Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: I'm Over The Edge, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Shy, gentle, and mighty: I reckon John put the guts into the Gordons, as well as Bailter Space. Didn’t know he did a stint with the Skeptics- must check that out.
I knew, but hadn't realised what a strong component of the band's sound his "horror-movie guitar" (as Nick Roughan puts it in the film) was.
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Guys! This is a private track so I couldn't embed it, but I think I can just link you to the download page:
Jestofunk - Say It Again (Karim Play It Again Edit)
Super funky house music!
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Hard News: Friday Music: I'm Over The Edge, in reply to Peter Darlington,
Oh, and speaking of James Blake, how about a fab funk version of The Wilhelm Scream from mean record label Tru Thoughts?
Ah. Someone was telling me about this but couldn’t remember the artist. Thanks!
Edit: And I was about to “Cool! It’s available on the iTunes Store!”
But: “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the New Zealand Store, but it is available in the Australian Store. Click Change Store to view this item.”
I guess I just have to find another means, then.
Edit 2: Here.
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I posted the link to this post to Face. From Dean Cornish in the comments:
The woman on the door asked if I 'have a gun or anything like that'
They really have no idea what they're doing there.
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Hard News: Friday Music: I'm Over The Edge, in reply to Tom Semmens,
All council facilities seem to be run by evangelist Christians on meth. The end.
Sometimes it's all perfectly sensible. Other times ... Bob tells me the chewing-gum search was at the Lawrence Arabia show, an event so wild and dangerous that it had cabaret seating.
Whether they have their security freakout or not just seems completely random.
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I tweeted the police's nothing-to-see-here response to Peters, which also says this:
Police note that Mr Ambrose was not subsequently charged with an offence in this matter, as Mr Ambrose took the pre-emptive action to write a letter of apology to the affected parties. Mr Ambrose was then given an official warning by NZ Police.
And then Bradley Ambrose indicated to me via Twitter that he had made no such apology.
This doesn't seem to be over yet.
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A summery reflection …
(With a little tilt-shift)
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And believe it or not, not every misog-troll is some techno-wizard. They’re sad little gits who shit on uppity women because they can, because they’re never had to face any cost or consequences.
Of the couple of dozen bannings here (yes, that few), two or three have attempted to come back and carry it on under different names. One – who may or may not have a diagnosis in the DSM – was particularly persistent. There have been a few other incidents, including one very ill-advised attempt by someone to pose as me.
But although not every misog-troll is a tech wizard, there’s a relatively high proportion of them in geek circles. Some of those fuckers will keep coming, in part because they have trouble conceiving of the impact of their actions on others, and in part because they don’t manage their own emotional responses well.
I encountered that more than once talking to “hackers” as an IT journalist. These guys very often see themselves as the victims.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Lilith __,
I think there are some very interesting issues just under the surface here, about equality of access and rights to free speech. Most people think moderation and/or banning on a website is the same as censorship. But websites aren’t actually public places any more than shopping malls are: the real estate is privately owned and the owners can impose any condition on entry that they choose.
I've had this argument a few times, and yes, this is my place and I decide what goes. Absolutely.
But Twitter is less a website than a communications service, via which 200 million active users send 400 million tweets a day. Yes, it does a reasonable job these days of handling spam reports (and I think a human does see every one one of those), but spam can be weeded with some fairly simple rules and and up-to-date corpus of spammy tweets. Twitter is full of user-created spaces with their own standards and vernaculars, none of which can be parsed at a glance.
I agree with Emma: Twitter must work harder on abuse, but the bar for sanctions will have to be high, and we shouldn't expect miracles.
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Also, I would like to nominate “metadata” as the PAS WOTY. WOT decade, probably, but certainly WOTY.
You'll need to join the queue on that one, buddy.
