Cyclops
Moaner
Bird Brain
Howler
Mr. Moustache
Beholder
Handlinger
Cyclops
Moaner
Bird Brain
Howler
Mr. Moustache
Beholder
Handlinger
Fight for your king,
Fight for your land,
You’re the defender of Orleans
So begins this epic euro-dance paean to Joan Of Arc. It really gives you a taste of what it must have been like to be a young French peasant girl fighting for her nation at the end of the hundred years war.
William The Conqueror - DMX Krew
A subject better known to the English readership of this weblog (hello Maidenhead!) this is a moody and desolate electro-goth celebration of Britain’s first Norman king.
If anyone knows of any other dance anthems based on major historical figures please let me know, emailing me mp3s would be an excellent idea (Rasputin by Bony M anyone?).
Falling for the Boing Boing hype I tried out the Miro (formerly ‘Democracy’) video/’internet TV’ player yesterday. I was interested by the promise of an iTunes like organiser for my increasing number of video files. My trial lasted for about 5 or 6 minutes. I subscribed to the TED talks feed, fine. Then I pointed it to my video directory to index it all and then I waited… and waited… and thought about it… and waited. Then I tried to quit as it was slowing everything down, then I tried again and again before finally doing a force quit on it and dragging it into the trash. In short it seemed more iPhoto than iTunes. Seriously who would leave this thing running in the background at all times?
Read the rest of this entry »
Obviously Edge is kind of still the arbiter of the video game canon (at least in the UK) just by default really and in spite of their efforts over the last two years to make the magazine as dull as possible. I’m not going to look any of these games up on wikipedia or think about it too hard or this will never get done so factual errors and ill informed opinions will undoubtedly abound (so business as usual LOL!). also worth mentioning I haven’t actually bought the “100 best games special” from which this list is drawn so I have no idea about the reasoning behind these titles inclusion. I just copied the list from an email a co-worker sent me…
Read the rest of this entry »
Look at all these people coming in to the building, all dreadfully important, I’m sure the nation would cease to function if they hadn’t dragged their bodies through miles of underground piping to get here. how would anyone know about Tony Blair learning to use a piece of technology that a 5 year old wouldn’t have a problem with? I can’t believe we let this guy be in charge for so long.
Read the rest of this entry »
As you probably know They Live! is one of my most overused cultural reference points but it seems particularly apposite for Selfridge’s store branding at the moment.
Apparently they’ve had these signs on and off for years, shows how much attention I pay to things on the rare occasions on which I find myself fighting my way around Oxford Street. All my focus is on finding the optimum path through the bumbling shambling crowd. Anyway isn’t this a bit blatant?
Our decomposing-skull headed overlords must be getting over confident.
[EDIT: here’s a more specifically dishonest and high profile example of someone claiming a graph to show something that it doesn’t]
So, I saw this chart…
… on video games (and stuff) weblog Wonderland where it’s used to support the notion that
collectively, movie companies really have no clue about what works
Alice got the graph from The Long Tail weblog where Chris Anderson opines
This chaotic mess of a chart below says it all. Like the wise man said, in Hollywood, despite the bluster about track records and taste, “nobody knows anything.” It’s all a crapshoot.
Chris got the graph from this report (pdf) which I haven’t read yet but looks quite interesting.
Anyway, I don’t disagree with Alice and Chris’ point that “Quality is also an issue in bigmedia-generated content”, hell, of the billion or so screens at my local Vue cinema not one of them is showing a film that I have any interest in seeing, especially not for £9 (maybe Die Hard 4 for old times sake but I’m prepared for it to be dire). What I do disagree with is the idea that this chart supports that.
First off the chart doesn’t include any information about the average cost of the films. I mean these Hollywood guys are presumably making their decisions based on a cost benefit analysis of some kind: “OK, we’ll probably make $80 million off this so I’ll spend $15 million to make it, wheras this one’s only likely to bring in $10 million so I’m not parting with any more than $1 million”. The chart tells us nothing about profitability of the films a studio makes. Disney’s apparently stellar performance in 2006 could really be nothing of the sort if the films the made cost on average $90 million each.
Second, the chart shows average box office returns for each year. i.e. total box office returns / number of films. It’s entirely possible that in 2006 Universal chose to make more films with lower budgets than they had the previous year, the chart gives us no information about their total earnings only that their films on average made less money. Their overall box office income may have remained static. From this chart there’s just no way of telling.
Third, people only have finite amount of time and money to spend on going to the cinema. If the six studios shown on the chart released between them 100 absolutely brilliant Citzen Kane beating films next year I just wouldn’t have enough time or money to see them all, no matter how much I wanted to. Looking at the average of each years averages i.e. the average box office for all the big studio films that year you get a much steadier picture. Reverse engineering the figures out of the original chart and then doing the maths I get each years mean lying between about $41 million and $47 million with a standard deviation of about 2.5. Quite stable really, so maybe another reading of the chart might be that all the people commissioning films for these companies are brilliant geniuses who know exactly what the public want and deliver pretty consistently but because of the aforementioned time and money constraints the public can only see a pretty much random selection of the films on offer. Hmmm…
OK I admit that last one’s not likely the explanation either but you see what I’m getting at: That the chart doesn’t support the argument that the bloggers are making. Even though I happen to agree with them, this annoys me as it does a disservice to the position that big business has no monopoly on quality creative content.
OK, I think that went fairly well, I was worried it was gogin to turn into one of those massive un-finishable posts that just sits in the drafts folder for 3 years. Here are some of the tangents I have successfully avoided going off on during the course of this post:
Please feel free to ask about them or talk about them in the comments.
In the interests of filling space, here are the wikipedia articles I’ve visited in the last fortnight, culled from my browser history…
3D House Of Beef 8 Bit Theatre A Reader’s Manifesto Ace Combat Alignment Atenism Axonometric Projection Ben Hammersley Book of Exhalted Deeds Book of Vile Darkness Clover Studio Cognitive behavioural therapy Computational archaeology Cormac McCarthy Death of Nancy Benoit rumour posted on Wikipedia hours prior to body being found Ed Miliband Gareth McLean Henotheism History of Los Angeles, California Hokey Pokey Holger Czukay Hypomnemata Invisible Man James Clark Jim Clark Kerry King Lenna Lewis Libby Make Poverty History Marit Larsen Microsoft Surface Moron (psychology) Morse v. Frederick MPEG-4 Part 14 Multi-touch Ontology Phatic Ron Paul RSS (file format) Solar deity Spore (video game) Stanford-Binet IQ test The Invisible Man The Mismeasure of Man The Road (Novel) Tramadol Who is a Jew
A while back Penguin released a series of books with blank covers, the idea being you could draw you own. I made one for Emma on our aniversary. What with Jane Austen being her favourite author this one seemed appropriate…
You wouldn’t believe how long that took, I must have drawn it about 20 times in pencil before I got up the courage to commit it to the surface with with pen. I’m slightly annoyed by how I chose to do the title too. It was a bit of an afterthought and I should have made it bigger, as it is the proportions feel a bit wrong. On the other hand it kind of enhances the home made feel which I didn’t want to lose.
It’s a neat idea. I find myself drawing alternate covers for books I enjoy quite a lot and would totally buy more of these books if there were some others in the series that I was interested in - Of the books I know Penguin do editions of Ralph Ellision’s Invisible Man and Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita immediately spring to mind.
I really like the back too. Penguin really should return to using Gill Sans (or similar) for their cover typography.
