Product Placement On Vintage Book Covers
Long before the advertising behemoth sunk its behemothy teeth into the pure and unspoilt film industry it had successfully raped the once-innocent book realm. If you’re of a certain age and liked a certain kind of novel then you probably won’t have been able to have avoided some of the more gratuitous examples of the world of merchandising’s grotesque product placements. The Rasp It may look subtle but Fyffes paid for the addition of over forty bananas onto the dustjackets of hardcover books over the course of a two-year period and received a sales bump of nearly 19% as a result. The Edge Of Doom Switzerland’s neutrality in post-war America was a point of contention for those who’d grudgingly turned up to fight in it four years late themselves but a blitzkrieg advertising attack of cuckoo clocks, dull-looking heroes, and chocolate bars that hurt the roof of the mouth when eaten carelessly on the fronts of popular books helped raise the status of the little country to shrug level in double-quick time. The Passion Hunters It’s easy to think that Jenga just appeared from out of nowhere in the 1990s but the push for dominance in the world of games a bit like KerPlunk can be traced back to the vintage books on which its form first graced the covers. Swamp Hoyden If you thought the popular-with-rednecks sport of Nascar just magically hit upon the formula of "tiny little sponsorship logos all over things make money!" then think again: the lusting-after-hillbillies genre of vintage books was pushing the boundaries of just how many adverts were too many adverts decades earlier. Satan Was A Lesbian When market research tells you that sales of musical instruments are low among the important lesbian and Satan-worshipping demographics there’s only one thing you can do to turn that frown upside down. The Lust Pigs In a rare case the attempt to persuade the delinquents of society to take up curling through subliminal product placement on book covers failed spectacularly. Happily for the global curling cartel a switch in the seventies from alley-based play to ice and the removal of the ten-second rat rule paved the way for its inclusion in the Winter Olympics and its acceptance today as one of the things worth watching in the...
MP3 Song Cover Art Thing
MP3 Song Cover Art Thing (MP3 SCAT… no, that’s horrible… I’ll call it MP3 Friend instead)… MP3 Friend version 0.1 (the 0.1 means I haven’t spent much time working on it) is a little Windows application I knocked up over the weekend in order to turn these: into these: Firstly, if you don’t know what they are then let me explain that the first image is the image you see in Windows Media Player when the song you’re playing doesn’t have any embedded cover art whereas the second is an example of some album cover art for an MP3. Secondly, my application does not add the cover art for Bert Kaempfert’s A Swingin’ Safari to every song without art because that way lies madness. Here was my issue: I had a lot of MP3s and a great many of them didn’t have any cover art. It was unpleasing to my eyes. So… I had a look online for a utility that would get the cover art automatically for MP3s. I was quickly disappointed. And that’s why I whipped up my own. The application makes use of the excellent UltraID3Lib.dll to scan and update the MP3s and uses the rather lovely Last.fm API in order to try to work out what cover art to grab. Here’s what my little MP3 Friend does… adds cover art to your MP3s based on the files’ artist and album or track title tags allows you to delete cover art from one or more MP3s at a time allows you to edit the artist, track, or album text for one or more MP3s at a time works on Windows 7 and Vista (because I checked) and it probably works on XP with .Net 3.5 installed too (but who knows?) And here’s what my little MP3 Friend does not do… guarantee any accuracy of results returned (the first, best match is applied, and it’s pretty good most of the time but it’s not always right because it’s nearly wholly reliant on Last.fm supplying correctly-weighted search results) work 100% of the time (expect the odd exception raised with badly formed MP3 tags; I might address them in version 0.2 if you’re lucky) or utilise worker threads to slickify (it’s a word) things look attractive (damnit Jim I’m a developer not an artist) work very fast (there’s a reason for this: I deliberately throttle the requests to Last.fm so as not to abuse their service) Here’s how to use MP3 Friend: 1. Install it from here – setup.exe – and ignore any warnings about it being unsigned (I didn’t sign it) or it being perhaps untrustworthy (I have...
Catnip
We finally found a catnip toy that isn’t simply ignored by my cat. Music: Alchemists Tower by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) – Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution...
Top 10 Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books (*)
(*) That I’ve read and own. It’s an old internet law that lists of favourite things are a requirement of all websites annually. Well, this year I’m getting mine in early. I used to read a lot of fantasy but the genre holds less interest now that I’m older; science fiction has far more depth to it. Nevertheless, fantasy is represented here as there is a particularly cracking novel by C. J. Cherryh that I couldn’t omit. To prevent the rest of the list from weighing too heavily in one author or another’s favour I decided to limit my choices to only one book from any given author. Enough waffle… to the list! 10. The Forge Of God by Greg Bear The Earth’s about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route… no, wait, that’s something else entirely. But the Earth is about to be demolished and for the vast majority of the people on it that means a quite awe-inspiring description of death. 9. Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks How do you like your dark novels? Dark? Well, has Iain M. Banks got a treat for you! Not only is there the word ‘dark’ in the title, but the story is a masterpiece of dark and depressing science fiction at its finest. 8. Engines Of God by Jack McDevitt McDevitt’s books are, essentially, archaeological sci-fi. Yes, you’re right; that’s a pretty specific genre that might not appeal to those who like their science fiction devoid of exploration and digging. Me? I like it. Engines Of God is in this list, though, not because of its archaeology and interplanetary historical detective work but because it contains a sequence of chapters that I can only describe as unputdownablehighoctanepageturners. One word: tsunami. Ooh! Lovely bit of writing. 7. The Chronicles Of Morgaine by C.J. Cherryh The only fantasy representative on this list is actually three books in one! You’re being spoiled! And there’s more than a hint of sci-fi to satisfy the science fiction fan too. Gates to worlds separated by space and time, a sword called Changeling which has terrifying powers, and the best description of climate change gone awry you’ll ever find. 6. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester Essentially a tale of revenge… and teleportation! What more could you possibly want to know? 5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Another internet law you may already be aware of is that all science fiction lists must contain Brave New World or 1984 or both whether you like them or not. I do like them both but of the two Brave New...
Disappointing 2010 Movie Sequels
Now, I’m not the sort of person who will openly say that Hollywood is a lazy, lying entity that has run out of ideas and is content to rehash old films and brazenly exploit existing movie franchises in order to make vast amounts of money for little effort and huge profits in this era of rampant piracy that is destroying the flourishing industry that is flourishing so flourishingly in this aforementioned piratical period but I am the sort of person who will mention it in opening and rambling paragraphs about cinematic releases in order to embellish the content of that which I’m writing. Like that! I’m also the sort of person who will support my opinion that the movie industry is long overdue a kick up the backside by presenting a few of 2010’s upcoming releases which, quite frankly, are an insult to the average cinemagoer in the world. Not that I go to the cinema, of course; it’s full of people and you know how they annoy me. If you thought fighting crippling memory loss and secret organisations within the CIA was tough then you try getting a loan for a house when you’ve got no credit history. Neo’s back – somehow, try not to think about it too much – and he’s more than a little distressed by just how much of a beating the world took. There is no spoon but there are plenty of useful DIY tips. Girls and their mums will flock to see anything with a gay vampire in it and this Twilight sequel will also boost sales at...
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