This Christmas, Glitch nearly resulted in me ruining the turkey, goose and trimmings. Having never been interested in massive multi-player online games (save for Half Life deathmatch quite a few years ago), I got totally and utterly hooked on Glitch. I thought I was monogamous with Scrabble, but apparently not. I can’t really talk about it as it’s still in alpha test, but check out the trailer:
Happy new year, folks. More in 2011…
I’m a little bit obsessed with this pared back, raw cover of Feist’s song, and the video is beautifully eerie.
Yesterday I went to see The Social Network toute seule. Entirely alone, in fact – I had the whole cinema to myself. FYI this post contains spoilers, so if you wish to see the film then I advise you to stop reading.
I found the film disappointing, as often happens when trailing the hyping masses to see a hotly anticipated film. I’d expected an upbeat, exciting, thrilling tale of Zuckerberg and pals, starting something massive in their dorm room. Instead I got a bleak mix of booze, betrayal, and some fairly depressing lawsuits. And Justin Timberlake as the super-confident Josh Lyman of the film injecting punchy mission statements and tacky glamour into the mix whilst mysteriously looking like a try-hard dad.
Facebook aims to make it easier to keep in touch with the people you care about, so it feels strange that the film is void of any warmth, and this lack of warmth is all pinned on Zuckerberg himself. Intentional or not, it feels a little too easy and contrived, and Zuckerberg’s character seems a little too robotic and one-sided. But perhaps I didn’t buy the screenplay generally – the break-up scene at the beginning of the film grabbed my attention, but it felt like an exchange between thirty or forty-somethings. I think in his bid to create a stinging volley of dialogue, Sorkin forgot to convey the characters as young people who are believable and emotionally clumsy. And that continued throughout the film.
A bit of navel-gazing never hurt any blogger, and as the film’s protagonist and I are roughly the same age, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Zuckerberg’s study environment in Harvard circa 2003 and my own of the same year. Fireplaces, a proper college-wide network and signature Sorkin-speed speech were the main differences. To contrast, I was inventing cooking dances to keep warm in the kitchen, (still) struggling with dial-up internet (I think we first got 128k broadband in 2004) and being quietly socially inept.
If the film doesn’t work in itself as entertainment (for me at least), it certainly doles out good advice to budding entrepreneurs (better than Alan Sugar’s Apprentice, that’s for sure): don’t be dumb about IP, be prepared to sacrifice your friends, cover your back and get a good lawyer.
The terrifically talented Owen Duff duets with himself on a tender cover of a Buddy Holly classic.
After a few months of hard slog launching a shiny new website for one of them broadcaster types, I’ve rewarded myself with two whole weeks of unpaid time off before I start a super-exciting new job, in which fun must be had.
Here’s my to-do list so far:
What else should I add to my list? And can you help me achieve any of them?
What a belter. The sun I prayed for shone brightly, solidly, for three days, apologising profusely for its previous absences. We arrived on site on Thursday afternoon without a hitch, set ourselves up and began our exploration. The good weather and the prospect of World Cup delight lifted spirits sky high, despite the sheer number of punters and the inevitable toilet stenches made worse by the blistering heat.
So to the music. As usual so much, so varied, so much missed. But what I did see what pretty damn good, including some surprises. Steel Harmony pummelled out some Beyoncé to an overjoyed late Friday morning Park audience, Phoenix put on a mediocre show on the Other Stage which I had to leave because my neck felt like it was on fire, Mumford & Sons packed out the John Peel stage like never before; Dizzee Rascal let rip and electrified the crowd with Bonkers (and of course, Florence got in on the act and chirped up a bit of You’ve Got The Love).
Gorillaz were the high point of Friday for me. The lukewarm reception from the crowd underlined my inkling that they were a controversial choice for headliners, but I knew their barrage of awesome beats and basslines (especially from the album Plastic Beach) would have me dancing like an eejit. It was an incredibly impressive show.
Saturday was spent mostly hiding from the sun around Circus, Avalon, and a fair bit of time in Poetry and Words, were Jon Hegley pulled in an impressive crowd and got us all singing about a bungalow in Luton. Scissor Sisters woefully underused Kylie (one song?! come on!) but at least Jake Shears got to show off his sinewy, Iggy-Pop-In-training body. And we did bump into Del Marquis later on at NYC Downlow club. Pet Shop Boys blew my socks off – after years of being my least favourite band on the planet (after U2), they put on a corking show and reminded me how many of their songs have become earworms I shall never dislodge from my cerebellum.
Obviously Stevie Wonder was some pretty funky icing on the cake on Sunday night, introducing little Stevie and even bringing Michael Eavis to do a duet of Happy Birthday to 40-year-old Glastonbury Festival (though let’s just say Eavis should stick to signing the bands up to perform, and milking cows).
And the rest? Crystal Castles you can keep, 100% Beefcock and the Titsbursters at DogFacedGeisha sure were memorable (with a name like that, you can’t help but remember), the human jukebox, the accidental tear-inducing viewing of Toy Story 3, and all the random late-night / dawn wanderings around Block 9 and Shangri-la were just amazing. That whole area is so much better than I remember it being in previous years.
