ONAEW is my 52 favourite albums acquired in 2026, in no particular order, with a Spotify Playlist. More to follow each week.
The album cover art is all copyright of the original owners.
]]>ONAEW is my 52 favourite albums acquired in 2026, in no particular order, with a Spotify Playlist. More to follow each week.
The album cover art is all copyright of the original owners.
]]>This is the 2025 Christmas Comics Advent Calendar. It will update each day with a comic to read, with this years 2026 2000ad Annual on the 25th. I hope you all get to spend Christmas how you best enjoy it this year. Happy Reading!
The cover art is all copyright of the original owners.
]]>This is the list from 2017:
My Top 5 from 2017:
More recently I have pages of links where I collate images, and download links for One New Album Each Week which I’m listening to. It would be cool if Copilot could collate that for me, and I can create a small bit of code to create the page for the list above… so… I asked Copilot…
From the following list of musicians and albums, iterate through each pair, download the album artwork and find a link to purchase each album, preferring bandcamp.com and bleep.com
…after a bit of a wait…
Awesome… but all of the links point to Amazon?
Can you retry, but prefer purchase links from Bandcamp.com and Bleep.com?
…it got it right on the next try…
…hmmm, let’s see what we can do with this.
]]>ONAEW is my 52 favourite albums acquired in 2025, in no particular order, with a Spotify Playlist. The list is closed for 2025, enjoy!
The album cover art is all copyright of the original owners.
]]>ONAEW is my 52 favourite albums acquired in 2024, in no particular order, with a Spotify Playlist
The album cover art is all copyright of the original owners.
]]>
Paul Hawken - The Ecology Of Commerce; Dropping a plastic box into the recycling, you're reminded that the physical object you're holding is just the tip of a movement of energy and raw inputs which served a purpose and now, maybe, if you're very lucky, is going to get recycled for another go around the production pipeline. Multiply that by the millions of people throwing away, and consuming resources around you, a proportion of them possibly throwing and thinking similar thoughts about similar rubbish/recycling and it very quickly starts to feel unsustainable, as an unresolvable mountain of waste is produced by just the people dropping that box into their bin.
This book then looks at that interface between energy and resource inputs, and the environment which is going to need to absorb waste from our production processes, and states quite plainly that the system which produced those boxes, and allows for us to probably just chuck things, without the firm ability for genuine recycling, is both unsustainable and harmful for Starship Earth. Therein lies another path, which is pointed at by the environment around us. We should aim to better utilise our resources in cycles, to ensure that we're dumping the minimum back into the environment, always trying to always create virtuous cycles where there is no waste, just inputs to another system somewhere else, and each input-output-input cycle creates money/enterprise.
We're then aiming for all our energy inputs to come from renewable sources, and for the inputs of any system to be the output of another system, just like in the planet around us. Without this, those boxes will scale to mountains in ten, one hundred or a thousand years. A small number scaled will kill a finite system if applied on an infinite timeline.
From when this was first written, we're now at the point that we're seeing the immediate effects of climate change caused in part by the massive amount of waste (gases as well as boxes) we're generating... we'd best get on with engineering and discovering those virtuous cycles.
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A martial arts star, Trigger Keaton, with a cast iron contract burns through his co-stars, stunt-people and film crews till years later, he dies of an apparent suicide. His current TV sidekick thinks it might be deliberate homicide (maybe it was moida?) He needs to recruit Keaton's ex-sidekicks, all of whom might have a motive to kill Trigger Keaton, to uncover whether Trigger's demise was more murdery than the Police report suggested. Great story, complete in one book, with fun characters, and wry humour. The martial arts cinema tropes are used well, and this made for a lovely bit of Christmas reading.
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The first volume of a story of a half man-half demon with chainsaws for arms and a face. The protagonist's father gambled the family's existence away, and upon death, the son became a demon hunter in hock to the Yakuza to pay off the debt. The story opens as he merges with his demon dog and becomes the eponymous Chainsaw Man, joining a group hunting demons in downtown Tokyo. At points puerile, and brutal, the main character is instantaneously endearing, the world around him constructed in an oddly believable manner given the subject matter, which makes this unlike much else before it, and an engaging read.
Fujimoto-san ranked second place in 2022 at the Manga Taishō awards for "Look Back" which shares the artistic and storytelling quality of Chainsaw Man, without the knee deep mess of a chainsaw demon wading through zombie gore. Definitely worth using that as an entry-point to look at the depth of characters he builds, with obvious empathy and skill to render them as whole beings, then come back to Chainsaw Man vol 1 for that, plus the gore, and giant bat demons.
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A frank Frank story, and an in depth look at how he created his music and his roots in strange Californian dust bowl towns as incongruous to his output as he was to them. This reads like a musicians deep dive into the drives and dreams of another musician they adore, worth reading to understand the kind of musical mind that would create The Black Page.
Growing up we'd very gradually be able to get our grubby little mitts on any of his work, and would be sharing 5th-generation tape copies of some of the more hard to find releases. If you have the bandwidth, reading this and listening to his work chronologically from his early Mothers of Invention output would pay dividends. After that, have a listen to:
The story of a hacker, Max Vision, who takes over a criminal credit card fraud network, whilst attempting to exist as a White Hat Hacker, and consultant to the FBI, who were simultaenously searching for his criminal alter-ego. Poulsen does well to contruct the environmental edifice around Max, which saw him make such terrible decisions, ultimately leading to his capture. Intelligence, with a lack of impulse control and boundary setting are a recipe for a gripping slow motion car crash.
There is a trope in there which very much reminded me of Heisenberg, and the ultimately fatal interactions with his brother-in-law. At least Max's weren't fatal for him, but were ultimately destructive.
Poulson started out as a Black Hat Hacker, with interviews in 2600 and Phrack in the 90s... he used his background to write about computer security news and issues and has some great content over at Wired which is worth communing with.
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