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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]
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Me at Techradar: What we’ve got, then, isn’t a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it’s a case of locking the stable door after the horse has evolved opposable thumbs, learnt to drive cars and driven through the stable in a Challenger tank. It’s far too late for Netscape and… [more]
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As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago. Could the same kind of… [more]
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It’s Tuesday. It’s Techradar time… Sagem’s Cosyphone is aimed at the over-50s. Not only does it have really big buttons and numbers, but it has near field communications technology, too. Need to call somebody? Why not wave a big picture of them in the air, like a simpleton? “It uses cards, which can be customised… [more]
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Photoshop is 20. Happy Birthday, Photoshop! From whitening teeth in billboard ads to foisting yet more lolcats on the world, its influence is enormous. Inevitably that influence has been bad as well as good. In the right hands, image manipulation can be undetectable, but all too often Photoshop falls into the hands of the overworked,… [more]
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Me, on Techradar: Hopefully this is part of a bigger trend. For years, technology has become more and more complicated, often for no good reason. I do a monthly radio surgery where listeners phone in with their technology troubles, and more often than not they’re being driven daft by something that should be simple, but… [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.
