Spreading Myself Too Thin

About a month ago the blogosphere was abuzz with links to a video of Clay Shirky's talk, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus"^*, from the Web 2.0 Expo. The main point that I took away from it, possibly not the main point that Clay wanted us to take away from it, was that I should become a more discerning consumer in my spare time.

Let me paint you a picture with words of a typical week-day evening chez h-lame. Tree and I will come home, one of us will make dinner whilst the other maybe does the dishes or some other domestic chore. We'll then sit and eat dinner with the TV on. There's nothing on that either of us wants to watch in that 19:00-20:00 timeslot so chances are it'll be on E4 (or E4+1) showing endless re-runs of Friends and Scrubs. If we're being particularly lazy that evening, it'll stay on until we go to bed. To freshen up this slightly depressing image of vapid consumption, I have to point out that we won't just be sitting in silence staring at the old goggle-box. We'll chat about stuff, occasionally we'll be browsing the internet trying to organise wedding stuff, or playing scrabble or something. However, the norm is that the TV will be on, playing something we'd not actively chosen to watch, and more often that not, at some point in the evening, we'd just sit there. Watching.

I figured that there's loads of good media out there that I don't need to just sit and watch whatever happens to be on the TV at the moment I choose to switch it on (typically an episode of Friends). To this end, for the past few weeks, since I saw Clay's talk I've been trying to actually choose what I consume.

• TV: Trying to watch good shows when they're on (like Dr Who.) or making better use of our LoveFilm subscription (we've been known to let things linger unwatched for weeks).
• DS: Thanks to dsvideo I'm able to watch shows on my DS. Currently: 30 Rock. There's also using the thing as a gaming device, but currently I'm not playing any games on it. I did just complete Ultimate Spider-man and Open Tyrian though).
• Laptop (as TV): Downloading Battlestar Galactica and Heroes.
• Laptop (as Book): I have a list of links to read as long as my arm, just waiting for me to take some time to read through them. I also download comics to read on my mac with FFView (recent / current: Preacher, The Invisibles, Transmetropolitan, X-Statix, Lucifer & Seven Soldiers - and there's bound to be more.
• Books: Whatever I'm actually reading in dead-tree form (shown in the sidebar)
• Comics: I still buy dead-tree comics too, and there's a bunch of them to be read: Y: The Last Man, Fables, The Walking Dead & Ultimate Spider-man.

And this is just the list of whatever I happen to be consuming right now. The list of TV shows I could choose to watch next is huge; The Wire, Deadwood, Twin Peaks, Flight of the Conchords to name a few. There's also lots of other stuff I could be doing at home, like coding or organising. Not to mention the range of activities I could be doing outside by taking advantage of all that London has to offer.

Suddenly I feel that every moment I'm not doing something I've chosen as being worthy of my time is a moment wasted. My spare time suddenly became complex. I might not be watched as many episodes of Friends as I was, but I'm not sure I'm happy enough about it.

^*Also available from Clay Shirky's own blog as a transcript. Sometimes I'd rather read something than watch a video. High bandwidth is killing the written blog, it's all podcasts and screencasts and no-one types anything anymore. It's shit.

Pixar Films

In order of enjoyment vs. obvious "ooh look how good we are at doing X with computers"

1. The Incredibles - being a goth is bad for your social life vs. cartoony violence with a hint of realism
2. Toy Story 2 - get over yourself, you ain't all that vs. close ups of cheezy puffs
3. Toy Story - don't be mean to the new guy vs. well anything really
4. Cars - ain't old-timey American road trips great vs. realistic dust particle effects
5. A Bug's Life - standard hero journey vs. something that's not Toy Story
6. Ratatouille - joke-free cookery romp vs. fast moving action scenes
7. Finding Nemo - boring family / coming of age / finding yourself story vs. flowy water
8. Monsters, Inc - terrible billy crystal routines vs. swishy hair

E.g. the more the film is obviously about a certain effect (trying to win yet more SIGGRAPH kudos) the less enjoyable it is. With the exception of A Bug's Life, which (as far as I can remember) was wholly about not being Toy Story.

This list would be different if we added the Randy Newman song scale into it (e.g. those without such travesties against our ears would score much higher).

Muztape

Seems like everyone and their dog is creating a muxtape right now. I fancied myself as a bit of a DJ too, so I thought I'd create one also. The problem is that I'm rubbish at building mix tapes properly with good thematic linkages between the songs, or nice segues from outros to intros etc, or basically, anything that would make the aural experience gratifying.

