Evening Times: our subs are drunk

How’s this for a headline?

Amazon’s experimental interface: WindowShop

A few months back I blogged about a tech demo that made browsing Amazon more shop-like. It seems Amazon spotted it too, because its new WindowShop interface does much the same thing.

I’m not sure it’s actually useful (at least on a PC – it would probably make more sense on a TV), but it does look pretty.

Charlie Brooker on Kerry Katona’s meltdown

Brilliant:

If you look down on the genuine misery of those you consider beneath you, you’re not just being an arsehole, but a snooty one to boot. The very fact that you’re willing to get so annoyed by an irritating celebrity that you’ll gleefully jettison any notion of sympathy is surely a bright scarlet warning light indicating just how empty your spiritual gas tank has become.

Three-word videogame review: Dead Space (Xbox 360)

Scary. Gory. Excellent.

Campaign posters: too much information?

These posters are on pretty much every bus stop in my town:

I’m sure you’ve seen them. The series includes a poster with girls drinking, another one with a couple snogging in the back of a cab, one showing a girl wearing a low-cut top, etc etc etc.

The idea behind the campaign is laudable enough – it’s an attempt to shift the blame culture where, incredibly, significant numbers of people still believe a woman wearing a short skirt was in some way “asking for it” – but it makes me uneasy – as did the recent poster campaigns warning kerb-crawlers, and some of the domestic violence ones. These are campaigns by adults for adults, but they’re appearing in spaces used by young children. So for example, the anti-rape posters are on the bus stops used by primary school kids round here, the anti-kerb crawling billboards were all over Glasgow’s South Side (one I saw was within a few hundred yards of a primary school) and so on.

I dunno, am I being overly sensitive here? I’m all in favour of changing attitudes, but is there such a thing as too much information when posters are being seen by everybody? Is having to talk to very young kids about this stuff the price you have to pay to change adult attitudes? And do such campaigns even work? “Hmmm, I’m feeling like committing a shocking crime against a woman,” a rapist said yesterday. “Because quite frankly I’m a maniac. But then I saw a poster and realised it was, like, a really bad thing.”

On a related but completely different note: nice, balanced viewpoint from some religious nut-job on Radio Scotland this morning. The caller was discussing the plans to introduce (very basic) sex education for schoolkids. “I’m very suspicious of any adult who wants children to know about sex”, she said, before hissing that the only words children of any age should hear about sex should be “God”, “sin”, “hell” and “temptation”.

*sighs*

Here come the Terminators

Eek!

What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

Baby Bigmouth is a year old today

I know what you’re thinking. Will there be jelly? Yes. Yes, there will.

Get a free Eels live EP (if you do it before the 28th)

Want a free Eels EP? Of course you do. So click on this link and give them your email address before 28th October.

The 4-LP Deluxe Vinyl Ltd Edition set of Blinking Lights – which this EP is promoting – is a thing of beauty, and I’m sorely tempted to buy it even though I don’t actually have a record player.

What’s wrong with the Daily Mail (typography)?

Is it just me, or does the typeface used for the bullet points in this boxout (from the Daily Mail) really suck? It’s used for body text in lots of the paper, and it makes my eyeballs bleed.

Bad Science: buy it, read it, send it to Gillian McKeith for Xmas

Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Science, is superb fun. It’s not just about the Gillian McKeiths of this world, although of course they’re in there; he’s equally good at giving both barrels to big pharmaceutical companies – companies that, as Goldacre points out, often make the very “alternative” supplements the anti-Big Pharma crowd are always blabbing on about.