Nick Hornby on why eBook readers don’t (and won’t) sell.
Be careful not to read too far into the comments page, though. It’s full of that special breed of Internet solipsist who hasn’t figured out that their borderline obsessiveness isn’t exactly representative.
But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people [...]
Via Kung Fu Grippe: YouTube vids of Hüsker Dü playing at the Camden Ballroom (now Koko)
Just… completely magnificent. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
WANT!
“The flat occupies part of the shared top floor of an existing Victorian mansion block. Our proposal extended the flat into the unused loft space above, creating a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one third. We created a ’secret’ staircase, hidden from the main reception room, to [...]
The iPod, or any media player, really, could use a feature in its shuffle mode to allow you to tag a song as always being followed by a specific song of your choosing.
Most adjacent songs on albums don’t flow together so much that you’d notice or care, but when they do it’s horribly jarring when [...]
Joy: My long-lost and never-ripped-to-mp3 copy of Downward is Heavenward turned up in a box of stuff that I apparently haven’t opened during the last 5 house moves.
Despondency: In that time it has succumbed to the dreaded CD-rot and is unplayable.
Paid-for Joy: Amazon second-hand sellers in the U.S. rescue the situation, and promise to ship [...]
And lo! The drooling of a million fanboys was heard clear across the Internet (and one more time, though it has to be said that teaser sites are made infinitely worse by allowing user comments…)
(Update: And more)
Since I don’t have a blog category for “OCD”, I’ll mark this under “Books” and hope for the best.
Since there are so many library cataloguing sites around these days, and I can’t actually figure out which one is better than any other, I’ve sort of arbitrarily started using LibraryThing (because I clearly need to be [...]
I’ve been reading a fair amount over the last few months, but I’ve finally had to admit to myself that I’ll never have the time or motivation any time soon to write about it in any depth. For completeness’ sake, then, here’s a list of what I’ve been reading and roughly what I thought about [...]
Keeping up a fine tradition, I went to 3 of the 4 Mirrorball programmes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year. (The 4th was sold out, boo!)
For the uninitiated, the shows are themed collections of the best music videos of the year and tend to range from the fantastic to the WTF? This year’s shows [...]
It’s been a slow few months of reading for me, but here’s what I’ve managed to get through.
Learning the World - Ken MacLeod
I’ve enjoyed all of Ken Macleod’s books, and this is one of his most immediately accessible. It’s a slightly odd setup, in that it’s a first contact novel in which almost no contact [...]
Sunshine is a remarkably pretty film, and if you are capable of ignoring everything you’ve ever learned about physics, everything you know about logic or common sense, and everything that any character says or does for the duration of the film, then you might even enjoy it.
For your viewing/listening pleasure:
Trailer Club 70 - is a site collecting trailers from 70’s grindhouse films.
Copy, Right? - is a blog with an impressive list of odd cover versions of songs. (Including a post dedicated entirely to Pascal Comelade’s fairground re-interpretations of 1970’s songs.)
Blender.com’s “50 Craziest Pop Stars Ever!”
Note: Contains an unsurprisingly high level of crossover with their “50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars”
I started writing short book reviews as a way for me to keep track of what I’d read over the years. I was too lazy to do the same for music and I was hoping that making judicious use of Lastfm would remind me of the things I actually listened to a lot.
Well, it turns [...]
Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
Mitchell’s first novel feels a lot like a warm up to him writing Cloud Atlas. It’s got approximately the same format of a series of globe-spanning short stories, each linked through some connection of the characters involved, but it doesn’t have quite the same impossibly-intricate, Russian-dolls structure of the subsequent book.
It’s [...]