So tonight I’m attending a concert performance of noted semi-local popular beat combo Pop Will Eat Itself at noted local concert hall the Hare And Hounds.
The ticket and Facebook event says doors open 8:00 and the Facebook event says it ends at 2:00.
What neither say is what time the live music starts. I’m going to the event for the live music, I’m not going to the event to listen to a compilation CD before the live music starts; being a weirdo I have a limited number of friends so I’m going on my own, so unless it turns out other people I know / people who are in that limited number of friends are also going I’ll have nobody to talk to before the live music starts. I get that pubs want me to drink as much beverage as possible, but I want to be responsible for choosing how much and when I drink my beverage without having the pub try to manage me into drinking more of it. I want to arrive at the venue ‘just in time’, ie I want to arrive at the venue in time to get through all the entry procedures, get some kind of [...]
My latest music semi-release - CRISPR - the musical - I'm reasonably proud of, but the process of creating it seems to me to be sufficiently interesting that I thought I'd write it up.
The story begins with one of my son's current favourite iPad games, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, where during the narrative of the game one of the main protagonist characters in it - GiGi - all of a sudden breaks out into what can best be described as a Big James Bond Theme Song. For a while it stayed in the back of my mind as being something impressive and amusing, until I developed an urge - an urge, I tell you - to make a Big James Bond Theme Song myself.
Structure
There are a number of archetypes in the James Bond song genre, but the one which is my favourite - which coincidentally GiGi's Song follows - is the Diamonds Are Forever archetype, perhaps most famously followed in the modern era by Adele for her theme song for Skyfall. My first task in creating my own [...]
Here’s an image I’ve seen doing the rounds on Facebook, the implication of which readers are obviously supposed to go ‘yeah, too right, far too many pen pushers doing non-jobs, sack the lot of them’
Yeah, cos it’s funny to fire the HR Manager, until Dave has an accident at work and needs his compensation sorting out
It’s funny to fire the Marketing Manager, until Dave’s co-worker is also made redundant because orders have dried up
It’s funny to fire the Logistics Manager, until Dave turns up to do a job but can’t get on with it because somebody didn’t ensure his heavy machinery was there at the site ready for him
It’s funny to fire the Communication Manager, until Dave missed the meeting at which it was announced that everybody was getting an extra day off and turns up to work that day to an empty factory
It’s funny to fire the Security Manager, until one night yobboes break in to the yard and completely trash the place, and the company can’t function for two weeks until everything is replaced and repaired
It’s funny to fire the IT Manager, until Dave missed an essential Windows update on his work computer, and he ‘accidentally’ clicks on [...]
The historicity of the British folkloric tradition of wassailing is somewhat contested; it's commonly described as being an ancient pagan custom, though there is limited evidence to support this view. What adds to the confusion surrounding its origins is the wassailing events which commonly take place today - and the community songs which are performed during them - are actually a conflation of two completely different traditions, both with their earliest documented instances dating back to around the 115th Century of the Human Era (15th Century), but the only common feature they share is the use of the word 'wassail' (originally an Old Norse word which passed into Old English meaning 'good health!' or 'blessings!') in their name. One custom had groups of peasants processing to the manor house of the feudal lord asking for - or in certain instances demanding with menaces - food and drink, whilst the other custom originating in fruit-growing areas of people going round the orchards to bless the trees in the hope of a good harvest for the coming autumn.
So what we commonly have today is a syncretic tradition of community events involving some or all of singing, Morris dancing (itself a folkloric tradition which [...]
From time to time I get adverts from Adobe pop-up in my Facebook advertising feed; friends of mine on Facebook will know that it’s one of my leisure activities to snark in the comments on Facebook adverts but I’ve usually ignored the Adobe adverts. The last couple of days though I’ve clicked in just to see what other people have been commenting; the lion’s share of comments have either been the usual luddites on the Photoshop-themed adverts banging on about how it’s cheating and real photographers make their pictures using the daguerreotype process or something, or mostly from people complaining about Adobe’s subscription model and pining for the good old days of being able to buy the applications outright.
Let’s look at the numbers, shall we?
Complete CS6 standalone — £2,223.
