My review of Harmonicraft, the new album from Miami sludge-pop quartet Torche, is up now on Thumped — as is my recent take on Night of the Living by Limerick’s We Come In Pieces.

Can’t think of a better way to mark the renewal of my Flickr Pro account by posting this pic from the few I snapped at the Ruins Alone gig at the Twisted Pepper last September. If you ever get the chance to see Tatsuya Yoshida do his thing, do yourself a favour and don’t miss it.

Just like the ungainly bird they’re named after, Pelican might not look like much, but they’ll bite the arse off you. My review of their new EP Ataraxia/Taraxis is up now on Thumped.

My review of the new EP from Galway hardcore band Only Fumes & Corpses is up now on Thumped. (In short? I liked it a lot.)

The highlights: Hitting the four stone mark in my weight loss efforts (I’ve dropped more than 57 lbs so far) / Getting stuck into Netflix for lots of TV shows (and the odd movie) I missed before / Trying to cook a proper meal for Bee once a week (I’m a bit behind on this, if I’m honest) / Getting my writing chops back / Meeting the hardcore legend Mick Foley, if only for a few seconds (he appreciated my Cornette Face shirt):

The most common question I get from designers after pointing out what is wrong with their work is, “Can I save this?”

You are not Jesus and comps aren’t for saving. If something isn’t working, start over. Otherwise the goal you’re working towards is saving your work, not solving the problem.

Also, comps do not have feelings. You are not abandoning them. (You have no idea how much therapy that sentence took. Seriously.)

This urge comes from not wanting to feel like the time they’ve spent on that comp is wasted. The only possible way you can waste time is by being dishonest with yourself about its value. If you just spent an hour on a comp thinking it was working, then that was time spent honestly trying to solve a problem. The minute you realise the comp isn’t working and you start trying to “save it”, you’re no longer working towards good design. You’re working towards ego salvage. You gonna bill for that? That’s what I mean by dishonest time.

Substitute ‘drafts’ for ‘comps’ and X for ‘design’ and you’ve got a spot-on pep-talk for people in any creative discipline (especially writers).

I’ve got a review up on Thumped of the new Dead Neanderthals album. Thanks to Pete for accepting my pitch! Here’s to more writing in 2012.

Leaving aside the notion of holding a public consultation after the proposals in question were already made law through the back door, we see that Minister Sherlock has made a gesture of sorts to his critics, calling on “those people who were exercised by the statutory instrument” to “engage in the very nature of copyright [and] engage on the issues within the consultation paper”.

In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA furore, up bubbles ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement which, as Forbes reports, contains provisions “just as pernicious as anything we saw in SOPA” and has already been signed or ratified by most of the developed world.

What are the consequences? Well, aside from enforcing food and drug patents that are crippling to the developing world, which is bad enough, the agreement also “bypasses the sovereign laws of participating nations, forcing ISPs across the globe to adopt [its] draconian measures.” Oy vey.

If you thought SOPA would break the internet, ACTA is much worse. And it could become law across the global economy without so much as a murmur of opposition.

That’s just super.

Meanwhile, and closer to home, people are kicking up a fuss about a sneaky little piece of legislation that’s been dubbed ‘Ireland’s SOPA’.

TJ McIntyre’s IT Law in Ireland blog has a concise overview of the Government’s plans to legislate for Irish courts to block access to websites accused of copyright infringement (and possibly other things) at their own discretion.

Yesterday, this site went dark as part of a worldwide protest at the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act which, if passed by the United States Congress, would give the US government and the entertainment industry extraordinary powers to control what is supposed to be a neutral space, effectively censoring the internet for everyone in the world. That’s right: everyone in the world.

To put it simply, this is bad legislation being pushed hard by corporate interests for their own benefit alone, and written so broadly that it sets us all down a path we don’t want to be travelling by.