Year: 2001

Mark is an arse.

An American, yesterday:

The ideology behind Barbelith and plasticbag.org laid bare: “The world is made up of two kinds of people: those who cling to the tired, old status quo and those who fearlessly embrace the new status quo. Me, I fall squarely into the latter camp. Not content to stick with the same-old same-old, I like to mix it up and put myself out there. You know, give the old heave-ho to the stodgy and staid. Say what you will about me, but no one will ever accuse me of being afraid to try popular new things.” [The Onion]

Tom reviews: The Living Daylights: “Unlike several of the previous episodes, this is a film with at least one foot squarely set in the real world. There are no vast subterranean bases, no plans to rule the world and a remarkable shortage of huge fluffy white cats.” Star Trek Generations: “The graceless ageing of the original crew and their self-satisfied ham acting don’t sit well with Patrick Stewart’s obvious intelligence and Shakespearean training – and make his reverence to Shatner’s paunchy hack seem almost degrading.”

Because sometimes it’s nice to be duped: “A friend of mine calls A&F “the poor gay man’s Prada”.”

Depressing but true. Someone spend the time to put together 1 of 101 Dave Eggers Jokes, format them like his memoir was formatted and stick them on the internet. The memoir was wonderful. The jokes are … not. They’re too mean-spirited. Which brings me to the thread on Metafilter which asks if anyone out in the community has been the target of a website parody or attack. The answer, of course, is that everyone has been attacked at one point or another. But that we deal with it. Case in point – still up and running and still secretly upsetting me: Plasticfag.org.

As has become unpleasantly normal, a new day means a new piece of bad news from the new media / publishing landscape to fill me with dread. Today? IPC closes key websites – most of which, it has to be said, weren’t particularly good or interesting sites. But still – not the point.

An insight into my barbelith posting habits reveals a singular interest in fanfiction and authorship, Buffy, sexuality and the recent Channel 5 movie, “Justice League of America”. That was way lame.

And no sooner had it came back, than Blogger search disappears once more.

It was the greatest and most glorious flop of the dot.com rush, and now it might be a movie. Cameron Diaz and Ed Norton may be in the running for Boo.com, the movie. The most depressing thing about this whole enterprise is that you just know there’s some poor techie or usability guy or designer sitting in the back of every scene sobbing his eyes out. Possibly the most idiotic company of all time to be given $100 million, Boo.com could have been run on a hamburger and a piece of string and still not made any money.