wachowski’s - do WATCHMEN! PLEASE! When this film opens - this will be a political molotov cocktail. Absolutely f*cking great! It isn’t the action film that the first MATRIX was - but it is easily a vastly more important and brilliant film. ”

I am so looking forward to this film. Alan Moore’s comic book V For Vendetta is my generations Clockwork Orange (book-wise) so I’m so glad that the movie is being compared to Kubrick’s masterpeice. This is going to be so good!

Coming to Brighton on the 19th & 20th of November 2005 is Dez Skinn’s Comic Expo.

I’m glad that the Expo is happening here as I’ve never made the Bristol or Glasgow conventions. Jim Steranko (Nick Fury) is apparently not going to make it, even if he still is a ‘confirmed keynote speaker’, which is a shame. But Mark Millar, Brian Bolland, Simon Bisley, Dave Gibbons, Glenn Fabry and a whole host of others will be there. I may bump into a few members of the V too.

I’ll be in attendance on either the Saturday or Sunday but I may be a bit too comic’ed out to do both days. I still can’t work out who is appearing when, so I haven’t decided what day to go yet. I’ll post more info when I get it.

Just a few quick links to look at if you’re bored:

Neil Gaiman Interview in The Onion

Jon Stewart interview in The Guardian

Oh, and a brilliant new trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Hello to anyone who came here from Neil Gaiman’s site. I hope you enjoyed the story I sent him about Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein Punch and Judy puppets. We moan (and laugh) about politically correct decisions made in the US but it embarasses me when it happens in England.

And I hope you have a quick look around my blog too. Its only a month old so don’t expect miracles Its getting there though (although I must make the ‘previous entries’ button at the bottom of this blog much bigger).

But first maybe I should say a little about how I came to know the work of Neil Gaiman seeing as a few of you are probably fans of his.

I grew up reading comics. I think I started on Whizzer and Chips, Whoopie and Wow - good solid UK kids comics - for about 4 years. Then at a strange book shop on Green Street in Upton Park, East London, I stumbled on a comic called Nemesis The Warlock written by Pat Mills and drawn by Kevin O’Neil. The art was amazing and the story really shook this 10 year old kid - set in the future it involved the human race trying to wipe out every alien species. The hero was an alien - the deaths were gruesome. Green Street on a Saturday afternoon was always a dangerous place due to West Ham’s home matches but I must have had my head stuck in that comic as I walked back to my Nan’s block of flats past all the hooligans.

A few weeks later I picked up a second hand run of 2000ADs in Green Street Market. It was about 6 issues and then contained probably one of the most famous Judge Dredd Stories of all time, Judge Death Lives, written by John Wagner and drawn by Brian Bolland. It contained the classic Gaze Into The Fist of Dredd panel and I was hooked. I dont know what else was in those editions but I was now a big fan of 2000AD and soon started picking it up weekly at the local newsagents, starting with issue 375.

I soon realised that Nemesis the Warlock was a 2000AD strip when the Bryan Talbot drawn series started (book 3?) - that was a great surprise! And somewhere in my 11 year old mind I began to fall in love with the twisted comedy and horror and awe of these comic books. In fact I think that John Wagner and Pat Mills (along with the Comic Strip Presents) had a lot to do with my own particulary black shade of humour. Well I suppose any young boy would if he was reading Strontium Dog, ABC Warriors, Judge Dredd and Slaine every week.

We now flick forward past six years of 2000AD and we see a young boy in a newsagents in Margate pick up his first American comic. It was an X-Men comic with a cover by Jim Lee, around number 250 or something. Within two weeks I was reading McFarlane’s Amazing Spider-man, the Rob Liefeld New Mutants, Whilce Portacio on X-Factor and also Peter Milligan’s Shade The Changing Man. Little did I know that this would be one of the most exiting times in American comic book history.

Soon I found a comic shop. Its hard to explain here exactly how it feels to walk into a shop that sells nothing but comics for the first time. I just never know they existed. It was Forever Comics in Canterbury and it became my Mecca. Every two weeks I’d make the pilgrimage to Canterbury to stock up new titles. This was the time that all the X-titles got a reboot and Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 went on to become the biggest selling comic of all time.

But for every 2 fans a reboot brings, one will think its the time to stop and so I decided to read more interesting titles and drop most of the X-books. I continued to read Shade the Changing Man, all the Quality 2000AD reprints and a title that Manny, the shopkeeper, recommended called The Sandman. This was written by some guy called Neil Gaiman.

The first issue I got was Three Septembers and a January which was an amazing one-off story about the real Emperor of America, issue 30 perhaps. I liked the story, the art, and the stuff that went on in mind when I read it. On my next trip I bought up all the Sandman I could get. There wasn’t much though as Manny had sold out most of the back issues, but I think The Dolls House had been collected so I bought that. And that blew my mind. The Sandman was then on my standing order list.

Well then the Vertigo banner came along, I got into Alan Moore too, and the rest of my comic reading habits were pretty much fixed. Nowadays I dont actually buy the single issues, just graphic novels. I get most of the Alan Moore stuff, Daredevil, 100 Bullets and Planetary trade paperbacks when they come out but thats about it. And half of the comics are going on eBay soon. But every two years or so I dig out all the Sandman trades and give the series an entire read through and remember all the characters and fairy tales I’d forgotten about. And for a while I believe.