Category: Random

British Telecom finally did something useful with the web. I know it is a shock, but it’s true! No longer will I be paying 50p a shot for directory enquiries when I can go to www.bt.com/phonenetuk.

Yesterday a new G4 arrived in TimeOut.com’s offices. I am in awe. Lust lust lust lust.

The point of weblogs is to talk about other weblogs – actually no, that is completely not the point. Still – never mind, eh? Metajohn thinks I am nice. Drat Fink has said in response to yesterdays ravings (and I quote): “i hate it when im confronted with intelligent thoughts on other blogs, then im forced to actually use my brain, which only reminds me that i hadnt been using it prior to that point”.

The domain name www.year2000.com has been put up for auction on eBay. I think bids closed at around $10,000,000 [Full Story]. Why do I suspect barbelith.com will never be worth a penny? Huh? Answer me that!

I am adding stuff to The Bomb as we speak. It might be in your best interests to go and have a look!

Powazek has politely pointed out that he has written two new pieces for sf stories. I am an idiot. While we are at it, why don’t you tell the fray where you were at midnight…

I wanted to get a new relaunched barbelith up today, but the site is so far away from being completed, that I just can’t. Which is a pity. Happy new Millennium people. Use it well.

Last night in a nutshell:

• 6:00 Start to get tense about various people not having contacted me about what I should be doing in the evening. Tension a direct result of over self-analysis in the face of large NUMBER.
• 7:00 Hear that the party that I thought started around 11pm, I shouldn’t be going to until 1pm having done SOMETHING ELSE. Desperately try to think of something else to do. Decide to join Toby in Central London.
• 7:30 Arrive in Central London – look around in an incredibly scared way. Trawl through mud to find several people I know sitting on inflatable sofa in Jubilee Gardens overlooking the Houses of Parliament and next to the London Eye ferris wheel.
• 8:00 Already slightly bored, I am delighted to see that something is actually going to happen as Tony Blair sends a signal from somewhere in London which starts the London Eye amid explosions of fireworks. It is very cold. There is a flyby by Concorde which is extremely noisy but completely invisible as the cloud is so heavy.
• 9:00 It’s even more cold now, and muddy and boring. Nothing is happening. Drink is scarce (which is partly my fault), but the absolute absence of anything to actually do is beginning to drive me insane.
• 9:30 My friend Fenner has a girlfriend called Sally. She has been wandering around for about an hour and a half trying to find him. She finds us just as he ducks off. She goes ballistic. He comes back, she is a pussycat. Women are weird.
• 10:00 People say that they want to walk around rather than sitting on inflatable sofa in middle of mud. Toby looks at them as if they are insane. Fenner admits to me that he is incredibly bored.
• 11:00 One hour to go and I suddenly realise that getting away from this central location after the fireworks is going to be appalling and will result in me being cold and bored for even longer than I feared. I suddenly decide that this is intolerable. Toby tells me that if I go anywhere else I will completely miss midnight. I decide that I don’t care and go for a wander. The crowds are incredible, heaving all over Central London. I go to Waterloo tube station, but they won’t let me in. I go to Waterloo bridge and it is closed for the night. They tell me that three bridges away you can cross the river. It’s half an hour walk which would leave me in completely the wrong part of London. I am trying to get to Bond Street to go to the party earlier than I was supposed to.
• 11:30 Getting increasingly convinced that I will miss midnight (but finding the running around much more interesting and warming than the sitting around) I finally find access to Waterloo Underground. It is all clean and new down underground, and almost completely empty because people are trying to get INTO London rather than out of it.
• 11:45 I arrive at Bond Street feeling mildly smug and wander down the road to the party. When I arrive I discover that it is a very small party which followed on from some kind of dinner party. I know almost no one there, but they are all really nice. The flat is astonishing and filled with very expensive looking period oil paintings, a dining room with dark mirrored walls and lots of strange corridors. Everyone is smoking and eating satsumas. I smoke a cigar for the first time ever and feel mildly ridiculous.
• 12:00 Midnight comes and I watch it on TV, while explaining to everyone exactly why I left the events we are watching in order to be at their party. They all ask about the people I am supposed to be there with. I look slightly sheepish and hope to myself that they will arrive shortly. Three major figures emerge at this point, Tiffany, who is a friend of a friend and extremely drunk (and who keeps changing the music on the stereo before her previous selection has even ended), Annie and her boyfriend Matt. Annie and Matt are both incredibly beautiful, with Matt being short with scruffy looking hair (which endears him to me immediately).
• 1:00 Kate and Nick arrive. Nick takes over immediately although he knows no one there at all. I gratefully recede into the background a little and try not to say anything too stupid. Kate and I play around like lunatics, giggling at straight men’s inability to dance.
• 2:30 I try to hide by myself for a while as I am suddenly tired and wishing that Max was with me, which he clearly isn’t. Get a bit maudlin. Three people come and insist on talking to me. I smile in a rather pale fashion and wish they would go away.
• 3:00 Kate, Nick and Tiffany decide that we should all go down to the river (which I left a mere 3 hours earlier). We never make it. Tiffany is too drunk and lears suggestively at every man we pass. Many of them lear back. Nick decides to be very ebullient to passers by. Kate handles everything extremely well, but is basically tolerating them. We walk around Central London for an hour without actually getting anywhere near the Thames.
• 4:00 Get on a night bus and arrive home around 4:30am!
• 11:30 Wake up. Have horrible lavatory related dietary problem. Decide to blame Toby’s cold sausages from many hours before. Go back to sleep.

How was it for you?

Today’s barbelith celebrates etoys decision not to press its utterly ridiculous law suit. Bear in mind though that the precedent probably still stands.

Oops. I accidentally wrote an epinion on Mystery Men.

Hey guess what! Everyone has cancelled! Instead of seeing Dogma, instead I am staying at home and throwing away all my old papers! I couldn’t be more thrilled…

So Barbelith is now getting more hits than The Bomb. Go figure. Plague marches on relentlessly. Managed to get to sleep at 3am, alarm set to 8am so that I can get the train back to my parents’ house in Norfolk. Note to self: buy cold pills immediately.

Why is it that I always seem to do my best design on other people’s sites? It’s only small, but check out the new student guide button on Time Out‘s site. I think it came out rather well.

Plague remains on periphery. Hopefully I will fight it off before it gets a chance to get a foothold. At least today is my last day at work before Christmas – so I can spend tonight watching TV in bed and wrapping presents. Easy, warm, health-producing activities.

There’s this wonderful thing in Baudrillard where he says that it is dull to think of the world as approaching an apocalypse, but much more interesting to work on the principle that it has already happened. There’s this wonderful thing in Grant Morrison’s work in which he talks about how the spiritual armageddon has come and gone and the physical world is just taking a long time to catch up. These ideas appeal to me. But as Y2K approaches, I can’t help wondering whether or not we will all be hunter gatherers in the months ahead. For more see fear2k.com.

So my throat is slowly closing up and I am having trouble swallowing. With three days to go until Christmas, could I really be finally getting the flu? Please god no.

Battled away with Neonlit at work today, despite the fact that there are endless other things I should be doing. Finally got it to a place that I am comfortable with. Take a look. Cheer me up.