Vice Magazine has a turbo charged review of Project Gotham Racing 4 in it’s latest offline issue. I drive in London so race simulators are lethal stimuli for me and since the episode with the Flight Simulator in Blackpool when I was 12 I’ve stayed away from them.
What caught my eye was this:
‘They only make three kinds of video games these days. There’s that one where you’re Bruce Willis shooting aliens in space and saying “HOLY SHIT!” whenever something happens or explodes. Then there’s the type where you’re a wizard or a fairy and you run around talking to other wizards and fairies, trying to work out if they’re being controlled by a sexy woman who lives somewhere EasyJet flies to so you could meet her in real life for sex (unlikely).Read the rest of this entry »
The meeting point of graffiti and technology is the place I go on mental holidays to, though it should be noted I don’t listen to Smack My Bitch Up on my way there.
Melancholy trainee speed walker (I know this because he lives around the corner from me) Charlie Brooker presents a now outdated but no less relevant run down of the 10 biggest cocks in advertising, or types-of-men-advertisers-think-we-are-like.
There are two reasons for this post, the first to add ‘cocks’ to our Google juice and attract more overweight pornographers to the blog as the most popular search term leading people to this humble daily essay on all things interactive is ‘Fat Man Porno’ and by writing that I have only added to it. Read the rest of this entry »
After a week spent devising and debating a new philosophy behind web commerce, our heads hurt. David used the word, ’swollen’, but I wouldn’t go that far. It’s more of an academic ache, and the only cure I could think of was a gratuitous, sub navel posting.
Sometimes Vice is just one drunken idea masquerading as a free magazine, a burgeoning web empire and some extreme travel DVD’s, sometimes it distills the inanity of the web into a single post:
‘Hot Chicks With Douchebags shoots itself in the foot. We understand that the name of the site involves the word douchebag, and a light peppering would be understandable, but there’s no need to bukkake us with it: douche accoutrement, douchewank, can of theological douche-worms, douchestrological rank, douche echo, douche-lips, uberdouchosity… Whoa guy, we get it. What is it with jocks and killing jokes?
Like the ability to make the Queen’s face on a £10 note look like John McEnroe, rumours abound as to why there is an empty row on the iPhone screen.
Well come January 15th 2008 El Job’s ‘Big Mac’ World announcement may be the opening of the iPhone software development package to third party developers. Seems they’ve been monitoring all the hacks and learning from them. Given Apple estimate they will have sold 8 million handsets by the end of next year, this presents a great opportunity for developers. Whilst the talk is of games, voip apps and services I hope to see savvy brands looking at developing branded applications and using the iPhone as an appvertising platform. Read the rest of this entry »
You gotta be dead drumming genius John Bonham not to have noticed the audible death throws of the the music majors this past week. Radiohead were not the first to release their album in a ‘pay what you think‘ format, The Charlatans got in a week before and no doubt others before that, but it takes a major player to get everyone to sit up and listen. Now it’s reportedOasis and Jamiroquai are to follow suit and Madonna is to expose her disco rear to Warner Brothers and sign a $120m deal for 10 years with concert promoters Live Nation.
The economics of music are shifting. The artefact, ie the vinyl record or CD no longer matter in the digital age. Now the artefact is a loyal fan, a concert ticket, a t-shirt. Given the cost of replication of any MP3 is zero, charging for a single is going to become a very difficult model to sustain, whilst the album can adapt and thrive in the new ‘pay what you think’ format. Read the rest of this entry »
About a year ago I was talking with Anthony Volodkin founder of music blog aggregator Hype Machine about getting involved with the site, building a business strategy and generally humming Arcade Fire whilst getting high on a deservedly hyped start-up. He’s based in New York and I’m in London, it proved impractical.
In that time Anthony has amassed an extraordinary team around him and now re-launched Hype Machine (see Read/Write for comprehensive review). For music discovery there is no better site and if the price of an MP3 single drops to zero, he’ll be in a great position to become the main marketing and distribution channel for music discovery.
‘On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.’
We’re a day late to the Blog Action party, so instead of bringing Al Gore in a sarong we’ve brought floating street signs featuring a re-cycling sign re-cycling itself.
Continuing David’s music theme I urge people to read Stephen Dubner’s article for the New York Times: What’s The Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum.
In the article he poses the question: So what really happened to the music industry, and what will it look like in five or ten years? to five people with more up tempo brains than us and it makes for an intriguing thesis, herewith some choice samples:
‘Putting profitability aside for now, what is the explanation for the sales reduction that has occurred? The most obvious culprit is illicit file-sharing on networks such as Napster, KaZaA, eDonkey, and BitTorrent. While linking the two seems tantalizing — file sharing rose to prominence at roughly the same time that record sales started to fall — there is surprisingly little evidence to support the claim that file sharing has significantly hurt record sales.Read the rest of this entry »
What has our world come to when a simple a woman is given the equivalent of a life sentence to satisfy a corporate record industry problem!!!
A court in the US has ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay $220,000 for offering to share 24 specific songs online, at a cost of $9,250 per song.
(bbc 5/10/07)
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Vice Magazine has a turbo charged review of Project Gotham Racing 4 in it’s latest offline issue. I drive in London so race simulators are lethal stimuli for me and since the episode with the Flight Simulator in Blackpool when I was 12 I’ve stayed away from them.
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