Great Magazine Articles

[Pigeon]

Things like National Geographic or the like are sensational on the iPad.

I covered that...

Some of them are downloadable things which only work on pointless expensive shite devices and require endless fcuking around to extract the content and make it work on the PC.

Agree. I like the paper one because it means time out on the shitter, but the quality of the imagery on the e-version and the rich media content is superb.

But the quality of the images in the paper version is bound to be better, since a paper magazine page is larger than the screen on one of those things and printing can be done at much higher resolution as well. (Granted there exist magazines whose print quality has gone down the pan since their ipad version came out, but I can't see NG being so cheap-ass as that.) If by "rich media" you mean videos, videos are way down in my rating scale of good ways to receive information... text is much better at providing detailed descriptions, still photos and diagrams are much better at representing the physical form of things, and when you want to check back on something that came earlier it is enormously easier to just look at a different place on the page than to mess about trying to seek a video to the right spot.

[Disastrous]

We'll have to disagree. I don't know (or care) what the retina screen resolution is but it looks fcuking brilliant-certainly equal to print to my eyes. Almost exactly the same size as the magazine too. Also, I produce video for a living and the stats available seem to point at it being an incredibly effective and popular way to deliver/receive information. I appreciate that not everyone likes it but that's a matter of preference, rather than a comment on its effectiveness generally.

[Käsemeister]

Things like National Geographic or the like are sensational on the iPad.

I covered that...

Some of them are downloadable things which only work on pointless expensive shite devices and require endless fcuking around to extract the content and make it work on the PC.

Agree. I like the paper one because it means time out on the shitter, but the quality of the imagery on the e-version and the rich media content is superb.

But the quality of the images in the paper version is bound to be better, since a paper magazine page is larger than the screen on one of those things and printing can be done at much higher resolution as well. (Granted there exist magazines whose print quality has gone down the pan since their ipad version came out, but I can't see NG being so cheap-ass as that.) If by "rich media" you mean videos, videos are way down in my rating scale of good ways to receive information... text is much better at providing detailed descriptions, still photos and diagrams are much better at representing the physical form of things, and when you want to check back on something that came earlier it is enormously easier to just look at a different place on the page than to mess about trying to seek a video to the right spot.

Rich media doesn't have to mean videos - NG for example remains a resolutely c.A5 publication, so whey they print a "big" picture, it's a fold-out with one or maybe two creases in. A few months back they had a feature on massive trees, where a chap had built a rig to take multi-megapixel images of the tree at 1m intervals and then stitched them together to make an enormo-image. On paper it was a pretty pic with two dirty great big crumpled lines through. On the ipad, it was scrollable, zoomable, and vastly higher resolution.

NG is an extremely good magazine. The iPad edition makes it look shockingly bad.

Sound On Sound is another good one - paper copy is great, thick, big pics etc. iPad edition fcuking rocks, with fully zoomable high res pics of PCBs, control panels, software GUIs etc, plus where they're discussing specific sounds or processing techniques, the examples and previews are all embedded.

I also love the way you can be reading an issue that is several months old, and the "news" page has been updated to the latest news rather than them being pages you'd skip over as irrelevant and out of date. Clever shit.

I'm not defending the iPad over the magazinbe as both have their place, but the two above are examples of how the medium can be used extremely well - it's not silly, nor video and internet requiring.

[Pigeon]

There's still the problem of the platform though. Because they deliberately deliver it in a format which is not either cross-platform or open, it is a pain in the arse hacking job just to get it into a form where I can read it. Heck, it's a pain in the arse even trying to get hold of it in the first place because its distribution is similarly restricted. They perfectly well could deliver it in a format which could be read on anything and obtained from anywhere, but they do it the awkward way on purpose. And there is no way I'm going to spend several hundred pounds on a pointless gadget which is markedly less capable than the machines I already have to get around these difficulties which are purely artificial and created purely in an effort to try and force me to waste money like that.

