Category: Random

• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events Being an episodic and not entirely functional film for children, whose unexpectedly dark, macabre, mournful and witty elements are easily worth the price of admission…
• PopCultureShock interviews Mark Millar “You create these books in a bubble so when I heard from Sam Jackson’s wife that he loves Ultimates or Affleck says he collects Marvel Knights Spider-Man or something I always feel like I’m getting Punk’d.”
• Jon Snow to host New Year’s Eve “Man only” version of Women’s Hour “Snow, who confesses to being hopeless in the kitchen, will also learn how to cook roast partridge under the tutelage of chef Tom Norrington-Davies, and will ask why women spend so long in the bathroom and run up such large phone bills.”
• Ashley Highfield interviewed by Media Guardian “If there is a more muted mood blowing through the BBC corridors, someone has forgotten to tell the ebullient director of new media, Ashley Highfield.”
• Richard MacManus reposts comments by Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web “The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can.”
• Oldie but goodie – images glued together to create an endless trippy experience of travelling through imagery Totally stunning and involving and connected to some stuff I’m indirectly involved in at work at the moment.
• What the hell does being gay have to do with getting a job? So here we go – some bloke on a website decides to give me a hard time for mentioning that I’m gay on a mock-up of a business card. As usual the crime is forcing my sexuality down his throat. Get. A. Job.
• Kerry (gay) and Mike (not gay) go to Hooters This naturally begs the question of, “why would a gay man suggest a place like Hooters?” Well you can ask him yourself if you like, but my guess is that he wanted to see if the world would explode when we stepped foot through the door.
• Exquisite Corpse Another blast-from-the-past with the Exquisite Corpse project where people submitted slice-like sections of imagery to produce composite beautiful art projects…
• Name the @ sign I think the name should reflect name and function, ideally. ‘peralpha’ would be a bit of a bastardisation of ‘surrounding an a’, but I prefer diangle or diasper which should be something related to the greek verb ‘to circulate’…

Tongue-in-cheek-ish slightly-bored early-evening version of what I would kind of like my business card to be like. Potentially on the finest, richest paper and with slight ridging for the text or something so it looked like the result of some kind of weird ink pen:

As ever in my fontified handwriting font: Coates.ttf

• Specially commissioned Simpsons animation to run against the Queen’s speech according to BBC News. The Radio Times’ site separately describes it as follows: “The world’s most dysfunctional family deliver a counterpoint to the Queen’s traditional broadcast, with Marge Simpson and the rest of the clan giving their view of the year. Lisa takes the opportunity to make a protest on behalf of Cornish liberation.”

• iPod hoodie “A naked iPod? Girlfriend, you‚Äôve got to cover that thing – and we have a super solution! C. Ronson’s iPod hoodie has all the features of its life-sized original yet scaled down to keep yr MP3 player
  or phone lookin’ spiffy!!! Blue or pink.”

• I have a new favourite episode of Futurama: “Less Than Hero” Includes the classic, awesome, beautiful line: “a badger with a troubled past and nothing left to lose”…
• Flickr Sucks! Highly entertaining riposte to Canadian photo-sharing site
• Wikipedia’s guide to Podcasting “The term podcasting plays upon the terms broadcasting and webcasting and is derived from the name of the iPod portable music player, the playback device of choice of many early podcast listeners.”
• What was in the Apple Store’s “Lucky Bags”? The Lucky Bags may contain a selection of the following items in any combination: Airport Express, Wireless Mouse, Wireless Keyboard, D-Link, Keynote, .Mac, iLife, iSight Camera, 20GB iPod, Silver iPod Mini, JBL on Tour…
• Steven Berlin Johnson moots two types of writers – those who own a space and those that traverse multiple spaces – which seems to have resonance to those of us whose work tends to wander across discipline For a while in 2000/2001 it felt like I could have become a pundit or consultant around weblogs of all things, but I went in another direction and then another after that. I wonder if that was the right thing to do…
• And lo they asked Metafilter “What’s the most head-scratch inducing present you’ve ever gotten?” I’ve already posted mine – a couple of years ago my uncle gave my brother a packet of crisps and me a can of Thai Chicken Soup. All beautifully wrapped up and everything…
• Matt Jones proses “Smart Muzak” Lovely ideas here – use ‘on hold’ music to convey through mood and pace and rhythm your place in the queue and how long it’ll be before your call is answered…
• OmniOutliner 3 Professional Beta OmniGroup are – as far as I’m concerned – the third part of the holy Apple trinity along with Apple themselves and Adobe. And OmniOutliner is a lovely little app…

I can’t be the only person who is suffering from an enormous collapse in motivation as we enter the last week before Christmas. I only wish I could say for certain that the timing was the only cause. Anyway, the consequence remains the same – I’m not feeling that an enormous amount of value is coming out of my head at the moment. And the stuff that does come out of my head isn’t necessarily often being translated to the written word.

