plasticbag.org

There’s a weblogger of some reknown called Mo Morgan. Mo has created a useful resource for webloggers which is very much worthy of a link. I heard about this resource because Mr Morgan sent me an instant message mentioning that if I wanted to blog it, I could. He insisted that I didn’t have to link to it, or anything. Just that I could. So I asked if he wanted me to blog it. And he replied, “Not particularly. But if you wanted to, you can.” So I kind of leant back and said, “So you don’t want me to link to it, then?” And he come right back with, “No”.

So what’s going on here? Clearly Mr Morgan did want me to link to the resource in question. But it appears he’s too proud to actually ask me to do it. I pressed and I pressed – just ask me I said, and I will link to it. But he consistently replied, “No”. In fact by the end of the conversation he said, “No – Please don’t link to them…” So if Mr Morgan mentions his new resource to you, you know what to do… Let’s cure him of this sinful pride – make him beg…

Metaspore n. A bastardisation of the word ‘Metaphor’ with semantic cross-over with the concept of the ‘meme’ – the metaspore being a violently self-propogating meme with particularly little interest in the survivability of its hosts, with propogation being of such a speed and virulence that conceptual spread is maintainable even though long-term prospects of communication disintegrate when the meme spreads globally. An example of a highly dangerous meme could be the suicide cult, or the concept of teenage suicide itself (cf Micronesian suicides in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’), while the most obvious contemporary candidate for status of ‘metaspore’ might currently be global capitalism in its full environment-damaging form.

London’s Underground system is as frustrating as it is iconic and vital. It’s the world’s oldest underground system, it’s teeming with people whenever it’s open – which (ironically) isn’t as often as it should be. The tunnels are too old and small to allow the trains to have any kind of air conditioning, and it’s prone to radical over-crowding. Daily use of it drives most Londoners to a state of vengeful apoplexy several times a week – standing up next to some sweating warthog of a man, crammed on platforms like self-canning sardines. So perhaps it’s hardly a surprise that all over the tube at the moment are these extraordinary adverts…

For reasons I don’t really want to go into at the moment, I’m looking for screencaps of iCal for a little project I’m working on. If you’re unfamiliar with the application, it’s Apple’s new calendar application that you can download for free (once you’ve installed MacOSX.2). E-mail me, if you find anything…

I’ve been collecting links for a few days now – things that I have really wanted to talk about, but just haven’t had time. So rather than get weighed down by them, consider yourself lucky – all the links, none of that bloody burbling preamble that you normally have to suffer… Be warned – what follows is jotter-style commentary at best – and completely without style or class…

• Buffy gets advise from Dr. Laura
  A frivolous piece of fun: “That’s not the point. The point is, it might not seem like a big difference now, but when you’re 77, he’ll be over 300. How can you get married and have children – and notice the order I put that in – with a man 224 years older than you?”

• Barbelith reopens its doors for new memberships
  I’m not making a big deal out of this one, because it might not last for long. With no publicity at all, we’ve had over a hundred new members in the last three days. I don’t want to swamp the place.

• Pixellation – the way of the pixel
  Discussion community of pixel artists and pixel enthusiasts.

• Badgerland
  Thanks to John Watson for sending me to a site full of information about badgers.

• PixelArt Tutorial
  So you want to be a pixel artist? From The Almight Grass Tile to Animating a basic attack (and lots of stuff in between).

• Riothero Redux
  I’m kind of hiding this link down the page in the hopes that I won’t scare him off – Mark ‘Riothero’ Olynciw is back, and has started personal publishing again. I’m a little nervous about the prospect of him quitting again, so I don’t want to go on about how great he is yet…

• Spy Kids 2
  Go and see it, because it’s really good fun. Cal and I went to see it last night and bloody loved it.

There are times when the BBC does something well. And when the BBC does something well it does it very well. Take their online title sequence archive for example. Loads of famous RealOne-Up-The-Wazoo-ed TV show memories from the last one million billion years. Most of which I remember – since I am ludicrously, stupidly, absurdly old. Key favourites – and memory-inspiring moments include:

• A Very Peculiar Practice
  There are loads of entries about A Very Peculiar Practice in my feeble diaries of the time. I was obsessed. It was so gloriously bizarre – a young doctor completely out of his depth in some modern University where Nuns rifled through the bins. I tried to replicate an image from the credits with Microsoft Paint on the early PCs in my school computer lab.

• Red Dwarf
  It come on TV when I was sixteen. I remember the weekly ritual of turning all my lights off in my bedroom and watching my parents old clapped out TV with the sound down and the door shut so that when my parents went to bed I wouldn’t disturb them too much. I used to have to do that a lot. My parents went to bed really early. Still do.

• Doctor Who (Peter Davison)
  I remember Tom Baker turning into Peter Davison more than I remember losing my virginity. I remember being utterly confused by the whole thing. And being completely glued to his run. I remember when Adric died and there was no credits music. I remember being really freaked out by that.

• The Adventure Game
  It appeared to be on all the time – thousands of times a week maybe. Maybe more. And it made utterly no sense whatsoever either. Every single characters’ name was an anagram of ‘Dragon’. Everyone in the UK around my age knows this already…

Other memorables: Box of Delights, Butterflies, Bergerac and Battle of the Planets.

What follows is the definition of a word that is relatively well known to webloggers across the world at the moment, that has been taken up quite quickly by American webloggers, but has strangely not been taken up as quickly by people in the UK.

\Blog”roll’ing\ n. [apparently coined by Doc Searls]
1. The placing of links in a semi-permanent sidebar-style form from one weblog to another, initially designed to be a short-cut for the creator of the site, which has subsequently become a place to demonstrate admiration, mutual respect, link-flattery and a tacit appeal for a return link of some kind.
2. The practice of individual webloggers to link repetitively and flatteringly to the posts and comments of their friends and online favourites.

Here is the word that ‘blogrolling’ is supposed to be a pleasant corruption or extension of – a word which one assumes is more familiar in the US than in the UK:

\Log”roll’ing\ n. [from Dictionary.com]
1. The exchanging of political favors, especially the trading of influence or votes among legislators to achieve passage of projects that are of interest to one another.
2. The exchanging of favors or praise, as among artists, critics, or academics.

What follows is the word that most English people will assume the word ‘blogrolling’ is a pun on – a word that is as utterly familiar to us as our own names and a word that casts a considerably less high-brow aspect on the whole ‘blogrolling’ phenomenon.

\Bog”roll n.
A slang term for toilet/lavatory paper – derived from the use of the word ‘bog’ to refer to the water closet or ‘bathroom’ in the United Kingdom – being a soft or semi-abrasive absorbent material with the specific purpose of removing excess faecal substance from one’s bottom after excretion…

Inspired by Been ‘blogging’? Web discourse hits higher level.

Another day, another stunning factoid from the popbitch people: “Newark is the only town in the USA which is an anagram of Wanker”.