plasticbag.org

I love prolific. She said nice things (as least I think she did… why – “heh, heh, heh”?) about the pictures of me at slutcore. I’m such a sucker for a bit of ego stroking…

“What are we going to do with a room full of genetically-modified homosexual corn?” asked Harry Hill on television tonight. I wanted to help him find an answer by sending you all to look at harryhill.com – but apparently it was a fansite and was shut down by an overzealous production company. If anyone can find a decent Harry Hill site, then let me know asap.

I’ve written this post three times today and every time, something has fucked up. This is my final attempt before pouring coffee on my parents’ computer and tearing out all my hair. And I have so much to say… I am finally back in Norfolk after the marathon moving session. After work on Friday I got a train back to Norfolk (arrived at 10pm), grabbed about four hours sleep before jumping into my mother’s car, driving back to London, picking up Nick C and Nick E (who had very graciously helped me pack), finally managing to get back to Norfolk by half-past six. Bloody exhausting day, all things considered. Now all I have to do is wait for my passport and I’m off to LA. Watch out, Kerry – here I come!

There’s an article in the Sunday Times today which is being discussed at the moment in the Nexus – it’s about two superheroes called Apollo and Midnighter who are both men and having a relationship. Quite why this is a newsworthy story is beyond me. There have been gay superheroes for years – find out more at the Gay League of America.

I remain in regular contact with the ever-changing site of riothero. Over the last couple of days, he has said some really nice things about me in both e-mail and on his site – like it’s good to be 27 and that I don’t look like the back end of a bus. Which is nice. I’m a bit embarrassed actually, as I can’t help thinking he must have hit the juice quite hard recently to have caused such brain-collapse and eye-failure. Anyway, the conversation reminded me of one of my old sites, which is basically a photo album. Check it out if you like: slutcore.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more self-referential – the weblogging universe collapses.

Finally, a couple of updates on yesterdays posts. Not that it really matters, but barbelith has reappeared on Metalog ratings. riothero and wetlog have now explained to me why I had dropped off – apparently it is post-redesign linkage withdrawal. I suppose that makes sense. Having said that though, I think my reappearance at number 28 makes it clear that you only have to ask a stupid question or say something controversial to get rated once more. Go figure.

[Addendum: Thanks to Weblog Wannabe for the Smurfalizer link (see yesterday).]

I don’t know – you turn your back for a moment and everything goes to hell.

• Metalog ratings
  It’s a sad day when the only thing you can talk about is weblogging itself, but after a couple of weeks of being consistently in the top 30, barbelith has suddenly vanished from the charts completely. I mean, not that I care or anything (grumble, mumble, sulk).
• Grim Reaper Age Guesser
  So far it hasn’t even been close. Prol was ten years out, and Riothero managed an astonishing 15 year discrepancy. All I can think is that the two webloggers must be mistaken about their ages. The Grim Reaper cannot be wrong.
• Webstandards & Project Cool
  I heard about this yesterday, but what’s the point of linking to (un)dead sites? These two sites (amongst others) went down for 55 hours due to ‘problems’ at Covad, their service provider. It’s both ironic and infuriating that these bastions of interesting content and web functionality should be let down behind the scenes. It’s like the opposite of the Wizard of Oz – all the wonder is on display, but if you look behind the curtain, there’s nobody home.
• Death to Powazek
  I have a friend called Toby. Toby is a scary puppy. Tom accidentally showed Toby Mr Powazek’s sutrocam feature – lots of animated gifs made by using a digital camera. Toby has a digital camera. I now get about two animated gifs a day sent to me. The last one had a statue of the Virgin Mary ooze rather poorly rendered pixelated blood (like something straight out of Stigmata). Toby … must … be … stopped …

Reasons to have hope for the future:

• Smurfalizer
  OK – I found this through smurfar blog but I can’t smurfar which one. How smurf. Anyway – the smurf this looks a bit bizarre is smurfat I decided smurfat I should write a smurf of the site, run it through the Smurfar and smurfen use the Smurfalized text. It’s the most ridiculously pointless smurf I have smurfen on the web in … days … The design is pretty classy, and if you can get past the overtly Scandinavian dialect, smurfen you can have all the fun in the world smurf other people’s sites into Smurf.
• Hamsters for President
  How do we feel about Hamsters for President? I can’t help thinking (on the basis of the current candidates) that rodents would be at least an evolutionary step in the right direction. In London at the moment, all the news is about the mayoral elections. Is it too late to sneak in a Hamster candidate?