I think there’s a danger that we conflate these things – that a site that you’ve used to express your thoughts for a very long time starts to become a burden/pressure and an impediment to thinking. So you don’t write your thoughts down in the same way. Are you still thinking? And if not, are you not thinking because you’re hung up on the immediate expression of those thoughts. Is the act of writing something down a process of ‘capturing’ your ideas, or is it just packaging and selling them off as quickly as possible. What if the social nature of your platform isn’t something you have time to engage with? How long does it take for a one-sided discussion to lose all meaning?

The big push in my life over the last few weeks has been a very different one. I’ve been organising stuff. Mostly I’ve been trying to impose order on my flat – working my way through many many years of paper and bought things and odds and sods of crap that I thought I couldn’t live without. I’ve learned two things – I can live without a hell of a lot of crap and that all imposed order is fleeting. In cleaning my flat I’ve recognised that writing for my site has come to have the same atmosphere to it as sorting through paper and doing the washing up. It feels like an action that is pure maintenance. Day on day, work must be done. But where’s the end result? Where’s the epic project with the huge pay-off or the addictive sense of satisfaction that makes everything else seem worthwhile?

I’ve been pushing for that feeling at work a lot too. Being at the heart of a big project that I really believed in has spoiled me for much of this other stuff. Those sensations of getting somewhere, of contributing and of helping to build something great are quite intoxicating and rewarding. But what to do when your have to move on? How do you get yourself re-engaged in a new project? When your back is to one source of heat, maybe it’s harder than ever to discern other warmth around you. Unless, perhaps, the heat is moving with you?

My feeling is that the process isn’t enough, the thinking isn’t enough, the milking and shifting of thoughts from my head onto screens and across the world isn’t enough. Organising stuff, maintaining stuff, keeping the wheels turning – not good enough. I want more. I need more. But maybe there isn’t more. Because there aren’t ends, there aren’t conclusions. Histories are structured in the act of telling. Breaks and shifts – beginnings and endings – these appear after the fact through interpretation. Am I struggling for a narrative closure and a ‘brand new chapter’ that the world simply cannot afford me? Am I struggling to fit the flows of experience into the same structuring world-views and aspirations to totality that I use professionally every day?

Or maybe I need a few days off and a bit of a change of context. Maybe all I need in the run up to Christmas is a few easy drinks, some food and family in Norfolk and a complete forcible dislocation from the most challenging, frustrating, rewarding and hard-to-get-over year of my life so far. I’m hoping it’s true. Is a phase shift on the horizon? I think that it might be, but it could be a mirage. Roll on 2005? Well I guess we’ll see.

• BBC press release about Radio stats – mentions our podcasting trial The podcasting trial of ‘In Our Time’ that Mr Webb’s been pointing to over at his site gets a good positive push by esteemed leader, Simon Nelson…
• Mr Webb talks about podcasting ‘In Our Time’ I meant to post this ages ago. Who knows – maybe I did post it ages ago. Anyway, you can get – for a limited time – MP3s of In Our Time delivered to your computer and from there – your iPod…
• Slightly weird and clunky BBC Zeitgeist page still includes interesting factoids Fascinating project this one – with clear parallels to the Google zeitgeist pages – except with an enormously smaller user base. Interested to see what direction it moves in. Could be too literal…?

• Trusty Sidekicks A new comics-related weblog by the gorgeous and charming Sparky of Ultrasparky.org – replete with nostalgia, full of cool old ads from comic books and dosed up on homo juice. Awesome…
• BBC relaunches 6music’s website So the department in which I work have relaunched the website for 6music and – along with the Radio 3 site that I helped out on – it’s one of the most true-to-the-medium sites that the BBC’s done to date. Very nice.
• The new home secretary is sticking with ID cards – despite the fact that I don’t know anyone in this country who actually wants them “The new home secretary, Charles Clarke, today rejected calls to reconsider plans for ID cards after Labour backbenchers suggested the departure of David Blunkett yesterday should prompt a rethink.”

• Get The Booty Ye Deserve! Watch in shock as the ninja / pirate battle moves into altogether more modern and frankly litigous grounds…

• UK: 2004 TV shows fail to generate mass audiences Only six programmes in 2004 attract an audience in excess of 15 million viewers. In 2003, 50 programmes got between 17 and 20 million viewers. In 1999, 177 programmes had more than 15 million viewers.
• But though the big programmes are losing out, the audience isn’t watching any less TV (pdf) “Television viewing has proved remarkably resilient to increased demands on consumers … and in fact has increased slightly over the last decade (from 25.6 hours per
  household per week in 1993 to 26.1 hours in 2003)”