Month: March 2001

Desperately Seeking Support for the Barbelith Underground which is throwing up errors and error messages 24 hours a day. Read about the problems in full at the Ultimate Bulletin Board Support Forums. E-mail me if you have any suggestions.

My escalator incident yesterday triggered a whole range of thoughts, which on my return to the flat I had to commit to paper immediately. The feeling of forward thrust that I hypothesized might be a direct consequence of imminent disaster made me think about ‘catastrophe’ as a concept.

I have spent a great deal of my life working on Ancient Greece, in fact I’d had over eleven years of study of the classics when I left my incomplete doctorate aged 25. Since then my knowledge has decayed a fair amount, but I can still tell a word with a Greek root when I hear it and I was also expecting theatrical resonances because of the term ‘strophe’, which is often used to describe a type of choral ode. I was nonetheless fascinated by the results of a search on the web:

From Dictionary.com:

1. A great, often sudden calamity.
2. A complete failure; a fiasco: The food was cold, the guests quarreled – the whole dinner was a catastrophe.
3. The concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy, following the climax and containing a resolution of the plot.
4. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; a cataclysm.

Last week I posted Cal’s novel solution to my little riddle – completely written in Perl. Now Ben has refined the code still further: plasticgame.txt

Congratulations to Prol on being mentioned (with link) on Wired.com: “Hitching a World-Wide Ride on Web”.

“Beware the bottled thoughts of angry young men. Secret compartments hide all of the skeletons.” [Jeff Buckley: Nightmares By The Sea]

Scott McCloud, godlike genius behind Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics has a particularly well developed web-presence, my favourite part of which (found via haddock.org) is the Giant-Size Choose Your Own Carl.

So I decided (inspired by Jason‘s third birthday to have a roam through his archives. Of all the entries, this one has had most impact on me so far. This is exactly where I feel myself to be at the moment. “Two or three weeks off to walk the earth.”

Courtesy of idiote.org: A song in french about plastic bags – a song with a startling hidden meaning.

Matt has taken Metafilter down for the weekend to do some maintenance and hardware / software improvements. But he hasn’t just thrown up a ‘closed’ or ‘under construction’ page – instead he’s taken the opportunity to celebrate Two Years of Metafilter.

8.30pm Friday: Yesterday evening I was travelling up the escalator in Maida Vale tube on my way home. Halfway up, I felt this strange sensation – as if some force behind me was gently pushing me faster than everyone else. For a fraction of a second, I didn’t know what was happening, but then the escalator gently slid to a halt. Like a car braking suddenly and its passengers being thrust forwards, my feeling had been the consequence of a sudden deceleration rather than a speeding-up. This has never happened to me on an escalator before. And it suddenly got me thinking about the sensation associated with things ending or breaking. Maybe there’s always a sensation of oneself moving forward – a positive feeling of individual movement, or progress – in the moment when the rest of the world suddenly slows and stops.

8.30am Saturday: Despite being awake until 3.30 am in the morning, I rise early when the postman arrives. There’s a letter from AOL in the post rejecting me for the role of Broadband Producer. I am surprised by how disappointed I am. I have several potential job opportunities around at the moment, but none excited me anywhere near as much as this one. It seemed to me something I could get passionate about – something exciting that I could excel at.