A couple of friends made these Pacman coasters out of Hama / iron-on beads and gave them to me as a flatwarming gift.
I got them a few months ago, but haven’t got round to photographing and blogging them until now. They are pretty cool! I use them at my computer desk.
You can find out how to make them yourself too.
The observant among you may have spotted that it is a month since I wrote a post for this blog. It is interesting that I have not even found the motivation to write about the General Election. This is not a conscious decision — I genuinely have not been moved enough to put finger to keyboard.
This is due to a combination of factors. Partly, I became disillusioned with politics a couple of years ago and have not felt the need to write about it for a long time now. But it goes beyond politics writing.
Just now I don’t have as much spare time as I would like. Depending on whether I can borrow my dad’s car or I have to take the bus, I am currently spending between two hours and three-and-a-half hours a day commuting.
The spare time I have left is spent on other activities. Partly, that is finding somewhere closer to my work to move, so that I can build some more spare time into my life. Finding somewhere to live in north east Fife is not as easy as I would like, but I think I am getting closer.
I also lost a lot of my motivation for blogging, and have turned my attention to more relaxing pursuits. After around a ten-year hiatus, I have rediscovered gaming after my truly awesome brother got me an Xbox 360 for Christmas! I may blog more about that in future, but for anyone interested my gamertag is ‘doctorvee‘!
Anyway, the point is that blogging seems like so much hard work in comparison to unwinding pretending you’re Travis Pastrana. Those who follow me on Twitter may know that recently I had a minor bout of blog depression, when I wondered what on earth I should to about that blog I don’t bother to maintain any more. It had become less fun and too hard-going.
The problem was that I had begun to feel like everything I was writing was inflicting readers with something they didn’t necessarily want to read. This was exacerbated when I merged vee8 (my old Formula 1 blog) with doctorvee. I originally separated out the content because I realised that my F1 posts had such a different audience to the rest of my posts.
This was echoed in the responses on Twitter. Some people said that I should continue, although they personally skipped over the F1 posts. Others said that I should continue, although they only ever read the F1 posts.
I found it easy to get wound up about that sort of thing, but at the end of the day no one minds and certainly no-one dies. Part of the reason for merging the blogs again was to help me become more at-ease with that. But I got neurotic about overwhelming the blog with F1 commentary.
The problem was that I had turned this blog into something where I felt as though everything I published had to be a beautifully-written, 1,000+ word long potential Pulitzer prize winner. Quality control is good, but I had gone too far the other way.
My best blogging years were between 2004 and 2006, when I was more prolific, more spontaneous, and more hit-and-miss. The quality was lower, but the readership was higher, and I had much more fun that way.
So this is just a heads-up to say that I will be making an effort to nudge this blog back in that direction again. I have made a few subtle design changes to make me feel more comfortable about that (the main one being to reduce the font size of the post titles to make them less preposterous if I am writing about something frivolous or personal). There may be a few more to come as well — I will probably experiment.
The upshot of it is that there will probably be a change in tone around here. There will probably be more posts, and I will try to become a bit less squeamish about writing about myself again.
But as you can see from this post, I still can’t resist allowing the word count to go sky high!
Thanks to everyone on Twitter and Facebook who offered their support and advice about where I should take this blog.
The other day I learnt from my brother that the graphic design company The Designers Republic went out of business earlier this month.
My interest in graphic design is not particularly heavy. But the interest I do have in it has all stemmed from my exposure to the work of The Designers Republic. Their work was usually bold and eye-catching; unconventional and experimental. It is exactly the sort of thing I appreciate in all forms of art. They were sometimes uncompromisingly experimental, yet they made it make sense. Their designs were often beautiful and pleasing.
My first exposure to the work of The Designers Republic was probably the elements of Pulp’s visual identity, which tDR produced when the band was at the height of its powers. Like Pulp, The Designers Republic was proud of its Sheffield roots and would often reference the area in its work.
Later, I would come across The Designers Republic again when it created the visual atmosphere for the wipEout series of futuristic racing games. wip3out in particular was exquisitely presented. Even though “futuristic” design typically dates horrendously, ten years on I think wip3out stands the test of time fairly well. To this day it remains my favourite video game ever.
This video below contains the intro sequence to wip3out, introducing the player to the industrial urban world of 2116 and the (anti-gravity) F7200 Race League. There are also striking corporate identities for each of the fictitious teams. There follows a spot of gameplay — a short eliminator round at the Mega Mall circuit — which shows just how important The Designers Republic’s influence was to the game.
An archived version of the wip3out website, also designed by tDR, is still available to browse.
The earlier wipEout games do not stand the test of time quite so well. Perhaps because it used very similar designs throughout the early-to-mid 1990s, most notably for the band Pop Will Eat Itself
My exposure to tDR’s work increased when became interested in electronic music, particularly the output of Warp Records. Warp’s striking visual identity was one of the things that attracted me to the label, and it was a perfect fit for the experimental, forward-looking techno music that Warp used to specialise in.
Like tDR, Warp has its roots in Sheffield, so the original relationship was one of expediency. But the fit was so good that in a lot of ways Warp and tDR are inseparably intertwined in the eyes of some. But in later years, tDR designed very few record sleeves for Warp at all.
