Category: Random

My posts have been so ridiculously long of late, that I have instituted horizontal rules between them to help people figure out which is which. My next plan – t-shirts that read “Tom is your friend” and “Tom loves you”…

God. There is just so much I want to get through today, and there just isn’t the slightest chance I am going to manage it. Potted summary of a couple of things:

• Birthday
  Oh god. I’m 28 on Wednesday. The fact horrifies me so completely it’s untrue. Anyway, I had a party on Saturday night which was really strange but quite entertaining. I don’t know that I have much to say about it though. Um. Nope.

• Interviewed by The Evening Standard
  Yesterday evening I went to be interviewed by a reporter for London’s Evening Standard, who was doing an article on weblogs and weblogging for the IT section. Katy is going to be interviewed as well, to get a “woman’s eye view”. I wonder if there actually is any difference between the genders in the weblogging stakes. It’s never even occurred to me. Anyway – we talked about a lot of weblogs – she knew a lot about the subject, but I’m afraid that my e-vangelical (sorry about the 90s style pun) enthusiasm about the web might have bored her slightly! Two full tapes (both sides) in her dictaphone later (and only one vodka and tonic) we finally part company. I told her if she wrote anything mean then I’d post her name, address and e-mail address up on the site and we’d go and sort her out. I was kidding of course…

• The Patriot
  I went to see this film finally, thinking that it couldn’t be possibly as bad as the English papers said that it was. It couldn’t be that offensive. Afterwards I went straight over to IMDB and wrote a scathing review of the film. Just in case they don’t publish it, here it is in full:

  I’ve never seen a film with such astonishing revisionist tendencies as The Patriot. Its slamming of the child-eating, church-burner, deviant British is pure racism, and based on eschewing American cultural responsibility for things like slavery. In the film the claymationalike Gabriel says something facetious like, “we are fighting for a new world, and things will be new in it, not like that silly old old world where they have slavery. we’ll not have any of that in the good old US of A”…
  The fact that the British outlawed slavery forty years before America apparently means nothing. And the fact that when the country actually got around to it they actually had to have another whole war because one side really wanted to keep African Americans in chains – these things mean nothing to the creators of the Patriot, who are only interested in playing the evil, corrupt, power crazed, racist big monarchist bad guys against the simple farmer folk who love black people and freedom and don’t really even WANT to fight and who are actually Australian in upbringing.
  As films go, this one is insulting to all concerned, and particularly insulting to history and vague formless notions like TRUTH and JUSTICE (and through association, we would LIKE to assume, the American way)…

• HSX
  Speaking of movie-related stuff, they have finally gotten around to redesigning HSX which is good. It’s still my favourite way of filling in a spare half hour or so, and I have so far managed to extend my initial $2 million investment up to a respectable $24 million. And all that without being in the country to feel the buzz on upcoming films…

• Meg 14 July
  And I thought everything had been resolved…

Finally, today I stumbled upon a weblog called Bad Blogs. And how did I stumble upon it? I did a search for barbelith at blogger and it came out top. And I quote: “Barbelith would usually escape our fire…” Phew! – thank goodness for that…

I’ve been looking for some coverage of the Yell Awards all over the place, but I can’t seem to find any at all. Has anyone actually seen anything about it anywhere on the web? [E-mail me]

[Being an expository piece investigating corporate web site hell and a scientific study of the effects of combined alcohol abuse, loud music and the presence of a television crew]

The Yell UK Web Awards is a pretty strange creature. Ostensibly for the public, and televised via BBC World to every single country in the world, except of course the UK, it is almost totally predominated by a corporate view of the web and what it is for. Not here do were have awards for the best designed site – no, here we have awards for the best web design agency. In fact only two of the twelve awards are really for sites which aren’t commercial, and these are named accordingly – “BEST PERSONAL SITE” (a fairly strange category which means any site NOT run by a large multinational) and “BEST SITE FROM A NON PROFIT MAKING ORGANISATION”, which of course prompts the standard jokes about Amazon, Last Minute and the inevitable Boo.com.

Into this corporate creature strides two representatives of timeout.com – one of which is my good self. The site is up for the award “BEST ENTERTAINMENT SITE”, which is extremely flattering, but a bit of a misnomer (yet again) for the Time Out site. [The awards are clearly geared towards “types of business” rather than on type of content.]

