Last.fm’s scrobbler app – which I played literally no part in making – is pretty good as a tabletop player. Incredibly glanceable, very clean, easy to use. I imagine I’m one of the brave few still using it. I also imagine it’s going to break when iOS7′s released. But it is very good.
Nice one, Last.HQ.
First day as a glasses wearer. Extremely strange. On the plus side, they look pretty good.
…using the medium of Powerpoint.
Joe List is brilliant. You should hang out with him on the internet.
Little bit of yesterday evening. Faint background noise is a snippet of William Adamson‘s ‘Under an East Coast Moon’. Plus, you know, me clattering about.
After last summer’s ‘LYMPICS I was pretty sure this year would feel like a slog, but it’s actually been a lovely month or so. Between Paris, Østmarka and a lovely little burst of direction/creativity I’d have to say that the second quarter of 2013 far outstrips the first.
Part of that’s why I’ve given up on week notes – I’m having a lovely time, and it feels like work to document it. The other reason was that I’m just not working on enough different stuff for it to be worth my while. That started to stress me out, until I realised it probably shouldn’t. That time is far better spent doing The Other Things.
Almost a month late to the party, I just found myself nodding along with Leila’s post on The Literary Platform about her enjoyment of comics back in the day, and how digital unmoors that a little. She challenges my assertion that webcomics today might not stand up to the resolution/platform/device -changing times we live in by pointing out that, actually, the web’s been pretty damn good at moving bits of content from one place to another.
For her, the process of collecting and growing a collection is the thing that’s damaged. It’s almost certainly an Anglophone thing, that, but it’s the bit of the world I’m from and I reckon she’s on to something.
In any of the comic apps released by major publishers, the biggest thing it does is eliminate the ‘MUST BUY IT NOW’ temptations of narrative scarcity. Or, to put it another way, if you can buy a digital version online now you’ll probably be able to buy it online forever. The opposite is true of print.
That’s not entirely online though. I’ve suffered a ‘wait for the trade‘ mentality for a while now. I’m mates with Si Spurrier – I even play Risk with him – but it took me ages to pick up X-men Legacy because I just assumed I’d always be able to get it, especially once it’s collected.
Except, I bet that doesn’t help a book’s chances of becoming an ongoing concern. I bet there’s still a glut of people working throughout publishing who haven’t adjusted to a reality where everything is the backlist.
(As an aside, Legacy is truly excellent and you should buy it.)
I bet that’s hurting small pressers too. If you, as a reader, are adjusting to a world where floppy comics mean something different – something you might not throw down a few quid for – then you’re going to view lots of slim, single-issue comics in that way. Certainly, glancing at Twitter, the UK small press feels like it’s a little bit past the peak of sales it appeared to reach in the last couple of years. It’s bittersweet to not have skin in that game right now.
Meanwhile, the bit in between just seems to be flourishing. The books on the new release table at Gosh look incredible right now, whether it’s Tom Gauld’s latest or Stephen Collins’ debut. They look great, feel hefty and smell like the mental image you get when nerds talk about the smell of books.
Of course I’ve got no idea about sales figures, so that’s just idle reckoning on my part. But they at least look the part, and they don’t appear to be troubled by scarcity or collectibility. And they aren’t partworks.
Gavin Singleton is one of the extremely talented folks collaborating with Anne on The Makers of Things (the short film project I referred to in week notes as SMEE).
He’s released the soundtrack for the films, and it’s beautiful. My favourite piece is probably ‘The Model Engineer’, which sits very comfortably alongside my slate of music to work to (Clint Mansell scores, Dear Esther, Doctor Who clips and Tron: Legacy).
You can check all of the tracks out on his Soundcloud and Bandcamp pages, and you can buy it for a very reasonable £4.
Inside Inside Gov is the clunkily-named tumblr run by one of the teams at GDS. Of the many important things done at GDS that I have had nothing to do with, it’s the one I’m most impressed by.
If you don’t work with me you’ll almost certainly have zero interest in it or why I like it.
‘Inside Government’ was the name given to the section of GOV.UK which plays host to the corporate publishing of government departments. It recently moved the 24th ministerial department over the platform, and has made some headway into moving more than 300 others over.
To get a scale of what that means, the work done now has involved publishing 50,000 documents, closing 222 sub-domains, and rewriting 223 policies in clear, human-readable language.
Doing that is an epic undertaking; communicating with that many stakeholders moreso.
Neil and the team started the Tumblr account as a means of publishing updates about progress, answering questions and describing new features and research instead of emailing that stuff on an ad-hoc basis to thousands of people. It was a very sensible decision. ‘Publish, don’t send’ – have one canonical place to point people at and say ‘Look! Here are the answers to all of your questions! Here is the one true thing, until it is replaced with the next true thing!’ Saying a thing well once has much more power than saying it quickly a hundred times.
What has impressed me, for a few months now, is (basically) Neil. His tone of voice has always been pitch-perfect, and it’s set a standard the rest of the team have done brilliantly to match. This post, published when the last of the ministerial departments moved over, had every right to be valedictory and tubthumping. But it wasn’t. It was humble, to the point, and honest about the challenges his team face. So too this one, a post telling people off.
I don’t know if Neil writes or clears everything that gets published. I haven’t asked him (he told me recently our conversations never take long to ‘get silly’, something I take as a compliment but probably shouldn’t). But it never appears like he does. It just seems like a flow of valuable information, published in a pretty regular and timely way, in terms clear to users and non-users alike. It’s exactly the model we’re going to need services to follow if they want to meet the Digital by Default Service Standard. It’s everything I wish Last.HQ could have made of their blog. It’s brilliant.
I wrote a while back about how a blog ‘should be a lot of work for a lot of people’. What I mean is that distributing publishing authority is the best way to stop bottlenecks. But the best way to stop bottlenecks on a blog, of course, is to publish blog posts. Keep them good, and keep them coming.
I watch myself worry about publishing the ‘right’ thing an awful lot, but too often I don’t consider that not publishing anything is almost certainly wrong. I just need to write well and often.
Like a few thousand other people, I stumbled onto the set of Doctor Who yesterday.
Too far away for any dialogue spoilers – which is fine by me – but fun to see what must have become a fairly standard sight on the streets of Cardiff while on my way to a meeting.
It was miserable out though. Freezing cold and really quite windy. I don’t envy that team one bit, nor anyone for whom a ‘set’ consists of the nearest flattish bit of ground with room for a TARDIS/similar. Lovely to see things like this though…
The tape on top reads “ALAN PLEASE LOOK AT TARDIS LIGHT”, which is a much more interesting note than the ones Russell usually leaves for me.
EDIT: Very good…
