Sent to me for review by MIRO themselves, because, I suspect, it’s well known that I go through a lot of notebooks.  Their new line comes in two flavours – Wood, on the far left and right, and Felt, in the middle.  The wood covers, while thin and flexible, feel fairly robust, though I confess I don’t want to test them to destruction, as they are quite beautiful.

These arrived today, and just in time.  There are some projects that I prefer to work out in a larger notebook, and a couple of those projects just surfaced.  So at least one of these books (or, at least, one of the two I have left after my daughter steals two) will be immediately pressed into service.  And, therefore, I’ll be writing at a later date about how well they hold up.

You can find them at remembermiro.com or @remembermiro.

In an otherwise interesting and incisive piece by James Bridle, I find this:

Added to the velocity of the new text is its sociability, its connectivity. Social reading, whether of the Kindle highlights, Kobo Dashboard, Instapaper, Findings or Readmill flavour, adds depth to the text without diminishing it. When I write about the reading experience, I’m talking about a deep engagement with text, an active, intelligent, two-way conversation between reader and writer

James, have you never read a comments thread in your life?  I’m sure you didn’t mean this to sound like the entitlement of the fan reader to tell the author exactly what the reader thinks of them, and to have the author respond on bended knee.  But do you really think that a writer is going to open the commenting function on an ebook and find something other than LOLWUT U CUNT?

This sounds like you believe your money buys you an exchange with the author.  I’m sure you didn’t mean it to sound like that.

(Some things are going to remain one-way broadcasts for a little while yet.  Books are one of them.  The alternative is crowdsourced literature, echo-chamber writing and the transcription of a focus group session.  And if you want that?  Television already exists.)

Courtesy of the Peckham Outerspace Initiative. Thank you!

Matt Jones and Jack Schulze for BERG, allowed out in public. Beer monsters shouting at you about photons and bacon for an hour, basically. Really quite wonderful.

(via)

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This image of a pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273 was released to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The distorted shape of the larger of the two galaxies shows signs of tidal interactions with the smaller of the two. It is thought that the smaller galaxy has actually passed through the larger one. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)  (link)

Arrived in the post today: a promo copy of the new album by Kode9 & The Spaceape, BLACK SUN, from Hyperdub.  Really looking forward to this: I played MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE to the point of bitrot, I loved it so much.  Thanks, Marcus @ Hyperdub.

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A case of joy has arrived, courtesy of Herr Direktor Funranium: six bottles of precision-engineered caffeine delivery system the Black Blood Of The Earth, proving that he can ship a box of this wonderful supercoffee internationally.

Sleep? Sleep is for YOU OTHER PEOPLE. You UNMODIFIED people. I will swap MY ENTIRE BLOOD VOLUME with the Black Blood, and develop POWERS.

Also yes probably also death BUT STILL.

I’ve got to keep up with this, or I’m just going to lose track of everything.

Thanks to the lovely people at Domino Records for this stack. Going to listen through it this week. Particularly looking forward to the Tricky and Clinic.

See these glorious little things? These are samples from the Isle Of Jura’s Boutique Barrels whisky collection, sent on to me by kind souls at Whyte & MacKay. If you’re reading, Craig and Jill, thank you so much. They are so beautiful I want to cry and treasure them. But instead I will pour them down my neck like the monster I truly am.

(way behind with these posts. house filling up with unprocessed stuff. books sneaking in through windows)

I write about things I like, here, in the hopes that you like them too and that they become more widely known. It’s about the attention economy and doing what’s right, rather than getting hold of boxes of swag.

I’ve written here before about the wonderful group Natural Snow Buildings. I believe I also mentioned how pissed off I was that time conspired against me and I didn’t get to see them (on the same bill as Grouper and Fennesz) recently. I don’t know them or anything. I most recently linked to their free-download album THE CENTAURI AGENT.

A box just arrived via FedEx from my book agent. It is filled with records, tapes and CDs. And on top was this note:

My day is officially made. Mehdi and Solange, thank you. That was incredibly kind.

(also, I think I just received the soundtrack for the graphic novel I’m currently writing.)

The attractive young people of No Pain In Pop have sent me along a sample of their goods. And, in fact, if you bop along to their website right now, they have a very interesting piece of noise by Future Shuttle for you to listen to.

http://www.tapebox.co.uk

Olympic Sized Tantrum from Sculpture on Vimeo.

A lovely care package from those wonderful people at Absolutely Kosher Records.

John Twells put me on to this. Tristram Cary was an interesting man. Looking forward to putting it on tonight. (More electronic music, yes: imagine him as parallel to the Radiophonic Workshop, maybe (he did also produce incidental music for DOCTOR WHO) – and in fact created equipment the Workshop would later use.)

It’s like watching a reknowned and venerable pointillist taking up a brushpen. Studying the paper for long moments, considering its tooth and weight. Laying down five lines without apparent consideration for where they should be or what they are. And with the sixth mark you realise, you see, you can’t imagine having seen anything else but a perfectly rendered human face.

I am failing at recording all the stuff that’s coming into the office. Which is bad, because my office is a dump and stuff gets lost or forgotten or possibly reproduces in the corners.

As noted a couple of days ago, I’m on a Delia Derbyshire kick again. The TOMORROW PEOPLE CD there contains a bunch of Derbyshire stuff under the name Li De La Russe (she was still under contract to the BBC at the time, and TOMORROW PEOPLE was an ITV show). The red CD is "classic" Radiophonic Workshop, and the bottom one is a broader spectrum, 1958 to 1997.

I’m writing a sequence on Project Drill today which my co-writer indicates as including "the machine that goes ping." Therefore I am playing some of the greatest Machine That Goes Ping music that Britain ever produced.