First of all, I have to apologise again for the overly extended break. I just started studying again and forgot how much work it actually is when you have other things you have to do.
So I don’t actually have an album to look at this week. Instead, I’m going to talk about an unfortunate trend in music. If I was a betting man that read that sentence without knowing what was coming next I would wager money that there was going to be an article on teen pop stars. Nope.
Surprisingly for a young, bohemian university student [like Justin Long in those mildly patronising Apple ads], I don’t have a smartphone. This makes me feel a bit out of the loop when I hear about, say, the pending release of the incorrectly-capitalised iPhone 5 or the new operating system for the Android or how annoying it is when that damn touchscreen cracks. So instead, I’m going to talk about my personal experience with phones, and you can all bloody well stop pissing about on Angry Birds and listen. …
Hello everyone.
So I’ve stopped doing “The Week”s and am trying “The Month”s instead.
The article to read from January is definitely this one from Mitch; the only near death experience story on the site!
Andy recently wrote more about the type of people in the music industry, also worth a read.
And as I didn’t do any “The Week”s over Christmas and New Year, I thought I’d point out the “Jerk of the Month” for December.
I haven’t yet tried this and I’m not sure I will, but I’ve heard it on good authority that one of the best ways to be cut off from someone forever is to tell them that their newborn baby looks ugly and will probably amount to nothing.
It’s not often that anyone will give you this piece of advice, so I thought I should be the one to make it clear to you. And this piece of advice, while it may seem irrelevant at the moment, could save your life one day. It also gives me a nice way to move smoothly into this weeks post. A few weeks ago I wrote about my history with music and how it changed the way I think about a number of things. This week I’d like to tell you that this isn’t an uncommon thing for those poor fools who find themselves caught in the trap of music. …
I’ve just returned from spending a week hiking around the Snowy Mountains with family and friends, then embarking after a one day turnaround on a road-trip down and up the NSW and Victorian South Coast with the boys. That’s all very interesting, but the really good story here is about why I’m now lying in bed dosed up on Nurofen, keeping hydrated and making sure my legs are elevated, all whilst Googling news stories about myself. …
Before I begin, I apologise that I’ve missed the last couple of weeks. It’s been somewhat of a hectic last few weeks for me and I haven’t been able to keep my finger on much that I’ve needed to, let alone be able to write a 2000 word analysis of it. That’s over now though and we should be back to a standard publishing routine from roughly here to whenever.
But anyway, a few weeks ago I was introduced to a website that has actually changed my life. I don’t mean this in the usual sense, which is the I-now-have-something-that-I-look-at-when-I’m-bored sense. I mean it in the I-haven’t-been-to-the-site-in-a-week-and-a-half-and-I’m-suffering-withdrawal sense. …
I’m sure plenty of us have had that experience. You hand in that assignment that you really poured your heart and soul into; hours and hours spent using Google Scholar to guess the contents of journal articles without reading them, using Word’s “synonyms” function to fill your paragraphs with language you’ve never heard of [and hasn't been used regularly since the 17th Century], and fudging the bibliography to make it look like you haven’t based your entire thesis on a single Wikipedia entry. This 2000-word document represents a lot of caffeine-tinged, midnight-shed blood, sweat and tears for you, and even though you’re still not entirely sure what the Chicago method of citation really is, you know you’ve done a good job. The slither of the plastic sleeve and its precious contents into the drop-box is the sound of the cathartic lifting of a huge weight from your mind. …
Um, wow. OK, so I expected some response to that gay marriage post, but I didn’t anticipate quite THAT much… As Jonno mentioned in ‘The Week’, a lot of people read it, and a lot of those people expressed very valid and cogent responses. I feel that a lot of these questions deserve answers, and that’s what this post is about; I’m going to go through a selection of the comments I received on facebook and the blog, pull out the main points from them, and try to clarify my position with regards to them. Now, that said, none of us want to turn ‘About All Of It’ into a massive hotbed of socio-religious arguments [and, subsequently, an online compendium of different ways to call someone a bigot], so this will be the last word I’ll be having on this debate, at least in this particular forum. …
I’m back.
I see that while I’ve been gone the acting editor, Mitch, has not only managed to only publish one article, but managed to triple our “most visitors in a day” record with said article. Also he made most of them angry… Seriously there’s a Facebook comment thread on Mitch’s profile with a lot of backlash.
Mitch is preparing a further article to address the comments, questions and criticisms. Either that article or one by me explaining why I wont post it will appear at the end of the coming week.