Notebook

Posted on by Alasdair

Notebook

I was at this conference today, and made this notebook, in addition to sphericising tomato puree, having fun with miracle fruit, watching some extremely interesting musical performances, and making a little plasticine octopus monster. The notebook contains the phrase “Hugo was rescued from the attic of a dead magician”, which in addition to being a factual statement made by one of the speakers today, is possibly the finest story prompt I have ever heard.

House of Hapsburg I

Posted on by Alasdair

House of Hapsburg I

Not sure how many of them I’ll wind up putting on line, but here’s one of the few shots I like from last weekend’s White Mischief/House of Hapsburg event.

Links for Friday June 10th 2011

Posted on by Alasdair
  • Apple’s iTunes in iCloud ‘won’t launch in the UK this year’ – Telegraph
    I am spittingly furious about this. Fucking PRS shitehawks, screwing the consumer once again. I have bought and paid for my music. There is absolutely no reasonable argument that says I should not have access to it wherever I damn well please, because shockingly, it is *mine*. I have already paid their members what they are entitled to when I bought the fucking stuff, and I find it infuriating that they somehow believe that they have the right to get in the way of my use of their product past that. (Why yes, I do really, really want iCloud.) It's not as if it's remotely meaningful – I *can* (and do) already do everything iCloud will let me do, just less conveniently. Yet PRS want someone else to give them money in exchange for making my life more convenient a third party making my life. They very embodiment of the standard music industry practise of getting between artist and consumer and making things worse for both while skimming the money off the top. How is that related to what their artists do? PRS are playing territory marking office-politics type games on matters that are unrelated to the actual rights in the music, and everything to do with ownership of products. What's next, are they going to GPS tag all my CDs, to make sure I don't carry them outside my house?

Links for Thursday May 19th 2011

Posted on by Alasdair

Links for Wednesday May 11th 2011

Posted on by Alasdair
  • Why I have left Twitpic, and why you should too.
    If you are a photographer who likes to maintain any kind of control over the licensing of their images, or even if you just don't like corporations whose default assumption is that they should have all the rights to do as they please forever and ever, including profiting off their users creativity without sharing that profit with their users, you should probably stop using Twitpic.