Apr. 11, 2015
Or, From There to Here With the Simpsons Old episodes of The Simpsons are great. The other night “Bart After Dark” was on and I really enjoyed seeing it again. It’s from season eight, the one where Bart ends up working in the Maison Derriére. I thought it was older; mind you, this makes it nineteen years old. When I thought about the episode later on that evening, I realised how the story anarchically set out in multiple directions before settling into its main storyline.
Tags: Ideas, The Simpsons, Fifteen
Apr. 3, 2015
I received a copy of The Martian by Andy Weir for Christmas. This week during some annual leave I managed to finish it. It’s one of those novels that just flies by once it gets going. I’ve stayed up incredibly late to read it as it is full of those “just one more page” moments. It’s a readable and enjoyable story of an astronaut trapped on Mars.
Mark Watney is believed to be dead following an accident during an emergency evacuation in a dust storm.
Tags: Books, Andy Weir, Science Fiction, Fifteen
Mar. 27, 2015
Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary about outlandish Chilean director Alejandro Jodorosky’s attempt at a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune in the 1970s. As a big fan of the novel and of science fiction in general, I was very interested in this film. It does not disappoint. It gives a great insight into the mind of a little known (if slightly batty) director and shows even an artistic failure can lead to shock waves that can be felt in later work by others.
Tags: Films, Documentary, Frank Herbert, Fifteen, Science Fiction, Books
Mar. 22, 2015
Last night an impromptu firework display occurred. I watched it from my bathroom window. Very pretty and somewhat extravagant, given that there’s no reason for one on the calendar. I could have filmed it on meerkat but it would have diminished the spectacle. However, it did at least motivate me to write this piece that I have put off for a while (since about November I guess?). One where I find out (i.
Tags: Science, Ideas, Fifteen, Writing
Mar. 22, 2015
There is so much good writing out there. All you have to do is fire up the guardian website, or download the medium app to your smartphone, or visit my friend Barrie’s site, or Lee’s, and so on and so on.
When it comes to my little whisper into this great choir, it’s easy to feel a bit intimidated. How do I add my voice? How do I feel distinct? How do I do it as well as all these other wonderful writers?
Tags: Ideas, Writing, Blogging, Fifteen
Mar. 16, 2015
Glow is about a guy called Raf, a Londoner whose life is going nowhere in particular; a state of affairs not helped by “Non-24 Hour Sleep/Wake Syndrome”. One night while experimenting with a new ecstacy-like drug that’s apparently derived from a social anxiety medication for dogs, Raf meets a beautiful girl and then loses her to the crowd in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. From there a conspiracy evolves involving the titular dog-medication-derived drug, Burmese dissidents, corporate espionage, pirate radio stations, and urban foxes.
Tags: Books, Ned Beauman, Fiction, Fifteen
Mar. 11, 2015
Ministry of Sound boss Lohan Presencer does the cry baby act in today’s Guardian, complaining that Spotify’s freemium model doesn’t allow him to bathe in a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool of golden coins any more. The cat is out of the bag for streaming music now, and no matter how much music companies cry foul they can’t stop Spotify and their ilk, and there wouldn’t be pots of gold waiting for them even if they could.
Tags: Music, Ideas, Fifteen, Spotify, Economics
Mar. 1, 2015
Aphex Twin “Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP” Aphex Twin follows SYRO (reviewed in Album Digest September 2014 here) with this 27 minute EP of music that, if we take the title literally, features computers playing acoustic musical instruments. It’s a very different sound to SYRO and sounds acoustic for the most part. It’s an important experiment about the role of the musician, one that is already blurred in the creation of electronic music.
Tags: Music, Album Digest, February, Aphex Twin, The Orb, Susanne Sundfør, Fifteen
Feb. 22, 2015
I listened to Let It Come Down by Spiritualized for the first time during a difficult time in my life. I think this will always affect my feelings towards it. For me it’s a great big comfort blanket of a record. Coming after one of the all-time best break-up albums (in an artistic sense) in “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise.
Tags: Understated Classics, Music, Spiritualized, Rock, Fifteen
Feb. 20, 2015
I’m pretty close to a round number. To date I have written 298,500 words for this blog, not counting posts that I have discarded or deleted. This will be the 505th post currently on the blog, which makes for an average of just under 600 words per post. Some posts are just a picture or a video or a gallery though, so that distorts the average a bit.
I don’t think I can write the 1500 words I need to hit 300,000 in this post.
Tags: Writing, Blogging, Self Improvement, Fifteen
Feb. 16, 2015
You can’t beat a good cheese grater. Cheese just tastes better in a sandwich once it has been grated. It’s been proven by ACTUAL SCIENCE that this is the case: something about the increased surface area making it taste more zingy (NB. QI is not actually a peer-reviewed scientific journal). Of course the cheese we are grating here is a nice mature cheddar, you can’t grate Camembert or Stilton (well technically you can, but why would you?
Tags: Ideas, Food, Fifteen, Cheese
Feb. 15, 2015
I set myself the task of writing about a fictional character for this blog post, so this post is about Jackson X. His surname isn’t really X, it’s just one of the details about him that I haven’t fleshed out yet. This is because Jackson X is the one of the protagonists of the novel I’m (not) writing.
The name of the novel is “The Summer of the Giant Space Whale”.
Tags: Writing, Blogging, Fifteen, Short Story, Ideas