plasticbag.org

Thank god, today I feel almost human, and have returned to work. The rest of yesterday passed in a bit of a blur. I vaguely remember my flatmates wandering into my bedroom and checking their e-mail on my computer. And I vaguely remember playing The Sims for a while. And listening to music. But what I remember most is sleeping and having a couple of really bizarre dreams involving ex-lovers, ex-love interests, bunk beds and huge distended jointed genitals with hands on the end. My mind, on occasion, worries me.

Time Out’s new Shopping Site is written up in the Media Guardian. A few interesting / weird quotes, particularly this one with it’s rather suspicious nature:

“The site claims to receive more than 3m page impressions per month with 180,000 unique users.” (My emphasis)

Now that plasticbag.org has been up for a while, I’d like to get some honest opinions about the design of the site. Please humour me on this one by taking part in this poll: “Do you like the design of plasticbag.org?”. If you have any specific comments to make, then e-mail me on tom%40plasticbag.org.

You’d be surprised how many of my female friends get into a strop when I try to argue (completely without foundation until today) this point: “Women are promiscuous, naturally“.

Praise the Lord. One of the few irritating aspects of owning a Mac is finally resolved. All praise the almighty upcoming presence of Mac OS X: [MacWEEK: Application unexpectedly quit]

So I bought the new Madonna album today, which as usual threw me into the existential horror of trying to work out exactly how gay that makes me.

I went through a really unexamined period about a thousand years ago when I was quite heavily dosed up with ‘la vie homosexuelle’ (it was the cheery-pills – what can I say). I’ve since managed to innoculate myself against most of its excesses (while becoming addicted to a few others in the process), and my resistance to gay music taste (in both senses of the word gay) is now quite strong. But old Madge managed to break through with the last album, and now I have succumbed once more. If I wake up in the night in a cold sweat aching for A1’s version of “Take On Me”, then I’ll know that things have finally gone too far…

Bizarre competition:
Unscramble these numbers to discover the fax number of a famous American actress (seriously):

0 1 2 2 3 4 5 5 7 8

Actors get stale after a while because they start to parody themselves. This is a truism of Hollywood. Notable examples of tics / clichés that actors have been forced to overcome by directors include Bruce Willis being told not to act so Bruce Willisy in Twelve Monkeys, and George Clooney being asked not to drop his head and look up at people from under his eyebrows.

Notable plasticbag.org clichés:

• Starting every post with the word “So”.
• Ending every post with an ellipsis (three dots).
• Overusing <blockquote> and <ul> (unordered lists).

So if you’ve noticed any more – drop me an e-mail…

It’s nearly midnight, and I have only one remaining day of holiday. It’s like some kind of torture, if you ask me. I’ve just got used to being relaxed and being able to fill up my day with whatever the hell I like (if only that didn’t involve quite so much day-time television), and now I’ve got to get ready to go back to work.

I’m kind of dreading it, for a variety of reasons. I’ve had some very sensible conversations with people during the last couple of weeks, and I’m feeling suddenly very professional – but with this professionalism comes a certain amount of resignation and a slightly jaded feeling that I didn’t expect.