18 December 2009
What does it mean to buy 10 copies of a CD? It means you have 10 copies of a CD to deal with. What does it mean to “buy” 10 copies of an MP3? You have the same file sitting on your hard drive 10 times.
In one sense there’s no difference. If you throw 9 of your CDs away and delete 9 of your files, it’s the same outcome. But you can do other things with your surplus CDs – give them to friends, for instance. And here there really IS a difference, in that buying 1 (non-DRM) MP3 allows you to do anything that buying 10 or 100 or a million of them would. more »
Tom in FT • 11 Comments
chicken wings are NOT for flying
!
Ah, who can forget the wide-eyed terror of throwing up a hail of low level umbrellas to catch a clumsy chicken who missed your initial shot, but not being able to stay and look after him as two other chickens are falling down on the other side and they’re scared and they’re crying, wah! They need umbrellas, and I have an unlimited supply! When will these chickens learn that their wings are NOT… for flying.
Fact: this is the only online flash game for which I have actually bought merchandise. A man in the supermarket agreed with me vehemently – “they’re for EATING!”… and then followed me around the aisles (probably seeing if I was going to pick up some of those terrifyingly grey ‘Basics!’ chicken wings).
There are many more beautiful looking games in the same style at orisinal.com, but Chicken Wings… is the only one that has had me in a long term trance of joy as your chubby chicken guardian runs about with umbrellas, flinging them up for his chicks to catch and gently drift down safely to the ground.
Warning: if you try to play this on a trackpad rather than a mouse, there will be tears before bedtime! I am quite sure of this! What we need are games designed to take advantage of their hem hem unique capabilities (or perhaps what *I* need is a USB mouse, hmm).
Sarah in FT • No Comments
17 December 2009
Sorry for delay. Free wine. Can’t think of a game to put up. There is only one solution. Google “MONKEY HIT GAME!” I was very drunk…
Hurrah there is a response.
Hello little fella.
more »
Pete Baran in FT • No Comments
Christmas cheese next week! Stilton’s the canonical choice, I believe, but what are your Christmas cheesy traditions?
Finn
Soft raw-milk cow’s cheese, made in Herefordshire and bought from Neals Yard Dairy
This is a squat little barrel of cheese, and I have half of one for my lunch. It’s got a white bloomy rind, and a pretty soft pale yellow paste; darker towards the edges. Towards the middle there’s a slightly chalky, crumbly texture.
The rind’s bitter, tasting of nettles; dark green and undergrowthy. Inside, it tastes sour and tart and salty, very creamy and with a smidge of rancid butter, There’s a green floral aftertaste – this might be the influence of the nettley rind – and just the merest hint of truffley mushroom. This cheese is delicious now, and I reckon it would be rather differently delicious in a week or two; softer and even creamier, with those hints of mushroom coming to the foreground, and a mellower caramel taste. This little cheese doesn’t get the chance to become a melting puddle of mushroom, though; it gets gobbled up in one go!
marna in FT /Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
One of the many arguments offered as to why The X-Factor is a Bad Thing for pop is that Simon Cowell has taken the fun out of the race for Xmas No.1. It strikes me that this is a little rose-tinted – was anybody really that enthused with said “race” in the pre-Cowell days? Of course the Christmas market has been very important to the record industry, because so many units shift then. And in that context the idea of “the christmas no.1″ was a good bit of marketing – sell a few more records by alerting people to the fact these singles was in the shops with a bit of press coverage and a 3-minute slot on Newsround. Did people enjoy this stuff? Absolutely! Did they care? That I’m less sure of. So maybe people are just sad that a bit of marketing razzle-dazzle they enjoyed has been swapped for a bit of marketing razzle-dazzle other people enjoyed. Nothing wrong with that, if so – the roots of any ‘tradition’ are likely to involve a bit of opportunism on somebody’s part. more »
Tom in FT • 38 Comments
Foreword: I wrote this over several weeks, forgot what I was doing with it, created a mysterious section (later removed, subsequently regretted) about armchairs and have entirely lost the plot of what it’s meant to be about. Also I am ill. Enjoy!
