Categories
Random

Big Gay Linkage…

Ok. Next year I want to be a Best Gay Chap nominee again. Do you understand me? I’m not satisfied with just being known for my design skills. I want to be the world’s best homo. I know I don’t talk about it very much, but that’s just because being gay is really boring, not because I’m not any good at it. I’m really good at it. I’m the Leonardo Da Vinci of Big Gay Shit. Am I convincing anyone? I should stick to talking about weblogs really. At least then I know what I’m talking about…

  • Jonno’s Cute Dead Guy of the Week
    My personal favourite has to be Louis Lingg, who was not only an anarchist and really hot, but also blew himself up in jail by putting a bomb in his mouth. You don’t get much cooler than that.

  • Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful video [real: lo | med | hi]
    You know when pop-stars can be as sensitive as this, it’s almost worth having them exploit our pain to sell records! I hope she gets another really big house. I really do.

  • Diesel Sweeties’ tasteful take on gay lovin’
    “I am an eccentric millionaire. Indie-Rock Pete, I will pay you for eccentric gay sex experimentation.”

  • Soccer Practice by Gay Pimp
    This utterly terrible song about hot soccer jocks is mostly entertaining for its dodgy gay subversion of ‘ho’-centred rap/pop videos. Also partially entertaining for taking the piss out of sporty straight-boys. Warning: Quite rude, ungodly and just plain wrong.
Categories
Personal Publishing

Blogger & Pyra redux…

Keen-eyed new media news spotters will have seen the article this morning, Google takes the plunge (by Bobbie Johnson) about the search engine company buying Blogger. Bobbie got some comments off me, a couple of which made it into the piece. Here are the rest of my comments, should you be interested:

(1) What do you think has made Blogger so successful: why did you choose to use it?

Blogger was a sideline for Pyra originally – they made it for themselves to play with and I think that shows in the first product. It was really basic but it was extremely easy to use, incredibly practical and – most importantly – it allowed you to publish your weblog through to your own personal web-space on the web, wherever that might be. There were web professionals who had written their own little content management systems, of course. And there were these centralised journalling and weblogging sites for people who just wanted to write stuff, but there was nothing that really catered for that sudden influx of new web-obsessed netizens, eager to find things online, keen to build things and desperate to play with the new medium. Plus this was the time that everyone was starting to buy domain names that they didn’t have anything to do with.

(2) How do you think it contributed to the growth of weblogging in general?

Of course it’s impossible to say in retrospect, but I think it was Blogger’s feature set, simplicity and general amenability (combined with the spirit of the time) that really got people playing with these tools in the first place. I’m not sure it would ever have sparked off to the degree that it has without their involvement. It’s no accident that Blogger is still the largest weblogging concern running – even though it doesn’t have anywhere near the features of many other systems it’s still one of the most self-explanatory, simple and bluntly effective tools out there. Without it I would be surprised if the community would have developed to be even a tenth of the size…

(3) Do you think there are any surprises in store for Blogger users?

Terrifyingly, I don’t think there will be any surprises at all. And that’s not because they won’t do anything, but because thousands of webloggers all started talking about the stuff they could do at once – sorting wheat from chaff, thinking up applications, new toys, horror stories, business plans – basically just fun things to do with weblogs and Google working together. I’d be surprised if there were any thoughts about the future of Blogger that hadn’t travelled several times around the hundreds of thousands of weblogs that are out there. But that’s ok! Because some of those ideas were pretty damn cool…

Categories
Random

Sunday night celebrity countdown…

Being a brief list of the celebrities that I’ve come into fleeting contact with over the last month or so. The gentle reader is expected to bear in mind that said celebrities are unlikely to be of the stature of your major Hollywood Oscar winner, since most were spotted milling around Covent Garden, Soho or Piccadilly Circus…

  • The guy with the hair from the Salon TV show.
    For the Americans among us, The Salon is a reality TV show set in a hair and beauty establishment (allegedly just off London’s shimmeringly glamourless Shaftesbury Avenue). The gentleman I spotted from the show was strolling down towards Piccadilly Circus one late-winter’s evening, with a few passers-by taking pictures of him. He looked slightly dumb-founded and as if he was rather enjoying it.

  • Matt Lucas, TV’s entertaining man-in-a-baby-suit.
    Matt Lucas (alias “What are the final scores?” George Dawes) went to the same university as me. In fact he not only went to the same university as me, but he went at the same time and was friends with a couple of friends of mine. But I barely new him, and so didn’t feel an urge to reintroduce myself to him when we both found ourselves stuffing our faces on nearby tables in the Leicester Square Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some poor, rather dumb-looking chap tried to get an autograph, but clearly it wasn’t an appropriate time.

