Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”…
Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is [...]
I hate and love the way we browse the web.
I’m almost certainly somebody with a high degree of addiction to the written word. It’s not an internet addiction; I was raised in a family that has an unholy veneration for the written word, and the advent of the internet just allowed me a greater access [...]
I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking [...]
I set myself a few goals regarding blogging after I got back on my feet. One of those was that I wanted to write more, and to write intelligently about topics that I find interesting, such as the uses of technology and science fiction. So far I’ve almost been keeping to a schedule.
What really slows me [...]
2010 and after are going to be about post-digital, by which I mean what comes after we’ve finished staring at our screens. We’re going to see an explosion in the amount of physical objects that would have been impossible without using digital process in the workflow, and objects that won’t work without a connection of some kind [...]
This book starts with a potted history of Wikipedia, beginning at it’s predecessor Nupedia, and then follows the development of the site until sometime in mid-2008, when the book was published. As an effort to keep up with both change and the technology, a wiki was set up to act as an afterword. Weirdly, although [...]
Above is an image by illustrator Jim Phillips, called ‘Screaming Hand’. It’s one of the most famous pieces of graphic design in the skateboarding culture, a piece of marketing that would still be in use as a company icon twenty-five years later.
Such is the fame of this image that Phillips himself relates this tale of [...]
‘You have to get well. Being ill is like being attacked, you see? Your body is like a great fortress that has been besieged by invaders. You’ve repelled them, you’ve seen them off, but you have to be good, and marshal your forces and rebuild the walls, refurbish your catapults, clean your cannons, restock your [...]
On Friday, I left the house for Datarama, Newcastle’s software version of Dorkbot. Well, maybe it’s a more artistic, friendly version of Dorkbot, without all the posturing that can be seen at the Limehouse. That’s not strictly important.
What is important is that, whilst there, I presented my resubtitled version of Gran Torismo.
Gran.Torino.subtitles (that’s the subtitle [...]
In my teenage years, I had a big comic habit (graciously funded by my parents). It all started with the Silver Surfer double-issue where the Kree-Skrull war kicked off, on a holiday in Saffron Walden. I can’t remember the year it was, but it was before my reading speed kicked into the ludicrously high speed [...]
