Go, go, go: moriwen1's What is This, a Joke?

Spike and Aslan walk into a bar. Or, more exactly, Spike's on the hunt for his soul and ends up with a bloody terrifying lead. Cue a breezy-fresh short story with solid metaphysical credentials nonetheless. And chapter one has a twist that keeps on giving. brutti_ma_buoni already linked it, but I'm linking it again, because I don't want you lot to miss it!

In other news, which should probably get its own post so as not to sour the proceedings, I've been sucked back into The Voice? I think it must say something for the rejigging of the format, because it was about this time last year that I abandoned it. It's just a fact, though, that neither Danny wotsisarrogantface nor Tom Jones have any clue about production, which is such a shame, because Jessie J and will.i.am's people are the only ones who end up giving proper thought-through performances.

Everyone's clear favourite, as it should be, is Leah... Because this is just aces! I can't bear pop, but modern covers of disco I apparently like. Also, the vast heaps of sarcasm she pours over the lyrics are great.



But I also like Leanne, who got kicked off. I think she dreams of being Christina Aguilera, but she really needs to be on the dance circuit. That icy high register of hers is dying out for pounding electronics. As they started getting to with this:



Soz; I iz proper hyper on curry and Hotel Chocolat chocolate wot I couldn't resist on the way home.

So, in a fit of wanting someone else to find new music for me, I signed up to the subscription service run by Rough Trade, where you get six of their favourite new tracks for £2.99 per week. It says that they get tracks often ahead of release and you get additional material - so far, I can certainly say that these tracks do seem to be ahead of release and properly fresh in that way. Not sure what they're talking about in terms of additional material, but they do also say that this is a fairly new service and they're building it up as they go along, so we'll see what happens!

For as long as I go for it, I thought it might also be fun to keep a blog of my feelings on the tracks. I actually thought this would be more difficult than I'm hoping it will be... My general worry with the service was that, as sponsored by the Guardian, it was going to be a lot of samey Guardian-reader-friendly tunes aimed at 30 year olds, which ten years ago would have meant a lot of Pixies-esque stuff... I don't know if it isn't that, but there's definitely variety here and a clear identity between tracks. My fear now that I'm interested in three of the tracks enough to want the albums is that every Saturday could potentially start getting very expensive. :/

( Reviews )

Overall I think that was a success! Not pausing my subscription yet.

I like it when Newsnight packages the interesting bits into single videos:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22625480

(Also, this reminds me of how much I've enjoyed some articles in the Financial Times over the years. Sure, I have no money to do anything with this stuff, but it's very interesting. And the How To Spend It magazine is the best of all 'ogle expensive junk' periodicals, even if the ratio of men's stuff:women's stuff in it is a woeful reflection of the financial sector.)

(Yes, I went looking for yesterday's Newsnight. It's not up yet.)

So, I think this is exactly the same as a parka I bought a couple of months ago in navy blue (because everyone seems to own khaki now and getting a new khaki parka seemed like an insult to my old, beloved, knackered one)... Only it's got peacocks on it?

http://tinyurl.com/ce82atk

(Bearing in mind that the reviews are silly and I thought I didn't like my blue parka because it was unlined and a bit basic, but now spend most of my time walking around in it looking in shop window reflections and thinking how well it goes with skinny jeans and DMs.)

(Really, I think I want it. I just feel poor because I finally got around to dumping most of my savings in an ISA rather than having them floating around my current account. You like it too, right?)

ETA: Wellll... I hope I don't regret that in the morning. To be fair, I haven't been drinking recently. So that makes it OK.

Once upon a time a read a lecture summary or something on the Cambridge website about what would happen if humans upped and vanished one day from a large city (such as Cambridge)... I've never been able to find it again, but it stuck with me and was one of the main inspirations behind abridgement. And these images from Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone remind me of that too:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-22246328

Can't get over that second image with the forest re-emerging between the buildings.

^ BBC headline right now. About pregnant!Kate pics.

... Er, gang, we're still in 2013, right? Watching Supersizers Eat The Fifties didn't actually send me back in time, did it? o.O

(Also watched the Supersizers do the Eighties. When did I start being charmed so much by the 80s? Why won't it stop?)

(I really, really don't want to go back to the library tomorrow. Even though I have Responsibilities To Undergrads I Have Been Shirking. My mum was right. I've hit the wall of my particular PhD marathon. In sport/bizarre craft projects this is usually where I give up. And my head is tender still. :( )

So, I am on my new computer! The shiny, it is beautiful. Windows 8 is weird and a bit cumbersome, but I think I can see myself enjoying it when I get to grips with it. Office 2013 seems fine, but I do NOT like the DESIGN CHOICE that MENU HEADINGS should be in CAPITALS. Ugly and hard to read at a glance. :( But I'm sure I'll get used to it.

The real sea change, though, is my monitor. Ever since I saw bogwitch's old HP laptop (even with its heating issues...), I have coveted an HP screen and the same depth of colour intensity. At last the dream has been realised in 23 inches of glory! (Because there were bigger screens on the market, I, er, thought it was going to be smaller than it was...) Watching HD on it earlier just makes me want to watch things all the time. And design things. And watch more things. Even if I'll probably stick to fic for the moment (and trying to remember how things used to be on my old Firefox).

New sitcom on BBC2: The Perkins! Joanna Scanlan doing some sort of wacky Fry/Laurie character! Excellent.

Did think there was something off about the production design, though. Couldn't work out whether it was the lighting, camera angles or music, but I think it needed a bit more so as not to look like you'd just tuned into a standard Perkins documentary. Hmm...

Well, the Pope's resigning. I don't have much to say about that, though I like the idea forwarded on the telly this morning that the new Pope might be from somewhere other than Europe. I think that would be nice for a lot of Catholics around the world.

In other news, though, I can't get over what has become known as the 'horsemeat scandal'! For those who haven't seen this particular bit of British/European news, they recently found that some (value) beef ready meals/things have contained horsemeat rather than proper beef and, the more they dig into it, the more there seems to have been some serious organised fraud happening in a pan-European supply chain - the latest victim is Tesco's spag bol.

I just can't help but feel like this is one of the definitive stories of our times. There's so much bound up in it - how expensive meat is (becoming again? has always been?) that fraud is worthwhile, how cheap we want/need our food, how meat-heavy we want our diets to be (despite all that), and yet how picky we are about what animals+cuts we eat - even when they're processed beyond our ability to discern any difference. Because, presumably, if we just ate horses our pockets would be the ones benefitting, rather than the fraudsters... But we never will.

Basically, I feel like beef is the new bread when you come to food history; it's the site of all our anxieties. Which amuses me.

I'm very, very worried I'm going to start watching EastEnders again. It's been over ten years, but for some reason I seem to be still invested in Kat and Alfie. And Nina Wadia is very compelling to watch.

*hides from own shame*