Still, that didn't stop me making one anyway. It won't flow aurally, but I think the little story I'm telling with the titles works quite well, although I might tweak it some when I have access to other music.

A Disturbing Fe-Tea-sh

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who has worked with me over the years, but I seriously love a good cup of tea.

I weaned myself off sugar in my tea about three years ago when I realised that drinking about 5 or 6 cups of 2-spoon sugary tea a day was probably a bad thing. It took me about a year because I was being pathetic about finally cutting it out entirely. I even cheated a bit by briefly switching to soya milk after I quit sugar (soya milk is significantly sweeter than normal milk).

Anyway, at the start of last month, I met my mate Gordon Noble who was down in London presenting at an archaeology conference in the British Museum. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, I didn't feel too good and Gordon didn't want to fall asleep and miss his flight back that night, so we settled in to a cafe for a few cups of tea instead of into a pub for a few pints. After a couple of cups we went for a walk and then went for one more whilst we waited for Tree to turn up then we could go for some food. Unfortunately at this second cafe, our teas came without milk as the guy behind the counter seemed more interested in talking about Egypt to some girls that had come in after us. We didn't complain, because, well, we're British, and you just don't do that sort of thing. So we sat and chatted over just tea.

And fuck me if it wasn't tasty as hell. Seriously, I was amazed, I expected it to be a bit bitter and horrid, whereas this was anything but.

As we all know, due in no small part to the efforts of The UK Tea Council^*, tea is super healthy as long as you don't load it up with milk. It seemed a no-brainer to follow their advice and just cut it out entirely. What surprises me most is that it took me all of 1 cup of tea to decide, unlike the 1,000,000 or so it took with weaning myself off sugar.

Of course, there is a downside to this new world of tea that I've entered. There's now no real reason to get one of these.

^*It's not the first time I've mentioned the Tea council, so I can't make any comments about the lady bathing in a giant cup of tea as I've made them before.

Reasons For Doing

More and more, I find myself doing stuff, not because I want to do it, but because I can see that if I don't do it the eventual solution wouldn't work out so well for me. I can't help but wonder if these are the most selfish acts I've ever done, which doesn't fill me with awesome glowy feelings. I also suspect that this might be the reason that totally inept people find themselves in positions of power making terrible decision after terrible decision, and I don't like the map that this plots for the rest of my life, should I continue along this path.

2007 Music In Review

Please indulge me in my little affectation of assuming that you care what music I really liked last year. Like past years^*, this will be based on the list of music I got my hands on in 2007^**.

There's been a shift in my music buying this year in that I got about half of it from eMusic rather than buying real discs. I think I've been much more "daring"^*** in my eMusic purchases than I might from a real shop, probably because it's so cheap (about 22p per song). I've also found myself buying more compilation albums than I would normally, cheapness meaning I'm nolonger scared of the inevitable 'filler' tracks. Sure with all these "daring" and compilation purchases it's been a bit hit-and-miss. Probably more miss than hit if I'm being brutally honest; there's a lot of stuff I've only listened to once.

What it all comes down to is that I approach making a purchase on eMusic vs. in a shop completely differently; there might be an album I wouldn't buy on CD but would quite happily download. Once I've bought something, if it came from eMusic or a shop will affect my appreciation of it. For example, I bought 'Places Like This' by Architecture In Helsinki on CD and thought it was OK, however had I got it from eMusic my opinion might be ever so slightly higher, just because it was cheaper. I know that this is clearly wrong because the cost difference between a 'real' and an eMusic purchase isn't so much that it should drastically affects my opinion of something, but it seems to. Bearing all this in mind, it seems only fair to rate the eMusic stuff separately from the 'real' stuff.

So, enough rationalising about my ridiculous rating schemes, on with the show:

Actuales

• 'My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go' by Aereogramme

  Aereogramme are probably one of my favourite bands of recent times. It's a shame then that this is their last album, although thankfully it's a good one. I can't really explain why I like it so much, I guess I'm just a sucker for this kind of sweeping, epic, emotional, metal-tinged indie-rock. I managed to see them play their last ever gig at the Connect Festival last summer and it was super-awesome. Whilst we're not discussing the album, there's is one of the best songs on scot-lit-rock compilation Ballad Of The Books.

• 'The Kissaway Trail' by The Kissaway Trail

  As far as I'm concerned you can't really go wrong with Scandinavian indie; Mew, The Cardigans, The Wannadies, Kings Of Convenience - all gold. I first heard of them when I saw they were the support for Aereogramme; which was enough to get me interested. They don't sound a thing like Aereogramme, but that's no bad thing as the sounds they do make are pleasant enough. They were also on the bill at Connect and played a stormer of a set. This may or may not be relevant, but Tree and I wake up to a CD alarm clock, normally we replace the CD each week - we left The Kissaway Trail in for about three.

