Category
Culture & Entertainment
Consumable media, probably consumed by me.
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02.06.08Game for a laugh (or something darker): deceit in popular cultureLast night, out for dinner with a group of friends in celebration of one of our number's birthday, I mentioned that I had noticed that in an awful lot of articles lamenting the lately departed entertainer and king of trivia and video clips, Jeremy Beadle, he was referred to as a "Prankster". In fact, a casual search on the interwebs shows that he's been referred to as such online on no fewer than 464,000 occasions, and that his name occurs in nearly a fifth of all search results for "prankster". This is surely the only proof required. This got me thinking about ...
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01.03.08My Week In MediaChallenged by m'colleague Neil to reveal what I've been consuming, media-wise this week, I am delighted to flash my digital hem, as it were, particularly because it affords me the parallel opportunity to apologise for being AWOL since before Christmas. I've been away, you see, and as a result, my media consumption for the past week has been a bit different in many ways to what I might otherwise have consumed. What I read Despite not being in the office (or perhaps because of it), I've enjoyed reading the paper: The Guardian, of course and particularly enjoyed the NYE quiz special edition ...
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12.24.07Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.This year, as I mentioned in a post a couple of months back, was the year that I finally, really got podcasts. And since it's nearly Christmas, I thought I'd share a little podcast-related brainfart with you: I've discovered in the last couple of months that This American Life is about the right length for my commute, give or take a chapter of a book on one end or other, or a few songs tacked on the end. I also had a bit of a rummage around and managed to source an enormous number of archive TAL episodes which have ...
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12.04.07On Art and Advertising[or: Haven't We Seen This Somewhere Before?] I've been noticing recently a number of ad campaigns which seem to have "taken inspiration from" (which is a polite way of saying "copied wholesale from") works of art. In recent years there's been controversy over the origin of Sony Bravia's Bunnies ad (was it ripped off from LA based art due kozyndan?), the Honda Cog ad (did it borrow extensively from a 1987 art film?) and (while the original doesn't really count as art, perhaps), even the Bravia's Bouncing Balls commercial (was it all Letterman's idea?) While there's always been a liberal approach to ...
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11.09.07Ten Reasons Why Numerical Lists Are The New BlackNearly a decade ago, when I worked in the editorial department of a major ISP, one of the homepage editors had a theory that while lists were always a good thing, there was a magic list number - a sort of divine proportion, if you like - which was the perfect length for any list of items, where perfection is measured in people's enacted interest which is proxied by the action of following a link trail. This number, I can reveal, is seven. Her reasoning was this: Five items is too short: it feels like there's not enough content there, or not enough ...
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10.15.07A World In Your EarSo, I didn't really get podcasts when they first became popular a few years back. This is probably mostly to do with the fact that, since my commute was a) above ground and b) short, I was more than happy to just listen to the radio on the way to and from work, which seemed to coincide perfectly with BBC Radio Four's morning slot (9am - things like Andrew Marr's Start the Week plus The Long View, Midweek, Desert Island Discs and Thursday's Boffinmungous (oh, alright, In Our Time, presented by Melvyn Bragg, and then on the way home at ...
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10.09.07Punchdrunk PoeI don't particularly like stage theatre (I find it impossible to suspend disbelief that the actors are anything other than people pretending, and saying the same things, night after night, to cues) but I have to admit that I am finding myself particularly tempted by the idea of a narrative which can be explored in a physical location, in any order you like, with audiences of many or one:"Journey into a macabre world and explore the four corners of Battersea Arts Centre’s Old Town Hall as Punchdrunk immerses the entire site in Poe's imagination. Inspired by the classic short stories ...
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10.02.07The Book Thief?I'm a big admirer of Douglas Coupland's work. I've read all his books, and am especially fond of Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus. So a couple of months ago, I went into a biggish branch of a high street book retailer to pick up a copy of GiaC to give to someone, because I'd been raving about it over lunch a few days before. I rifled through the various titles on the shelf, disappointed that they didn't have the one I wanted in stock, when my fingers alighted on...something unexpected. The Gum Thief is Coupland's keenly-awaited and newest novel, due ...
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09.11.07A guessing gameSo every day on my way home I pass by the Hammersmith Apollo gig venue. And at least one day in three, pretty much, there's a different band (or comedian) on. But I don't actually get to see the front of the Apollo until the bus pulls out of the bus station. So before that, between the tube and the bus, I get to see hoardes of people swarming the underground station, on their way to the gig, or picking up some refreshment (a sandwich and a neon alcopop, usually) from the Tesco Metro before they go in. And as a result, ...
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08.29.07Game onOne of the main problems with having a dreary, damp summer (apart from flooding, mosquitos and real issues, obviously) is that I have become acutely aware that I tend to go to come home at night and think about, build and tinker with social/web things, despite the fact that I have usually spent the working day doing precisely that on the other side of London, for my employers. So, some web tinkering and thinkering is for work, and some is for pleasure. In fact, the trouble with doing what I love for a living is that it's increasingly difficult to ...
recent posts
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