One of those really nice things to happen to a guy when he’s not paying attention: Haddock’s hiatus page is all, you know, nice.
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Month: August 2001
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I've changed my mind. Now
I’ve changed my mind. Now I want to win.
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What happens if my flatmate moves out?
My flatmate is looking for a house. I should be happy for her, but I’m not. The reason? My current work state is so sporadic and occasional that I just can’t be sure that should she move out, and if I was then forced to move, that would be able to afford a flat or guarantee that I would get it. Every time she mentions it, I get a shiver of fear. What happens then? What would I do?
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Working from home, short of
Working from home, short of cash, recovering from houseguests, thinking about my future. There’s a fair amount of stuff in my head at the moment. I go out so infrequently at the moment (compounded by working from home) that I’ve almost forgotten what it is to enjoy other people’s company. It all seems like a tremendous hassle. And I wonder if it’s making me antisocial. Every so often I forget how comforting I find my own company. And then on other occasions it occurs to you that it’s a way of avoiding taking your place in the world. I think about what job I might get – whether the BBC will be interested in my application or not. And I think, if they are, what will it be like? Will it feel like I’m moving forward? Or am I killing time? And I think about love and sex and romance. And how I’ve decided against all of them. Or how they’ve decided against me. And how I’m happy with that. And I wonder, deep down, am I really?
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Looks like I'm not the
Looks like I’m not the only person with a love of Graceland.
Paul Simon: Graceland It’s 1986. I’m fourteen years old. I’ve had a few albums bought for me before, but I’m basically illiterate when it comes to popular music. I’m living in a village of eighty people, ten miles away from my nearest friend. My brother is one year old. I spend most of my time in my room – reading and listening to the radio. The outside world seems a hundred thousand miles away.
One day I buy Graceland. Essentially it’s the first album I ever really bought myself. And I got it because I’d heard ‘You Can Call Me Al’ on the radio. And I’d liked it. In many ways it set the tone for the rest of my teenage years – thoughtful before my time, disconnected from deep disturbing bodily urges, unsettled and slightly jaded.
There are a hundred times I can remember involving the album. I played it until the tape died. Then I waited a couple of years and bought the CD. It was an album that my mother listened to with me in her Vauxhall Astra on the way into school on frosty winter mornings, my legs only recently out of grey short-trousers. It was the album that played when Glyn, Simon and I wandered around the south of England in my rusty yellow Polo, when I was eighteen. As I get older I get less up-tight, less nervous. And Graceland grows with me.
“Over the mountain, down in the valley, lives a former talk show host. Everybody knows his name. He says there’s no doubt about it, It was the myth of fingerprints. I’ve seen them all and man, they’re all the same.”
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So, Blogger is two years
So, Blogger is two years old. Which means that this weblog can only be three months off from it’s second birthday as well. Originally known as barbelith, this weblog and I have had much fun with Blogger over the last couple of years. I’ve met a lot of people, written a hell of a lot of words and scratched together some fairly amiable designs along the way. I’m raising a glass and I’m saying cheers to everyone who remembers when Blogger looked like this (and this). Particularly to Megnut, Ev, Derek and Jason.
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The life cycle of a meme…
The life cycle of a meme: I’m currently obsessed by the NASA fakes Moonlanding page that has been circulating around the web recently. I first noticed it a few days ago on a routine trip to Brainsluice. Davo had been sent an e-mail with astonishingly amusing copy in it, and had decided to republish it. I read it, collapsed laughing and passed on. Next thing I saw, it was high in blogdex’s charts, and then I saw it on Metafilter. Several days later, it is still at #3 over at Blogdex and over thirty-eight separate sites are linking to it. The latest news is that it has apparently resurfaced ‘topside’ once more. Davo informs me that a friend of his received an e-mail linking to brainsluice.com, telling them to check out the moonlanding page.
Of course there are dangers associated with pages becoming wildly successful, the most significant of which is vast and unpleasant bandwidth bills. But most of us experience such surges only very occasionally (if at all). But the interesting thing for me in this is how you can almost track the spread of this page as it moves from site to site, language to language, and even begins to change media. Most interestingly, we remain unaware of the stories actual origins, although through some research I stumbled upon this Google cache of a page that is no longer up and running.
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Greetings from Thoco Horea, Setpolo
Greetings from Thoco Horea, Setpolo of Dutonin. [Discover your Star Wars name at parris.josh.com.au, via Lukelog and The Barbelith Underground.