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I love it when a daft idea turns into something good: with two Steve Jobs biopics in production, I wondered what sort of films other directors would make about the late Mr Jobs. After some spirited discussions we came up with a shortlist – Michael Bay, David Fincher, John Lasseter, the Coen Brothers and Norah… [more]
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One of my MacFormat columns has made its way online: The problem with kids is that the very things that make them so sweet – their complete trust in grown-ups, their utter lack of cynicism and their lack of impulse control – make them very easy to exploit. And that’s exactly what many app developers… [more]
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I loved Fighting Fantasy books as a kid, and this wonderful MetaFilter post collates all the FF goodness you could possibly want from the internet. Meanwhile, this hilarious Tumblr collates many of the ways choose-your-own-adventures could end. [more]
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Digg, the social news site formerly valued at around $200 million, was sold this week for a paltry $500,000. It’s been a long time coming, as I wrote in .net last year: There’s an old saying about websites: if you can’t work out what product the site is selling, then the product is probably you.… [more]
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A nice piece in The Atlantic on the demise of the much-loved Word magazine: But the recently announced demise of The Word, a nine-year-old British rock monthly, hurts more than most. The Word did something that seems beyond most of its competitors now: It breathed. Even at its most list-tacular, there was nothing assembly-line about it. When it… [more]
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Me, at Techradar, on why IMAX is better than 3D. When you consider all the cons of 3D – the price, the stupid specs, the hurty-eyes bit when you look at the background and it’s all blurry – against the single pro, which is that at some point you’ll be able to go “OOH OOH… [more]
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I’d never heard of this: artists being covered before they release their records. From The Telegraph: Copycat versions of popular songs have been widely available since digital downloads took off a decade ago. The practice sees session musicians and computer experts produce a near-exact imitation of the original after hearing it on the radio. The… [more]
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The iPhone is five today. Tech journalists like me are paid to be the Waldorf and Statler of technology, the grumpy old men in the Muppet Theatre’s balcony pouring scorn on everything they see, but even at my most jaded and cynical I can’t help being excited about where we are now. [more]
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Me, on Techradar, writing about Microsoft’s Surface and Google’s Nexus 7: By getting Asus to make millions of exceptionally cheap Nexuses, Google isn’t saying “Hey, guys! Make these!” to the other OEMs. It’s throwing a tablet party, and the other OEMs aren’t invited. [more]
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Permit me a quick plug: Dan Oliver, formerly of .net, has a new project: Creative Bloq. Promising a daily dose of design inspiration, the site aims to bring together the best content from the creative side of the Future Publishing portfolio – .net, ImagineFX, ComputerArts and so on – as well as commissioning original content.… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
