Links

Long live Rocktronica. New Uncharted Audio mix featuring Kings Have Long Arms, Mu Chan Clan, Fat Truckers, Phoenicia, Cylob, Kid 606, bit_meddler and Kitbuilders.

Something to keep your bandwidth occupied when the slsk server goes down: a startlingly large collection of Douglas Adams mp3s including the complete Hitchhikers and Dirk Gently, Starship Titanic and Last Chance to See.

Mmm, potentially sunny bank holiday weekend approaching; if there had been time to plan it would have been tempting to do something along the lines of Arab Strap’s The First Big Weekend.

From The History of Nipper and His Master’s Voice:

In Liverpool Nipper discovered the Phonograph, a cylinder recording and playing machine and Francis Barraud “often noticed how puzzled he was to make out where the voice came from”. This scene must have been indelibly printed in Barraud’s brain, for it was three years after Nipper died that he committed it to canvas.

Wise robot Jorn Barger’s Philip Pullman resources on the Web.

A new Haruki Murakami fansite, Murakami.ch. The short story and bibliography sections are already pretty impressive.

Mp3it features live and rare mp3s from artists such as Gastr Del Sol, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Lesser (including the Christina Ricci Tribute), Optiganally Yours, The Black Heart Procession, The Sea and Cake and Tortoise, all of which have been posted with the artist’s permission. I mentioned it in former weblogging life, but it’s definitely due a revisit.

The LCD Rock and Roll Guide To London:

King’s X, pronounced “King’s Cross”: I have no idea whether the American Christian band takes its name from this neighborhood, but it’d be poetic justice if it did, as it’s one of the seediest, most drug- and hooker-ridden sections of London.

Zippo tricks are perfect for those that need another reason to ditch ill-considered New Year’s resolutions.

Amiga demos and intros, “captured from an Amiga and uploaded to the web as DivX encoded videos”.

Otisfodder’s 365 Days Project:

For the entire year of 2003 (January 1st to December 31st) this site will feature one mp3 file (every day) to download. The content will be focused on musical pieces, but will also include spoken word. Listeners of the incredibly strange and outsider realm take note, for this is the majority of material that will be made available.

E.C. Brown presents a rather impressive categorised list of links to free mp3s. The categories include your standard electronic, indie-rock/pop as well as more diverse styles such as eccentrics, Russian, Iranian, Sufi, Swedish Folk and (scarily) bagpipes.

The Word Spy is devoted to “recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are being used in new ways”.

The Art of James Bond.

One more before heading off again: Douglas Adams’ The Meaning of Liff online. Back with a new, giuegaue-laden anglepoised early next year. Ah, the joy of laptops.

The WIRE drinking game:

“Are you fed up with the relentless self serving publicity of pop personalities and their innuendo laced tunes? Dane Bowers and J.Lo, we’re looking in your direction. Would you rather listen to two hours of scraping noises punctuated by the occasional whooshing sound, made by a bald guy in a dank basement in Vienna/Cologne/Chicago? If the answer is yes to any of these, chances are you read the WIRE.”

Extensive Samurai Archives.

Ooh, a huge archive of hip hop mp3s, including The Pharcyde and Public Enemy!

Abbie Hoffman’s counterculture text is appropriately available online.

Sato Kenji’s More Animated than Life discusses “the significance of animation to the Japanese and why it is not what Westerners expect”.

Glitch Art: The aesthetics of digital corruption (and my dodgy crash from way back).

A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang.

Beestung features a huge archive of Throwing Muses, Belly, Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh mp3s (including live sets, B-sides and rarities).

Exifer for Windows is a handy application for managing the metadata (EXIF/IPTC) of images taken from digital cameras.

“Because many image processing software destroys this metadata when saving such files, the idea was to create a backup of the metadata before editing it in any software, and then, after that to restore it back into the processed file. With Exifer you can do this very easily.”

Incredibly extensive Encyclopedia of Everything Japanese node on Everything2, including sections on history, people, culture, samurai/martial arts, religion, literature, art, food, anime/manga, language, and geography. Yum.

Paul Love are “2 guys from D.C. expanding the horizons of HipHop”. Well hey, that’s news to me.

Foyles have started maintaining a list of their forthcoming literary events. Authors appearing this autumn include Chuck Palahniuk, Jeremy Paxman, Will Self, Donna Tartt, Michael Palin and Iain Banks.

How to keep your immune system sorted.

The Times on the commercial hijacking of Prague.

“Yet precisely because Prague has such a miraculously preserved centre – a time-capsule, unravaged by war, oppression or the high-rise architects who have trampled over the sensibilities of every other world capital – one feels all the more acutely the tensions created by the abrupt westernisation of the past 13 years.”

The survey into life and labour in London (1886-1903).

The Guardian’s Biff cartoons online – finally! You should see the portrait in my attic, lady.

Taoism or Daoism?

“The difference in spelling and pronunciation exists because “Taoism”/”Daoism” are formed from a Chinese word which can be transliterated either as “Tao”, using the older Wade-Giles transliteration system, or “Dao”, using the newer and more preferred pinyin scheme for the romanization of Chinese.”

Pitchfork on How to Survive Without Audiogalaxy.

Plaid DJ mixes available for download, including the unreleased Futura Connect (Mouse on Mars, Autechre, Pierre Bastien, Squarepusher), the Tork Radio mix (Satie, Debussy, Boards of Canada) and the Midsummer Mix (featuring Roland Alphonso’s bizarre dub version of the James Bond theme).

Spotted random art cows around London? CowParade has the answers.

Nobody mentioned that High Jinks had a website. Handy for t-shirts.

Faith Erin Hicks’ comic, Demonology 101.

The (excellent) PowerPuff Girls Portrait Studio.

UK Rail Journey Planner for Palm and PC (i.e. timetables and suchlike). Not free, alas.

The Japanese Speaking Machine.

More MIDI files than you could ever need (or want).

Marcia’s crazy tunes for crazy webloggers.

Wired on the Lowercase sound.

“Created largely by scientists, techies and experimental musicians, lowercase recordings are frequently based on the magnification of minute sounds through a computer, typically a Macintosh.”

Excellent collection of old album covers.

Urban Dictionary, a slang dictionary with a cheeky appropriation of the Dictionary.com design.

Glossary of Oxford terms.

Spoonerism: The accidental or deliberate transposition of the initial letters etc. of two or more words in a phrase. E.g., “You have tasted a whole worm. You have hissed my mystery lectures. You were caught fighting a liar in the quad. You will leave by the next town drain.” Named after Revd. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) who was Warden of New College, although many ‘original’ spoonerisms are now known to be apocryphal.

Skin Deep tattoo exhibition, free at the National Maritime Museum (until 30 September 2002).

Late bar info via SMS. May prevent further ill-considered Tatty Bogle outings.