Russell Davies

Skins! bongo party with Les Baxter

A simple game

Have just watched this for the second time in three nights. It really is very good. A fine example of a documentary form I love, not a roller-coaster journey into an unexplored world, or startling new angles on familiar territory, just some people telling stories that they've obviously told very many times before - so that they've got very, very good at telling them.

It also strikes me that they're unusually articulate for a bunch of footballers. I wonder if Clough recruited them in his own image.

My Kids Are Me, But We Should Get Too Cool / Cry in the Redemption

 

I'm enjoying watching the machines slowly learning how to write. Click-o-tron is a pleasing development - it uses Recurrent Neural Networks to generate clickbaity headlines and they're entirely, grammatically plausible.

Equally intriguing is the phenomenon Max Barry describes on his blog - robots writing novels and putting them on Amazon under the guise of famous authors, hoping to confuse inattentive shoppers. The fake titles would have tempted me: "The Ascension’s Mirror" and "Cry in the Redemption".

Dillawoon

♫ #lastfm artists: J Dilla (72), Grimes (47), Jamie Woon (42), Space Dimension Controller (42) & Masayo.. via @tweeklyfm #music

— russell davies (@undermanager) November 15, 2015

Tell the truth I'm not sure about the J Dilla. The sounds are fantastic but I think it may have crossed some noodly threshold for me. Nice noises, no direction. The Jamie Woon is rather lovely. Incredibly smooth. Restrained. But with just enough modern texture to not bland-out. Like a post-Dilla Sade.

313-319

How big, really?

George and her growing cadre of collaborators and advisors have built a splendid "spelunker" for The Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum.

The How Big Is It? bit is especially nice. 

Advice to everyone

Martin Belan's 

5 things I think journalism students need to know about technology

is brilliant.

Advice to students

 

Charles Eames, 1949

From Scratch perform Rhythm Works

Doing presentations

Henry asked a question the other day and it made me realise I should gather all these posts into one place. This is that place:

1. Doing the hard work to make it big.

2. Doing the hard work to make it clear

3. Doing the hard work to make it bearable

4. One more thing