No, VCTB hasn’t been hacked, and I’ve not started doing paid posts bigging up products I don’t use. Well, not yet, anyway. 
This is a favour for a friend, and also a sort of word-to-the-wise and SEO-boost in one. My buddy James (who, despite claiming to be a doughty Anglo-Saxon warrior, is probably the most amiably geeky death metal fan you’ll ever meet*) is about to move house.
He loves a bit of that television stuff**, and he’s been researching how much it’ll cost him to get kitted out with all the High Definition channels and other bells and whistles. The packages Sky offers are pretty pricey***, so James took a look around at alternatives … and guess what, savvy consumers?
It appears the best way to save big money on Sky HD is to get your HD from elsewhere.
This has been a public service announcement. As you were!
[ * That's the price you pay for my favours, James. Muah-hah-hah! ]
[ ** No television in this house. Looking forward to the annual visit of the scanner people, who always leave disappointed after I've showed them every TV-free nook and cranny of the flat. ]
[ *** SRSLY - that package price would cover all my utilities - including broadband - for a year, and still leave enough to take a few mates out for The Friday Curry. I'm sticking with books and music, I reckon. ]
Definitions, descriptions, genres and sub-genres … it looks like the sf blogosphere is unearthing more evidence to demonstrate that the harder you try to put things in a box, the more likely you are to find that the box doesn’t fit.
Continue reading ““Beer-money hard-pulp cyber-opera”, or “Defining the indefinable””
Depending on where you sit, the word ‘literary’ preceding the words ‘science fiction’ is either a handy descriptor denoting a certain flavour of genre writing, or a pretentious label that denotes tedious over-egging of the writerly pudding.
It’s probably fairly plain that I’m a fan of literary sf, but what the hell does that actually denote, anyway? Where is the line drawn? And is it inherently ‘better’ than other forms? Continue reading “A vindication of ‘beer-money’ science fiction”
Okay, looks like this evening I veer somewhat into politics by way of futurism, but this is an issue that I can’t avoid posting about. Continue reading “Why Tony Blair loves nuclear power”
Man, I’ve been badly slack on posting here, apart from the link dumps. What can I say, I’ve been a busy person. But today I saw a little gem of a post about the economics of online games and I have half an hour to spare… Continue reading “Online economies reach across the divide”
Good old PayPal - how else would we buy pointless and unnecessary eBay items while blind drunk in the early hours of Sunday morning without being defrauded? Continue reading “PayPal goes mobile”
At least according to a US General, that is:
“Ultimately it comes down to the free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our own nation and everybody else in the world depend.”
It’s almost a relief to hear one of them say it out loud. But not really.
Link ‘liberated for democracy’ from Metafilter.
It’s the pseudo-religion of the rich and famous (well, one of them, at least). Continue reading “A peek inside the world of Scientology”
