I got my first incredibly offensive reaction to the weblog today:
“Please shoot yourself now. You should be ashamed of the shit that you put on this site. I know people that could do a much better job of it than you do (my six year old niece for one). I’m sure that Grant is sorry for endorsing your site.
Fucking do it right or fuck off and let someone who is actually a fan do it.”
Hey look – barbelith’s non-corporate art poll was clearly such a spankingly hot idea that it has been liberally appropriated by Vitaflo’s gorgeous site [HREF section].
In personal news, having decided to get over ex (Max) and thrown myself vigourously into the pursuit of new foxy people, I get an e-mail from him asking myself and Chris out for a drink. I reply to e-mail. No response. I ring him, he sounds pissed off with me. I give up. Understanding other people is too hard.
I accidentally wrote some epinions of: Moby, Play / Roswell High / Empire Strikes Back. Sorry!
First of three things to talk about today is a bit of an announcement. There will be a gathering for anyone who hangs out in The Nexus on February 4th at Popstarz in London. More information as I have it, but it should be a tremendous laugh with much drinking and the like. Drop me a line if you are interested!
Second thing is a little diary entry – and is also about Popstarz. On Friday night I went out for a drink with Nick E. to the Leisure Lounge and Popstarz. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be in the right kind of mood for all night clubbing, but it turned out that Nick was perfect company and we had a great time schmoozing and boozing. The club is about 60-70% gay, and Nick is about 95-100% straight, but he often seems to meet attractive and interesting women there.
Nick had told me earlier in the evening that he used to explain very firmly to any gentleman who flirted with him that he wasn’t interested, thanks very much, but that he had decided in recent months just to play along and flirt back for a while and then wander off with a smug smile on his face. I told him I thought this was reasonably dodgy and could really interfere with the cheeriness and good spirits of anyone foolish enough to find him attractive.
This night however, he found himself very squarely in the sights of a rather aimiable-looking 6’4″ besuited man. But appearances can be deceiving and within about five minutes, said collosal gentleman was exploring Nick’s body with an altogether unexpected enthusiasm. Nick looked very sheepish. Several times he gestured to me to save him from this situation, but I decided that (since all he had to do was say – oops … sorry … straight) he probably deserved it and could save himself. With a great big grin on my face I made a cod impression of someone who didn’t understand his request.
But Nick REFUSED to ‘fess up to the Giant Suit – and as time passed he got simultaneously more perturbed and amused by his situation. For an instant I turned away, and when I glanced back Nick was alone. He grinned a grin, and made a gesture of relief and we danced some more. Suddenly I find Giant Suit leering up behind me. Doubling over to reach my ear he whispers to me “Why did you have to have such a HOT boyfriend?!”.
Nick is in trouble.
Anyway – the rest of the evening was fun – I met a great guy from the LSE with whom I spent an entertaining evening and whom I wish I could see again, but don’t think I will. I could tell you more, but I don’t think I will. All in all a pretty entertaining few hours.
Finally, on a rather more geeky note, I have been looking at iSyndicate Affiliates (which was designed by our esteemed colleague at powazek.com) in preparation for the big redesign challenge I am setting myself. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen many of their affiliates out there in the real world, which made me wonder if they would be of any use to me at all.
So I was interested when today I was sent the URL for a site called Fragile Minds which uses similar newsfeeds from places like moreover.com. Fragile Minds is an interesting site which illustrates that one an use these newsfeeds not just to replicate the content of the information provider but to allow you to produce a site in which everything you create is new, while still offering more of a service to the people who read your site.
I’m still not totally convinced by such newsfeeds, but it is cool that there are decent sites out there using them.
So that’s it for today – quite an epic post – much longer than normal. Hope you are all having a good weekend!
I don’t mean to be churlish, but how come for the last week barbelith has been getting about 150 visitors a day, and then yesterday suddenly gets over 300?! There’s no evidence in the referrer log. What on earth is going on?
I have been separated from most of my e-mail because of a problem with my ISP. I can still receive it, but I can’t easily reply, which leaves me feeling more than a little cyberimpotent.
I have been looking over sites that I built nearly a year ago now, and I can’t help thinking that they were rather better than the crap I am building at the moment. I mean The Bomb looks pretty hot, but started around that time, I still think The Nexus looks like complete arse (particularly when compared with glassdog.org and Barbelith itself is little more than a gaudy stopgap.
So to help myself get myself back on form I have decided to upload one of my older projects Fin de Siecle to the site – it probably won’t be updated any more in its current form (it was far far too much work), but hopefully it will inspire me to get around to rebuilding it, and the other parts of the site that are in desperate need. Whatever happened to Microlith, Dice Man etc etc? Well – I need about four months off work to get them up and running as well!
So go and check out the old Fin de Siecle and let me know what you think of it. I’ll try and get the new one up and running sometime before July… (!)
Time Out’s reviewers have reached new heights of perfection. The new Pet Shop Boy’s single “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You Are Drunk” is described as: “More dirty grunting fuckpig pop from the leathered-up and greased-down mule-bucket gore-hounds.” What can I say?
As far as I am concerned, the only news of the day is AOL buying Time Warner. A few months ago people were talking about how large media companies would be buying up Internet companies, but now it looks like the world is moving in another direction. AOL is already worth almost half as much again as Time Warner, which counts amongst its acquisitions an American TV Network, an international chain of shops and cinemas, Warner Bros films (who made The Matrix), Time magazine and DC Comics amongst many others. AOL on the other hand owns Netscape, ICQ and now has a controlling interest in the newly merged company. And this company is affiliated with Sun Microsystems, both of them allied against Microsoft‘s domination of the computing operating system market.
Things are just getting interesting…
Under strick instructions from Jason Kottke I went and checked out Matt Groening’s Top Ten Simpsons Episodes. I don’t agree with a couple of them – Frank Grimes was appalling – but there are some classic moments here. “We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us!”.
What kind of advice is this: Mystery Meat Navigation: An Introduction. People are always asking me, “What’s the best site on the Web?” My response is “There is no best site because the best site is the one that as soon as someone clicks a link to go there, money is automatically sucked out of their wallet.”?
Well I am afraid Barbelith operates on a non-corporate principle, as I think do most of the very best sites on the net (at least the ones that I visit). So I am therefore more than happy to be (in the words of the man who I quote above) a web site that sucks.