Let's Keep Things Simple

4 Fuks Saké

This blog has moved and changed names.

Please head to 4 Fuks Saké for more of the same.

Goodnight and God bless.

What Goes Around Comes Around, Again.

Blogging, Web 2.0 - God it's so dynamic and fresh. Gizmodo have just posted on Nintendo's Gameboy (sic) shoes.

Me and a couple of mates of mine at Cake made those for Nintendo back in 2000. We were trying to suggest that older, cooler people might play Game Boy other than the kids we'd weaned onto Pokémon.

I'm A Loser

The headline isn't a Spears-like cry for help to drag in some voyeuristic passing traffic - but more a bemoaning fact, having lost a game of magazine Russian Roulette at the news stand earlier today. I was in the mood to be patronised about my dress sense, and was willing to pay $HK61 for a copy of GQ. I lost on the 50:50 shoot out on whether I was buying the US or UK version - Christian Bale looking suitably transatlantic on the cover to throw me. What's more, I later found out that I've been wearing my trousers with too much 'break.'

What is happening in the magazine industry? I confess, I haven't been paying attention. That doesn't mean to say I'm not allowed to have an opinion - any idiot can, that's how blogging works right?

Anyway, for $61, I feel like I just had the piss taken out of me by a conspiracy of fashion labels, media planners and buyers, and a publishing house. You'll see the obvious complaint coming...no editorial, all ads, everyone going to parties and having their picture taken all drinking the same vodka etc etc...

However, I'm not going to have a pop. It seems to me GQ is doing very nicely. A fat mag, with fat ads - all looks healthy to me. The thing is, all the hot air we are expelling seems to have focused on the stresses of TV companies through PVRs and audience fragmentation, and newspapers hemorrhaging circulations. I've had few conversations about the short, medium and long term viability of magazines and I'd like to know if anyone is.

Inevitably, in our new world, magazine brands are transferring successfully online; FHM.com being a colossus. But others, to me just seem to exist as a glossy paper-based fuel for the fashion industry. They're just a paper version of cocaine. Buyers, sellers, designers, photographers, stylists - you name it - are sucking it up, passing their glossy images from one to another to notch the next deal - whilst real readers quietly drift away, along with the content.

The Devil Wears Prada must all be 100% true. Or the whole thing balances on a precipice waiting for a new Anna Wintour to tear the whole conspiracy apart.