Hmmmm...

Someone has uploaded my track with Brassica "Without You I'm Nothing" to YouTube.

While I appreciate that this person must like this tune a lot to do this, this song has never been released (so how did they get it?) and remains unfinished (so I'm going to ask them to take it down):



EDIT

So I had a little chat with the uploader who was very understanding and graciously took the clip down, as you can see. Thank you!

Facebook gay kiss ban follow up

So, the answer to the question posed in Wednesday's blog post would seem to be "no".

Facebook have not apologised to us. The press have got their facts wrong and are not doing their job properly. Unless their job description is to be lazy recyclers of unchecked information forced into factually incorrect stories to fit their own editorial agenda. Which seems very likely.

The story has now spread to both the front page of Huffington Post, and to the dwindling readership/relevance of Perez Hilton. Both of which get it wrong. I have stopped reading about the story and my own involvement in it, as it seems pointless, but there are two articles which feature interviews with Richard Metzger that I recommend.

From The Atlantic Wire:

The Controversy Over Facebook's Gay Kissing Ban Isn't Over

"On Monday, after many gay men and women protested the decision by putting up pictures of themselves kissing on Facebook, the company issued a statement to a handful of media outlets: “The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

But Metzger doesn't see why anyone's celebrating that acknowledgement. "It's just generic PR speak that doesn't even refer to a gay kiss," he says. "The real problem here is certainly not that Facebook is a homophobic company. It's that their terrible corporate policy on censorship needs to stop siding with the idiots, the complainers and the least-enlightened and evolved amongst us."

And getting right to the core of the matter, from Media Bistro:

Richard Metzger Contends Media is Guilty of Sloppy Reporting on Facebook Scandal

"Metzger and Niall O’Conghaile, the individuals whose photo was censored and who originally reported on the incident, have not received word one from Facebook.

In fact, the only actual evidence of an apology from Facebook that Metzger has been able to find anywhere is in the comments section of the Dangerous Minds blog:

...

A comment on a blog post isn’t exactly an official statement, even if it did come from Facebook, and who knows? Anyone could have written that comment.

And yet, major media outlets such as AOL, Huffington Post, Gawker, The Advocate, and Yahoo! News have reported on this “official statement” as fact."

Or you could just go directly to the source:

Dangerous Minds: The Controversy over Facebook gay kissing ban isn't over

So That Makes You A Square: In Defense of "The Hipster"

Cross-posted from Dangerous Minds, this article has taken me a while to write, but I think it has been worth it!



There has been a lot of dropping of the H-Bomb here lately, whether it be in relation to riots at SXSW, or criticism of The Stone Roses. The word “hipster” has gone from vaguely meaning “poseur” to being a catch all term to describe anyone with different tastes to ourselves. I think it was time I addressed the matter head on. I’m not going to try and define what a “hipster” is here - if you need a crash course, I’ll point you in the direction of the Wikipedia “Hipster (contemporary subculture)” page, which is surprisingly on-point. I don’t even need to prove to you that the term is media fabrication used to hate on the young - though I probably will. No. I just want to say “Enough! If you going to call someone a hipster as an insult, then you should know that makes you a square.”

The first article I ever read on the subject of “hipsters” was Douglas Haddow’s Adbusters’ piece “Hipster - The Dead End Of Western Civilsation” from 2008. The article’s shrieking headline and hyperbolic tone should be a giveaway to the author’s intentions, but the fourth and fifth parts of the essay really show the hypocrisy involved. Haddow is at a party taking photos, yet manages to complain about both the other photographers at the same party AND the kids who want their photos taken. It’s genius! And herein lies the rub - the people doing the complaining themselves fit into the neat little bracket they have described. We have cultural commentators and arbiters of previously obscure tastes moaning about the now more widespread acceptance of those tastes. We have opinionistas offering up opinions on why we should hate other opinionistas. Photobloggers bitching about other photobloggers. Fixed gear cyclists who tell us only THEY can ride bikes properly.

Using WIki as a guide, it is possible to trace how this meme caught on in the media, and came to be some sort of established fact . It was not the first time the term was used this way, and “hipster” was not completely pejorative when it re-emerged in the last decade, but articles like Tim Walker’s “Meet The Global Scenester” re-inforce the idea that “hipster” was a stick used by cultural commentators to beat a perceived threat to their roles. There was no talk of the positive elements of the emerging youth culture, a culture these articles sought to define. It felt like it was a backlash waiting for an actual scene to happen. For a time in the early ‘90s, the UK music press lumped shoegaze bands together as “The Scene That Celebrates Itself” - anti-hipster chronic
lers could now just as easily be labeled “The Scene That Berates Itself”.

Raad more.