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On the one hand: I would cook almost nothing from this. And it is hugely, hugely expensive. On the other hand: it looks utterly fucking beautiful. I've never cooked anything from my Fat Duck book, either, but I love it…
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This is utterly brilliant. If I haven't decided where I want to be scattered when I die, then I want this done. Completely superb.
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This has done the rounds over the last week. Yes, I am profoundly annoyed about this. Yes, were it another company, I would probably be saying "well, I'm going to stop using their products" over this. And when Apple produce products that actively use this patent or similar technologies, I will avoid using them, and/or seek ways to circumvent them. Just, y'know, so we're clear that yes, I worry about the privacy-infringing moves of companies I like, too.
Links For Wednesday 25th August 2010
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On the one hand: a nerdy deconstruction of the plot holes in the Toy Story 3 and their implications for the franchise is rather missing the point of the film, in that it's a work about emotion, and you're supposed to forgive narrative flaws if you notice them, because they're in the service of a emotional point. But I'm certain Wallis knew that when he wrote this. His broader point, though, is excellent: that all narrative is now interactive narrative, and that people will take any narrative, and find things in it the creator never intended, and invent new material in the vacant spaces of all stories, and that decrying that is pointless – we should be embracing it.
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I am particularly interested in the first two, and wish to remember to return to those ideas later.
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This isn't big news, or anything I'm going to need later, this just made me smile.
Links For Tuesday 24th August 2010
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Heatmaps for the city. Ten kinds of awesome.
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This will be useful in the near-to-medium future.
Hyperfictions
I spent some of Sunday in Battersea Park with Miranda, stopping in at Comica Comicket and the Hypercomics exhibition at the Pump House Gallery. The image above is one of Dave McKean’s sculptures for the show.
I remain painfully dissatisfied with the state of hypercomics (as distinct from webcomics) but that’s a rant for another time and one that everyone has heard me give before, and in any case, until I actually put my money where my mouth is, I should really shut the fuck up on that front. That said, Mr Goodbrey, who was part of the show, continues to be one of the few people out there trying to do anything interesting, and Mr McKean’s take on them within this exhibition was interesting, but I think more about being an art exhibition than about the narrative potential of an hypersurface. But still, pretty and interesting, hence the photo.
It’s the first UK comics event I’ve been to in a few years, and it was really lovely to see people there. And I’m delighted to see that the bodies of work that people I have collaborated with in the past, particularly Messrs Goodbrey and Azzopardi put me to shame.
Oh and Gillen was there, as well, but obviously his output is a load of old toss that anyone could have come up with. The bastard.
Links For Friday 20th August 2010
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I have no use for this right now, but I'm just bookmarking it so I don't forget – I really like a lot of the pieces they have here, and one day, I will have the spare cash and space for seriously nice furniture.
Links For Thursday 19th August 2010
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Facebook have added 4square like geolocation into their offering. Naturally, they've fucked the privacy settings up on it, by making it possible for your Facebook friends to include you in their location updates, so you'll need to go in and turn that setting off, so that your friends can't advertise when it's appropriate to burgle you. Fuckwits.
365 Bullets
So, having said I’m condensing everything down to one blog, it’s time to talk properly about the exception. Anyone paying close attention to my flickr stream will have seen a new set appear there titled "365 Bullets". The long and the short of it is: I haven’t done nearly enough photography in the last 18 months, and what I have done, I haven’t shared enough of. So, in order to break that habit I am doing a photo-a-day project, using my iPhone camera, and the plastic bullets app – the idea being to force myself to take more photos, and to be less perfectionist about them, by only allowing myself a limited amount of control (a choice between 4 random effects, basically) over the post processing. If you want to follow the whole project, you’ll find it on its own tumblr, but in any event I’ll be posting the better shots (because with 365 photos, they can’t all be winners – some days, I’m just not going to see anything that interesting) to flickr and then to my blog, so you’ll get to see the good ones anyway.
Really Quite Unecessary
Another one from the department of only-of-interest-to-me, but I have spent most of the night writing a little tool to delete the vast swathe of duplicate posts that my shiny new-edition blog dumped back into my LJ. I have no idea if this means that the people who got a swathe of notifications the other day are going to get another swathe – in any event my apologies for one or both sets of pointless email garbage, but with any luck, that’ll be the last of it. And I can go back to playing computer games with my free time, instead of coding.
Links For Tuesday 17th August 2010
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BERG produce a site that helps you understand the scale and distances of things in the recent, and not so recent past. If the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed at your front door, could the distance they walked have enabled them to buy a pint of milk? How far away from your parents house would the German trenches have been, if WWI had happened where you grew up? And so on, and so forth. Nice!
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If I didn't have my Dodocase, or if, god forbid, anything should happen to it, I'd want one of these, I think.
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China Miéville has a blog. I believe this may be relevant to our interest
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In case were weren't aware NHS Tayside are offering a £68,000 a year job for a fucking homeopath, despite having laid off 500 people due to the current round of cuts. The level of angry this makes me is hard to fucking describe – it is a near perfect example of the counter to the "well, it can't hurt, and it might help some people" argument that others put forward. Anyway, setting incandescent fury aside for a moment, here is an amusing read: A qualified neuroscientist applies for the job.
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interesting article on the daily routine of the Obama presidency, and the difference between the media now, and the media of a decade ago.
Links For Monday 16th August 2010
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This has been doing the rounds, so you may well already have seen it. But in the event that you haven't, here's a fascinatingly in-depth look at Pac-Man – you may think it's a very simply game, and it is, but its very simplicity masks an awful lot of very subtle design decisions that are key to understanding the tactics required to win.
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I haven't looked in the photojojo store in ages. There is a truly staggering amount of stuff in here that I really want. Just sayin'
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Something that's been at the back of my mind recently: good fictional role models for boys.
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Someone has dug up the add in support of net neutrality that Google produced 4 years ago. Now, I'm the first to admit that that what was true 4 years ago isn't automatically true today, and that people who can't change their minds about things in response to changing circumstance and new arguments are stupid people. But: I don't see that the circumstances and arguments in this particular case have shifted in that period.