plasticbag.org

I had to bash together a quick Oasis interview page in the very narrow confines of Time Out’s templates yesterday. In about half an hour I produced this: The Brothers Grim. It’s OK, I guess…

I’m a bit weirded out by dvdauthority.com apparent working specs for a barbelith rip-off site (including the name of my site in the URL of all things). Anyone know what it’s about? Bizarre….

I’ve been waiting for this for a while, and I have finally been rewarded for my patience. Full glorious photos of Apple’s new products – gorgeous, unholy, beautiful evil things like a new keyboard, a new cube computer (not much use to me, admittedly having just bought one) and a new mouse that can only have emerged fully formed and perfect from Aphrodite’s armpit in that Botticelli painting. I am drooling as if drool never went out of fashion (1800s, if you’re interested). It’s like Steve Jobs is personally seducing me. He might as well put on suspenders and stand outside my house going, “Hey there, fancy a good time?”. Except that might be a bit gross. Oh My God. Anyway, who would have thought technology could be quite this gobsmackingly wonderful?

I’d just like to say thanks to everyone who sent me an e-mail or an e-card to wish me Happy Birthday. Thanks, everyone! Really cheered me up!

Thanks to jezebel for the wonderful card!

Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that it is my 28th Birthday today, and that I am completely weirded out by that, and that I don’t really want to think about it, but that it keeps appearing in my head like some spectre of impending death. Let’s also ignore these disturbing figures: Ten years since I left school, two years until thirty, several betrayals, seven years on the net. Please god, let us ignore much of what I’ve done this decade: somewhere in the region of six hundred trips to the cinema [working out at about £3000], ten different homes, innumerable arguments with my mother, around twenty flatmates and enough coca-cola to submerge a small country. Finally, let us be sure to ignore my accomplishments: a degree, a couple of abortive relationships, three and a half years working on a doctorate that never came to anything, nine months of temping, a journalism re-training course, five or six websites of greater or lesser quality, and a minor depressive episode.

I should put it all into an Excel spreadsheet. Or perhaps a web stats package. Referrals, impressions, hits.

Finally. Mark is back in the land of the blog-active. And with hands covered in urine, no less. How … revealing! Still – it’s good to have him back…

On a completely unrelated note, does anyone actually have the image that is missing from the article about the Mac G4 Cube at Apple Insider. Seems that Apple threatened legal action. I’d love to get me a copy of that…

My posts have been so ridiculously long of late, that I have instituted horizontal rules between them to help people figure out which is which. My next plan – t-shirts that read “Tom is your friend” and “Tom loves you”…

God. There is just so much I want to get through today, and there just isn’t the slightest chance I am going to manage it. Potted summary of a couple of things:

• Birthday
  Oh god. I’m 28 on Wednesday. The fact horrifies me so completely it’s untrue. Anyway, I had a party on Saturday night which was really strange but quite entertaining. I don’t know that I have much to say about it though. Um. Nope.

• Interviewed by The Evening Standard
  Yesterday evening I went to be interviewed by a reporter for London’s Evening Standard, who was doing an article on weblogs and weblogging for the IT section. Katy is going to be interviewed as well, to get a “woman’s eye view”. I wonder if there actually is any difference between the genders in the weblogging stakes. It’s never even occurred to me. Anyway – we talked about a lot of weblogs – she knew a lot about the subject, but I’m afraid that my e-vangelical (sorry about the 90s style pun) enthusiasm about the web might have bored her slightly! Two full tapes (both sides) in her dictaphone later (and only one vodka and tonic) we finally part company. I told her if she wrote anything mean then I’d post her name, address and e-mail address up on the site and we’d go and sort her out. I was kidding of course…

• The Patriot
  I went to see this film finally, thinking that it couldn’t be possibly as bad as the English papers said that it was. It couldn’t be that offensive. Afterwards I went straight over to IMDB and wrote a scathing review of the film. Just in case they don’t publish it, here it is in full:

  I’ve never seen a film with such astonishing revisionist tendencies as The Patriot. Its slamming of the child-eating, church-burner, deviant British is pure racism, and based on eschewing American cultural responsibility for things like slavery. In the film the claymationalike Gabriel says something facetious like, “we are fighting for a new world, and things will be new in it, not like that silly old old world where they have slavery. we’ll not have any of that in the good old US of A”…
  The fact that the British outlawed slavery forty years before America apparently means nothing. And the fact that when the country actually got around to it they actually had to have another whole war because one side really wanted to keep African Americans in chains – these things mean nothing to the creators of the Patriot, who are only interested in playing the evil, corrupt, power crazed, racist big monarchist bad guys against the simple farmer folk who love black people and freedom and don’t really even WANT to fight and who are actually Australian in upbringing.
  As films go, this one is insulting to all concerned, and particularly insulting to history and vague formless notions like TRUTH and JUSTICE (and through association, we would LIKE to assume, the American way)…

• HSX
  Speaking of movie-related stuff, they have finally gotten around to redesigning HSX which is good. It’s still my favourite way of filling in a spare half hour or so, and I have so far managed to extend my initial $2 million investment up to a respectable $24 million. And all that without being in the country to feel the buzz on upcoming films…

• Meg 14 July
  And I thought everything had been resolved…