plasticbag.org

Thought of the day: Careless writing costs blog-readers. Is there such a thing as acceptable losses? Can you reclaim a site for your own idling agenda after it’s gone so completely mainstream?

So I went to see Star Wars this afternoon with Cal and Nick and frankly we were very impressed. That’s not to say we couldn’t gripe – because god knows we could – the dialogue is as bad as it is in all the other films, the plot (such as it is) is swamped by episodic diversions, some of the characters aren’t doing what they should be doing (when did Obi Wan get so bloody lame and were Mandalorian Warriors all as naff as Jango Fett) and the whole thing could have been twenty minutes shorter (and each individual episode within it – particularly the battle scenes could have been correspondingly shorter as well). But despite all this, it was really not a bad film at all.

Of course the horror of the event is that before it had even started the nostalgia kicks in. You think you’re going to be immune, but you’re there in the cinema and the 20th Century Fox drum-rolls sound and then the Star Wars music kicks in and the logo appears and you’re ten again, Star Wars forcibly inserted into your DNA – your reactions as formulaic and robotic as if you were a puppet on a string. Which a lot of men around my age must feel like to be honest. And as you sit there, you’re always overwhelmed by hope, expecting it to be shit but unable to accept that it will be.

But even stripped of decades of obsessive love, this is still a film that you can actually enjoy. There’s action and drama and interesting and well-designed aliens and a real look and feel that inspire you to want to believe, and much less offensive ethnic stereotyping and a few (mostly but not exclusively ill-judged) jokes and Yoda…. Well, Yoda kicks butt…

Guess who’s going to see Star Wars! In an hour! On a weekday! Instead of looking for a flat!

Ok. Because I have an infinity of other things that I should be doing instead – including writing a presentation for a conference that’s getting remarkably close and move and sort out my next job and pack everything and sort out my taxes and… and… and… – I have of course decided instead to suddenly become serious about resolving the problems with plasticbag.org‘s rendering on Mozilla. And when I say that I’ve become serious, what I mean is that I’m hoping desperately that one of you out there will be able to sort out the problem. Amaze your friends, fix a mostly functional CSS-based site!

Anyway, in order to be able to do this most effectively, I’ve uploaded the full plasticbag.org Blogger template and you can access the CSS files for the front page and the archives. They’re very different. See if you can figure out why… Winning entry will be able to show me a functioning copy of plasticbag.org displaying a couple of entries (over more than one day).

It’s difficult to tell whether it’s because they were recently accused of being pro-spam when they automatically defaulted all their web-mail users to the ‘receive lots of crap’ option, but Yahoo’s anti-spam advice is not only very good, but is being publicised via banner ads all over the place.

The question of the day is do we need a weblog foundation? And it’s being debated at this moment over at metafilter.

Every single day I get loads of spam. Loads. More than I think is strictly normal. Dozens of messages. Every day. And it’s very frustrating. But what had never occurred to me today is how many messages I would be getting without the ISPs filtering them at source. But an article at bbc.co.uk has revealed that the spam problem is larger than most regular users think: “The problem is a lot worse than consumers think. A lot of it is filtered out before it reaches them,” said Joe McNamee from Euro ISPA (Internet Service Providers’ Association).

I’m regularly startled by the range of fascinating articles on news.bbc.co.uk – and that article on spam is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent days we’ve seen behind the scenes at Google, the first Segway crash and a survey revealing that Russian businesses bribe more abroad than any other states. Stunning.

Today I’m too wound-up by the ironies of my life to truly relax. Flat-hunting is truly the most nightmarish experience that a misanthropic intensely private brooding young genius should ever be forced to endure. The crises of faith about money, the moments of horror about the state in which one might find oneself living. It’s all too overwhelming. I now have to find a place within the next two weeks, and today I just said I needed 24 hours to think about a place that costs £910 a month. A MONTH. Along with all the other bills I’d have to pay, that doesn’t leave a lot of money for fun and biscuits. It’s all too much. I can’t cope.

I’m the Pixies’ song, In Heaven: “You’re mysterious, picky, and a bit aloof. Some people say you have a very cheery personality, but it’s hard to say because you mask your emotions behind dark pretenses. You enjoy watching obscure movies and going to plays, but by the end of the day you’re usually too wound-up by the ironies of your life to relax.”

If anyone knows a place online where you could type in your income and see roughly how much tax you should be paying (obviously this will be aimed primarily at people based in the UK) then mail me. I’m looking for estimates here, not forms that take three months to fill in and are directly submitted to the Inland Revenue.

• i-resign salary calculator, supplied by Paul of digitaltrickery.com
• Listen to Taxman – thanks to Kees for this tax calulator correct as of 2000.