I totally disagree about the automatically updating news pages too - that's another reason to avoid it. I don't want my stuff changing unless I myself have specifically made it change. If I keep a magazine (which I usually do) it's so that I can go back to it in future and renew my acquaintance with the content which I know is in it (and checking old news pages to remind myself of when a particular thing was news is a frequent type of such acquaintance renewal). To find that content to have automatically removed itself would massively piss me off (just as it would to go back to a paper magazine and find someone had torn pages out of it). So in fact I'd still have to go through just as much hackery arseache even if I did give in to the corporate manipulation, because I'd need to make it storable in a sane format which is just as much trouble as putting it into a sane format to make it readable.

Some things are even worse because they stop being readable at all after a certain time, and that again is the kind of arrant cnutery up with which I will not put.

Also, I produce video for a living and the stats available seem to point at it being an incredibly effective and popular way to deliver/receive information.

Popular, I won't dispute, though I will deplore, with disparaging references to the mong generation and Fahrenheit 451. Effective, I rather doubt, since the information density is so low - watching an hour's documentary conveys massively less information than an hour reading a book on the same subject.

[Tumescent Acorn]

All electronic versions of magazines are shite. Some of them are PDFs in which the images have been over-compressed and have coloured bands and other artefacts all over them. Some of them are websites which take forever to load and only provide pics which are a quarter of the size of the paper version and are fcuked up with stupid crap like animated page turning effects which achieve precisely fcuk all apart from making it even more slow and awkward. Some of them are downloadable things which as well as having all the same problems as the websites require the installation of some horrible shit like Adobe Air to make them work. Some of them are downloadable things which only work on pointless expensive shite devices and require endless fcuking around to extract the content and make it work on the PC. Some of them find different ways to be a cnut. All of them share the same characteristic of providing lower quality image content than the paper version and making it a pain in the fcuking arse to read it.

Things like National Geographic or the like are sensational on the iPad.

Agree. I like the paper one because it means time out on the shitter, but the quality of the imagery on the e-version and the rich media content is superb.

Do you wash the iPad afterwards ?

[Tokyo Sexwale]

However I don't find as much time to read thousands of words at one time. On holiday I can devour books back to back but normally it takes me weeks, sometimes months to finish a novel.

I was exactly like this till I started using the kindle app on my phone. Now I always have a book on my and if I'm waiting somewhere for a few minutes, having an etc I can read. I'm getting through a book a week again now and there's no way I'd do that if they were traditional paper books.

There's still the problem of the platform though. Because they deliberately deliver it in a format which is not either cross-platform or open, it is a pain in the arse hacking job just to get it into a form where I can read it.

Why would National Geographic want to design the delivery of their media around someone like you? No offence intended but you shun anything modern and cutting edge and seem to revel in using ancient things so it would make no sense for any company to have you as the ideal customer and base things around what you want.

[Disastrous]

There's still the problem of the platform though. Because they deliberately deliver it in a format which is not either cross-platform or open, it is a pain in the arse hacking job just to get it into a form where I can read it. Heck, it's a pain in the arse even trying to get hold of it in the first place because its distribution is similarly restricted. They perfectly well could deliver it in a format which could be read on anything and obtained from anywhere, but they do it the awkward way on purpose. And there is no way I'm going to spend several hundred pounds on a pointless gadget which is markedly less capable than the machines I already have to get around these difficulties which are purely artificial and created purely in an effort to try and force me to waste money like that.

I totally disagree about the automatically updating news pages too - that's another reason to avoid it. I don't want my stuff changing unless I myself have specifically made it change. If I keep a magazine (which I usually do) it's so that I can go back to it in future and renew my acquaintance with the content which I know is in it (and checking old news pages to remind myself of when a particular thing was news is a frequent type of such acquaintance renewal). To find that content to have automatically removed itself would massively piss me off (just as it would to go back to a paper magazine and find someone had torn pages out of it). So in fact I'd still have to go through just as much hackery arseache even if I did give in to the corporate manipulation, because I'd need to make it storable in a sane format which is just as much trouble as putting it into a sane format to make it readable.

Some things are even worse because they stop being readable at all after a certain time, and that again is the kind of arrant cnutery up with which I will not put.

Also, I produce video for a living and the stats available seem to point at it being an incredibly effective and popular way to deliver/receive information.

