Friday Reading S12E04
…interview with executive producer Matt Strevens The new series starts on Sunday, and as soon as the episode finishes you will be able to join in the comments on my episode recap for The Halloween Apocalypse on the Guardian website. I don’t have the link yet, but it will appear at the top of this page at 7.15pm on Sunday: Doctor Who – episode-by-episode There was actually a Dukes of Hazzard episode that had an alien in it. TRACK OF THE WEEK: Unité…
Good Friday Reading S13E14
…o cut Killing Joke out of my set of bands I habitually go and see live and download new albums etc etc. Except they’ve got a new track Total and honestly it is so good, if you’d told me it was a rediscovered off-cut from between 1985 and 1989 I would not have disbelieved you. Hmmmmm. Main Dans La Main by Elli & Jacno is the slice of vintage 80’s French synthpop you didn’t know you were missing – cracking video with it. I make 80s-sounding electron…
Lots of new (and old) Doctor Who for Christmas
…ty review of every Doctor Who episode as it transmits, and then hanging around in the comments to tell everybody that obviously, they are wrong and I am right, but with kindness. It’s my perfect gig. I feel so proud to add it to my career. But I also feel such sadness about it.” Anyway, my shorthand verdict of this year’s Xmas special in the comments was “perhaps not the most plot-laden entry into the Doctor Who canon, but pleasant enough for bein…
Thoughts on … Grand Theft Hamlet
…That has in turn made my kids laugh as I was forced to reveal that having downloaded it on the day it came out for the PS4 in November 2014, I had last played it in December 2016, and during those two years had completed a whopping 3.7% of the story. For shame. Now, staging Hamlet inside Horace Goes Skiing, that is a project I could get behind. *As weird as making live broadcasts of Fortean electronica? Who can say. I haven’t turned that into a d…
How we built Ampp3d in eight weeks
…85% positive. What does worry the users? 1. They’d like more depth. We’re coming round to having to publish less content, and do it more in depth. Our initial idea of snackable data journalism where just a couple of numbers were enough to support a snappy 100 word story looks like it isn’t what the audience want from us. We’re now working harder on putting something a bit uniquely Ampp3d into every story. 2. Some are concerned about bias. We come…
#GamerGate poll: Clarifying the change from “Uncovering corruption” to “Fighting corruption”
…pro-GG vote until you edit manually! pic.twitter.com/5FIuTO7Dlp — Scott Malcomson (@RoyCalbeck) October 3, 2014 The suggestion being hinted at there was that I had deliberately done that to stop #GamerGaters sharing their vote. That wouldn’t be something I’d ever do. So I was faced with a choice of either editing the poll after it had been up for a while, or leaving pro-#GamerGate votes unshareable. Both of those options were sub-optimal. I decide…
Friday Reading S08E06
…ruck by this though, when he talked about the snobbish-ness that sometimes comes at you if your background is on the sport desk. “One thing I’ve often noticed is that television presenters whose background is in sport – and particularly local radio – are often the most competent at talking their way out of trouble when things go wrong on-air.” Having done some sport desk stints myself, it’s such an enjoyably curiously different beast to news, and…
Friday Reading S09E06
…a good job with its election coverage (43%) than a bad job (14%) Despite hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on social media advertising by political parties, only around one in seven (14%) of our survey respondents said they had seen one of these political ads online. Not a great week for media companies posting pictures of the wrong MP if they were a black woman. Here is a first hand account from Dawn Butler about what it felt like: “Google i…
“The who, what and why of UsVsTh3m” – Martin Belam at Hacks/Hackers London
…alls”. It recorded your personal best and made a satisfying “Ta-daaa!!!” sound when you completed the task, and proved to be horribly addictive. We very much enjoyed watching people taunt their friends over Twitter with the scores they’d got. It gave us the chance to be meta about ourselves as well, as every raging internet success deserves a navel-gazing “how we made it” feature. We wrote “16 behind the scenes secrets about ‘Ed Balls Teaches Typi…
Hello, world (Slight return)
…I painstakingly reconstructed every word and URL. And even all the spammy comments. In fact, at one point, I’m fairly certain I had the biggest Apache redirect config in history. On reflection, it’s amazing how much spare time you had before you have kids. When I switched to MartinBelam.com, I froze currybet.net as it was, and started afresh, with a plan to gradually migrate over some “key posts”. I think I migrated two or three. This time? I wro…