Not for beginners, you understand, by one for lo, I am a new bug. I don’t remember the smoking ban coming in (here, at least; it was quite an event where I was at the time, in Mid Wales) and Samuel Smiths are still a little entertaining to me in their sheer oddity; people say ‘Clerkenwell’ to me and I go ‘cor is that a real place? I really liked the Real Tuesday Weld album of the same name!’ and I have, on two separate occasions, spent ten miserable, sodden minutes standing in a doorway outside Euston Square station, peering at Google Maps and wondering what the hell happened to the road that I’m sure I went down the last time I came out of one of the doors here; I think everywhere east of Westminster is bat country, still find Oyster cards a bit esoteric and don’t understand the Blue Posts acronym system; occasionally I still give bartenders scandalised looks when they tell me how much a pint of Kronenbourg and a Winter Warmer is going to be and despite the best attempts of my educators, I’m not actually sure I understand what an estate pub is* and six months ago I knew a lot less.
Here is what I have learnt. more »
Hazel in Pumpkin Publog • 5 Comments
Suga Shikao, looking fiiiiiiiiiine in a red top and waistcoat, reads slowly from the pages of the day’s Metro – Japanese… Jpop… Superstar!! – and everyone at the ICA cheers. I say everyone. It is possible that I squealed at a pitch audible only to small dogs. Small Japanese dogs, at that. Suga Shikao is big business in Japan, and tonight he’s at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I know two things about him before the show at the ICA: 19sai (19yrs old) (the theme tune from an anime xxxHOLic, though is that relevant? I have never seen it, considering most anime to be king of suck), and, er, his co-authorship of crunchy mega-boyband KAT-TUN’s best seller ‘Real Face’. WHAT OF IT.
suga shikao, making jam, yesterday
Overheard some comments that ‘Japanese fans have a lot riding on Suga Shikao’ … ‘ambassador of Jpop’… never mind, ‘broke all the rules of pop’. What, precisely, would Japanese fans have riding on Suga Shikao? A domestic artist conquering abroad, being showered in laurels and then a victorious Moomin Saver flight back to Narita having glorified Jpop and saved the industry? First of all – this was a gig, this wasn’t representation and record releasing for the UK Christmas No1, and wasn’t a
track hastily recorded in English to please a prolific songwriter (thank goodness)! A serious market break… doesn’t sound like it?
more »
Sarah in FT • 2 Comments
16 December 2009
From Kat, Queen of game playing procrastinating (perhaps abdicated):
“Before we had Nintendo brain training, the country’s academic elite were forced to sharpen their faculties in other ways – the Post-It Note Forehead game, shotglass chess, 14-hour Civ III marathons, late night Texas Hold ‘Em. Anything to keep our brains from rotting away under the lobotomising influx of essays, lectures, reading lists, practical write-ups and tutorials – though appearing on dreadful Channel 5 gameshow Brainteaser (filmed nearby) was probably a step too far as one of our chums discovered to his cost.
My intellectual poison of choice was a slow-paced strategy puzzle with a theme familiar i) Isaac Newton ii) to anyone who has ever played Uno.
more »
Pete Baran in FT • No Comments
#575, 23rd August 1986, video
Alas, to wake up you must first fall asleep, and Boris Gardiner’s lovers’ rock slowie veers awful close to lullaby. The tune is sweet, the keyboard lands halfway between bounce and caress, and there’s a gentleness and humility in his creamy delivery. What might have been something as oily as “The Lady In Red” instead comes over as a harmless summer evening melody, almost chaste. “Harmless” rarely sets the blood racing though, and “I Want To Wake Up” is as heavy on the eyelids as it is on the sentiment.
Tom in FT /Popular • 30 Comments
The Hole In The Wall
The Hole in the Wall is not a hole in a wall so much as a space under a railway arch by Waterloo. That is to say, it has a smallish carpeted front bar with a handful of tables for cushioned lounging in an L-shape facing the bar; a biggish uncarpeted box of a back bar with probably ten tables and plenty of standing room, and a laughable tiny concrete “beer garden” smokesies area out the back. Clientele a mix of commuters, hard drinkers, randoms and (on matchdays) football and rugby watchers. That’s it, really. But.
In the middle of the 1980s, before I was old enough to drink legally and before I’d even thought about living in London, I’d visit my student older brother here. I’d arrive and depart from Waterloo, off the one-track chuggy line up from Honiton.
My brother would meet his friends at the Hole In The Wall - they, undergraduates in not-unnecessarily-fashionable rags, would impress and awe me with tales of the kinds of activities I could only read about in the NME. I was a country boy in love at a distance with a specific brand of indie (let’s say continuity mod-pop with a non-rigorous and unsustainable kind of oppositional rhetoric) and the downwardly-aspirational, boozy, fading folk-punk scene (I loved the Boothill Foot-Tappers as much as I loved those early Pogues records). All the good stuff seemed to happen in the pub, up London. This place seemed like the sort of pub where it just might. more »
Tim in FT /Pumpkin Publog • 22 Comments
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