I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but if you read a lot of online content then Readability should be on your bookmarks bar. It’s a one-button site reformatter that turns even the most eyeball-zapping site into a simple, readable page. I love it.
2017: Sadly this one is long gone, but there’s a good guide to readability here.
The Times and Sunday Times are doing the paywall thing from June. I’ve written a wee bit about it:
What we do know is that publishers need to do something now – or at least, they do if they want to avoid the same fate as the record industry.
The businesses aren’t identical – with newspapers, the people giving stuff away for free are the newspapers, not pirates – but the imminent iPad could be as much of a doomsday device as the iPod proved to be for the record business.
The iPad is a credible alternative to print, a device that’s usable for reading in a way laptops and desktops simply aren’t. If it, the next Kindle or some other new device takes off as a newsreader while free access remains the norm, then what little money’s left in news will be diverted from the content creators and into the pockets of the hardware firms.
It may be too late for the news business, of course. They’ve been giving their stuff away for a very long time now. If you’d been working for free for a decade and suddenly asked your boss to pay you, he’d probably tell you to piss off.
Craig Grannell, on the same topic:
Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.
The late, great Keith Waterhouse had some very strong opinions about journalists’ writing. Press Gazette has published some of them. I liked this one.
The standard Fleet Street excuse for shoddy or silly writing has always been that the offending story was written against the clock.
It usually isn’t so.
Deadline fever encourages taut, crisp writing with a maximum of facts and a minimum of frills. The straightforward hard news story, phoned virtually straight on to page one, rarely displays any of the faults discussed in this book.
The truly awfully-written story, of the kind that ought to be hung on the walls of schools of journalism as an example of how not to do it, demands time.
The puns have to be sweated over, the laborious intro has to be reworked again and again until it cannot possibly be any more forced, the jocular references have to be carefully strung together like blunt razor blades dangling from a magnet.
I’ve written a wee piece on Techradar about GameCrush, the frankly bizarre new service that will enable you to play videogames with girls, for a fee.
Paying women to talk to you? Isn’t that what the ads for HOT GRANNY ACTION in the back of movie magazines and men’s magazines are for?
Apparently not. GameCrush’s ethos is much purer than that. It’s designed to engage the brain, not engorge the groin. That’s why the girls can choose to offer chats ranging from “flirty” to “dirty” or, if they’re feeling particularly empowered, “flirty and dirty”.
360 deals – contracts where record companies get a share not just of record sales but of other things such as concert revenues – are becoming increasingly common. Are they good for artists? Perhaps not, according to this Billboard piece by Bob Donnelly.
When you read the fine print, you’ll also discover that the labels want to make money from the books that artists write, the Hollywood movies in which they act and the fan clubs they create. In fact the labels want to share in absolutely everything. Does that sound fair to you?
In many of these 360 deals, the record company will demand that their earnings come out of gross revenues. This means that if the cash the labels actually receive has been reduced by any parties in the middle of the transaction (even if those parties themselves add value, as, for example, many music publishers do), then the label will add those amounts back in before calculating the percentage of revenue they retain.
Think about that for a moment. The manager doesn’t get paid on gross, and the artist certainly doesn’t get paid on gross. Why then should the record company be paid on gross?
The Huffington Post details the best-selling magazine covers of 2009. This is one of them.
Isn’t that brilliant?
As you might expect, most of the other covers were about Michael Jackson. There’s also a slideshow of the worst-selling covers. Surprisingly Rolling Stone’s Shakira cover is one of them.
This is great: six hours of work in a two-minute clip.
Over 6 hours of my onscreen compositing, retouching, color correction, type obsessing, all condensed down to a slim sexy one minute 55 seconds of cover design. Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…and even then I left out the not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of my cover design process, such as reading the manuscript, sifting through Alexia photoshoot outtakes, background photo research, etc. And since this is a series look that has already been established for Soulless and Changeless, there weren’t the usual batches and rounds of versions of different designs that happen with standalone or first-in-a-new-series covers. That would be a weeklong video!
It’s not hard to find common ground between Babybird and Eels. Both are ostensibly bands, but in reality they’re solo efforts that may or may not involve other musicians. They both tend to use the same recurring musical motifs (or, if you’re not a fan, both keep releasing the same bloody song). They both tend to depth-charge their chances of commercial success (one of Eels’ most beautiful songs is called It’s a Motherfucker, while Babybird’s comeback single starts with the line “I will kill you, said the five year old” and moves on to talk about feral kids and kiddie-fiddling). And if they’re known in the outside world at all, they’re known for the One Big Hit – Novocaine for the Soul in Eels’ case, and You’re Gorgeous in Babybird’s case.
Where they differ is in personality. Despite the horrific things E from Eels sometimes sings about, there’s always an aw-shucks, self-deprecating humour behind it all. There’s humour in Babybird too, but it’s much darker, much bleaker. Eels’ humour is survivor’s humour, gallows humour. Babybird’s is a maniacal cackle, the sort of noise the mad scientist makes before pressing the big red button that unleashes the killer monkeys. Or something.
Actually, they differ in another way too: quality control. I love Babybird, but of the 4 billion albums he’s recorded and released I reckon there are four really amazing albums in there.
I’m thinking about all of this because Babybird’s got a new album out, Ex-Maniac. If you don’t like Babybird you’ll bloody hate it, but if you ever liked the band there’s a lot to like here. Unless, that is, you’re a fan of You’re Gorgeous – a fan in the “it was our wedding song” sense, because it does seem that a lot of people bought it for the title alone and didn’t listen to the rather horrible words. Ex-Maniac’s happiest title is “Bastard”.
Ex-Maniac is very Babybird, both in good ways and in bad ways. The bad: it’s patchy, and when it’s bad it’s self-indulgent and pretty tuneless. The good: there’s some great stuff here. Like Them nails the paranoia and anger of (some people’s experience of) fatherhood, while the Failed Suicide Club is heartbreaking in the same way so many Eels songs are heartbreaking. Drug Time is both funny and sad, and Unloveable – with long-time fan Johnny Depp playing guitar – is almost funky. Apparently Depp largely paid for it too, although while Ex-Maniac was recorded in LA – the same place Eels hail from – the sunshine clearly hasn’t cheered Babybird’s Stephen Jones up at all.
I hate reviews that say “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” but… if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.
Here’s a link to a live version (or at least, live pictures stuck on the studio audio) of the cheery single Like Them. I’m going to the Glasgow gig on March 18th. Do say hello if you’re there too. I’ll be the overweight bloke blubbing to If You’ll Be Mine. Or more likely, one of the overweight blokes blubbing etc etc etc.
Penguin’s been showing off some iPad-related ideas, and I think it’s fair to say they’re amazing – particularly the kids’ books.
Valve, makers of Left 4 Dead, Half-Life and various other gamer favourites, is bringing its steam platform to the Mac – and to make people aware of it, it’s been sending teaser images to a bunch of websites. The images include a parody of Apple’s famous 1984 ad, a parody of the Mac versus PC ads, and my favourite: a parody of an iconic Mac ad. This one was sent to Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
The copywriting’s superb (click the image for a bigger version), especially if you’re familiar with the advert they’re parodying.
Meanwhile, there’s also an Easter Egg hunt going on for PC gamers that suggests either Portal 2, a new Half-Life episode or both, and the reaction I’ve seen on various games sites is absolute delight.
