plasticbag.org

So I spent last night watching Queer as Folk 2 [I love you Blackstar] with Mella, which made me want to go and blow up cars again, move to America and threaten people with guns. Before we decided on QAF though, we were considering watching The Breakfast Club, which we had purchased a couple of days beforehand. It’s one of Mella’s favourite absolute favourite films. I wonder how she’d feel about the threatened remake.

Personally I think that it would have to be considerably more sophisticated and nuanced a film to work today – particularly after the parody on Dawson’s Creek. And of course, the recent plethora of TV and film projects involving teenagers has spiralled since its lapse in the late 80s. Films like American Pie have already partially (re-)debunked the stereotypes of teenagers (geek, jock, brain, princess). Questions for the morning: Does a new Breakfast Club even have a role to play any more? If it does, can Alyson be in it?

Got a lovely e-mail from Meg, which has reassured me completely and made me feel less like a prurient scandalmongerer. It also included this line: “I’m so glad you copied that little girl bike post too, now everyone’s copying. Man the funniest, most unpredictable things, happen on the web.” For even more on the whole fiasco, there’s another thread on Metafilter.

What do you do when you have nothing left to say? I suppose the only answer is read – catch up with the weblogs that you’ve missed recently, and try and find some ones you haven’t read before. Underappreciated weblog of the day: bindi.

I’m seriously considering signing up to bigmailbox.com – and thus allowing all of my regular readers to have an awesome “yourname@barbelith.com” e-mail address. Does anyone know of any other companies that do this? Opinions?

Ways to really piss people off [courtesy of my boss]…

1. Do a check for Shockwave before letting someone into your site. If they don’t have it, tell them to fuck off. Otherwise let them into the site. Where, of course, there is no shockwave or flash. Snigger slightly.
2. Run a banner ad on your site. When someone clicks on it, trigger a pop-up with this message inside it: “Banner ads typically get less than 1% click-thrus, what makes you so particularly lame as to be one of them?” Feel smug.
3. Do a page extolling the virtues of Explorer but only make it work on Netscape browsers on the grounds that 95% of the population knows this already and doesn’t need to read it. Laugh maniacally.
4. Start a large corporate site which grabs your e-mail address when you enter a non-existing competition and sells it to evil far-eastern spamming organisations. Build a secret underground base to feel superior in…

Pictures from the meeting of Katy, Mark, Vance and I:

I’m working on a redesign – my first for about six months. I’m feeling a combination of delighted and horrified with its progress. I was looking around at a few sites that really caught my attention and screen-capping them, grabbing components of them in Photoshop and mucking around with them on my screen. One component really stuck in my head and became the focus of everything I did after that point, and has since dictated colour schemes, and basic page structure. The mock-up I’m moving towards looks very little like the original site as a whole, but has elements that are clearly similar. This worries me.

The thing is, initially I was just mucking around with some stuff to see what ideas came to me, and now I am loath to give up on the work I have done and throw the product of that work in the Trash. It’s less about copyright for me than it is about creating something by myself, for myself. I’m a bit torn. Opinions?

I don’t know what’s weirdest – that megnut and I should suddenly appear on metalog (because of the whole little girl thing) or that Jason didn’t. Find out more about the whole Little Girl Viral Meme at Metafilter…

I never really go to Bloat, but I was reading (properly for the first time) the notes at the bottom of Beebo’s weblog ratings page and thought I’d see how barbelith was doing. So I went and had a look. Nothing. Not a mention at all.

Well at least that was how it appeared at first. On a whim, I opened up the HTML for the page and did a search, and there I am floating invisibly between Rebecca’s Pocket and Evhead. Weird. I have to say that I quite like it. Completely invisible. And long may I remain so…

London based members of the Underground are summoned to the Spreadeagle Pub on Camden Parkway tomorrow (Sunday) at 2pm. Around ten to fifteen invisibilists will be there, eagerly awaiting your ability to buy more beer and destabilise western democracy.

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