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Astraba - Sink The Moon Apart from this being a London band's debut there doesn't seem to be a lot of background to Astraba, which can feel suspicious for ones so fully formed, but they're a band who seem to have much in front of them, routed in layered psychedelia that shifts from Mazzy Star-adjacent wistfulness to spiralling surges, all still ethereal at heart and all that. Augustin Bousfield - …

[1981]One of the great post-154 albums. If you like your post-punk nice and gloomy yet sometimes uplifting, the incredibly dreamy Fiction Tales LP is for you. Along with Alex Johnson's inventive idiosyncratic vocal style & melodies we get serious post-punk drummage, classic goth bass lines and an array stellar dreamlike guitar textures. Chuck in weird atmospheric sound fx, a bit of piano, synth waves and some sax on a coupla …

The Great War is on and all the young men are heading “over there” so when a pediatric surgeon decides that his place is with his young patients, he is scorned for shirking his duty and loses the woman he loves. Home Media Availability: No official release yet. Yankee Doodle do or die Hollywood went […]

Occasionally, you have to accept when you fail. Week notes are such a failure to me. My day job almost makes it impossible for me to collect anything helpful I want to reflect on during the weekend. But I love to write regularly. So, let’s try something new and also stick to the advice of Jeff — please publish and share more. His post also includes two further tips to …

Hi Darling Ones, How are you? I have not been well, hence the extended silence. The triple-whammy of Trump’s victory + my recovery plateau + the dying of the light (erm, time change) has left me. . . sad? grouchy? angry? nihilistic? empty? I can’t finish that sentence and thus I haven’t written in more than a fortnight. Where do I even being to deal with everything? How do you …

• The London Overground rebrand is finally happening (London Centric) • A women’s history guided tour along London’s Suffragette line (The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything) • Renaming the Overground, step by step (Diamond Geezer) • The plan to fix the London Underground’s busiest line: Video (CityMoose) • Worth the wait, or worth waiting a bit longer? (BusAndTrainUser) • Let’s Ride… The GWR Marlow Branch: Video (Geoff Marshall) • No …

Strangers Press is a publishing project based at the University of East Anglia, specialising in sets of strikingly designed chapbooks, with stories in translation. Their latest project is ká-sióng, a collection of five tales from Taiwan. They kindly sent me a set for review, and in this post I’m looking at the first three. ‘Not Your Child’ by Lâu Tsí-ûTranslated by Jenna Wang Parliamentary assistant Yu-Jie is on the train, …

Image from Lucius Hunter | unsplash.com Most researchers are honest and their work is a worthwhile addition to the scholarly record. However, a significant percentage of researchers are engaged in questionable practices or producing work lacking integrity. For example, Bik and colleagues have estimated ~2% of the biomedical literature is affected by image manipulation problems. Adam Day, who runs the Papermill Alarm, has estimated that 2% of the literature has …

I keep a personal collection of beautiful macOS app icons, which might make you ask: “How does he get those icons?” Apps in the App Store For apps in the Mac App Store, I have my ways. I don’t necessarily want to write about them because I’m semi-afraid Apple would frown on my doings and close off my ways. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being nefarious. If you spent …

Two evenings of basketball this week. I had my usual run at the beginning of the week in which I thought I played well and made lots of shots. Then on Friday, I had my first competitive basketball game of the season, playing in Worthing D&D White's 102-87 away win against Eastbourne Neptunes U23. I finished the game with 6 points by making two three-point shots, though I could have …

Well, not this one. But this one is! How? Let’s take a closer look at Bluesky and the AT Protocol that underpins it. Note: I communicated with the Bluesky team prior to the publishing of this post. While the functionality described is not the intended use of the application, it is known behavior and does not constitue a vulnerability disclosure process. My main motivation for reaching out to them was …

November Cruise Although the numbers used in the introductory example are fine, I’m unhappy with it and seek a replacement–ideally with the same or similar numbers. It is assumed that there is a concern both with inferring larger, as well as smaller, discrepancies than warranted. Actions taken if too high a temperature is inferred would be deleterious. But, given the presentation, the more “serious” error would be failing to report …

The first time I heard a critique of mediated experience, the critic was my dad. He was an avid photographer who, during our family’s year in India, when I was a young child, used his 35mm Exacta to capture thousands of photos that became carousels of color slides we viewed for many years thereafter. It was a remarkable documentary effort that solidified our memories of that year. But dad was …

Happy Sunday, everyone! Just in time for what feels like the longest Black Friday sale in history, I am bringing you a special holiday shopping guide edition of the Hiro Report. Below, we’ve got a whole bunch of Hiro-approved gift ideas spread across four price brackets.Please note that many of these links are affiliate links that may get me a little kickback but, as always, I am only recommending products …

This made me chuckle This made me frown Still enough of a believer to consider it defilement to have a version of "Sex Pistols" tread the boards without Johnny Rotten.... Other bands that go the prosthetic singer route, I'm not so bothered.Well, there's one and half others on the same Glasgow punkstalgia lineup that are doing that - The Stranglers, sans Hugh Cornwell, with a younger-than-the-others singer (younger-than-the-others - what …