  • The quite-cute-one-off-The-Office.
    Celebrities are clearly intrinsically grumpy people. I go to this hair place in Soho, and have done since I worked at Time Out. I always knew that it used to be cool, but I’d never seen an actual living celebrity in there before. Today was different, however. Because Martin Freeman (who plays the nice one from the Office) stomped in eager for hair-rescue. The only unfortunate thing about this encounter is probably that he’s not really known (primarily at least) for the quality of his haircuts. In fact maybe a bit anti-known. So in a sense him coming into my hair place probably isn’t the best sign of my continued style.

  • Stephen Gately.
    The anaemic butterfly in bizarrely successful prefab pop-group Boyzone somehow managed to defy nature by becoming a weird fat caterpillar-like non-solo-star. But that was then – as the other day my work colleagues and I spotted the bad-skinned and newly-skinny, tiny pop-singing, proto-West-End-starring Joseph-in-his-designer-stressed-denim while on our way to a nice little restaurant in Covent Garden. He kind of had that look on his face that Chandler got in Friends when he came into the room with his new Tom Selleck-alike moustache. Only scarier and much less good-natured. We avoided him. And maybe pointed a little.

So there you go. My last month’s celebrity encounters. Anyone spotted anyone more interesting?

Categories
Random

On the avoidance of harm…

There’s some fascinating stuff around about the relationship of depressive illness to strategies of harm avoidance:

Clinical depression is associated with two modulations occurring simultaneously and chronically, dysphoria and the generalized stress response. Dysphoria is a modulation that is part of the harm perception/avoidance axis. This is an emotion we all feel when we perceive a futility in our current behavior and experience disappointment. In contrast, we experience anger and aggression when the disappointment is perceived as being caused by an external source. When the disappointment causes dysphoria, the modulation shift increases behavioral inhibition, increases anticipation of harm, increases harm avoidance, increases introspection, decreases exploration of the environment, decreases reactivity to external stimuli, decreases appetite for food and decreases sexual appetite.

In short, it coordinates functions that allow us to retreat, introspect and to redirect our efforts in a more effective direction. In this instance, dysphoria facilitates adaptation to disappointment. [mentalhealthandillness.com]

I like that. Dysphoria faciliates adaptation to disappointment. Lots of interesting things fall out of investigations like these, but this sense of harm avoidance is the one that interests me most – that the depressive personality and the introverted personality are heavily connected. That the wallflower reacts to disappointment, attributed internally. Fascinating stuff.

Categories
Random

High Octane Link Fuel…

Fill your browser with your link-fuel and let’s Easy Rider information interstate 666. Feel the breeze in your hair – fluff-links for the quasi-hip:

Categories
Radio & Music

The return of the Bangles…

The Bangles are back! And the Thriller-like corpse of my trashy, teenage self has risen from the dead and is doing a little dance inside me. I mean – it’s the Bangles! I had my first major crush while listening to the Bangles! I wrote off a car while listening to the Bangles! I was the person who bought the Susanna Hoffs solo record! They’re core to my adolescent and pre-adolescent self. And it’s not only me! The first song my little brother recognised on television was Eternal Flame (the only Bangles song I hated). He used to call it “One Eye” because there was a big eye at the beginning of the video. I think he still kind of likes it. He certainly wasn’t keen on Atomic Kitten’s version (I think he felt it was sacrilege).

I mean, look at them! They’re iconic! There’s the cool depressive one on the left that you actually believed could write songs. She was responsible for “Following”, the weird stalker anthem that I loved when I was fourteen. Then there’s Susanna Hoffs, who was kind of tiny and pixie-like and all my straight male friends really wanted to shag. And then the lead guitarist who looked a bit too much like the prom queen to be taken seriously. And finally the weird blonde drummer who looked a bit like a man in drag. How much do they rule?!

I once owned the Bangles Greatest Hits video that I bought when I was about sixteen. But we had this party in my second year at university – a party in which we had to call an Ambulance because someone got alcohol poisoning – and then someone stole the stereo and then someone set fire to the television and that spread to the videos that were placed nearby. No more Bangles video. Sigh.

And now the news is that they’ve got a new album coming out and it’s bound to be terrible (even though I swear that their other albums are all really really good) but obviously I’m going to buy it and stick it on my iPod and try to look cool when people ask me what I’m listening to. And I think they’re coming to London to play live. And I really want to see them, but I bet no one will go with me.

Categories
Politics

Let them hate as long as they fear…

Excerpts from John Brady Kiesling’s letter of resignation sent to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell:

Dear Mr. Secretary:
     I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart…
     The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been Americaís most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.
     We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners.
     We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has ìoderint dum metuantî really become our motto?