Popular, I won't dispute, though I will deplore, with disparaging references to the mong generation and Fahrenheit 451. Effective, I rather doubt, since the information density is so low - watching an hour's documentary conveys massively less information than an hour reading a book on the same subject.

As I said, we'll have to disagree. I think you're confusing your preference with fact but I appreciate you are anti technology that isn't designed by you so I think Nat Geo are probably right to press ahead doing it their way as I can't see you subscribing any time soon??

As for the video stuff, I think you're just wrong. Almost every educational institution I can think of is archiving lessons and lectures as video for later reference, presumably not just for the hell of it. Nobody is suggesting it's a replacement for written material but as an addition to it, it's invaluable. Even my parents (old fashioned teachers) rate it as a source of help but I suspect you probably think teachers don't know anything about education too...so we'll just have to disagree

[minimoog]

Clearly the maxim ' a picture paints a thousand words' butters no parsnips in Pidge's creel.

[Disastrous]

Clearly the maxim ' a picture paints a thousand words' butters no parsnips in Pidge's creel.

Laugh. I started a really wanky pitch lately with "If a picture' worth a thousand words, what's video worth...? >controlled silence, change tack< Well, the answer is £10Bn I the UK alone...I'm sure I'm not alone it...etc etc"

I was quite pleased with it as an opener. I delivered it masterfully, as I'm sure you can imagine.

[Strawman]

I think if you took the picture out of Maxim magazine it would be reduced to pamphlet
http://www.maxim.com/

[Tumescent Acorn]

When was the last time any of us had a wank over a magazine ?


This is probably the ultimate test of whether they are redundant or not.

[Turntable]

Speaking of playboys, this is fascinating.

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/07/prince-jefri-201107

I just spent half an hour utterly absorbed in that.

[Disastrous]

Speaking of playboys, this is fascinating.

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/07/prince-jefri-201107

I just spent half an hour utterly absorbed in that.

I read that a couple of months ago. Incredible article.

[Turntable]

Not a magazine article as such, but I found this little internet thingy earlier.
Basically it's a diary of a seniorish executive in a large US Company which, during reshuffles and redundancies, has forgotten that he exists.
So he has an office within a satellite office and for the past few years has done literally nothing. No job.
He keeps thinking that he will get caught-up with but it never happens.
I like it.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

[Disastrous]

Not a magazine article as such, but I found this little internet thingy earlier.
Basically it's a diary of a seniorish executive in a large US Company which, during reshuffles and redundancies, has forgotten that he exists.
So he has an office within a satellite office and for the past few years has done literally nothing. No job.
He keeps thinking that he will get caught-up with but it never happens.
I like it.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

I love that so much. It's my dream.

[span]

Not a magazine article as such, but I found this little internet thingy earlier.
Basically it's a diary of a seniorish executive in a large US Company which, during reshuffles and redundancies, has forgotten that he exists.
So he has an office within a satellite office and for the past few years has done literally nothing. No job.
He keeps thinking that he will get caught-up with but it never happens.
I like it.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

I'm enjoying that

I had a couple of months once where I was given absolutely no work to do. The company was a bit strange - it was the plaything of a rich idiot, who liked the idea of an office full of people to march through, but without much idea of making it profitable. He had an office and boardroom created, and nothing ever happened in them - once I saw inside his filing cabinet and all that was in there was some protein powder and a huge book he'd printed off about fitness.

Anyway, he implied that as long as in two months' time I was ready to start work on this project, he was happy that I was spending the interim time 'preparing'. It was disconcerting. Because I was 99% sure we were both meaning the same thing - that I would just sit there looking busy and being paid for two months - but that 1% of uncertainty did worry me. It was fine though as it turned out.

[thekungfury]

Not a magazine article as such, but I found this little internet thingy earlier.
Basically it's a diary of a seniorish executive in a large US Company which, during reshuffles and redundancies, has forgotten that he exists.
So he has an office within a satellite office and for the past few years has done literally nothing. No job.
He keeps thinking that he will get caught-up with but it never happens.
I like it.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

That happened to a friend of a friend. He was at Anderson Consulting around the time they became Accenture and got lost in the system.

