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When people like me get worked up about ISP censorship, national firewalls and other wonderful ideas, it’s not because we condone theft. It’s because the people who do the censoring are often idiots. Here’s yet another example: the UK Music Publisher’s Association (MPA) managed to get an entire public domain music site taken offline because [more]
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An illuminating piece by David Hepworth: When you have built up some anticipation around the release of anything, what on earth is the use of delaying that release and allowing that anticipation to fade into disinterest? Public attention is a finite resource and it is quickly diverted on to something else. [more]
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This is wonderful. I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything. He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life. He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be [more]
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I’ll be amazed if it isn’t. Andy Ihnatko: A Kindle Tablet would have an instant clarity with consumers that no other tablet can communicate … not even the iPad. There’s a real perceptual problem with tablets. Just what the hell are they, anyway? And how is the average consumer — someone who’s by no means [more]
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That, boys and girls, is Apple waving its arse at its rivals. Wi-Fi only: £399 / £479 / £559 Wi-Fi and 3G: £499 / £579 / £659 [more]
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Twitter is five, and like all good five-year-olds it’s about time it paid its way. Me, on Techradar: I was in Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night. If you haven’t been recently, it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting where the demons wear too-short skirts or G-Star Raw. It’s genuinely unpleasant, a seething mass of drunken, [more]
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Andy Ihnatko: Many of you were around for the transition from text to graphical user interfaces. Some of you were even around when the world shifted from mainframes to personal computers. Well, congratulations: you’ve lived to see your third revolution in computing. I think the good Mr Ihnatko is bang on the money: the iPad [more]
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Jon Bon Jovi reckons Steve Jobs has killed the music business. Sometimes I love my job. By a happy coincidence, I reckon Jon Bon Jovi represents everything that’s wrong with the music business. I think there’s a reason why Bon Jovi albums don’t sell like they used to. It’s because they’re rubbish. And thanks to [more]
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The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer. There are only two possible explanations. [more]
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The nice people at .net magazine have a spanking new website, and one of my pieces is on it: “What are words worth”, where I… well, you saw the headline. In the age of social media and user-generated content, suggesting that your name on someone else’s website is “exposure†is like suggesting membership of the [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.