For those without the benefit of a Classical education, oderint dum metuant means Let them hate as long as they fear. You can read this letter in full at The New York Times.

Categories
Random

I'm voting LIBERTY X…

So Project Stupidly-Long-Post about this iWire post is taking much longer than I’d expected, and work’s suddenly started taking up my mental space for the first time in a month or so, and I’ve been trying to get some stuff finished for Ben Hammersley and my door’s being fixed (long story behind that one connected to an earlier post of mine). And basically this all adds up to a busy little Tom who can’t think of things to write on his site. Except he’s been collecting things he does want to talk about, and rather than discard them, he’s going to do another linklog. But he’s going to do it shamefully and in full recognisance that he’s basically shirking his intellectual responsibilities to the world. And with the shirking of intellectual responsibilities in mind, let’s jump straight into…

  • The Latest Liberty X video
    The were the anti-group-by-committee pop-group that was itself made by committee and managed to come out with considerably more attitude than the demographically-generated Hear’say. Obviously that doesn’t make them any good – but at least they have the class to take the piss out of themselves. This rather high-quality cover features the band mass-producing hundreds of duplicates of themselves in an effort to get high quality mass-culture pop product out to the masses. Highly entertaining and much recommended…

  • Katy’s Coccyx
    So this is totally the grossest thing you’ll see on the web today – my good friend Katy Kitschbitch has had an operation on her lower back – and decided not only to keep what they removed, but also to take meaty pictures of it and put them online. Utterly grotesque. Strangely compelling. Get well soon, Katy!

  • Tom Lenk on Buffy spin-offs
    “Danny and I keep suggesting that the season finale, which is potentially the end of the show, should end with me kneeling down at Jonathan’s grave, putting blood on my face like Willow did [when she resurrected Buffy]. After I resurrect him, we build a robot of Warren, and then we have our own show. Then we’re hired by the government to use our powers for good, and we’re given a watcher, which would be played by Morgan Fairchild!”
Categories
Net Culture

On Google's trademark…

Over on kottke.org at the moment there’s a piece by Jason on Google’s response to verbing. The story goes like this – there’s an entry on Wordspy for a the verb to google. Google decided to respon to this entry by sending a letter telling them that they shouldn’t publish stuff like this because it dilutes their brand. Jason’s comment?

“That letter from Google is a bluff, an example of a corporation using their significant corporate resources (i.e. time and money) to make individuals – who generally have neither time nor money, relatively speaking – do what the corporation wants them to do, regardless of legality.”

Unfortunately in this particular case, I believe that Google are in the right and Jason is incorrect. The problem is not particularly one of Google trying to force the little-guy into acquiescing. In fact Google have to go through processes like these to stop their brands becoming normal parts of language. When you’re trained as a journalist, you’re told that you have to capitalise brand-names. If you don’t, the company concerned is forced to write to you requiring you to make it clear that it’s a brand. If it doesn’t do so – and cannot demonstrate that it’s done so, then the word can be associated with any product at all. Classic examples are things like Hoovers and Frisbees – they’re synonymous with the object themselves, but they have to be routinely defended otherwise Hoover (the company) loses the right to the brand name – and anyone on the planet can market a vacuum cleaner as ‘a hoover’. If Google don’t protect their trademark and it entered general speech, then there would be nothing legally to stop altavista renaming themselves altagoogle, or Google search.

At least that’s the way it works in UK law as it pertains to journalists. I’ll try and find some more information on this subject shortly.

Categories
Random

Monday Morning Linklog…

Depressingly, at some point it looks like I’m going to be compelled to go for the full separate link-log option, but at the moment you’re just going to have to make-do with the annotated lists that I slap up every so often…

  • Safari to get tabbed browsing
    If you’re a fan of tabbed browsing, then this article (which includes scary looking pictures) is interesting, if not entirely reassuring. Positive feature: ‘x’ on each tab allows you to close it. Negative feature: apparently an entirely new form of tab style – hanging downwards from the URL.

  • Daypop Wordbursts & Top Blogs
    Two new toys from the daypop crew today. Wordbursts is the more interesting of the two – following on from the New Scientist article about trend-spotting in webloggery from a few days back. I don’t know that such a shallow analysis will reveal any particularly huge trends at this stage, but there’s no denying that it could in the long-term. The ‘Top Blogs’ thing is more notable for the internal Google-style weighting system – the more heavily linked-to a weblog is, the greater its ‘page-rank’ and in turn the more effect its links have. It’s an interesting approach, but one I have to think in more depth.