• Pullquote: Yell if you think Awards Ceremonies are Rubbish

Jonathon Ross was presenting the awards, and was generally pretty amusing, even though he was clearly reading mostly promotional fluff copy from Yell itself. Meanwhile, David and I were busy exploring the opportunities for drinking Vodka, which were surprisingly limited.

About halfway through the evening the award for “MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGY” arrives, and to my complete surprise, k10k are nominated. Finally, I think to myself, someone here who really deserves an award, who builds a highly creative site without expecting to become an e-millionaire out of it – someone who actually has passion for the medium.

Of course they don’t win. But I start hunting around the room to see if any of the people from the site are actually in the room. I can’t see any sight or sound of them. By this stage our quest for Vodka has driven David out of the TV studio itself and he is roaming the building looking for non-wine. A plan begins to form in my mind as I watch yet another corporate president expressing their delight in their award and thanking everyone who has worked hard to get them to float their IPO. I cease to be interested in what the representative of tescodirect.com might say.

• Pullquote: Mondus wins Yell Awards

David returns to the table – our barman has finally come up trumps, and I have text messaged David, “Vodka has arrived! Return to Base Camp immediately!” Time Out’s award is up next. I am increasingly nervous for some reason, particularly when I realise that I am going to go up on the stage with David and say a couple of words with him if we win. And win we do.

With my hands in my pockets I sheepishly follow the rather exuberant David up to the platform. We shake Mr Ross’ hand and David turns to the audience with a huge grin on his face, says that everyone seems to have been very serious, thanks Bart Simpson, Eric Cartman from South Park and the barman who supplied our “Special Water” and then stands aside.

Before they get a chance to turn on the dirge-like music which means our little speech-slot is over, I bounce over to the microphone. Lights shine in my face, and two hundred mildly drunk corporate people loom at me out of the darkness.

With mounting horror and staring resolutely at my feet I say something to the effect of: “The heart and soul of the net is the individual creative and personal website – and I’d just like to say that I’m delighted to see that all the representatives of the Personal category and particularly k10k have been recognised here tonight.”

Suddenly extremely embarrassed (and yet proud of myself) I stand aside, shake Jonathon Ross’s hand and stand for the press shots, looking as sheepish as I can possibly imagine. “Nice speech”, he says…

Considering my current ethical dilemma regarding redesigning, I was delighted to see that Weblog Wannabe is just going for it. Go for it, babe!

Quote of the night: “I’m sure that’s not words.” Name that film…

Kate and I just returned to the Wu-tang name-a-lizer site. Delighted to find out that our flatmate’s name translates into CHOCOLATELY SHATNER, which I believe is some kind of stomach disease or a reference to a Star Trek star’s sick fetish for Milky Ways (boom boom). Mella, we miss you… [Addendum: Apparently there is a weblog called Chocolately Shatner. Bizarre stuff, indeed…]

Thanks to jack for this:

“my post on friday about tabloid journalism and people being paid to write each other’s personal site content– it was a joke. ›i’m sorry if it wasn’t clear to all readers, because tom seems like a nice guy to me. ›i certainly have never been someone very good at detecting where fact and fiction start to blur for anyone besides myself, and even when i do, i sometimes like to take things over the line. ›..but jokes aren’t any good if you have to explain them, so i’ll just leave it at that. ›if i did, i’d have a bike i still wouldn’t peddle.

“i was not joking, however, about being single.”

So I spent last night watching Queer as Folk 2 [I love you Blackstar] with Mella, which made me want to go and blow up cars again, move to America and threaten people with guns. Before we decided on QAF though, we were considering watching The Breakfast Club, which we had purchased a couple of days beforehand. It’s one of Mella’s favourite absolute favourite films. I wonder how she’d feel about the threatened remake.

Personally I think that it would have to be considerably more sophisticated and nuanced a film to work today – particularly after the parody on Dawson’s Creek. And of course, the recent plethora of TV and film projects involving teenagers has spiralled since its lapse in the late 80s. Films like American Pie have already partially (re-)debunked the stereotypes of teenagers (geek, jock, brain, princess). Questions for the morning: Does a new Breakfast Club even have a role to play any more? If it does, can Alyson be in it?