In about an hour I have to go and meet my prospective new flatmates (in the process probably missing an old friend’s birthday party) to discuss their anxieties regarding the flat in King’s Cross. I can’t help but think that the experience is unlikely to be entirely positive – but I have to try to restrain myself from saying that I’ll get a place by myself. I still don’t want to, but it has occurred to me a couple of times that perhaps we are just looking for different things in a flat.
I don’t get it – everything seemed to be going so well. The King’s Cross place looked like it had at least two of us completely committed and only one waverer. How did that situation turn into one where I am the only one who still wants it? Over the last 24 hours I had really managed to resolve things in my head – the location seemed to give me opportunities to make more gay friends and to be a local/regular at one of my favourite places in London. By yesterday evening the ever-present anxiety of my vagrancy had almost completely faded, and my mind was swimming with the possibilities of living so close to the centre of London. And now…
Let’s drown our relative sorrows with a few links: Are webloggers becoming self-indulgent?, Bump redesign madness.
With the end of the Invisibles in sight, I am again considering the fate of barbelith, the nexus and the bomb. This is what I have come up with so far (a quote from the nexus):
“My thoughts on the future of barbelith have been prompted by Eloi and a variety of other people’s comments – some more carefully worded than others …
“My ramblings on the front page (which I accept might not be to everyone’s tastes) – were originally put up because i didn’t have anything else to put there – people weren’t sending me things to put up and those that were were generating so much work for me that I didn’t have time to do it, a full time job and eat or breathe.
“However, I have roughly decided to buy myself a new domain name to shift the weblog into (because I enjoy doing it and I get a lot of positive feedback but I accept that it might not always be in the spirit of the Invisibles) and from there attempt to concentrate more on the subversive and political aspects of the Invisibles on Barbelith.
“All opinions are valued – but projects that require considerable initial effort with limited difficulty in updates are preferable to me to those which are less initially time consuming but take longer on a weekly basis. I would ideally like to be able to almost completely leave the page for a few weeks without it dying. I am thinking of some system which would misuse something like blogger to put content into pages as easily as possible. Perhaps some kind of article submission proceedure, where I built a page which ten or so people were randomly chosen as editors for things people wrote to them (to spread the load), and could post them as required, with me only having to update the front page. It could be like a repository of articles somewhere between Disinfo and the Bomb’s analysis sections. We could even use the articles currently in the analysis section to smooth over any gaps in the schedule. I would be thinking of getting between four and six new articles a week up.
“I don’t know really – what do people think of that kind of thing? Discussion could then follow in the Nexus.
“Oh and bear in mind that the Bomb as to remain a substantial part of the site…
“All ideas appreciated, as I say – and look out for web-applications and web-based publishing ventures that might help the site operate with as little FTPing, html rewriting etc etc as possible.”