I’d just like to say thanks to Ralph and Simon for respectively trying to knock some sense into me and cheer me up. Despite their valiant efforts I remain, as ever, your obedient miserable narcissist.
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Month: February 2001
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Buy No Logo…
I don’t know when it came out, but the new edition of Naomi Klein’s No Logo is now available, and should really be required reading for everyone who is sick of being sold to all the time, or resents the human rights violations of multi-nationals in the developing world.
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From when Tom visited Los Angeles…
In February of 2001, shortly before running screaming from my job at Time Out, I ran away to Los Angeles. My hosts Kerry and Sean reintroduced me to the wonders of the west coast.
There was a series of ads running on billboards all across LA – this one particularly amused me. The thing I can never get over about Los Angeles is the sky. After a while in London you completely forget it’s there.
On the left we have the immortal Kerry Bailey, looking a little the worse for wear. He also looks like he’s barely tolerating my photography. Which is almost certainly true. On the right we have the Texan Sean Nadeau. The picture on the right is most notable for the small street sign that appears to be hovering permanently by Sean’s right ear.
Just in case you haven’t realised, Kerry and Sean are gay.
LA isn’t really the kind of place that you just go wandering around in on foot. But I didn’t have a car, and to give my hosts a break I wandered off every so often. This picture pretty much encapsulates LA for me -the sky, the tress, the grid of cables. Maybe I’m missing the point. Perhaps the following pictures are closer to the reality of LA life…
One of the best days I had in LA involved meeting up with some of the freaks from Barbelith. It wasn’t an entirely easy meet to arrange, and when I finally found the bar that we were to meet at, there was no one there. I wandered off and sat in a net café for a couple of hours. When I returned there were several weirdos to talk to. Excellent. These pictures that follow are from the rest of that day…
And here’s Anna and Ralphy:
Also on that day I saw this store:
Near the end of my stay with the Bailey-Nadeau’s, Kerry took me to the Sony lot to spy on what was going down. On the way back to the car I took a couple of photos that I love, but can’t really explain why…
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On 'Phatic language'…
Further to the Signal to Noise post I made earlier in the day, Ian from Blogadoon has pointed me in the direction of xrefer.com‘s definition of ‘Phatic language’.
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On the Pixies…
The best band the world has ever seen release an album of their b-sides. It must be nearly a decade since they split up, but The Pixies still heavily occupy my mental landscape.
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Buffy the Streetwalker…
Entertainment Newsflash: ‘Buffy slapped by watchdogs for being too sexually explicit.’ And thus proves that my old flatmate Pippa’s descriptions of her as “Buffy the Street-Walker” aren’t too far off the mark. In other Buffy news: “Sarah Michelle Gellar, the karate-kicking star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is to star in a film version of Scooby-Doo, alongside boyfriend Freddie Prinze Jr.” [BBC News] and “The Pagan Federation, which represents druids and witches, says it has been “swamped” with calls following teenage programmes featuring good witches.” [BBC News]
Inspired by this post over in a thread at Metafilter about the signal to noise ration of community sites (which reminds me of this thread over at barbelith.com) I am beginning to think through the implications of information transmission and its relationship to community. Imagine two nodes on the net – designed essentially just to send information from one to another. Additional information is also transmitted however – information on the relationship between nodes, information on whether a packet has been received or not etc. This relationship is very similar to that of community sites – a site which merely transmits information is not, and cannot be a community site. Nor indeed can an individual who merely transmits information be considered part of a community. To an extent the ‘noise’ is more a staple of the community than the information – it may appear like meme fluff – unnecessary – but it’s the stuff that transmits information about disposition, affiliation, loyalty, relationships both in terms of expressing oneself, and developing one’s relationship with others. So the question becomes: what is the appropriate ratio of signal to noise?
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Never going to be famous…
It’s slowly beginning to dawn on me that I’m never going to be famous, I’m never going to be truly exceptional, or lauded over – I’m never going to travel to the moon, I’m never going to kill someone, I’m never going to gazelle on stage. This may be one of the most crushing realisations of my life.
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On Connect Flo…
The terrifyingly able Pixelflo collective present their latest project: Connect Flo. Whatever the strategy that the computer uses is certainly effective. I may be only a beginner, but I haven’t beaten it once!
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Rebirthing pure browsing via randomness…
I’ve been playing with my Surprise Me bookmarklet over at the Google Directory in an attempt to experience some parts of the internet that I wouldn’t normally think of going to. My particular favourite random destinations so far have been: Yahoo! Clubs: nosprogs (“Welcome to the club that actively opposes squirting out spawn…”), Chowbaby‘s restaurant guide (with possibly the strangest logo of all time) and a recipe for Baked Ham with a Secret Glaze (somewhat oxymoronic considering that it tells you how to make said Glaze). It’s a refreshing approach to the internet – rebirthing pure browsing as a recreational activity.