Yesterday (22nd Feb) I was on a panel at a Cardiff Blogs meet-up. I was invited along to answer questions about last year’s 365 project. The rest of the panel were great, representing a variety of blogging styles and content, they were Gemma Southgate, Elena Cresci, and Nathan Collins. The others that came along who put questions to us were a nice bunch, too. I answered some questions as best I could, but as is always the case with this kind of thing, there were things I think I could’ve put better, or things I just plain didn’t say that I should’ve, or ways that I could’ve actually tried to relate my experience from last year to actual blogging and that kind of thing, so what better medium to rectify this than a blog post? Read the rest of this entry
For many there’s nothing more humourless than insisting on analysing humour. E.B. White famously said: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” I can agree to an extent, to begin over-analysing why something is funny can end up sucking the humour out of it. On the other hand, I think that when we find something funny, we are making those connections in our minds anyway. Humour is often about drawing attention to the familiar, or finding a common understanding, and so to dismiss laughter as a simple reaction that isn’t the result of any thought does comedy, and the people who enjoy it, a disservice. I would argue that we laugh because we understand why something is funny. It’s strange that White’s oft-quoted take on analysing humour (and who knows how serious he was being about it anyway) is both humorous and seemingly worthy of analysis. Even the language choice of ‘the frog dies of it’ is a great punch-line. So, it turns out, for better or worse, that I am a person that is interested in analysing it. As well as being interested in humour for humour’s sake, I’m also interested in comedy that uses humour to say something, and I think almost all comedy does.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide series is as silly as it is smart, and as thought-provoking as it is humorous. Adams chose to deal with our species’ position in the Universe from the very opening of the first novel in this series. Read the rest of this entry
Someone at BBC Radio Wales heard about my Cooper365 project and invited me in today to talk about it.
As you can hear it was only mildly awkward, and I would say it went a lot better than I thought it would.
I’ve cut out the chunk of audio that was the interview (and at the end they played Crooked Barstool to close things off). It turns out this counts as national radio airplay (I often have to check Wikipedia to find out if I even live in a country. Apparently Wales is still a country.) And apparently the BBC pay people 48p for every track they play. HELLYEAH.
Also, I mentioned the song I wrote for Geekpop during the interview and realised I haven’t put this here yet which I’m sure is making you weep all over your keyboards. Here it is.
Ok. Lovely.
I made a video that was intended for the promotion of the ‘Perpetual Noise’ mix and in the description I started putting in some highlights. It got a little out of control and so I thought I’d also put them here as a kind of ‘link-dump’ post.
So I did plenty of other stuff this year, but these are some things that I’d consider to be some direct offshoots of this project of mine. I decided to write ‘Oh, hey remember…’ at the start of them all because I’m hilarious and nonchalant. Read the rest of this entry
