Category: Random

ANNOUNCEMENT: The first multi-national IRL meeting of The Nexus will be taking place this coming Friday (4th February) at various locations across the globe. Check The Nexus for details of local meetings.

For those of you in London – many of us (hopefully) will be meeting at the Leisure Lounge in King’s Cross before proceeding to Popstarz’s new home at The Scala. These are indie/alternative nights at mixed gay/straight venues. I will be at the Leisure Lounge from about 8.30pm and I don’t expect to leave the club until approaching 5am the following day. I have no idea how I will recognise people, although someone suggested that we all wear black trousers and t-shirts, which is an intriguing mixture of Left-Bank Existentialist Philosopher and Denizen of Geekworld. If anyone wants more details, then just drop me a line at tom – at – barbelith.com – otherwise I look forward to seeing you there.

I’ll stick up another reminder on Friday morning!

So The Bomb was indeed on TV last night. Slightly bizarre seeing my work up on the screen. Certainly not unpleasant, but strange nonetheless.

I have about a thousand links that I have been building up over the last week or so, but I am going to save all of them until tomorrow. Instead a quick bit of boring life monologue. Feel free to barf if it gets too self-indulgent.

For the first time in nearly a month, I am at home on a Friday night. I hate being at home on a Friday night. Cos then Saturday morning just oozes past so slowly and suddenly you only have a day left before work begins. Today’s reason is as amusing as ever. I decide it would be a cool thing (you know – meet knew people, show Max how cool I am with the whole not going out this) to hang out with Max and friends – and drop him a note seeing what he is doing this evening. He says that he’ll ring me today. And then he doesn’t ring. At 5 I think I should find out what he is up to so I ring him. He sounds flustered and then says that on second thoughts it probably isn’t the best idea if I go out this evening since he is trying to line up another guy. So I am left on a Friday night with nothing to do but sit around thinking about Max sleeping with other people. There’s a fun evening for you.

Still I might manage to wangle a drink out of Evil Nick if I get a chance. Only time will tell.

So an incredibly cool thing might be about to happen to me. Channel Four have a late night slot called 4 later. On this slot is a TV program called Disinfo Nation which is hosted by Richard Metzger with whom I have (many moons ago) had many an e-chat. Anyway – so I am checking my referrers log when I stumble upon the page above, in which tonight’s episode is said to include (and I quote):

“Websites of the week belong to The Bomb, a fan site dedicated for Grant Morrison’s cult comic book The Invisibles (which contains an amusing “Dress Up Lord Fanny” cartoon game), plus porn queen Rebecca Lord’s own informative sleaze site (in which she doubtless dresses up her own Lord “F”, just not in such amusing colours…)”

It looks like The Bomb is going to be on TV! Set your videos for 00.45am on Channel 4 (UK).

Mini Bio: Richard Metzger was in charge of scamming the corporate weirdos into funding disinformation before they freaked when they saw what he had done with it. Needless to say they let him, the company and quite a large amount of money go in one fell swoop. Metzger managed to get vast amounts of publicity and tapped into the zeitgeist that also abortively produced The X-files to produce a site that actually made money. He’s now merged with the omni-directional Razorfish SubNetwork, but we don’t blame him for that in any way.

There’s so much more I want to talk about, but I haven’t got time. Brief personal news items for those of you that care:

• Kate and Manuella look like they are not going to be ready to move into a flat when I need to which means I am back to tromping around North London.
• Job goes through ups and downs (as ever) although at the moment I seem to be in a bit of an up.
• General background tension at a high at the moment, which makes me too sensitive to the whims of fortune – leading to frantic desire to go out and pull someone in order to reassert claim to being reasonably attractive. Except I know I am utterly unattractive when in these moods – irony hasn’t escaped me.
• Managed to make my hair look good for about twenty minutes this afternoon, which is a record for the month. Have taken this as a good sign and am proud of myself.

The net gets younger and younger. Riot Hero is still at school (15! 15!) and is producing an above average weblog dripping with interesting little tricks and techniques. It’s enough to make you feel practically octogenarian. He’s never even eaten a lima bean.

