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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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… [more]
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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. [more]
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This is great: six hours of work in a two-minute clip. More here: 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… [more]
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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… [more]
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Penguin’s been showing off some iPad-related ideas, and I think it’s fair to say they’re amazing – particularly the kids’ books. [more]
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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… [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.