All-in-all a brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime festival, and my first Glastonbury without having to resort to the hot spiced cider. If only festivals were all so universally warm, dry and fun!
Kay had one for her birthday:
Read the full story at Stef’s blog
This year will mark my third visit to Glastonbury Festival, where Bono’s pain will be my pleasure as U2 make way for Gorillaz to headline on Friday night. Hooray! I’m very excited about Glastonbury because, as ever, I’m sure the music, comedy, arts, crafts and booze will be outstanding.
There is, however, the inevitable and slightly upsetting prospect of bucketload after bucketload of teeming, inglorious, skin-wrinkling rain. In 2004 and 2007 I shivered in the drizzle, hot spiced cider in hand, and boogied in the muddy bog. Augustus Gloop: eat your heart out. Last year at Glade was no exception – once again I brought the clouds.
This year I’m praying I won’t be the bad weather omen and we’ll have at least one day of good old-fashioned sunshine and a chance to shed the kagoul for once.
Is that too much to ask?
Well. I’ve done a bit of digging and looked up the historical weather data from nearby Bristol airport around the time of Glastonbury festivals going back to 1997. The results are in the table below:
| Year | Headliners | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Verdict | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High (C) | Conds | High (C) | Conds | High (C) | Conds | |||
| 1997 | The Prodigy Radiohead Massive Attack |
15 | Rain | 15 | Rain | 17 | 12 | Rubbish! |
| 1998 | Blur Primal Scream Pulp |
15 | Rain | 18 | Cloudy | 18 | Cloudy | OK |
| 1999 | REM Manic Street Preachers Hole |
22 | Sunny | 24 | Sunny | 17 | Rain | Good |
| 2000 | Chemical Brothers David Bowie Basement Jaxx |
18 | Cloudy | * | No data | * | No data | Hazy |
| 2002 | Stereophonics Manu Chau Fatboy Slim |
18 | Cloudy | 17 | Cloudy | 19 | Cloudy | Dull |
| 2003 | De La Soul Flaming Lips Damien Rice |
18 | Cloudy | 21 | Cloudy | 26 | Sunny | Good |
| 2004 | James Brown Oasis Orbital |
20 | Sunny | 16 | Rain | 20 | Cloudy | Bit rubbish |
| 2005 | The Killers KT Tunstall White Stripes |
22 | Sunny | * | No data | * | No data | Fog |
| 2007 | The Who Bjork Arcade Fire |
18 | Storms | 20 | Cloudy | 16 | Cloudy | Rubbish |
| 2008 | Massive Attack Groove Armada Mark Ronson |
19 | Rain | 21 | Sunny | 20 | Sunny | Good |
| 2009 | Blur The Prodigy Tom Jones |
24 | Sunny | 25 | Sunny | 22 | Rainy | Good |
| 2010 | Stevie Wonder Gorillaz Pet Shop Boys |
25 | Sunny | 24 | Sunny | 25 | Sunny | Awesome |
Data kindly provided by Bristol Airport via Weather Underground
So the data seems to suggest that your average day at Glastonbury will be about 19°, cloudy, and you’re very likely to see Basement Jaxx or The Prodigy. And as for rain, here’s the conclusion:
Compare that with my experience so far:
So you see I feel entitled, even owed, a dry festival. Please, let it be this year!
Update (June 21, 2010)
The weather forecasts from Accuweather and Weather.com are pointing to, astonishingly, a dry, sunny festival. Let it be true, ye Gods!
Update (July 2010)
I’ve added the data from 2010′s amazing, sunny, dry, hot festival.
Over the last few days I’ve been lucky enough to read about the hype of the UK iPad launch from my own iPad, which arrived about a month ago.
After seeing a friend’s iPad at a wedding a couple of weeks before that, and seeing him proudly draw a giant penis on it, I had my reservations – aside from having a beautiful screen there were no killer apps, no super connectivity and the keyboard was not up to serious typing.
Now I’ve had my own for a few weeks, here’s why I love it:
And the dislikes:
So all in all I feel the iPad is absolutely not a necessity device – it takes tasks which are easily achieved on the iPhone and on your laptop and makes a few of them much, much easier. It is not a replacement for anything per se.
Cory Doctorow posted a few weeks ago on his frustrations with the iPad, Apple’s skewed monopoly on innovation, on what he calls the infantalisation of hardware, on closed vs open.
The points he makes are valid but I feel he quickly dismisses the vast market for whom a closed platform is perfectly fine. A large group of people out there (and I count myself as one of them, most of the time) don’t want to tinker or take their devices apart (perhaps burnt by previous failed attempts at fixing VHS machines or 90s PCs). They just want things to work really well, be beautiful and easy to use. Is that so bad?
I was lucky enough to do a little funky dancing over at Koko in Camden last Saturday where the potato-enthused, tea-drinkin Mr Scruff was doing a marathon six-hour DJ set. An mp3 of the entire set is available for the next week from his site using download code Bs97kw.
And if that wasn’t enough there are a bunch of folk on Mr Scruff’s Soundcloud page tagging up the songs in previous mixes too.
minor9th.com is a weblog about music, running and geekery by Simon Pearson, a web producer and bathroom entertainer in London.
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