This BBC News story from Uganda reads like an archtypcal fantasy story.
The hero of the story commisioned a blacksmith to forge a special weapon with which to slay the beast. Then he and a large number of extras fought the monster for an hour and a half before finally killing it.
I’ve always assumed that the dragons of European legend were travellers’ tales of African crocodiles. Which would make Mubarak Batambuze a modern-day St. George.
Tommy Vance’s last recorded words were “If you really want to liven up a shepherd’s pie, just add one Oxo cube while browning the mince”. And so, as Rock and Metal fans, we do this in memory of him.
The Baby Pendolino Kichstarter project has now morphed into Revolution Trains. The Kickstarter project came tantalisingly close to meeting their £210,000 target, and even through it “failed”, it proved the proect would be commercially viable. So there will still be an N-gauge Pendolino, now financed by pre-orders.
They have been taking orders at the original Kickstarter prices, restricted to those who had already backed the project. Now they’re taking further orders at a slightly higher price for those who didn’t back the Kickstarter. The price for a “basic” DC 9-car train is now £300, which still represents good value for money. It’s also available as an extended 11-car set, or as a 5-car “fun size” version for those without space for the prototypical 9 or 11 car train, with all variants available in either DC or DCC with sound.
The Pendolino is only the start. The intention is to follow up with other models, using the same pre-order model.
According to the census results, Bolsover in Derbyshire contans Britain’s highest concentration of Satanists. But both Bolsover Council and The Church of Satan are questioning this.
Bolsover is precisely the sort of place that ought to spawn metal bands. So where are Bolsover’s Black Metal acts?
It’s the time of year when continental manufacturers announce their new models, and there are some interesting things in the Minitrix New Items brochure (pdf).
The Cisalpino Re484 with matching coaches has been on my wishlist for a while, since they were regular performers on the Lötchberg route in the mid-noughties. Cisalpino was a joint Swiss-Italian venture for through trains between Switzerland and Italy over the Lötchberg and Gotthard routes. The coaches on the Lötchberg were the standard Swiss EC stock, initially hauled by pairs of Re4/4s, later by dual-voltage Re484s that eliminated the need to change locomotives on the Swiss/Italian border.
They’re selling as a set with the locomotive and three coaches (two first class and one second), with additional second class coaches sold individually. This will enable modellers to assemble the correct prototypical six-coach formation of two first class and four second class coaches.
The EC coaches have been in the Minitrix range for several years, as has the 4-pantograph Bombardier TRAXX locomotive. Since a similar train has also appeared in the Arnold catalogue this year, using Eurofima coaches, I’m assuming the simultaneous appearance is to do with past licencing issues with the livery.
Here’s the prototype at a rather wet Spiez in 2007. The six-car Cisalpino sets were frequently strengthened with older Swiss coaches during their run through Switzerland, in this case the three leading vehicles are rebuilt RIC stock, available in model form from Kato, which means the whole train can be modelled.
Vinyl may be making a comeback in a big way, but this long and technically informative piece in LA Weekly suggests CDs may actually sound better after all. The digital nature of CDs means it’s possible to capture an amount of dynamic range that simple wasn’t mechanically possible with vinyl.
It is a fact that vinyl sounds different from CDs. And many people prefer vinyl’s sound. But it’s not clean reproduction of a recording that makes vinyl a preferred format; it’s the affect the vinyl adds to a recording that people find pleasing.
“I think some people interpret the lack of top end [on vinyl] and interpret an analog type of distortion as warmth,” says Jim Anderson, a Grammy-winning recording engineer and professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. “It’s a misinterpretation of it. But if they like it, they like it. That’s fine.”
It’s also clear that the vinyl experience is about more than just sound. Pete Lyman, co-owner and chief mastering technician at Infrasonic Sound, an audio and vinyl mastering studio in Echo Park, says he believes listeners are gravitating toward vinyl for the physical experience of owning, holding and flipping an LP.
“I don’t think that [sound is] really the appeal for people right now,” Lyman says. “They like the collectability factor. They like the whole ritual and process of listening to it. They’re more engaged with the music that way.”
So, is the vinyl revival purely down to middle-aged men trying to recapture their long-lost youth? (I know of no female vinyl enthusiasts!). One reason may well be that many contemporary CDs are intended to be listened to in cars or to be ripped to iPods for listening to on public transport. So they’re given a loud compressed mastering intended to punch through background noise, making little use of the CD format’s dynamic range. In contrast, vinyl recording are sold to be played on Big Expensive Stereos.