He was home based and between assignments when things changed so he kept calling in to find out his next job only to be told "Nothing on at the moment, we'll let you know". After a fortnight of this he began going into the office to do some (pretend) photocopying and ask around and kept getting the same answer. He decided to be cheeky and go for rounds of golf and still nobody checked. A month passed and he booked a holiday to France to go surfing for a week. Called in on the Friday and was told "Still nothing for you" so he stayed there for another week.

This went on for about 3mths with him just playing golf and pissing about. He suddenly got a letter from HR to attend his annual review. He went in thinking the game is up but his clueless line manager gave him a good review, a pay rise and a bonus.

After about 18mths he actually got bored and decided to find a real job.

[span]

This went on for about 3mths with him just playing golf and pissing about. He suddenly got a letter from HR to attend his annual review. He went in thinking the game is up but his clueless line manager gave him a good review, a pay rise and a bonus.

After about 18mths he actually got bored and decided to find a real job.

Blimey, that makes me feel anxious just reading it.

[Disastrous]

I used to work with a girl at Hewlett Packard who was pretty much a one-woman smoke generation unit. Did bugger all but was dead fit and quite nice so I was inclined to help when she asked for help covering an unapproved holiday to France for a week by taking any calls for her and passing them onto her whilst she was 'attending a customer site visit in Europe' officially. Never got caught but it must be sad to be so irrelevant.

I'd love to be though. 18 months fcuking about sounds superb to me. I'd buy a microlight, I expect.

[thekungfury]

I'd love to be though. 18 months fcuking about sounds superb to me. I'd buy a microlight, I expect.

One of the main problems was that everyone was working so he was larking about on his own so I can understand why he stopped it.

Plus there were zero career progression opportunities and he was stuck in a mid-low level position with a salary to match whilst his mates were moving up.

[Disastrous]

I'd love to be though. 18 months fcuking about sounds superb to me. I'd buy a microlight, I expect.

One of the main problems was that everyone was working so he was larking about on his own so I can understand why he stopped it.

Plus there were zero career progression opportunities and he was stuck in a mid-low level position with a salary to match whilst his mates were moving up.

Fair enough - you'd want to get to a level where you were happy with the money. I'm quite happy fcuking about with things on my own so would be happy with that, I reckon.

[Dirk]

Not a magazine article as such, but I found this little internet thingy earlier.
Basically it's a diary of a seniorish executive in a large US Company which, during reshuffles and redundancies, has forgotten that he exists.
So he has an office within a satellite office and for the past few years has done literally nothing. No job.
He keeps thinking that he will get caught-up with but it never happens.
I like it.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

Excellent. And all too believable in some of the big companies

[Tokyo Sexwale]

I didn't believe that link at all but now you're telling me real world examples, maybe I was over cynical.

[span]

Hey everyone, remember this ace thread I did once?

Anyway, I recommend this article which I found quite moving. It's about two bodies that were found washed up in Norway and the Netherlands, in identical wetsuits, and the story of identifying one of them. It is less a detectivey thing than a refugeey thing.

The Boys Who Could See England

[Clown Ice Skater #4]

I read Fatal Distraction, span, and it was surprisingly upsetting.

[Turntable]

Hey everyone, remember this ace thread I did once?

Anyway, I recommend this article which I found quite moving. It's about two bodies that were found washed up in Norway and the Netherlands, in identical wetsuits, and the story of identifying one of them. It is less a detectivey thing than a refugeey thing.

The Boys Who Could See England

Very sad.
Good article

[span]

I read Fatal Distraction, span, and it was surprisingly upsetting.

It's probably the one I remember best and I remember it often. Which sounds very morbid (and is) but there's something uniquely nightmarish about the extremes in terms of responsibility and intent, and then the horror of the outcome.

I just went back to read it again and stopped - not as resilient with those types of things these days!

[Turntable]

I have what sounds like the dullest article in the entire world here, which is actually utterly fascinating.
It is an article about a material someone has created out of carbon. Read it at once and love it
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/material-question

[Turntable]

Someone better had read that article now I have proofed it for you all

[span]

Someone better had read that article now I have proofed it for you all

I still have the tab open.

God really, TT? I will, but it looks sooooooo boring.