My latest reviews for Thumped include my takes on Verdonkermaan by Dutch avant black metal outfit Nihill (one of the last from Hydra Head), Horseback’s Half Blood (out on Relapse), Chaos Reigns by Danish crusties Nuclear Death Terror, The Divil Wears Prada EP from local boys The Bridges of Madison County, and Poison Idea’s The Fatal Erection Years on Southern Lord.
Also up is my first piece for the music/culture zine Burning Ambulance: a review of Endless Procession of Souls, the new record from Swedish death metal OGs Grave.
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You know we're going to revisit voices like his some day and think 'Why didn't we listen?' even though we know exactly why, for the same reasons why people have never listened, ever, in all recorded history and millennia before. #link
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Filing this for future reference. #link
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A blog concentrating on two-player board games, something me and Bee have really been getting into recently (especially since I'm crap at video games). #link
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I want to do something like this for our hallway; cheaper and more unique than buying a long rug, methinks. #link
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GIFs and stills from The Simpsons paired with the movie scenes they reference. There are far more than I ever realised [c/o ]. #link
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Art's biggest charlatan gets torn apart by The Guardian's Jonathan Jones. Bravo! #link
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Very reasonable prices, too. #link
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Here's a great-looking series of compilations of underground sounds from Los Angeles back in the day. Lots of nuggets from the weirder end of the SST spectrum, too, which I can dig [c/o Boing Boing]. #link
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I usually rear up when I read about things like this as they always strike me as faux-elite, cliquey hipster guff pretending to be far more important and influential than it really is. So it's easy to be cynical. But Baio raises some highlights some worthy stuff and raises some excellent questions, even if he does slip a little into the mobile-is-changing-everything fearmongering. #link
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If you think this is bad, it's nothing compared to the copy many journalists submit. #link
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It's not the sitcom du jour anymore (that's probably Community) but I love the hell out of 30 Rock and it's interesting to get some of the backstory here. #link
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Some of these are too frightening for me to comtemplate. #link
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Love these slice-of-life candids. They're very kinetic, too; more animated than feature films of the period [c/o Kottke]. #link
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Yotam Ottolenghi’s shredded lamb shoulder with watercress and ginger recipe
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s onion recipes
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Might well do one of these someday. #link
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Tom's notes on Chip Kidd's debut, which I loved when I read it on a whim years ago. #link
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Love this thread on linguistic ananchronisms that turn out to be anything but. AskMeFi earns another 'best of the web' star from me. #link
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"Calling "hero" everyone killed in war, no matter the circumstances of their death, not only helps sustain the ethos of martial glory that keeps young men and women signing up to kill and die for the state, no matter the justice of the cause, but also saps the word of meaning, dishonouring the men and women of exceptional courage and valour actually worthy of the title." Damn straight. #link
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You know when people involved in an accident or other such stressful incident say that time seems to slow down? Maybe that's what's fooling footballers into thinking they have agency in what's probably more an instinctual response. #link
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Subbing is hard work. Wish I was doing more of it, though. #link
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Jennifer Egan's latest was serialised on Twitter, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Prose that doesn't invite replies doesn't really engage with the medium in any way that hasn't been aleady overdone. #link
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Seeing as how it was Blog Day the other day, I thought it’d be a good idea to tidy up this post I’ve had in the works for a number of weeks: a behind-the-scenes ‘productivity special’, if you will.
One big change in my work methods since March is the switch I made from using the ‘One Big Text File’ method to Notational Velocity for my electronic notebooking needs.
Notational Velocity, or NV, is weirdly enough harder to explain than it is to use. Basically it’s an open source app for plain text notes (about anything you want: blog posts, recipes, to-do lists, etc) and a way of organising those notes so everything you need is at your fingertips. You give your note a title in the top bar, you type what you want to type in the main window, and it’s saved in a designated folder. Every note constitutes its own text file in that folder, but you never need to see the folder: everything is consolidated within the app.
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