Month: April 2001

So it looks like there was an article on weblogs in a recent issue of Yahoo Internet Life. Has anyone scanned this in or transcribed it yet?

About three hours ago I had a surprise conversation with Demolition Derby. It was a bit out of the blue – Dan and Matt were going to the Popbitch party and wanted to know if I would go along. But the conversation didn’t go too well. Things strayed within a thousand miles of a sensitive subject, and I suddenly felt bile rise within me (about the subject not Ms D). I had no idea that such an immediate and strong reaction was possible. I don’t know that I’m comfortable even being able to feel such blind aggression and bitterness.

I was a Teenage Sexualist: I went to see the American version of Queer As Folk at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival a while back, and for me one of the most amusing parts was the peculiar significance of a magazine photograph of Patrick Swayze in the life of two burgeoning masculine sexualities. This led me to think back to my youth, dim and distant though it might be, and to attempt to remember what impacted upon my naive sex-scape.

The first thing I remember having a … strange … significance was a teen book about two boys who fell through a ball of energy in a woodland and emerged in Ancient Rome. I remember very little about it, except that the two boys clearly came from some kind of parallel world because they kept talking about how where they came from, the ancient culture that followed Hellenism was centred around Reme, rather than Rome. It doesn’t sound very sexy, but it worked for me. [Do you know the name of this book?]

Two other things, I am, however, quite clear about. The first was a bizarre piece of SF called Planet of the Warlord. It’s the closest thing to a weird hot S&M fantasy you can imagine. The cover of the copy that I still own has a huge golden masculine robotic body (with a diseased grey face emerging from it) attempting to crush our long-haired hero, Keill Randor above a pit of almost pubic tendrils. Douglas Hill was clearly a bit of a pervert, but the book is extraordinarily strangely sexual. I’m horrief that I’m revealing too much here. You will stop me if I go too far, won’t you?

The other thing was, I’m afraid, Cocoon. I’m not proud, but there it is. And before you ask, no I did not find Don Ameche particularly arousing. But it is a film full of short, scruffy, Steve Guttenberg goodness. Mostly naked goodness at that – except for the odd tight t-shirt. And you must never forget that extraordinary alien sex scene with the injection moulded female. This may have formed the basis of many a pointless crush for years to come. Short, pointless, irritating. Come to think of it, teenage fetishes have a lot to answer for.

[Darren was a teenage sexualist as well.]

Last night my complete over-whelming exhaustion caught up with me finally. I went out for a drink with Meg, Luke, Davo and Catherine at the O2 centre on Finchley Road. After precisely two cocktails, I couldn’t stand and became gradually more maudlin. They persuaded me to go back to their flat for a bacon buttie – almost the only thing I’d eaten all day – by which time my fingers were getting cold and numb. When I finally got home at 10.30pm I collapsed in bed and slept for nearly ten hours.

Thanks to my helpful contact at AOL, I now have access to a really good ArsDigita article on HTML e-mail. This confronts most of the issues associated with the subject, and is very much worth a read. [Another article]

Can someone explain this to me? If merely having images of a paedophilic nature on one’s computer is a crime (no matter the context), then how can Jack Straw say, “I’ve seen some of the exhibits – if you can call them that – that are available on the internet, that are run by paedophiles. They really are absolutely appalling” without being promptly arrested? Any decent civil liberties group should be pointing the police in the direction of his PC.

So my old employers, Time Out, have finally launched their first city guide in the new style that I had a part in assembling. Certain things seem to have been lost in the shakedown process, but it still just about works. There’s a few things that I am a bit confused about, to do with continuity over the site and things that I expected to be brought into line over the site before launch, but it’s worth a look nonetheless.

Urgent: I’m looking for a site which gives the lowdown on producing well formatted HTML templates, complete with a website’s look-and-feel, but which don’t break in hotmail, Yahoo! mail and Outlook / Outlook Express. The best I’ve come up with so far is a fairly lacklustre article from Webmonkey.

Found in Inbox: Someone sent me this a while back, and I forwarded it to another one of my e-mail addresses because I was at work or something, and now I don’t know who did it. If it was you mail me. Anyway – having stumbled upon it once more, I thought I should share it with the world. It really is strangely apposite [Addendum: The source of this particular image is young Meg]:

The Guardian’s Ethical Conundrums presents us with the question: How do you mend a broken heart? My favourite answer to this, because it amuses me, not because I’d do it, is: “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone….”