Year: 2000

Mark at Riothero is having a pretty weird time at the moment – not that you would know it from the main page of his weblog. If you want to read some of the most heartfelt and occasionally painful writing on the web, you have to explore his Quietriot section. You need a password, but as long as you don’t actually know him in real life, he’s pretty cool about sending it out. Obviously I can’t go into detail about what he is going through at the moment – that would rather defeat the purpose of the password – but let’s just say that anyone who has ever been a teenager and in love will be able to relate to everything he says. In some ways it really reminds me of the writing I did when I was his age – I have these notepads hidden away somewhere at my parents where I used to write down all the things I couldn’t say in public. I read them now and again and they hit me like a ton of bricks.

I’ve just decided to join weblogs.com. I’ve been putting it off for weeks because I was stumped by the question “Describe your weblog”. I always find those questions both alarming and absurdly difficult – it’s like those bits on CVs (resumés for the Americans amongst us) where you have to explain why you are perfect for the job. They make me queasy. Anyway – this is what I have managed to come up with:

“A half-baked attempt to fuse personal writing on the web with commentary and links of a futurist, politicised and millennial nature.”

Andy at Dlog has responded to people’s criticisms of his weblog design reviews (including a slightly savage one from the real world). His reply is well considered and good reading. I was particularly gratified that he decided to clarify his criteria for review:

“Some people have voiced concern over how I’m judging the quality of a weblog based on design. I don’t think that’s the case, though – I’m just talking about the layout, the look of the page. As I mentioned earlier, Riothero is one of my favorite blogs. And kottke.org, for that matter, is a site I rarely visit. My stupid little “grading system” has nothing to do with how Good or Bad a blog is, just what I think of the design.”

As a final thought – a bizarre Invisibles Preview has appeared on ebay. Does anyone know anything about it? If so, let me know.

Before I get down to business (as it were), can someone explain to me how I have missed haughey.com after all these months of weblogging. I can’t even remember how I found it today. Very much worth a visit.

A day without blogger. And a difficult day it was too. My complete inability to update the site at lunchtime or before work has been profoundly frustrating. In general this has been a pretty weird day, and one that cannot hope but improve (that is of course assuming that my meeting with my new flatmates goes well). After that, I am off to the Liquid Lounge, before (possibly) heading on to Popstarz. I’m wearing a dark blue Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt with the number “36” on the back should anyone else be there.

What is it with A&F anyway? We don’t have them in the UK (so forgive my ignorance) – I picked up some of their clothes while in LA with Kerry and Sean. The catalogues are renowned for their homoerotic imagery (and with good reason), but they still seem to sell just as much to straight men of a pretty conservatively masculine disposition as they do to gay people.

A&F are basically part of the same trend in clothing that spawned the horror of the Evil Gap Clones – ie. everyone wearing the same thing – looking the same. This is a great source of horror to many people, and given my politics you might expect me to have a similar reaction. Weirdly though, I don’t – it’s almost as if clothes have become so generic that they have become invisible – for most of us they are no longer the demarcation points of culture or class. Perhaps homogeneity has resulted in a certain amount of liberation. Perhaps if we all wore the same thing….? On the other hand, I always have in the back of my mind the line from A Handmaid’s Tale – spoken by the arch-conservatives who want to ‘free’ women from dangerous things like ‘free will’ – that there are both freedoms to and freedoms from. It is the sign of the politically libertine to always aim for the former (“go libertines!”).

Homogeneity in and of itself shouldn’t be considered a bad thing – sometimes the act of mimicry inevitably carries with it a certain amount of irony. Take openlog for example – is this a piss-take, an affectionate (self?)tribute or a straightfoward design decision? It’s the same and yet because of its mimicry it has its own unique identity. [Check out kottke.org if you don’t know what I am talking about.]

Today began with a very sad event – a direct result of my vagrancy – somewhere in all the move I crushed one of the pairs of sunglasses I bought in LA. If I was of a more morbid disposition I would say it was symbolic.

I’m still at Chris’ place which is nice because he doesn’t expect me to go out and entertain him all the time and he likes watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is ultimate escapist entertainment. Tomorrow I’m on the move again though, which is exhausting – this time to Camden to stay with Liz. And of course I have my meeting with my new flatmates. The sooner I get a flat, the sooner I get my computer back. The sooner I get my computer back, the sooner I can finish the site (and the sooner I can get a good night’s sleep).

One thing I really need to know – does Darren of timemachinego go to the EasyEverything on Tottenham Court Road? Because if he does, I’d like to wave to him one day from the balcony at Time Out. Which reminds me – the website is currently running a online drugs poll which I worked on.