April 2009
43 posts
“The golden age of the album cover is pretty much over.
There has been a...”
– Simon Warner, Leeds University
Good read about the supposed ‘death’ of album art on the BBC (“Pop art in the era of the pixel”). I don’t think I buy the cries of ‘death’, although the art sits in the balance and faces a slightly rocky short-term future.
Designing an album cover has always...
March 2009
43 posts
♥ →
Feeling down? Bit at odds with the world? Feel like killing all humans? Or yourself?
Twistorati streams every mention of ‘I love’ on the service smoothly across the screen. Happy. Calming.
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“This wasn’t meant to be posh, it ended up that way because there was only posh...”
– David Singleton in Posh Cheese on Toast » munchmun.ch
This quote makes me smile, simply because it underlines how our kitchen used to be pretty much all the time. God forbid you ever needed some crap cheese to grate on something.
“And from that, we come to the headline. Food is not fuel. Not to be misconstrued...”
– Food is Not Fuel
Some time ago, in a country far, far away, my friend David and I started a food blog. We registered an awesome domain name, threw together some header graphics, wrote a few entries, and proceeded to fail dismally at launching it.
Time passes.
With a kick of motivation,...
Slow hand clap
My two previous posts had to be separate. It’s the best way to express the bi-polar conflict that is my state of mind right now.
Usually I resolve positive/negative easily, because I err on optimism and the good of a situation cancels out the bad, leaving me some to spare. I come out contented at the least. But this is different. It’s like when I clap these hands together...
… On the other hand.
For everything that happened in the past three months, my situation is remarkably positive. It’s a tale of survival, against odds and expectations. It’s underpinned by luck, hard work, and the effort of dozens of kind people who tried to catch me when the rug was pulled from under me. Some of them known to me, some of them total strangers acting out of instinct and respect. I’m...
On the one hand…
Every day I’m upset. Every day I lose three hours to a bus. Every day I’m staring out the window thinking about what I’ve lost. Thinking about that amazing dream job that for six months was just that.
I think about the people I used to see every day. People held in great respect became friends. Friends that have made me a better person. I think about how instead, I now spend my...
“I’ll be ctrl-alt-deleting your face with no reservations”
– Death to Los Campesinos!
In my ongoing periodical of posting awesome Los Camp! lyrics, comes this one. I don’t see my infatuation with them dying down any time soon.
Retinal Reattachment
A few months ago I started an experiment to publish photos from my iPhone into a separate photostream, Ben Ward’s Eyes. The intent was simple: I wanting to visually document more of my day-to-day life, but without polluting my Flickr account with poor-quality, fuzzy phone-camera pictures.
The value of such a stream would be quantity, not quality. That is, the value comes of viewing the...
The most notable thing I remember from art classes in school was building a model clay house when I was 15. Most people built nice houses, with smiles and flowers, and fences and a shrubbery. However, due to a mid-teens Tarantino infatuation, all the people in my house were gangsters, and half of them were dangling from windows, somewhat dismembered or missing… internal organs. They all had...
Concerning spillage
Chris: stupid liquids + electronics
Chris: why can't they just get along?
WatchSong of the Day: Department of Eagles - ‘No One Does It Like You’
As part of my ongoing policy to like whatever music David Emery tells me to like, here’s Department of Eagles from last year. Needs to be played at the right time of day, I think, but rather delightful.
“These issues exist because the ultimate nature of human taste is irrational and...”
– I’ve just purchased ‘“Volunteered” Civility & Professionalism’ by Soccer Team. It’s downloading direct onto my iPhone as I write. I purchased this album because I’ve been listening to ‘Recommendations’ Radio all afternoon on Last.FM, and heard another of Soccer Team’s...
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES
In iTunes, the little clickable ➜ links to the iTunes Music Store are regarded with dismissal as money-spinning bloat. Thing is, they turn out to have a useful second face.
Hold down ⌥ and click an arrow link. Rather than be taken to the iTunes Music Store, you’re instead taken to that artist’s section in your own music...
Playful schizophrenia makes for a crap flatmate
Ben: Hey Ben, did you do the laundry like I asked?
Ben: Oh, hey Ben, you look nice. No, I just emptied all the dirty laundry into the middle of the bedroom floor; juggled it around a bit; played football with the socks. Figured you'd sort it out.
Ben: No, you shit, I've spent all evening doing our taxes, and resurrecting our Green Card application so we don't almost get deported again. Remember that?
Ben: I remember your mum.
Ben: Well, yes, good work sending those flowers. But even so, what the fuck? We have no socks and the bath towel smells kinda flunky again.
Ben: You had better put the washing on then.
Ben: Do we have any quarters?
Ben: Nope. Hey, is that rain out? At least Ariel made you buy an umbrella, right?
Ben: I hate you. I miss David. He bought better records than you, too.
WatchSong of the Day: The Horrors - ‘Sea Within A Sea’
David Emery has been talking this up for a month or so, hinting at amazing new things and changes of direction from The Horrors (a band I never got into first time around). Short story shorter: He’s right. As usual. ‘Sea Within A Sea’ is awesome.
“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so...”
– Doug Bowman in Goodbye Google.
For all my armchair criticism of Google’s ghastly look & feel, clunky icons and incessant rejection of using the right HTML elements in the right places, I never would have imagined it could be this broken inside.
Best of luck to Doug. He was there at the...
Forever's Not So Long →
Beautiful short film by Shawn Morrison and Garrett Murray. Not embedded because the sparse, elegant microsite makes for a vastly better viewing experience.
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Marco posted about some of the quirkier unicode glyphs, and notes:
The characters differ from browser to browser in terms of appearance. I have no idea why this is. Fascinating!
The characters vary because Firefox and Safari use different font rendering engines — Firefox of course being non-native to Mac OSX.
Most unicode glyphs don’t exist in every font, so an intelligent text...
“printernot (pryn·ter·knot) n. Any example of a newspaper’s feeble attempt...”
– Charlie Brooker: Chudge, nowtrage and plebbledash - just three of the words to learn from my New Media Dictionary.
The London Paper, do you see this? Do you?
Didn’t link Charlie Brooker’s New Media Dictionary when it came out. Still awesome. Other vital additions to the language...
“Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is...”
– Bacn. How on earth had I not heard of this before?! Brilliant. (via. Chris Messina)
“The Hawaiian-born, half-Kenyan leader of the “free world” is a...”
– Obama family tree has roots in Cambridgeshire village — Cambridge News online
Great Shelford is the small village I grew up in. (Stapleford is the next village along.) Small world, Mr President.
“Calpol is a common cause of accidental child poisoning, due to its pleasant...”
– Calpol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Was reminiscing about the incredible taste of Calpol. Apparently not as funny as I thought it was.
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“Radio 1 also apologised on-air immediately after Bono used an expletive to...”
– BBC News