search engine weirdness

it’s odd, when i first started writing under the skull cull logo it seems that the search engine terms that dragged people to this page were somewhat weirder. perhaps the more content you get the better quality of surfer gets directed at you? like internet karma or some such bullshit. i don’t think that can [...]

Ranthead: Au Revoir April Fools

a whole day swamped with the efforts of stupid people with unfunny jokes. i never did like the kind of pranks that april fools tend to plump for, and seriously, the guys who push the whole agenda of that dumbass day are the april fools. at least i suppose it is not as commercialised as [...]

Magazine Graveyard: Vox

I fail to remember exactly what happened to this magazine — I think it was swallowed up by one of it’s rivals — The NME if memory serves correctly. I know with these articles I should sit there on wiki and painstakingly research stuff but they are, after all, supposed to be opinion pieces and [...]

Magazine Graveyard: The Face

It led the way in a lot of respects — taught people what a culture magazine could be and it taught with style. At one point The Face could have been considered a setter of trends, a creator of them, but there was some kind of imperceptible shift and suddenly it seemed to be running [...]

Take Art: Damien Hirst

I think, as with a lot of things, the Young British Artists, as they were known, are easy to look at and assess from a perspective that is not barraged by so much hype. I think at the time so much of the talk about the pieces was coloured by people reacting against the publicity [...]

Ranthead: Proofread

I know that as soon as I sit down to write this rant, no matter how many times I look at it there will be a typo that is going to make me look like an arsehole. That aside though, I would just like to say, that if you are putting out your first issue [...]

Turn The Page: Siddartha by Herman Hesse

As with a lot of the works by Herman Hesse this book is not large in regards to the number of pages but the largeness of the spirit contained within is immeasurable.
Sometimes you read a book and you feel that serendipity has delivered it to you, so closely does it seem tailored to the needs [...]

Turn The Page: Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde

I have to admit that when someone recommended to me that I read this book I was not very eager to take them up on their recommendation — there was something about it that just seemed a bit too touchy feely. I am not an un-emotional person, in fact the opposite is true — you [...]

Take Art: Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley Painting: Genius

I think, to a degree, being part of an exhibition called Sensation damaged this painting and limited its impact. I really wish that I had got to see at the gallery — that long walk that they had designed towards that iconic image: a child killer recreated from children’s hands. A lot of the Young [...]

Comicsphere: Freakangels Theories

I know it’s probably not the best thing to be floating theories around before something is notionally out of the gates but there is enough of intrigue already in the Freakangels to get the old noggin working. I was wondering what the significance of Jack The Ripper might be to Freakangels given that it is [...]