Pointless Releases
Come Back in Ten Years, I'll Tell You All About It
Mark Rushton’s Abundant Spare Time is an email where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist. This is being released on Sunday, December 7, 2025.
Topics:
Pointless Releases
20 Year Old Tech
Frances Barber and Pet Shop Boys - “For Every Moment”
Pointless Releases
In the tech world, where I’ve worked for over three decades, I’ve become tired of things I call “pointless releases”.
It’s always a big company, like Apple or Microsoft. They all do this.
You know what I’m talking about. New “features” like being able to change the background color of the About page of the app. I saw that once.
Or it’s vague “security” or “bug fixes” - thus proving the point of many critics who say that “new tech” isn’t necessarily “better”. They just haven’t found all the new bugs.
Companies are just keeping that “Agile” schedule (which isn’t how “Agile” should be…).
Rinse and repeat on schedule. Preferably with new ads targeted to your experience. Or a subscription fee increase. Or a new Terms of Service that removes your rights as a customer and replaces them with “binding arbitration”. They are going to put you in a “bind”.
Or annoying “helpful” popups, which even Qobuz had recently.
I don’t know, but maybe “pointless releases” is why I wanted to make my Post / Email schedule a little more “loose” and unscheduled.
20 Year Old Tech
This week, for the art studio, I bought an Elmo HV-3000XG visual presenter.
Kim had talked about missing an opportunity to buy something like this - an early 2000s version of the old 3M “grease pencil / Easy Bake Oven bulb” projectors my teachers used in the 1970s.
I found this locally, on eBay. Around $50.
It was at a warehouse-based business that sold, or resold, on eBay. Those are still around! I had to ask for local pickup and they updated the listing. They were located “between Des Moines and Altoona”, in an industrial park. It wasn’t a storefront. They only had a handful of local pickups this year. But it was a cool place. Messy. Stuff everywhere. Friendly guys. I saw this on a shelf, waiting to be sold.
After buying and setting up the Elmo, I needed a visual output. The Elmo outputs via S-video. I had a quick hunt on eBay for a small projector with S-video input. 20 year old projectors that still work are a dime a dozen. I found a NEC VT695 in Oklahoma for $25 plus $15 shipping. I also had to buy the right kind of S-video cable. All this will arrive next week.
It made me wonder about the “SMART Boards” that my daughters had in school about 15 years ago - essentially an enormous dry erase board with a bunch of tech on it. They were $2000 to $7000 back in the day, depending on features. I didn’t search long to find a working one for $130 on eBay. Plus $242 in shipping.
Are kids smarter today? I don’t know. A lot of them seem “tech skeptical”, which I appreciate.
Anyway, I think it’s fun to play around with cheap “old tech” in the art studio.
Art should be fun.
Frances Barber and Pet Shop Boys - “For Every Moment”
Tell me about the Musik thing with Frances Barber and the Pet Shop Boys. What was it?
The “Musik” you’re asking about is a cabaret-style musical that premiered in February 2020 at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh (as part of a short run before a planned longer London season that was delayed by Covid).
Frances Barber plays April Musquay, an ageing, outrageous, bisexual punk-pop artist and performance artist who was once the biggest star in the world. The character is basically a fictional mash-up of real-life provocative artists: think Marianne Faithfull meets Billie Whitelaw meets a dash of Vivienne Westwood and a lot of made-up scandal.
The show is structured as a monologue/concerto: April tells her wild life story (drugs, sex, art scandals, prison, East Germany in the 1970s, etc.) while the Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe) appear on stage as her silent, black-suited backing band, performing the songs live with her.
Critics loved Frances Barber’s performance (she got rave reviews for her comic timing and singing), and the show had a cult vibe because the Pet Shop Boys rarely do theatre work. It finally had a proper short London run in 2021 after the pandemic delays.
So many companies claiming to be agile have no idea what Agile actually is. It’s quite irritating.