• 'The Devil And god Are Raging Inside Me' by Brand New

  I was originally going to buy this from eMusic, but for some reason I bought it from Fopp. I'm really glad I did because it kicks so much ass. Rather than describe them, I'll just say they sound similar to bands like At The Drive In or ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.

• 'Good Arrows' by Tunng

  When people say Folktronica they probably think of Four Tet and stuff that focuses more on the tronica than the folk. I think that tunng nicely reverse that trend. It's perfect music for a lazy Sunday afternoon, or if you're a nerd like me, debugging manky SQL code. This is the second of their albums that I bought this year (Comments Of The Inner Chorus being the other) but I could only choose one and this one is just ever so slightly better.

Digitales

• 'Verses Of Comfort, Assurance & Salvation' by Au Revoir Simone

  My, admittedly somewhat inconsistent, attendance of the How Does It Feel club nights this year have caused me to listen to even more fey indiepop. A lot of these bands have a few really good singles but their albums don't really deliver (I'm From Barcelona I'm looking at you). However, these three New York ladies manage to have a great single backed up by a pretty good album. Ok - it's a mini album, maybe a full 13 tacks would be considered a fail, but that's not the point.

• 'A Lily For The Spectre' by Stephanie Dosen

  Ms. Dosen was on a Bella Union label sampler that I bought and I really liked her voice, mostly because it reminded me of The Sundays. The album might be a bit samey, but I like the thing it's all the same of, so there's no complaints from me. Also, she grew up on a peacock farm and has a swan and a fox as pets.

• 'A House Full Of Friends' by Various Artists

  Whilst trawling for eMusic for Lucksmiths songs I found this compilation. There's only one actual Lucksmiths track on here, so in one minor sense it failed, however in most other senses it wins supremely.

• 'The Glow vol 2.' by The Microphones

  This was recommended to me by John Allison of ScaryGoRound fame. Well, I say 'recommended to me' like I know him, I don't, he wrote about it on his blog and I thought - "hey, his, end of year charts are usually pretty good this might be worth a punt". He was right, it's lo-fi indie stuff of the highest order. Yay!

^*See 2006 music in review, 2005 music in review (it's update: 2005 music in review (itunes-says)) and 2004 music in review (it's update 2004 music in review (trees choice))

^*See the cd-list, 2007 is 'The Peel Session' by mum down to 'Pretty In Black' by The Raveonettes.

^***Oooh! Look at me, I bought a hip-hop album.. I'm so daring.

Bees: December News Update

As the year draws to a close it seems that every other web outpost is obsessed with looking back on the year and compiling lists or year-end reviews. Not to buck a clearly successful trend, h-lame towers proudly presents:

2007: The year in beeview

So, ignoring January in which we hadn't decided to become the internet's premier monthly bee news update service, we started out reporting on sniffer bees. A story that's still doing the rounds but a close investigation leads us here: Inscentinel. A sinister company that offers an All year bee supply. How do they do this, given the apparent rise of Colony Collapse Disorder that we reported on throughout Feb and April? I think we need to pay close attention to these bee-loving swine. Something is amiss.

Throughout the year we reported on many human deaths caused by bees as well. It's an all too common thing really as we've never had problems finding new evidence of the ongoing genocide. What is interesting is that many sources seem to assume that being killed by a bee is not something that happens very regularly, so you will often find reports along the lines of:

You are 10,000 times more likely to be killed by a bee than to be killed by a bat.

That might be true, but it seems from anecdotal google-based evidence that being killed by a bee is quite likely, which makes being killed by a bat even more likely. So now we have to live in fear of bees and bats. Not to mention Sharks, Bears and even the simple terrorist. We're sure here at h-lame towers that this is all part of a plot by our evil bee opposition to make bee-related deaths seem irregular, when they are in fact as common place as death from horrible body failure.

It was the latter third of the year when our investigations really started to come up with something. We started noticing evidence of training then trends in attacks and to top it all off massively disturbing evidence of bee propaganda and miscegenation.

It's obvious that our enem-bee is getting ready for The big Push whilst we are just sitting there blindly waiting for them to sting us all to oblivion. Not us at h-lame towers, obviously, we've got cans of RAID and we're not afraid to use them. However, in these dark times there is one glimmer of hope. We're now getting reports of a civil war within the bee-nation. It's not much but it's a start.

Bee seing you.