I love this octopus chair [via @injculbard] | related: The Squid Hunter [via #longreads] | all you need to know about cannibalistic squid [indirectly via @edstern] | Sew A Squid | light from under the sea | Calamari de L'Amour | related: Mark Stafford's Largely Unseen exhibition at Orbital Comics |

squid cartoon by Mark Stafford

I took loads of notes at November's Thrilling Wonder Stories II but never got around to typing them up. Fortunately, @rossignol's report is pretty much what I would have said (although I don't agree with him about all of the speakers) | a TWS2 report from @markasaurus | interview with the TWS2 curators, Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young | interview with Matt Webb of @berglondon | video archive of TWS2: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 | original Thrilling Wonder Stories magazine covers on CoverBrowser | retrofuture.com | Dissecting The Mystery: the Death of the Retrofuture  

Less thrilling wonder, more quietly mundane, was #boring2010 in December, where I didn't take any notes at all. Luckily, Lucy Peel did, and posted a list of all the speakers' websites and presentations. | (The only thing she's not mentioned was my 30mins slideshow of photos of coal holes that was onscreen while people came in and found their seats. But that's because nobody knew it was there, due to the lights being too bright to see the screen and the music too quiet to hear over people greeting each other. Oops.) | more #boring2010 links: Irish Times | WSJ | @oye_billy | @siansparkles | @joemoransblog | A Less Boring Version of 4′ 33″ by @martylog and friends [via @mykreeve]
     

coal holes on Londonology | 200 manholes per mile | how to lift manhole covers safely | beautiful Japanese manhole covers | misplaced manhole covers shows sudden, surprising beauty in accidental juxtapositions 

Sound Diaries [via @iamjamesward] | submit your own vending machine sound diary here, to be included in this year's #boring2011 | related: @oye_billy on vending machines 

More found sounds from: @mapsadaisical, the Sound(s) of Islay | London sound survey | Inhabit Sounds, an "urban soundscape project". I love this bit: "A road that was once thriving with the sound of manufacturing is presently occupied by Ghanian worshipers – whose religious congregations [...] fill the wide street with sounds of song and music. The result of the buildings change of use actually results in a road [...] where there was and still is a bold and vivid soundscape that envelops the passer-by." [found via a google search for "coal holes". Everything connects...]

And at the moment I'm sitting here listening to pretty birdsong being drowned out by emergency vehicle sirens (probably for the hospital but there's a police station nearby too), and wondering how a word that originally signified something irrestistably alluring ever came to be applied to such a harsh and ugly noise. Language is weird. 

More mondo linkage collected at the mondo linko tag.     

#closeyoureyesanddrawbatman is brilliant [via @robgog and @injculbard] | related: portraits drawn without looking [via @jabberworks] | build your own Mo-Bot [via @neillcameron] | related: my review of Neill's book at Write Away | interview with John Porcellino [via someone on my UKCZI list] | interview with Kelly Supersonic | Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics, a conference at the Courtauld Institute that looks pretty good. I'm busy but you should go.

Chico & Rita is lovely film with amazing backgrounds and a great soundtrack. Worth checking on a big screen if you can, but there are lots of pics and clips here. There's a fun scene where a car falls apart, which must have been based on this illustration by co-creator Javier Mariscal | every appearance of Han Solo in the TV show Firefly. Like I needed another excuse to watch it again [via @ninagleams] | Firefly is notably missing from this article In Praise of The Sci-fi Corridor — so is Farscape — but the pictures are all great [via @moleitau] 

In a similar vein, nice photos of arcades [via @johncoulthart] | New York Sleeps, lovely large format photos taken by Christopher Thomas early in the morning [on show in London until Feb. 26] | unlike morning birds such as Christopher Thomas, I really am more productive much later in the day, so I like cosmickitten's theory on night owls, because I, too, "am a watcherwoman by genetic destiny"

Camden Passage, Islington, 2006

Two bloggers from the early days made a welcome return to my feeds this week: Troubled Diva |  Interconnected | related: @intrconnctd is on Twitter | (Matt is one of the most thought-provoking people I have ever met, and strange intriguing notions seem to fall out of his brain in the same way the rest of us breathe air.) | "Digital duct tape": if this then that looks really nifty [via @peteashton] | Pete's articles on The Future of Local, what it means to be "local" in the context of the internet, are worth a read.  

Punch & Judy Festival, Covent Garden, 2009  

How we engage with the places in which we exist: the poetry of the Shipping Forecast [via everybody] | related: a lovely obituary for Finisterre from a few years ago | A Cloudy Language, the poetry of weather reporting — more here. Lovely stuff [via @creativereview] | City of Sound: Flood. Dan Hill not only provides an outsider's first-hand (and first-time) account of the Brisbane floods, but also drops it into a historical and architectural context which provides some sharp lessons on why the damage needn't have been so severe in the first place. | *Hauntology* Flickr group | Remembering Trish Keenan | a live performance of Lunch Hour Pops by Broadcast. RIP Trish.

Still, it gives me an excuse to mention that one London sewer flusher has started writing a blog. So far it's all celebrity anecdotes and campaign-slogans, but could be worth keeping an eye for any occasional interesting treasure that might turn up in the same old crap.

Anyway, I figured I should say something for all the people who follow me via RSS, because even if the site disappears at least there'll be a post out in the ether somewhere to let you know why. And there's always my livejournal account as a back-up — the RSS feeds directly into it, and it's chock full of archives dating back to before I got around to getting my own website at mondoagogo.com.

It does give me a good excuse to finally get around to the redesign, I suppose.

This one on (mostly) anti-British propaganda from the Victorian/Edwardian era — take particular note of the stuff about the Boer War.

Stephen Worth at ASIFA has a thoughtful post on propaganda from both world wars. It's interesting to see how German propaganda changed compared to the material in the first post I linked to, and shows how to some extent how it lost its bite. Also interesting to see how the Americans adopted/adapted the British "Loose Lips Sink Ships" to "Loose Talk Sinks Ships" which isn't nearly as catchy or mnemonic, but probably had the same effect in the end, which is the point, after all.

Speaking of wartime stuff, my chum Steve is doing a 10K run to raise money for TNMOC at Bletchley Park, a place regular readers will know I am a big fan of. You can go and sponsor him here. [via] And you can see all my pictures from Bletchley Park here.