Okay. I don’t normally do these things and please God don’t take this as an opportunity to start sending me more of them, but I’m going to respond to Lubin Odana’s book-reading memetic challenge. I don’t normally do these kinds of things because I don’t really think they’re aimed at me. I think they’re really good ways to introduce people to the wider world, to help people get a grasp on your character and stuff, and that if people haven’t figured out what I’m like by now after five years of slapping this rubbish on the internet, then they basically never will. Still never mind, here we go…
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be? This is a really tricky one for me. Probably my all-time favourite book is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 which I’ll talk about in a bit. But another favourite of mine is a book called Ready to Catch him Should he Fall by Neil Bartlett which I think is one of the few books that I’ve read that managed to capture a powerful and natural-feeling, balanced idea of a non-hetero-orthodox gay relationship. I found it incredibly powerful and interesting. More importantly, I’m much less confident that anyone else would look after it in a dystopian future than I am about Slaughterhouse 5, and someone has to stand up for the poofs and it might as well be me.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? God, I have absolutely no idea. Probably when I was much younger I thought that Keill Randor from Planet of the Warlord was unbelievably hot and there was some weird S&M plot in that book too which probably did a lot to confuse my teenage mind. There are many characters in books that I’ve idolised in various ways – Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ Against Nature was probably a core one. And Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae. But I think probably I have more crushes on fictional characters from TV shows, comics and films than I do from books. This probably suggests that what people look like is important to me. So I’d talk about Booster Gold from his original comic book series, Dr John Carter from the first few seasons of E.R., Ricky Fitts from American Beauty, Han Solo / Indiana Jones and maybe the Colonel from Stargate. I’m so shallow that the slightest drop of water would find no rest in my embrace…
The last book you bought was: Terrifyingly it was Getting Things Done by Dave Allen. I bought it months ago and have bought no books since because I’ve been busy and found it difficult to focus. I read about half of it. Then got stuck. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
What are you currently reading? On my last count I had 160 open tabs in Safari, I had 30 open tabs in NetNewsWire, I had 3000 unread posts in my newsreader and I had 27,000 unread e-mails across my work and personal e-mail accounts. What the crap do you think I’m reading?
Five Books you would take to a desert island:
I’d also take with me about four hundred dodgy comic books and a pile of DVDs. But hey. Anyway, I hope that’s satisfactory and interesting enough for you filthy voyeurs out there in realspace. I’m going to pass the challenge on to some people who almost certainly won’t want to go near it: Dan Hill because he’s my boss and needs to suffer, Stefan Magdalinski because he’s a stroppy bastard and as such I’d enjoy hearing his rants and Matt Jones because he reads weird shit…
This is more of an update than a post and won’t be of enormous interest to an awful lot of you, I’m sure. Basically for those of you reading this site via an RSS newsreader, I’ve decided to remove the splicing of photographs from my Flickr photostream. This is for a number of reasons, but mainly because I’ve started to feel a bit uncomfortable about the enormous shifts in tone between the two feeds and how they inter-relate to one another. If you enjoy seeing pictures from my photostream however, you can still subscribe to a dedicated feed.
For those of you who are not familiar with the plasticbag.org feed, or with newsreaders in general, then I can recommend the Wikipedia article on RSS and newsreaders and if you’re using a Mac, then NetNewsWire remains the client of choice.
This little job is just the first of a large number of changes that you should be seeing around the site over the next few weeks as I work to redesign the place from the ground-up. I can warn you now that many of you are not going to like what I’m going to do with the place. I’m taking it very stark and simple. But I’m finding it quite exciting. If you’re of the speculative sort, then why not have a look at my page on a design history of plasticbag.org and see if you can spot the trends.
I’ve just posted this question to Ask Metafilter, but I thought I’d cross-post it here to see if anyone knows the answer:
When I was a kid, I remember hearing on the news about a study that had determined that there were a few specific life-cycles for the way a hypothetical person’s might react to any new pop-song. One type of song would get more popular the more times it had been heard and then would plummet in popularity when a person had heard it around fifteen times. Others took longer to get popular but would stay at the top longer. These studies were used to help radio networks determine what to play – how to make songs into hits and how often to play them once they had become hits. Does anyone know anything about these studies and where I might be able to find them?
If you know the answer to this question feel free to either post it on the thread (if you’re a Metafilter member) – What studies have been done on the lifecycle of pop songs and how people respond to them over time? – or below if not…