Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Chum Daniel was scouring the Argos website for said sporting implement, and stumbled across this piece of festive magnificence. He’s particularly delighted, he says, that civilisation has developed sufficiently over the last few thousand years that we have now reached the point where we’re able to calculate a fee for three years’ product replacement cover for such an object.
Progress indeed. Human ingenuity marches ever onward.
Utterly hilarious Wired article ripping the piss out of blogs – if you don’t find this funny, you obviously don’t have 200+ feeds in NetNewsWire. Seriously, dude, get with it.
via – natch – Kottke.
If you’ve downloaded the new iTunes 7 and – despite the bizarre visual inconsistencies – are rather liking the nifty new bits like the CoverFlow browser view, you might like to take a look at CoverFlow itself. It appears that the iTunes implementation is based on the freeware/donationware I’ve been raving about all year, except that inexplicably the author was still releasing updates as late as last weekend.
You can snag the latest (and presumably last) stand-alone CoverFlow build from MacUpdate. There are significant advantages to this over the built-in version; get it while you can.
My guess, incidentally, is that the iTunes implementation is entirely independent of del Strother’s, and they’ve simply done the decent thing rather than screwing him mightily. He, meanwhile, was racing to finish as much as he could before the concept and name became officially Apple’s, and he had to stop work (in exchange for $$$, or at least a Mac Pro, one hopes). The standalone version is much more dynamic and fluid, with a year’s-worth of clever little touches that makes it feel much more like rifling through a CD collection. It also seems cleverer about texture loading.
Just a theory.
I have two web browsers open (don’t ask…), about fifteen windows, and maybe a hundred tabs. This is ridiculous.
CBBC commissioning rounds have typically had a few hundred submissions. The recent one had – and I’d advise you to be sitting down – 2,500. I actually feel quite sorry for the BBC about this, because wading through that lot is going to be a somewhat onerous task. Heck, finding somewhere to put them all will be tricky.
But let’s think about it for a moment. Coming up with an idea, writing a pitch, talking it through with somebody senior, redrafting it, preparing something even slightly glossy, and submitting it – that all costs money. By my reckoning, £400 is conservative. That’s a cool million spent on pitches.
Currently, there seems to be a round of call-backs/pitch meetings going on, which involve (in my case) another day’s work, being flown to London, and put up in an hotel… and there are three of us going. So far as I can gather there are circa 100 such meetings (again, conservative), at let’s say an average cost of another £400. So that’s another £40k.
There are, one gathers, about 7 commissions up for grabs. Suppose each of those commissions is worth £750,000. The ‘production fee’ for a CBBC show (in a facile sense, the profit margin) is – I believe – 15%.
(15% of £750k) × 7 commissions = £787500.
By this reckoning, whatever the outcome of this commissioning round, the children’s TV industry is going to make a net loss.
Of course, I’ve not taken co-production money into consideration, nor future international sales. This is hardly a thorough analysis. But you see my point, no?
(while I’m at it: at the Edinburgh TV Festival the BBC admitted that they’re also looking at the future of children’s programming on BBC1. Interesting.)
On 31st January I wrote a bit of a rambling post (yes, really) that should have gone:
Didn’t get the job, didn’t get the girl.
Yesterday, I wrote another rambling post that should have gone:
Got the job, got the girl.
That is all.
Back in Glasgow, that is. A goooooood week – more later, doubtless. Maybe much later, we’ll see. Meanwhile: arrrrghhhh! Panic! Arrggghhhh! Too busy! Arrgghhh! I’m in London on Tuesday for a pitch meeting, which is rather exciting, then a week on Monday I start work in Dublin. Yes – I got the job, we’ve agreed terms, and we’re kicking off on the eighteenth. I’m hugely excited about it, actually, though mildly scared that between now and then I need to think of some blisteringly clever stuff to say about the show, and start to work out in what direction I wish to steer it this year. But hey, I’m sure I’ll cope.
Meanwhile – I’ve been offline for a week. 854 emails arrived, NetNewsWire is back over 5000 unread, and I gather that lonelygirl15 is definitely a hoax. Wait, that last one isn’t news, right?
Hugh MacLeod finally confesses to the existence of a secret blogosphere A-list, months after I revealed the first hints of such a thing. I knew it! See, I told you! Hah!
Next week, I’ll reveal the results of my research tracking down the super-secret wiki that’s used to coordinate the Bilderberg Group. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff on there about… excuse me, there’s a knock at the door…
A little while ago, BoingBoing had a series of posts about earwax and ear picks, from which we learned that there are two basic types of the stuff – the squishy yellow stuff with which I’m unpleasantly familiar, and a dryer flakier variant that’s apparently more prevalent in Asia.
But now, via the most excellent Inky Circus, we have a proper lab analysis of the yellow stuff.
Eu eu eu!
What, you’ve not been caught up in this yet? For heaven’s sake! You call yourself a citizen of the net, and you’ve not watched every single one of lonelygirl15‘s videos on YouTube? You’ve not joined the raging is-she-or-isn’t-she (a marketing shill) debate? Not even in the LA Times or New York Times or BusinessWeek? Blimey.
OK, so… the story so far: cute, doe-eyed, apparent-teenager starts posting ‘girl talking to webcam’ videos. So far, so generic. But the videos are very well put-together, ‘Bree’ is an engagingly funny performer, and after a little character-building there’s a bit of a plot that bubbles up. People start to notice that Bree is remarkably well-lit (which, frankly, is a dead give-away. Lighting is hard).
Somewhere along the way, Lonelygirl15 becomes the hottest thing on YouTube, and debate rages. Is it a viral marketing scheme? Is there a whole production team hiding behind the door, trying to get signed to HBO? Did they make all the films in a single batch, or have they faked comments interaction too? And, remarkably, plenty of people still seem to think that the whole thing is absolutely what it purports to be. Yeah, right.
Me? I think I’m watching near-genius production, that Bree is perfectly cast, and I’m fascinated to see how the makers propose to make money out of this – or even cover their costs. More likely, I think, is that they knew a fantastic young actress and decided to try something… and it all got a bit carried-away… and they’re wondering about the money thing as much as the rest of us.
In the meantime, I can’t begin to say how much I think Flash video sucks. Ugh ugh ugh!