Year: 2000

It’s a Saturday morning in mid-February in Hampstead and the beginning of my last full weekend in this flat. Over the next week I am loading up all my stuff into a van and driving it up to Norfolk, where my parents live. And then I have a month of homelessness (including two weeks of holiday) where I will be sleeping on the floors of friends. I am contemplating wandering over to America for a week or so – I might go and see Kerry in Los Angeles.

At the moment though, I am sitting in my bedroom looking out over Heath Street and thinking about the last year and a half living here – all the stuff that has happened to me, all the stuff I have had to deal with and all the stuff I have accomplished. It’s a strange time indeed.

Things on the web move so fast. Yesterday at work I was asked to write a list of a few sites that I thought were well designed and interesting. I duly wrote this list from memory, only to find that glassdog.com had completely changed its look, famewhore.com was on a self-imposed hiatus and vitaflo.com (a recent favourite of mine) had disappeared completely without trace.

Opinions can change so quickly too. Derek Powazek, an old friend to barbelith, used to have a pretty low opinion of weblogs and weblogging – until he tried it for himself. Now he’s written a piece about it – What The Hell Is A Weblog And Why Won’t They Leave Me Alone?. It’s interesting reading which raises a fair number of important questions (including “Why do people waste their time when they could be building something Big, beautiful and daring).

Even emotions seem energised and heightened on the web. Riothero has been in my thoughts a lot recently – when I first stumbled upon his site I was amazed by his energy, and as time has passed he has managed to connect that energy with a flair for writing entertaining and quick-witted copy. His latest move has been to put a personal letter online – one that resolves his recent crises with Lyda. It just goes to show how the weblog can become something completely beyond its initial remit as a bunch of interesting links, and can become a synthesis of confessional, entertainment, journalism, column and online diary – a new and interesting, albeit low-key genre of writing. I only have one question – I wonder if she knows?

I’m quite proud of this one – a little tiny microsite I built at work today for the Time Out London Eating & Drinking Awards 2000. It’s not particularly flashy, but it does the job.

This is the nattiest little feature I have seen on a blog in a long time. Look up in the top right hand corner of RandomWalks and you will see a little check-box. If you select it, all links on the page open in a new window. If you don’t select it, then they open in the same window. The whole sordid question resolved in one elegant move.

My mother and brother came and visited me for lunch yesterday. My family lives in Norfolk, which is a two and half hour train journey from London, so they don’t visit that often. Yet again I realised how much I miss my brother when he’s not around.

Tonight is a Friday night, and for the last month that has meant a trip to Popstarz in King’s Cross to bounce around and flirt with people. This week however, that is not going to happen. Last week’s thing is too fresh in my mind for me to even think about it. But I have to think of something to do otherwise I’ll brood. Perhaps I’ll go and see The Bachelor – although epinions of it seem rather mixed. Or perhaps I’ll stay at home and order my first pizza online (Domino’s) and watch Buffy and Angel on TV. That normally cheers me up.

Let’s start the day with something frivolous and infantile. Say it with me: “I’m scared of the dancing bunny”.

I’ve had a lot of e-mails about whether or not I could pass for a proper web-designer. No one has said anything negative, but then I suppose I shouldn’t really expect them to – I needed validation and I received it – thanks to you all. However, one thing is clear from the e-mails that I received – there are an awful lot of people out there with talent who are being passed over in the web design business for people who have managed to fudge their way through print design courses and don’t really know what the hell they are doing. Without wishing to get all “support group” – keep the faith my brothers and sisters. It’s those of us with the passion that produce the interesting sites…

A lot of people are worried about Mark at riothero. He’s been having a pretty hard time of it lately. I’ll tell you this much for nothing. I’ve been having a rough ride recently as well, but I wouldn’t be fifteen again for all the tea in China.

There is a secret frantic redesigning madness coming over the weblogging community at the moment. Latest to fall for its charms (for the second time in recent weeks) is the inestimable megnut. The new look is bold and manages something really obvious that I seem to have overlooked in my recent redesign – a great big obvious logo. Now why didn’t I think of that?

Someone at work today would not let me express my opinion about the navigation scheme of a site that I am connected with, because – and I quote – “You are not a designer”. I was incredibly frustrated by this statement. It’s true that I have no formal design background, and I am merely a self-taught HTML coder, but I honestly believe I could make a living from freelance web-site design. If there are any professional and/or freelance designers out there who could let me know if I am deluding myself or not, it would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, enough about the frustrations of work. Pretty much every day I go and visit riothero‘s site. After my post yesterday about my heroes (about which I got a very nice e-mail from Mr Powazek himself), he posted a message to his site about the possibility of us collaborating on his new site – hero.nu (not live as yet). I started thinking about it immediately and have been considering it all day. And the answer is – let’s do it!

The Oscar nominations came out yesterday, which cheered me up quite a lot, as I had invested in a good number of the films concerned at HSX. I was, however, disappointed that Wes Bentley wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor. I know he’s young, but his performance was incredibly assured.

A couple of days ago there was an appeal at work for people to produce a top ten of their heroes. At first I thought it would be an easy project, ten minutes at most. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realised that I really didn’t respond to the world in that way. When I was a kid, I never really had a hero – no role model to aspire to. After a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that for many people today, the whole concept seems dated. So instead, I decided to concentrate on people whose life or work has interested or inspired me.

1. Jean Baudrillard
   The first person I read who managed to take all the weirdness and fun of the world and collide it with philosophy. His take on transexuality, terrorism and cancer invigorated me when I got bored of academia.

2. David Bowie
   He taught me to swagger – and there is nothing more important than that – the ability to wander through the world, even for a few minutes, as if you were total, perfect and owned the world.

3. Kim Deal
   The Pixies were the first band to make me feel drop-dead cool, and while Frank Black was the main driving force behind them, Kim Deal kept the spirit of them alive with The Breeders. I met her once, and asked her to write a sexy autograph for a friend of mine. She grinned, wrote “Fenner, FUCK ME, Kim Deal” and then disappeared. How cool is that?

4. Sigmund Freud
   The biggest name on my list should be read by everyone. His less plausible ideas are now ridiculed, while the rest have been gradually transformed into “common sense”. Whatever your opinions, his insight was astonishing, and his ability to work through a problem unprecedented.

5. Sam Mendes
   American Beauty appeared in my life at a rather difficult time, and in the course of a couple of hours managed to resolve almost every worry that I had. Since then, new problems have arisen, but the experience of watching a nearly perfect piece of art remains.

6. Grant Morrison
   What can I say – the writer of comic book The Invisibles co-opted my mind about five years ago and has yet to let go. His work ranges in quality and cohesion, but never fails to head-fuck.

7. Derek Powazek
   One of the most important areas of my life is my presence on the web, and I think I can be completely honest in saying that would not have been the case without Derek’s work. Web god of fray, kvetch.com and sfstories.com – he is probably responsible for more wannabe sites on the net than anyone else.

8. Luke Rheinhart
   Much more than any of the theoreticians I have read, Luke Rheinhart’s The Dice Man opened up the idea of personal transformation (through disintegration) to me. His ideas and humour created a world in which there was only possibility.

9. Kurt Vonnegut
   He wrote many books, but by far the most life-changing (for me) were Slaughterhouse 5 and Timequake. He is to science fiction, what Salman Rushdie is to the fantasy novel, and his insight burns with thrilling intellectual gambits and a jet black humour.

10. Noah Wyle
    I was 24, thinking about leaving my doctorate and terrified of what was to come. And so rather than think about it, I watched ER, where Doctor John Carter was in exactly the same situation as I was. And he was almost exactly a year older than me, and he was beautiful. It’s a strange choice I know, but what can I say?

Don’t ask about yesterday. I decided to pretend that it never happened and get on with my life uninterrupted. Although I should briefly say thanks to Liz, Nick, Katy, Evil Nick and Ed the barman.

Barbelith’s weblog has been named by Bloat as one of the top ten weblogs for the week, and the site has finally started to register on metalog’s ratings page. I am pretty cheery about these things.

Opinion is divided as to whether or not talking about stats is taboo – but webloggers are talking about it all over the place. To start off with, check out the comments (and occasionally figures) of: prolific, riothero, evhead, bump.net, Ghost in the Machine, Oh Messy Life, Wetlog, rastorweb.

I think I am going to break some kind of weblogging taboo and discuss stats. I don’ t know why it should feel so odd to do so, but it is almost as if (when you pass a certain stage) you feel a need to keep this information to yourself. Perhaps it is the online version of not standing directly next to people in urinals [I wonder what the female equivalent of that is]. Anyway – let’s get this over with – there are around 250 visits to barbelith’s front page every day (phew – I came out and said it), another 200 to The Bomb and the same number again to The Nexus. I hereby send this challenge out to everyone else in the weblogger community. I’ve shown you mine…

Weblog of absolute note today has to go to mood-indigo.net. It’s a an extremely well-designed and elegant log, with areas reflecting all the interests and aspects of Rachel. But I think the thing that attracts me most to the site is the same thing that attracts me to this form of communication in general – honest and personal online self-expression. Rachel is more than comfortable with exploring her cultural identity online – just as I (I hope) I am on occasion with my sexual identity. And she has managed to make the design of the page emerge from that identity, which in return reflects back and clarifies her sense of herself. A wonderful site.