asides Blog

One line thoughts of the day.

So I’m a tester, and I happen to be the very first person to order something from a new website. Of course I found a bug.

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

So farewell, Lou Reed. I was never one of his greatest fans; he represented the opposing pole in rock to much of the music I love. But there’s no denying he’s a hugely iconic figure in rock history who has cast a very long shadow across a great many genres. I do hope radio stations have been commemorating him by playing Metal Machine Music in its entirety.

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Hey lighting guys. If the venue’s rule is “three songs in the pit”, and they’re strict about it, it helps if one of those three songs isn’t entirely backlit with no spots on the band….

Posted on October 26, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Every time I see someone use “Punk” as a metaphor for something that has nothing to with music, I always hear the sound of a middle-aged music bore looking back at their their adolescence through rose-tinted spectacles.

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Congratulations to Morpheus Rising for hitting their Kickstarter Target for their long-awaited second album with nine days to spare.

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

The British music scene is made up of multiple overlapping subcultures. The largest of those subcultures is represented by the likes of Later with Jools Holland, the main stage at Glastonbury or the Mercury Music Prize. It thinks of itself as “the mainstream”, but it’s really no less an subculture as the underground prog scene. It doesn’t really represent anything but a tiny fraction of the diversity of music that real people listen to across the country.

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

My somewhat satirrical definition of Hard Science Fiction is “Anything that reads like a cross between an engineering textbook and a right-libertarian tract”. This might be one cause of the sexism in the SF world, in that few women are interested in writing that kind of stuff; instead insisting on having things like three-dimensional characters.

Posted on September 2, 2013 by Tim Hall | 2 Comments

George Osborne’s enthusiastic support of HS2 may just be a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day. Unfortunately Osborne is so discredited and so widely loathed by the majority of the British public that his stance risks undermining public support for the project.

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

“There was an infestation of tribbles in Apocalypstick Avenue. We sent Donald Rumsfeld to deal with them, but he couldn’t get in because of the shoggoth”. Who said software testing was boring? And yes, that was an actual, real test scenario.

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Congratulations to Chantel McGregor for winning not one but two awards in the 2013 British Blues Awards. Not only has she won Best Female Vocalist again, but best guitarist as well. As anyone who’s familiar with Chantel’s music will know, both are well-deserved.

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment