Del.icio.us links for May 24th through May 30th:
- Drinking Red Bull with the Devil – DiS meets RBMA – Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Red Bull company could be forgiven for thinking that their raison d’être is, firstly, to sell caffeinated soft drinks and, secondly, to sell more caffeinated soft drinks. Apparently this is not the case. The Red Bull company exists to rock out, party hard and give up-and-coming young musicians wings. At least that’s the impression their press release gave me. I had come to a nondescript building near London Bridge to find out what sort of musicians would sign up to be part of a rock brand.
Tags: music musicindustry corporations branding pr - Pwning The Music Industry: An Interview with Jeff Rosenstock AKA Bomb The Music Industry – “It’s not hyperbolic to call BTMI pioneers of the digital music age. They stand as an ostensible answer to the question, can a band survive and make music successfully in an age where digital music is of such little monetary value? Will people donate money for music if they don’t have to? Forget about bands like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails who have taken a similar route but with major label PR money already under their belt. What about the underground? Jeff has shown that it’s possible to make it work, and more importantly that we live in a time where doing it yourself is not only an important and prevalent idea, but one that is, perhaps, superior to the alternative.” Great interview with Jeff of BTMI.
Tags: interview music punk diy - America’s exalted capacity for murder | Pankaj Mishra – A car bomb in Times Square wasn’t what Obama may have been expecting when, fulfilling his presidential campaign promise, he expanded the war on terror into north-west Pakistan. Last year more soldiers and civilians died in this almost unnoticed new theatre of war than in Iraq and Afghanistan put together. It was also last year that the American-backed Pakistani assaults on the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas turned an astounding 3 million people into refugees.
Tags: usa foreignpolicy war pakistan afghanistan barackobama - Speaking Out: On Voice Direction – As a fan of narrative-led games, there’s one subject that I’ve never taken for granted: voice direction. Which led me to wonder why so many games companies apparently do. Why do so many games have perfectly decent actors struggling with scripts, lines delivered with completely incorrect intonations, and conversations between characters which couldn’t sound more disjointed? Something as simple as this can change the tone of a game, reducing a big-budget epic to sounding like a junior school play.
Tags: gamedesign gamedevelopment voiceacting acting direction writing