Year: 2000

I’m not normally one for this kind of thing, but someone suggested I have a look – and what do you know – it looks just like BARBELITH.

I have decided to have a policy in which I suggest links at the top of each new entry and those few of you who want to follow the unending soap opera of my life can then read on into the paragraphs below.

Biggest worry of the week is film censorship. There’s this really interesting article about a film which has just been banned outright in Australia (disinformation). This comes at the same time that standards in the UK seem to be relaxing (with the release of films like Head On). I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks that an adult should have no restrictions on what they CAN see, and that they should figure out for themselves what they WANT to see. Doesn’t seem very tricky to me at all!

What have I been up to? I went for a drink with Evil Michael after work on Friday at the Leisure Lounge in King’s Cross. He was great fun for a while, but became increasingly irritable and aggressive the more drunk he became. I get a little worried about him at these times, and frankly I don’t know what to do about it. I then decamped to Popstarz, which was exhausting, but fun, and having been drinking for eight and a half hours I decided I should go home – only to discover that my landlord had wandered into my place, knocked a couple of things over, stood on a plate and removed my blinds without asking me. Since I have no curtains and face the sunrise, my actual sleep amounted to about two hours. And while I was hiding under the duvet from the world, Evil Michael rang at 9am forcing me to shout at him a lot.

Saturday night was spent with Max, with long and intense conversations in which I said that I didn’t think I should see him for a while. He got a little upset by this, said OK, then we went to a late night showing of the Matrix and he rang me the next morning. All very strange.

Flat problems may be getting gradually closer to being resolved. Kate has suggested we talk about the possibilities of living together and with Manuella. I am more than happy to do this, except for the fact that they don’t want to do it as quickly as I do (which means that I might have to live on people’s floors for a couple of weeks – gulp). Still – at least it’s a move in the right direction.

Shit. Tom wasted a morning writing a review of The Pixie’s last album Trompe Le Monde.

I am at home today writing epinions and thinking. It’s been a funny month/year/decade/century/millennium so far – in fact in many ways it has been downright unpleasant. A lot of my friends are reporting the same feeling of being lost, almost desperate for ‘something’. I wonder if we wanted things resolved before the new year that just couldn’t be resolved, and now we are coping with the fallout from our clumsy attempts to resolve them. To those of you who feel the edges of a spiritual apocalypse – good luck.

Word used to be a visually and intellectually stimulating place to be. Now I must confess I can’t be bothered to read it. The knock-off Yahoo! look is so offensively dull when divorced from the pure functionality of the directory itself that it actively discourages me from reading the articles. Powazek is getting quite heated about their designers, and I have to say that generally I pretty much agree with him.

So I got a note from my Landlord:

“An old friend has been calling me over the past couple of weeks saying that he desperately needs accommodation as soon as possible. He has asked me if I have any space and I feel that I would like to help him out. I’m afraid that I will therefore have to ask you to vacate the room. I’m sorry if this causes you any problems and is disruptive for you, and I’m sorry to break the news to you in this way, but I hardly ever see you to talk to these days! Please retain this month’s rental as return of your deposit and let me know as soon as possible when the room will be free. I am out this evening, but will be around tomorrow morning if there is anything you would like to discuss.”

I think I might have to give up reading. I’m sick of bad news.

I got my first incredibly offensive reaction to the weblog today:

“Please shoot yourself now. You should be ashamed of the shit that you put on this site. I know people that could do a much better job of it than you do (my six year old niece for one). I’m sure that Grant is sorry for endorsing your site.
Fucking do it right or fuck off and let someone who is actually a fan do it.”

Hey look – barbelith’s non-corporate art poll was clearly such a spankingly hot idea that it has been liberally appropriated by Vitaflo’s gorgeous site [HREF section].

In personal news, having decided to get over ex (Max) and thrown myself vigourously into the pursuit of new foxy people, I get an e-mail from him asking myself and Chris out for a drink. I reply to e-mail. No response. I ring him, he sounds pissed off with me. I give up. Understanding other people is too hard.

