Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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Hard News: The Public Address 2012 Word…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I feel like this year so many events have had their own hashtag to define them that I'll nominate
Hashtag
Events having hashtags of their own is not new for 2012. Afterall, #eqnz was a nominee in both 2010 and 2011. What is new for 2012 is "hashtag" becoming a word in its own right. People talk about hashtags without needing to gloss what it means. And check out the IRL spoken use of such lol phrases as "hashtag woteva". And then there's the news that a new parent had (maybe) named their child hashtag. Yeah, the word has become its own thing in 2012. #hashtag
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Hard News: The Public Address 2012 Word…, in reply to Toby,
brainfade
I second this! I love that it's pretty much become a standard description in the media for John Key's inability to diplomatically answer a question he'd rather not answer.
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TV plays for music videos continue to head towards irrelevance.
I recently looked through all the previous annual reports for how the music video funding was handled. When it started, it was a cool new thing and TV plays were gleefully reported. But by the late '90s, the music video funding got one sentence, a brief mention of how music videos support the holy grail of radio play. But things changed in the mid '00s when the power of online videos started to come into its own and music videos were again seen as being a valuable thing in their own right.
Another interesting change - with the launch of the Making Tracks scheme, NZ On Air no longer funds full albums. Now it's only singles that get funded. This and the singles-dominated music landscape makes me wonder - will we see successful artists who chose not to release albums, deliberately only releasing singles?
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Fave thing - the audience at the Screaming Meemees gig, including the alarmed-looking punk chick and the very sweaty man in a suit. These are quality photos. Thanks for sharing them, Murray!
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Back in the olden days, I'd eagerly await the posting of the weekly Hard News transcript to nz.general. But PA is a million times better than that - it looks better, there are no newsgroup nutters, just a splendid community.
The Great Blends are always a good time, and they really need some props because organising quality IRL stuff is hard.
So happy 10th anniversary, Russell and the PA posse! So much love!
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My favourite new thing: all the people who've tweeted about how "embarrassed" they were that Home Brew behaved that way in front of Ben Harper. Lolz!
I wonder if they'd have been similarly outraged to discover what guests of honour Toy Love were like back in the day.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Do not disturb, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I might be finally showing that I'm not really down with the kids, but... why?
1. The kids who are into cassettes today never experienced them as children. They were born in the world of the compact disc.
2. Now that turntables and vinyl are commonplace again, cassettes fill the gap of the rare music technology that most people don't have.
3. With music technology having been dominated for decades by dads obsessing over fidelity and clarity, the kids are subverting that and turning to hissy old tape.
4. Like vinyl and unlike mp3s, tapes are a physical format. But it's even more exciting than a record because it has so many moving parts, cogs and screws. Thrillingly, things that can go wrong.
5. Also, cassettes are cool. -
Here’s a Toy Love performance some of you might have seen: the band playing at Auckland University on the same Orientation tour that I snuck into in Christchurch.
Quality. Mr Knox’s angry growl made me feel all funny, which is what good rock should do.
comes on cassette, because that’s what all the cool kids are pretending to listen to these days.
I need to stop pretending. I have a crate of vinyl that I’ve been acquiring since the ’90s. I’ve never listened to most of it, and I don’t even own a record player any more (or a stereo, for that matter). Now looking at it just makes me feel sad.
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“No good can come of a hacker talking to a TV journalist,” my hacker friend said when I asked him to go on camera for a TV journo. He was goddamn right.
I'm 37 and since I was a child the term "hacker" has popularly described someone with malicious intent. I know there are benevolent hackers, but that's a niche definition that most people don't know about. The general public and media have trouble understanding the concept of a good hacker. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, like a "good rapist". That's why there's trouble.
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Hang on.
My jeans were torn, my hoodie was pretty ragged, and I hadn’t shaved for a week. It turned out that bloggers are remarkably good at disguising themselves as unemployed, without even trying.
Bloody hell. That's a shitty stereotype to perpetuate in the service of an opening gag. Everyone I saw down at the Willis Street office was usually nicely dressed!