Category: Blogging (page 7 of 88)

Day-to-day minutiae.

23 February 2020 / 0 Comments

The herculean task of remembering all the 1990s UK indie band names ever

Back in 2011, I took one of my many trips down Amnesia Lane. A little bit like this one, in fact. I decided to create a list of all the great UK indie bands from the early 1990s. The problem was, I wasn’t an expert at all, and I’d never lived in the UK.

But who needs Wikipedia? I had a whole bunch of friends on Facebook who were all alive at the time. They were also going through more-or-less the same stages of sentimentality and nostalgia. Why not ask them?

A detail from the original Facebook post. I invited friends to nominate their favourite early-1990s UK indie bands. Over the course of several hundred comments, the standard of the nominations deteriorated. Then again, given that Cud came up so early, you could say the entire exercise was a fail from the outset.

So, I opened up the comments on a Facebook post, and together we came up with a list of over 100 bands. 100 is too big a number for what was an obscure moment in musical history.

Besides, many of the bands nominated were not actually indie, UK-based, or active in the early 1990s.

Others were shit so I excluded them with no regrets whatsoever. But, in the interests of scientific objectivity, I am reproducing the entire list here. Perhaps, one day, someone will come up with a more detailed and informative version. Oh, wait.

A screenshot from a 2011 Facebook thread in which users listed UK indie bands from the 1990s.
A screenshot from a 2011 Facebook thread in which users listed UK indie bands from the 1990s. Anonymised to protect the not-so-innocent.
A screenshot of the Chaplin theme by Anders Norén.
11 September 2019 / 0 Comments

New site theme: ‘Chaplin’

Ever since I installed my contact form, I’ve received a barrage of emails from web designers offering to fix this website.

Every time, I say: “Yeah, you’re right. I need to fix it. But I’m what’s known in the industry as a compulsive theme changer. I’m not ready to change my website theme just now. I’ve actually gone three months without changing anything. You could say I’m in remission.”

Obviously, when I say ‘say’, I mean ‘think’ and ‘to myself’.

But yesterday I finally cracked. The latest email mercilessly dissecting my website, its lack of a responsive mobile theme in particular, sent me over the edge.

So, instead of contacting that web developer and asking them to re-do my site (which would probably be an eminently good investment of their time and my money) I switched to another free WordPress theme.

It’s called Chaplin, and was created by my favourite WordPress theme designer, Anders Norén.

Let’s see how many more fricking emails I get now.

mature-age-students-love-jacaranda-trees-too
Lilac flowers of doom—an image of the jacaranda tree in the Main Quadrangle of the University of Sydney by Jason Tong
29 July 2019 / 2 Comments

Mature-age students are really cool

As a teenage undergraduate in the early 1990s, I lived in a world of blissful ignorance. Two or three lectures a day, a couple of essays to churn out each month, a handful of exams. No biggie. The rest of the time I spent mooching around and listening to UK indie. It wasn’t until I was well into my third year at university that I actually ran into any mature-age students. It was almost embarrassing, like seeing your mum in a lecture theatre. Wasn’t uni supposed to be for young people?

God, I was ignorant. And pretty far up myself.

Now, 30 years later, I’m about to do something I never contemplated, or understood, at that time of my life. At the ripe old age of 47, and as a father of three small children, I’m off to university again.

That’s right, I’m about to become a mature-age student.

Read more
17 July 2019 / 0 Comments

Where did the time go?

After spending so much time redesigning this website and beginning the long and arduous task of sorting through over 1,000 posts, it’s suddenly been around two months since I last added anything new here!

Where did those two months go?

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way: I genuinely don’t know where they went.

Well, actually, I do.

While I don’t make a habit of discussing my personal life on this blog, I’m really thrilled to say that my partner recently gave birth to our third child. We’d been expecting him to arrive from the beginning of June onwards, so by the time he arrived in late June, we were well and truly ready for him.

Perhaps this explains why I was not able to find the motivation necessary to update this blog. Right now, our two older kids are crawling around under my desk, making mischief.

I get the feeling that I’m going to have to be more determined and disciplined if I ever hope to get around to working on all of the projects I set myself to finish by the end of 2019.

As they say in the classics, ‘More updates shortly (or whenever I get time)’.

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This is [d/dn], the home of David Prater, a writer and editor currently living in the third person.

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