I accidentally wrote some epinions of: Moby, Play / Roswell High / Empire Strikes Back. Sorry!

First of three things to talk about today is a bit of an announcement. There will be a gathering for anyone who hangs out in The Nexus on February 4th at Popstarz in London. More information as I have it, but it should be a tremendous laugh with much drinking and the like. Drop me a line if you are interested!

Second thing is a little diary entry – and is also about Popstarz. On Friday night I went out for a drink with Nick E. to the Leisure Lounge and Popstarz. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be in the right kind of mood for all night clubbing, but it turned out that Nick was perfect company and we had a great time schmoozing and boozing. The club is about 60-70% gay, and Nick is about 95-100% straight, but he often seems to meet attractive and interesting women there.

Nick had told me earlier in the evening that he used to explain very firmly to any gentleman who flirted with him that he wasn’t interested, thanks very much, but that he had decided in recent months just to play along and flirt back for a while and then wander off with a smug smile on his face. I told him I thought this was reasonably dodgy and could really interfere with the cheeriness and good spirits of anyone foolish enough to find him attractive.

This night however, he found himself very squarely in the sights of a rather aimiable-looking 6’4″ besuited man. But appearances can be deceiving and within about five minutes, said collosal gentleman was exploring Nick’s body with an altogether unexpected enthusiasm. Nick looked very sheepish. Several times he gestured to me to save him from this situation, but I decided that (since all he had to do was say – oops … sorry … straight) he probably deserved it and could save himself. With a great big grin on my face I made a cod impression of someone who didn’t understand his request.

But Nick REFUSED to ‘fess up to the Giant Suit – and as time passed he got simultaneously more perturbed and amused by his situation. For an instant I turned away, and when I glanced back Nick was alone. He grinned a grin, and made a gesture of relief and we danced some more. Suddenly I find Giant Suit leering up behind me. Doubling over to reach my ear he whispers to me “Why did you have to have such a HOT boyfriend?!”.

Nick is in trouble.

Anyway – the rest of the evening was fun – I met a great guy from the LSE with whom I spent an entertaining evening and whom I wish I could see again, but don’t think I will. I could tell you more, but I don’t think I will. All in all a pretty entertaining few hours.

Finally, on a rather more geeky note, I have been looking at iSyndicate Affiliates (which was designed by our esteemed colleague at powazek.com) in preparation for the big redesign challenge I am setting myself. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen many of their affiliates out there in the real world, which made me wonder if they would be of any use to me at all.

So I was interested when today I was sent the URL for a site called Fragile Minds which uses similar newsfeeds from places like moreover.com. Fragile Minds is an interesting site which illustrates that one an use these newsfeeds not just to replicate the content of the information provider but to allow you to produce a site in which everything you create is new, while still offering more of a service to the people who read your site.

I’m still not totally convinced by such newsfeeds, but it is cool that there are decent sites out there using them.

So that’s it for today – quite an epic post – much longer than normal. Hope you are all having a good weekend!

I don’t mean to be churlish, but how come for the last week barbelith has been getting about 150 visitors a day, and then yesterday suddenly gets over 300?! There’s no evidence in the referrer log. What on earth is going on?

I have been separated from most of my e-mail because of a problem with my ISP. I can still receive it, but I can’t easily reply, which leaves me feeling more than a little cyberimpotent.

I have been looking over sites that I built nearly a year ago now, and I can’t help thinking that they were rather better than the crap I am building at the moment. I mean The Bomb looks pretty hot, but started around that time, I still think The Nexus looks like complete arse (particularly when compared with glassdog.org and Barbelith itself is little more than a gaudy stopgap.

So to help myself get myself back on form I have decided to upload one of my older projects Fin de Siecle to the site – it probably won’t be updated any more in its current form (it was far far too much work), but hopefully it will inspire me to get around to rebuilding it, and the other parts of the site that are in desperate need. Whatever happened to Microlith, Dice Man etc etc? Well – I need about four months off work to get them up and running as well!

So go and check out the old Fin de Siecle and let me know what you think of it. I’ll try and get the new one up and running sometime before July… (!)