David Emery OnlineGod Help The Girl
The new project from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, which we launched yesterday. Contains my first use of the new CSS 3 ‘column-count’ property to have multiple columns of text, which was so crazy easy (and degrades nicely to one column in IE) that I’m probably going to use it all over the place now…
Visit ➔Celebration Electric Tarot
We as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. The birth of the MP3 has dreampt the death of the CD, and so all across the board Cd sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched, polycarbonate, rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom—freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the evironment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the World Wide Web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want—no waiting. we know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires anymore.
Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license, all of our new music will be free to download on our new website. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is—laid bare.
Good luck to them – I’m a big fan. If you have the means, making your music free like this could have some interesting repercussions artistically (free of the shackles of the album format, ‘hit singles’ and the like).
Visit ➔Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
A simply lovely video for one of the best tracks of last year.
I particularly like the singing ghosts:
Visit ➔OnLive Makes PC Upgrades Extinct
You may never buy a new video card ever again. Actually, the only PC gaming hardware you might ever need will cost you less than a Wii, should OnLive’s potential live up to its promise.
[…]
The concept is simple. Your controller input isn’t going from your hand to the controller to the machine in front of you, it’s going from your hand to the controller through the internet to OnLive’s machines then back again as streamed video. Whether you’re using a USB gamepad, Bluetooth wireless controller, or tried and true keyboard and mouse, the processing and output happens on OnLive’s side, then is fed back to your terminal, with the game “perceptually” played locally.
Very interesting, especially considering the rise in netbooks and other low performance, connected platforms (cough iPhone cough).
Visit ➔Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
A absolute must read article. RIP the newspaper industry; long live journalism.
Visit ➔Open-washing and the Camel Open Circle …Jerk
Camel doesn’t really believe in openness — let alone grok the concept — let alone give a shit about openness — but since all the cool kids are doing it, they’re happy to co-opt the label to win points. Let the backfire begin.
At the height of cynicism, we have a company whose primary business is architecting new schemes to kill people with their death products, aligning their brand with “openness”. Consider the line crossed.
I don’t get how Camel – or their agency – thought that this work. ‘Open’ has jumped the shark quite thoroughly, although whether it was actually anything other then a pointless buzzword (see ’2.0’) is up for debate.
Visit ➔Textpattern Admin Themes
dds_admin_style is a Textpattern plugin that enables two features for the Textpattern Admin:
1. Select a style saved within Textpattern as the admin CSS.
2. Set a unique favicon for the admin.
A nice set of themes for the admin section of Textpattern – one of my current bugbears with Textpattern is how old-school the admin interface is (along with the lack of rich text controls) and this solves that problem nicely.
Also, check out David DeSandro’s site – who made the plugin – as well; it’s very nice.
Visit ➔