But it was difficult to escape the fact that tDR was producing less and less for one of its most iconic clients. In fact, I had knowingly seen hardly any tDR work at all over the past few years, and a lot of people came to see tDR as lazy. Sometimes their work was a bit too minimalist, to a cheeky extent (see, for instance, the track-by-track artwork for Quaristice).
But a number of their designs were very striking, and I own a lot of t-shirts that were designed by tDR. Since being exposed to their work I have made a conscious effort to make anything I design (like this blog) look good. For a brief period of my life, I even seriously considered going into graphic design as a career (before concluding that I probably wouldn’t be any good at it).
Even though The Designers Republic closed down this month, its influence will always be felt. tDR spawned a million copycats, and the course of artwork related to electronic music in particular has been changed forever by tDR.
Anyway, many of tDR’s best designers over the years have moved on (see, for instance, Universal Everything or Build). And tDR’s founder, Ian Anderson, has pledged that it will return in some form or another. The Designers Republic is dead, long live The Designers Republic indeed.
Over the years, tDR has produced some of my favourite album artwork. I’ve gathered some of them below the fold.
I have only been an adult for three weeks, but I think I am well on the way towards becoming a grumpy old man. Something happened this Easter that annoyed me quite a lot. Some parents actually gave their children gifts at Easter time.
Fuck off! As far as I am concerned, Easter is for chocolate eggs and nothing else. In my day, all I got was chocolate eggs. I remember getting quite a lot of eggs, mind. And maybe I got some money as well. I can’t really remember. But that was all I got. Nowadays kids seem to get bloody toys and everything.
I even saw one website suggesting that some parents who “wanted to give their children something more special than Easter eggs” would be buying PlayStation 3s for their children’s Easter. For fuck’s sake! These kids will grow up thinking scarce commodities fall into their hands directly from God’s anus (or the Easter Bunny, whatever) at the click of a finger.
Soon enough we will have bossy kids going around wailing their heads off whenever they don’t get what they want. And the weakling parents will cave in and get them what they want anyway. Brilliant. A generation of Little Miss and Mr Bossy Boots will be running the fucking country in thirty for forty years time. As if our leaders weren’t already bossy enough.
People in this country point at places like China and say, “Ooh, look at all those Little Emperors.” Well I think some parents need to take a bloody look at the Little Emperors they are bringing up themselves.
It seems as though some weakling parents are a bit too desperate to be the best parents in the world. And of course, it only takes one of these parents to get an idea in their head. Of course, they will have some hints whispered into their ear from toy-making firms. A sign is hanging in the shop window, “The perfect gift for Easter!” splashed across a picture of a PS3.
I can see the evil parents’ thoughts now. “My little angel is the best little angel in the world. To show her how special she is, I will buy her a PS3! And then she will love me and look after me well in my old age!”
After the Easter break in the school playground, the kids are discussing their Easter eggs. Then Little Miss Bossy Boots pipes up. “Chocolate? Pah! I got a PlayStation 3 for Easter!”
The other kids then become jealous, then go home and tell their parents how the normal thing to do is buy an exorbitantly expensive games console for Easter. Parents are then guilted into buying ever more impressive presents as the years go by. The entire trend spreads around the country and that is us stuck in consumerism hell forever.
In 2006 Tarquin got a PSP.
In 2007 Henry got a PS3.
In 2009 Bobby from the council estate will get a fucking bloody HDTV from guilty parents who can’t afford it.
If I ever have kids — which I won’t — I will give them mud for Easter. That will teach them that luxury goods are earned and not given to the kid that throws the biggest tantrum or guilt trip.
Well a happy new year to you, now that we are actually in it. I notice that a few bloggers (like Will) have been posting their top five posts. I can assure you that the five most-viewed posts of the year will not have been my five best posts of the year. They will just be the ones that have attracted Googlers the most.
But no surprises as to what was number 1:
A few posts from 2005 were actually more popular than some of these, but they don’t count right because we’re talking about 2006.
The ‘popularity contest’ plugin, which also takes into account things like comments and whatever else, comes up with a slightly different result:
So there you have it. My five (or seven) best posts of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it. Although I can deduce that April was a stupidly popular year. Hmm. I will try and get some kind of Reddit- / Digg-style voting plugin for this blog. That would probably be much better.
Okay, how else can I look at last year? What music I’ve listened to. I know I still haven’t posted my top ten albums of 2006 yet. I promise that is coming. But Last.fm offers a handy way to track what you listen to, and a glance at the rolling year chart on this day allows me to have a look at what I listened to over the past year. This will change tomorrow, so it’s worth taking a note of, if you’re interested in that kind of useless information.
Perhaps the most surprising thing (apart from how high Broadcast are) is how low Autechre are. For the most part though, this isn’t too different to my all-time top ten on Last.fm.
As for the tracks chart, apart from two tracks that appeared on two different releases (thus probably getting twice as many listens as they otherwise would have), all of my top ten is made up of tracks from Florida by Diplo and Everything Ecstatic by Four Tet. I got both of those albums for last Christmas. So that is probably proof that I don’t spend nearly as much time on the computer as I used to. The chart will probably look completely different at the end of the month.
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I am Duncan Stephen, based in Dundee but originally from Fife. I work as the Web Editor for the University of St Andrews. This is a personal blog.
My interests include motorsport and experimental / electronic music.
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