Today’s pet obsession is the Beatles’ song “A Day In the Life”, which has become some kind of vast uber-meme in my head, munching its way – in a cheerful fashion – through every other thought I might attempt to have.
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Author: Tom Coates
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The horror of the HMV sale…
Dark times are coming. The end is nigh. If only they’d heeded the warnings of their peers. Fellow sufferers of the HMV sale, I salute thee: monger.co.uk, not so soft, lukelog.
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On designing a site for Dan Hon…
Dan Hon, ex of Daily-Doozer has relaunched as Extenuating Circumstances. I said a while back that I’d design a site for him, but now I’m a bit torn – I mean, it’s not like his new design isn’t pretty bloody cool. But I did promise at the same time, and I don’t want him to feel obliged to use it if it’s not as good.
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Rate me, baby…
Go on, you sexy sexy people. Go and rate plasticbag.org over at blogstart. You know you want to.
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Freedom of Unspeech…
It’s a new politics for a new era. Visit Not a Protest today:
“The First Amendment guarantees Freedom of Speech, EVEN IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY”
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HMV’s sale cripples my finances…
Oh my dismal fall from grace. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been trying to reintroduce the counter-cultural spin to plasticbag.org – a trend I hope to continue. But I have hit a “speed bump”.
Yesterday I got a text message from Mella. It told me not to go near HMV, that they were evil and that they had caused (with their sale) her immediate bankrupcy.
“Pshaw!” I thought to myself, “I am not as weak willed as this foolish girl! I can resist these corporate temptations.” Forty-five minutes (and fifty-eight pounds ($85) later), I was forced to confess myself unequivocally their consumer bitch. I was about ten minutes away from begging to give them more money. [You only have to look at the Consumption panel to the left to realise the extent of my horror.]
Kate found it all funny when we got back home. But she didn’t find it so funny this morning, when she reported the “accidental purchase” of six videos…
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OSX on Intel?
Perhaps the answer for poor beleaguered Apple is to sign the petition to start making OS X on Intel. If it wasn’t for my suspicion that Microsoft might start withdrawing the use of packages like Office and Explorer, I’d support it whole-heartedly…
Bad news for Apple sends the stock price falling. And unlike every other computer company in the world, what’s bad news for Apple is bad news for Apple users, as quite a lot of the company’s ability to stay afloat has been the absolute refusal of most of their consumers to realise the obvious, give up, and bow and scrape to the altar of Gates. As an Apple user myself, I know this to be true…
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The Complete Human Genome on CD…
I went to a meeting today with some people who work at Prospect magazine, which markets itself as “the magazine for the intellectually curious general reader”. I wasn’t familiar with the publication before the meeting.
I pick up a copy of the magazine and there’s a CD attached to the front, which I glance at briefly. And then I do a comedy double-take. The CD has written on it in large blue letters on a silver background:
“The Complete Human Genome On CD”
I stood there in some kind of dumbfounded silence for a few seconds, looking at this astonishing declaration with a mixture of feelings.
First came the awe at being in the presence of such an astonishing accomplishment – the same awe I would have felt the CD had contained every book ever written in English.
Then came a certain amount of fascination, and a kind of utopian wonder at the accomplishments of humanity.
And then came a bizarre feeling of betrayal and disgust that I was really not expecting. The same space used by magazines for distributing computer game demos, dodgy shareware programs that crash your computer, picture libraries of animals running or sitting or eating each other – this pure commercial space designed to flog both magazine and product – was now being used to contain an artefact with almost arcane power as if it were the toy in a Happy Meal.
Whether they know it or not, it seems like evidence of the increasing commercialisation of our lives – the ever present opportunity to repackage, rebrand or market anything and everything as a means to the tripartite commerical gods: “Sales”, “Sales” and “Sales”. Something important has been broken.
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The future is intelligent slime…
The wave of the future is … wait for it … intelligent slime. That would explain the state of the New Media industry at the moment…