I bought The Knife’s Silent Shout on CD last week. I’ve been enjoying the MP3s for a while but hearing it on CD lifts the album to a whole other level of black shiny brilliance. It’s easy to forget how good things can sound on CD when most stuff we get is compressed to hell and back. Note to record companies: If you want people to buy CDs rather than copy MP3s you should try and make a proper difference exist between the formats.
Also: Nick Southall sums up the “loudness war” and the importance of good mastering without coming across like an irrational audiophile wierdo, which is quite easy to do (come accross like an irrational audiophile that is).
courtesy of ascii maps (via er… delicious I think)
Also, seeing we’re talking about maps on computers (for a change) you should check out the amazing hi-res imagary and data at the Hawaii Data Clearinghouse.
I’ve made a wiki page for music genres. That was the link to it just there. If you missed it here it is again… LINK!
The idea is to make a list of all the genres of music you can think of, and ones you’ve just made up, in no particular order, and eventually to have a page describing each and every one. It’s just like wikipedia. Except some of the genres will be imaginary (c.f. Kettle Core). Anyway, get stuck in, and don’t worry about accuracy or anything. After all, it’s a wiki!
Ok let me expand on the last post. Last week I started reading the ‘Da Vinci Code’. I swallowed my prejudices, told myself I was being a snob and took it down off the shelf (my mum gave it to me) half expecting to be swept up in the whole thing (50 Million people can’t be wrong). That didn’t happen, not even slightly, I had to stop at page 30 or so, such was the degree of the fuck-wittery stained onto every page. Not only is the whole thing absurdly pompous, self important and incredibly stupid (I knew that allready) but most of the time it just doesn’t make any sense.
Look:
A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.
Voices don’t speak, people speak, using voices.
If you’re frozen you can’t turn your head, not even slowly.
Fifteen feet away, behind a sealed iron gate. Is that chillingly close?
How could you see the irises of a sihlouette? From fiteen feet away? Through an iron gate?
This isn’t an isolated example, the whole thing is like this, any kind of attempt to create consistent setting or characters, you know the basic stuff you expect from a novel, is totally absent.
Look I read a lot of trashy comics and pulp sci-fi but this is so stupid it makes the DC spin offs like ‘Superman’s Girlfriend Louis Lane‘ look like, oh I don’t know, Umberto Eco* or something.
Summary: 50,000,000 people can be wrong if they’re idiots (sorry mum). Dan Brown is an idiot. If you like this book you are an idiot and you should read at least one other book before recommending the Da Vinci Code to all your stupid friends.
*Foucault’s Pendulum does the knights templar/techno thriller conspiracy thing really well, with style and intelligence, maybe you should read that. Actually Eco is a professor of semiotics (sometimes called semiology) which is probably the word Brown was searching for when he came up with the afforementionedsymbology.
According to a survey of Britains most popular brands (random sample, population 3000) in ‘Marketing’ magazine The Daily Mail is the countries most loved newspaper brand.
I just shared a lift (or elevator if you’re one of the people in America who reads this) with Nicky Campbell (or Satan if you’re one of the people in America who reads this). I’m convinced it was his malignant influence which led to my Costa Coffee double choc-chip muffin with chocolate goo in the middle being wrapped in plastic and slightly smaller than usual.
courtesy of ascii maps (via er… delicious I think)
Also, seeing we’re talking about maps on computers (for a change) you should check out the amazing hi-res imagary and data at the Hawaii Data Clearinghouse.
The idea is to make a list of all the genres of music you can think of, and ones you’ve just made up, in no particular order, and eventually to have a page describing each and every one. It’s just like 
Also, speaking of Satan and stuff, 
Why do people get excited about this crap?