So I changed the name of the weblog from Xenolith to Barbelith yesterday, since it seems to be the most substantially operative part of the site at the moment. And now it looks like no one can find the thing. I still prefer Xenolith as a name for it, but I thought it was too confusing – people were calling the site all kinds of different things. Weird, disturbing things…

According to the age guesser, I am 31. I suppose it’s not that far off the mark. Only four years. Still – quite clearly in the wrong direction. It works on quite a cool principle – each answer to each question corresponds with an age, at the end of the series of questions it asks you your actual age. Every question that you answer in the way they expect (eg. answer “duran duran” if you are in your thirties) is weighted slightly more. And every question that you answer in a way that they did not expect (eg. answer “Stretch Armstrong” if you are in your eighties) is weighted slightly less. In time – only the really accurate questions will carry any weight at all. The questionaire is evolving…

The idea of web queeries is really growing on me (now if only I could do something about the name). I’m beginning to see the possibilites of this new form of journalism – a weblog that publishes important and entertaining news and is edited/researched by a variety of people, most of whom will never have met one another. I think when I made the leap from thinking about it in terms of personal content and more towards comment and news, the whole idea made much more sense to me.

No one seems to have got my Voyager reference yesterday, which is probably a good thing to be honest, as I’m sure enough of you think I am a geek as it is. There’s this episode in which Captain Janeway, the slightly jowly woman with the squeeky voice (and rather ‘hands-on’ approach to interstellar diplomacy) has been being attacked by a race called the Krenim (or something like that). As the cast all rock backwards and forwards in stylised “starship been shot at” ways, Janeway scowls and then remarks to herself, “this is turning into the Week of Hell”.

The joke? The episode has the rather less optimistic title “Year of Hell”. Let’s hope I am not similarly ill-fated.

The slightly bizarre baltimorecitypaper.com has a feature about the disinfo.con. And I quote: “Easily the most charismatic speaker of the event was the wiry, shaven-headed Scottish writer Grant Morrison, whom, judging from the enthusiastic applause, is becoming highly regarded … The great underlying truth that makes this so, Morrison said, is that “words are the binding agents for reality,” and hence can bent to our desires”.

Zannah won the blog of the week over at blogger.com. Congratulations, old girl, you deserve it. In other weblog news, Fairvue is a site I haven’t seen before, which drips design savvy and has a wonderfully tiny icon-based links bar. The only problem is, barbelith doesn’t have a logo. Note to self – improve site branding asap. A couple of other nice people have started linking to barbelith – dailybread looks and reads really well. It’s a pity she’s cursed with that damnable GeoCities advert – stuff and rot has said lovely lovely things about the layout around here and has introduced me to a couple of sites I’ll be visiting much more often – and finally, a proto-blog is coming together at Luke’s site o’ stuff. Could it be the world’s first overtly Christian blog?

I’ve just signed up to join web queeries, which is a glbt community blog. I’m a little sceptical about the idea at the moment, mainly because I’m trying to work out what the difference should be between writing for it and writing for barbelith. Should I be “less gay” in my weblog? Should I be only writing “for gay people” in the group one?

If you, like me, pine for the good old days on the net, before IPOs and uber-corporate assimilation, then you will be delighted to know that weblogs are our way back to the future we used to believe in. Wired will show you the way…

Here’s another little microsite that I built for timeout.com – Should Ken Livingstone stand as an independent candidate? Answer the question!