2009

25 February

features

Feature Essays Underground, Overground: the State of Zines Today by Kate

Zine publishing seems largely to have survived — touch wood — the current troubles facing independent magazine publishing and, if anything, there seems to be more talk of zines in the air. With this in mind, I asked zinesters Melissa (Cherry Bomb Comics), Lizzy (Marching Stars Distro ) and Davida (Xerography Debt ) about how they saw the zine world developing and whether there was any truth to the rumours.

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2008

17 December

blog

Music Freaky Trigger's Popular by Nick

A blog reviewing the history of UK number one singles (more)

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14 December

blog

New Media Web TV or another advertisement by Kate

This article from today’s Observer blurs the lines between web series and online commericals, particularly in the casual use of sentences like:

Created in partnership with Burger King, the first video in this cartoon sketch series devised by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane scored three million hits in two days.

Another example given of a web series, Easy To Assemble was created by Ikea. Seriously. Observer writer, Ajesh Patalay, describes it as “like an episode of Extras set in Ikea, with cameos by Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr and others”. I describe it as a freakin’ ad (with cameos by Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr and others).

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12 July

blog

Television The countdown to Dr Horrible has begun by Kate

But until Act One is released on Tuesday , we will just have to keep watching the trailer again and again (after the jump). Go NPH! .

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03 July

blog

Criticism More about that whole Boing Boing censorship thing by Nick

I’ve been following — with indecent interest — the Boing Boing OMG censorship! thing, so ably reported on by m’colleague a couple of days ago. (continued)

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25 June

blog

New Media Women needed to rescue the UK games industry? by Kate

The Guardian Games blog argues that a sort of WWII labour-shortage solution is needed to rescue game development in the UK. Strangely amiss is any kind of argument about why women aren’t represented in this industry in the first place.

22 May

blog

New Media Twitter wimps out on Harassment Problems of its users by Nick

Found this, ironically, from a comment on Twitter itself:

Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service

As I found out last month, the reality of Twitter is that they refuse to warn and/or ban people who use their service to “abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users” (to quote their forth line item on their TOS page). What does this mean? In short, anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity and Twitter won’t execute any means of community management.

Ariel Waldman’s been experiencing persistent abuse from the same internet fucktard for at least a year, but Twitter is too scared of lawsuits to ban said fucktard.

I love Twitter but this ain’t right, guys. To put it mildy.

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2007

24 October

blog

Activism What. No, Seriously, What? by Nick

I was digging around for some useful links for an upcoming post about the Dumbledore outing when I discovered this piece of what the fuckery. Turns out that “Ampersand”, one of the blogosphere’s most noted male pro-feminist bloggers, has sold his domain name to a porn site in order to pay for server costs. (more, with update)

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24 September

blog

New Media Chinese Gaming Company Bans Transgender Play by Nick

From Kotaku

Shanda Entertainment – one of Mainland China’s heavy hitters in the gaming industry – announced that their subsidiary, Aurora Technology, has frozen accounts of male players who have elected to play as female characters in the King of the World MMORPG. Apparently there are no bans on women playing male characters, but women (and men-wanting-to-play-as-women) will be required to prove their gender via webcam.

Incidentally, Kotaku blogger Maggie Green is doing a bang-up job in attempting to bring culture to the site’s community of teenage fanboy readers. I don’t envy her, though.

01 September

blog

New Media WikiScanner: The greatest hits by Kate

These are just some of the more entertaining findings from WikiScanner since its release a few weeks back. Now, bring on Wikileaks .

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