Interesting day – I met up with a guy I knew MANY years ago at Bristol. Very interesting day indeed.

This is a brief quote from the weblog at the beginning of November: “So – everyone on the Nexus hates the new look for this site. Which is a bit disappointing, I have to admit. It seems slightly pathetic to actually ask people for nice comments. [10:49:17 AM]” Opinions are mixed on the new look as well. Very strange day. Very strange day indeed.

American Beauty [Non-Official/Official] won three Golden Globes. My friend Katy designed a really impressive site for the film. My other friend Kate has a friend called Tara who is also really cool, pretty scary and inspired the phrase “GODZILLA! / tiny japanese village” (don’t ask). She also worked on the film. We all wish her the very best. Very exciting times indeed…

Hey kids – look! I am in the middle of redesigning The Nexus.

I’m not normally one for this kind of thing, but someone suggested I have a look – and what do you know – it looks just like BARBELITH.

I have decided to have a policy in which I suggest links at the top of each new entry and those few of you who want to follow the unending soap opera of my life can then read on into the paragraphs below.

Biggest worry of the week is film censorship. There’s this really interesting article about a film which has just been banned outright in Australia (disinformation). This comes at the same time that standards in the UK seem to be relaxing (with the release of films like Head On). I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks that an adult should have no restrictions on what they CAN see, and that they should figure out for themselves what they WANT to see. Doesn’t seem very tricky to me at all!

What have I been up to? I went for a drink with Evil Michael after work on Friday at the Leisure Lounge in King’s Cross. He was great fun for a while, but became increasingly irritable and aggressive the more drunk he became. I get a little worried about him at these times, and frankly I don’t know what to do about it. I then decamped to Popstarz, which was exhausting, but fun, and having been drinking for eight and a half hours I decided I should go home – only to discover that my landlord had wandered into my place, knocked a couple of things over, stood on a plate and removed my blinds without asking me. Since I have no curtains and face the sunrise, my actual sleep amounted to about two hours. And while I was hiding under the duvet from the world, Evil Michael rang at 9am forcing me to shout at him a lot.

Saturday night was spent with Max, with long and intense conversations in which I said that I didn’t think I should see him for a while. He got a little upset by this, said OK, then we went to a late night showing of the Matrix and he rang me the next morning. All very strange.

Flat problems may be getting gradually closer to being resolved. Kate has suggested we talk about the possibilities of living together and with Manuella. I am more than happy to do this, except for the fact that they don’t want to do it as quickly as I do (which means that I might have to live on people’s floors for a couple of weeks – gulp). Still – at least it’s a move in the right direction.

Shit. Tom wasted a morning writing a review of The Pixie’s last album Trompe Le Monde.

I am at home today writing epinions and thinking. It’s been a funny month/year/decade/century/millennium so far – in fact in many ways it has been downright unpleasant. A lot of my friends are reporting the same feeling of being lost, almost desperate for ‘something’. I wonder if we wanted things resolved before the new year that just couldn’t be resolved, and now we are coping with the fallout from our clumsy attempts to resolve them. To those of you who feel the edges of a spiritual apocalypse – good luck.

Word used to be a visually and intellectually stimulating place to be. Now I must confess I can’t be bothered to read it. The knock-off Yahoo! look is so offensively dull when divorced from the pure functionality of the directory itself that it actively discourages me from reading the articles. Powazek is getting quite heated about their designers, and I have to say that generally I pretty much agree with him.

So I got a note from my Landlord:

“An old friend has been calling me over the past couple of weeks saying that he desperately needs accommodation as soon as possible. He has asked me if I have any space and I feel that I would like to help him out. I’m afraid that I will therefore have to ask you to vacate the room. I’m sorry if this causes you any problems and is disruptive for you, and I’m sorry to break the news to you in this way, but I hardly ever see you to talk to these days! Please retain this month’s rental as return of your deposit and let me know as soon as possible when the room will be free. I am out this evening, but will be around tomorrow morning if there is anything you would like to discuss.”

I think I might have to give up reading. I’m sick of bad news.