From a Guardian piece on Eddie Bo, the gentleman of soul who never got his due:
“James [James Black, drummer] was also an accomplished trumpet player,” Bo recalled. “On that day, the trumpet player was doing his part on From This Day On, but it was too complicated. I was getting frustrated with him. In the end, James took the trumpet from him, and hit him in the head with it – bent it. Then he said, ‘Let’s go – I’m tired of bein’ here.’ And he played the trumpet part himself.”
Ouch! If you’re a trumpet player, be wary of the drummer!
This piece is a good example of why music writers love interviewing veteran musicians – theyve got stories to tell that up-and-coming bright new hopes just can’t match.
Panic Rooms have just announced a tour in May, featuring the newest version of the band with Dave Foster on guitar.
They are promising a show containing material from across four albums, presented as a two-part show, beginning with an acoustic set featuring stripped-down remiaginings,followed by a full electric set.
Six dates have been annouced so far, with more to follow
May 2nd – LONDON – The Borderline
May 3rd – MILTON KEYNES – The Stables
May 7th – YORK – Fibbers
May 9th – ST HELEN’S – The Citadel
May 15th – MANCHESTER – Sound Control
May 17th – BILSTON – Robin 2
Greek singer Demis Roussos died today at the age of 68. Before a lengthy career as a solo artist he was the lead singer and bassist of Aphrodite’s Child, the prog band featuring Vangelis on keys.
“Four Horsemen” is a standout song from their bonkers 1972 concept album based on The Revelation of St. John. It’s a far better memorial for Demis Roussos’ talent as a singer that the throwaway cheesy hit that featured in the BBC period piece “Abigail’s Party”.
This is a prog classic that would probably have made Alison Steadman’s character Beverly’s head explode
Lengthy and interesting post on Slate Star Codex titled The Toxoplasma Of Rage. The whole thing is well worth a read as one explanation as to why so-called “Outrage culture” behaves in the way it does.
One section that jumped out was the part about how the nature of social media platforms affects the ways in which people behave, and cites Tumblr as an example.
Tumblr’s interface doesn’t allow you to comment on other people’s posts, per se. Instead, it lets you reblog them with your own commentary added. So if you want to tell someone they’re an idiot, your only option is to reblog their entire post to all your friends with the message “you are an idiot†below it.
Whoever invented this system either didn’t understand memetics, or understood memetics much too well….
…. I make fun of Tumblr social justice sometimes, but the problem isn’t with Tumblr social justice, it’s structural. Every community on Tumblr somehow gets enmeshed with the people most devoted to making that community miserable. The tiny Tumblr rationalist community somehow attracts, concentrates, and constantly reblogs stuff from the even tinier Tumblr community of people who hate rationalists and want them to be miserable (no, well-intentioned and intelligent critics, I am not talking about you). It’s like one of those rainforest ecosystems where every variety of rare endangered nocturnal spider hosts a parasite who has evolved for millions of years solely to parasitize that one spider species, and the parasites host parasites who have evolved for millions of years solely to parasitize them. If Tumblr social justice is worse than anything else, it’s mostly because everyone has a race and a gender so it’s easier to fire broad cannonades and just hit everybody.
Tumblr’s reblog policy makes it a hothouse for toxoplasma-style memes that spread via outrage. Following the ancient imperative of evolution, if memes spread by outrage they adapt to become as outrage-inducing as possible.
Which begs the question: to what extent do the design decisions taken by the developers of a social network determine the culture that develops? The above example suggests the decision of Tumblr not to have blog-style comments ended up fostering the aggressive call-out culture for which Tumblr is infamous.
In a similar way Twitter became a significantly more hostile place around the time they introduced the Retweet, which I don’t think is entirely a coincidence. And Jay Allen has suggested that the anonymous imageboard culture that’s developed through sites like 4chan is responsible for the toxicity of #GamerGate. Similar things have been said about the self-reinforcing echo-chambers of parts of Reddit.
Will the next generation of social media platforms learn anything from this? It’s really a diversity-in-tech issue. If a platform is developed by a term who are overwhelmingly young and male with homogeneous socio-political views, it will inevitably reflect their biases and blind spots. Sometimes you can spot those blind spots instantly; for example ello.co’s launching without a mute or block function demonstrated that nobody there knew anyone who’d been subjected to stalking or bullying online.
Human nature and wider society being what they are, it’s not possible to design out toxic behaviour entirely by technical means alone. But social media companies do need to think what sorts of behaviour their design decisions have the effect of rewarding, what sorts of behaviour they actively want to discourage, and what wider impact they might have.