iPad specific apps for Australian newspapers are starting to trickle out. The Australian have announced theirs, with an “introductory price” of $4.99 per month which seems like pretty good pricing.

Fairfax (SMH, The Age, FinRev) haven’t announced any newspaper apps, but they are releasing an iPad version of their fluffy Sport & Style magazine. Insanely, it’s going to cost $3.49 per issue - when it’s a free glossy insert in the $1.50 newspaper.

Chatting to a colleague today about Google PAC-MAN, I started raving about the good ol' days of arcades and dropping 20¢ pieces. The machine which ate most of my teenage cash money was R-Type, which was pretty much perfection in a side scrolling shooter. It was the natural endpoint that started (for me) with Asteroids & Galaga, upgraded to Scrambler & Defender, was temporarily blinded by Dragon’s Lair, briefly poured money into Gauntlet, memorised the gear throws and corners in Daytona, before becoming obsessed by R-Type¹.

One thing I realised was that back in the day, your 20¢ was sacrosanct. You had no choice but to make that coin last as long as you possibly could. And with something like R-Type, that meant continuously working your way through bullet hell to a particular boss before dying/wiping over and over and over again as you learnt the boss strategy/rotation. It was punishing. So punishing that if you didn’t reach some bosses with all your ship mods complete you pretty much had to start over despite having made it to the boss chamber.

There were no Internets, no strategy guides, no faqs, no videos. It was just you, a pile of coins, and a queue for the machine.

Which made me wonder why the same thing kind of head-beating determination to learn a boss from scratch is largely absent from MMOs. I pretty much point blank refuse to approach a new boss without first having read up on it and watched the videos. And yet it is no harder than facing an R-Type boss unseen. In fact it’s easier, because you don’t have to work all the way through the prologues (aka trash) and other bosses each time to reach your current nemesis, and you don’t only have 3 lives to do it. Plus it doesn’t cost you 20¢ a try :-)

The biggest difference of course is that you are playing an MMO with 4 or 9 (or, lord have mercy, 24) other players. That’s the reason you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) spend time wiping whilst just watching or reacting to what is going on. Trying to co-ordinate that many people is challenge enough, without introducing the added element of learning on the fly. It’s more about implementing and executing than discovering. And maybe the other 9 love faqs. Or are good at execution. Or like following. Maybe they are impatient. Maybe they don’t want to spend hours getting frustrated. Maybe you’re afraid to look like a nub. 

Or maybe the other 9 didn’t play R-Type.

Straight outa the Blue Mountains, more indie pop perfection. I seem to have gone from alt-country to pop obsessed. There’s always something great about listening to local music - it might not always have the same polish, but it feels more, um, ‘real'. Like The Triffids always hitting home more than someone like Okkervil River, who mine the same vein but are unavoidably Americana rather than Australiana.

Brutally personal account of deep, dark drug addiction from New York Times media critic David Carr.

A permanent home for Google PAC-MAN - worth it for the (Flash based) sound alone.

Two interesting articles (The Barriers of Music Consumption &  The Broken System) about the change in music consumption from physical/album based to digital/single. The articles make some good points about the change in how people collate and collect music, from a wall of physical LPs to an iPod of tracks, and the changes that has brought to the development of musical taste.

Their main thesis is that for those that have been raised in the digital music era the old/existing music industry is broken, not the other way around. The digital consumers don’t know any other way of listening to and discovering music, so there’s no chance of the recording industry ‘fixing' things and going back to the way it used to be.

Something Sir Mick articulated well in a recent BBC interview:

“But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! 

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. 

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.” (via Daring Fireball)

If the recording industry wants to stay relevant, they need to adapt to the digital consumption era rather than trying to reintroduce and enforce the analogue years. Unfortunately for Big Music I think it’s too late - the indies, artists, and web music services have supplanted them in usefulness.

Crazily detailed infographic about the BP oil spill catastrophe. Too much info for one graphic?

Must see, if you’re a football fan. Or even if you’re not! Spot on with nationalistic reactions, player personalities (Ronaldo’s ego, Rooney’s agro), and classic interludes from Kobe Bryant & The Simpsons. Can’t wait for June.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (who’s filmography includes Amores Perros, Babel, 21 Grams etc).

Something interesting brewing from Neal Stephenson (and Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo et al) - some kind of serialised story to be delivered via iPhone/Android/Kindle. Seems that to be part of the delivery team you must be bald and have an evil goatee (not sure how Galland will manage that).

Stephenson dominated cyberpunk for a while, wrote the brilliant Cryptonomicon, and a great Wired tale about laying globe-spanning fibre. His more recent books (The Baroque Cycle & Anathem) have been in dire need of editing and focus, but he remains an interesting writer & thinker.

Balanced coverage from Daring Fireball. Other than, you know, destroying Microsoft.