Complete CS2021 — £40/month (you mean you didn’t subscribe during one of the frequent special offer periods?).
Length of time you subscribe for to match the last standalone price — 4.6 years.
OK, so it’s fair to say most individual users won’t actually use all the applications in the suite, so let’s take a typical individual user — let’s take myself and the Adobe applications i routinely use:
#OneYearAgoToday was the day which from where I sit in the world Everything Changed.
Two weeks ago I think most people still thought of the approach of The Event as something which was still broadly a Somewhere Else's Problem - we'd all started washing our hands more often, fersure, and we were doing the elbow bumps (and feeling faintly ridiculous doing so) thing, one week ago folks were starting to be a bit more circumspect in their behaviour, and I think the Downing Street briefings had started, but by and large the UK was still continuing to function normally. It might have been yesterday or the day before when our team manager told us to start taking our laptops home with us at the end of every day at work, 'just in case'.
The News, though, whilst The Event had spent the last two months creeping up the running order, still had other stories on it as well.
Today, March 13, it all changed.
I'd taken the day off work, because it was March, and I always end up taking random days off work in March because I always end up with quite a few unused days of annual leave to take. I'd [...]
#OneYearAgoToday was the day which from where I sit in the world Everything Changed.
Two weeks ago I think most people still thought of the approach of The Event as something which was still broadly a Somewhere Else's Problem - we'd all started washing our hands more often, fersure, and we were doing the elbow bumps (and feeling faintly ridiculous doing so) thing, one week ago folks were starting to be a bit more circumspect in their behaviour, and I think the Downing Street briefings had started, but by and large the UK was still continuing to function normally. It might have been yesterday or the day before when our team manager told us to start taking our laptops home with us at the end of every day at work, 'just in case'.
The News, though, whilst The Event had spent the last two months creeping up the running order, still had other stories on it as well.
Today, March 13, it all changed.
I'd taken the day off work, because it was March, and I always end up taking random days off work in March because I always end up with quite a few unused days of annual leave to take. [...]
Looking at STA travel now being a CovidCasualty, alongside other travel industry casualties just before The Event and the ones which are inevitably to come, it does occur to me that travel industry casualties are of somewhat more reaching and significant social consequences than the retail sector’s and the hospitality sector’s casualties.
Arguably over the last few years the hospitality sector had been expanding far in excess of the capacity of the market to sustain that growth anyway — it was a bubble that was inevitably going to burst, and the casualties are arguably more of a market correction than an existential crisis. When All This Is All Over there will still be plenty of pubs and bars, cafés and restaurants, for people to go to, and the ones who survive The Event will do so as businesses which are more sustainable.
Little needs to be said that hasn’t been said at length about the state of the retail sector — people aren’t buying things from shops because shops aren’t selling things people want to buy when people want to buy them. Shops aren’t closing left, right, and centre, it’s just certain shops which are closing left, right, and centre — you [...]
This article was originally written for a module of the Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology which I did in 1996.
Creative music making has always been seen as something which is difficult to do, some thing which is not for the average musician, but which can only be done by certain types of performer: the Jazz musician, the Rock guitarist, etc. Somehow people seem to forget that in 99% of cases their very first experiences with a musical instrument will have been of an improvisatory nature, for how many of us were able to pick our instrument up that first time all those years ago & read & play a piece of music from a piece of paper; indeed how many of us were even able to read music when we first bashed at the keys of the classroom piano as a child ?
Nowadays the ability to play more than just what has been written down by some body else is becoming more & more important, & also to teach this ability to other people. The British National Curriculum for Music has composition as a major part of its syllabus. Music Colleges, such as Birmingham Conservatoire, have as a constituent part of [...]
If you enjoy this, you might like some more of my music on YouTube Music, on Spotify, on Apple Music, and on Amazon. If you like it enough to give me some money, you can do that on Bandcamp.
The code behind this site is a bit of an abandoned project; I originally had lofty ambitions of it being the start of a competitor for Twitter and Facebook, allowing other people to also use it turning it into a bit of a social network. Needless to say I got so far with it and thought who did I think I was! Bits of it don't work as well as I'd like it to work - at some point I'm going to return to it and do a complete rebuild according to modern standards.
Perfect 
