Year: 2001

What’s wrong with you people? Why haven’t any of you bought anything for Lance Arthur or Derek Powazek? Are you mad?

There is nothing more depressing in this world than realising that you will never ever be able to afford a house on the salaries that you earn: BBC News: Property prices continue to rise.

“Curse you Jerwin… That fat thigh comment was too much even for a diva of my stature to bear in good faith. I’ve had my bodyguard spike your Mai Tai with some methylated spirits and monkey pituitary gland. You will be Bob Hoskins before the week is through… Nyah hhahahaha.” [what the fuck?]

CNN has an interesting article on New Media Workers ‘struggling to keep up’ – which I think is a feeling that I completely identified with a couple of years ago, but don’t so much nowadays. I think it’s a question of establishing what you’re good at and developing that angle of your working life. Having said that, I am, of course, unemployed.

Just in case anyone had not already heard, the new Star Wars film (Episode II) is to be called ‘Attack of the Clones’ – possibly the worst title of all time, after (maybe) ‘The Phantom Menace’. Will this film suck as heavily as the last one did? Only time will tell…

I’m quite fascinated by the way that Netscape is developing it’s cross-network infrastructure. It doesn’t really make total sense to me, although there’s some interesting stuff going on. The top navigation at Entertainment Weekly is now entirely Netscape branded – which means it’s probably part of the AOL Time Warner monstrosity that is eating our planet. But all the navigation seems to go back to Netscape Central rather than to encouraging people around the rest of the Time Warner Sites (Mad Magazine for example) – which I find slightly strange.

Could this be the next form of advertising? Inbuilt navigation? Could TimeOut.com get revenue by placing a full block of someone else’s navigation on the top of its front page?

I’m in love with the look of Webmonkey at the moment. I know the redesign happened a while back, but it works so well and really looks like a site rather than a magazine or a bit of print design. Plus it’s not afraid to play a little. I wonder if there’s a way to automate that staggered blocks of taster-text so that I could do something like that with Greymatter.

It is 2.45pm and here is the news from the BBC:

“On the 56th anniversary of the day that a war was won by the wholesale slaughter of a whole city full of people: Hiroshima remembers A-bomb.

“Is this the future of public internet access? Complete with brass covers and four modem points, an English Park Bench goes online.”

“And on the day that Tom’s American guest stays up until 7am watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, his countryman Ben Affleck enters rehab for problems with drink.”

More news in our evening bulletin…

Today on Barbelith: Philosophy of Fan Fiction – “In other words, fanfiction as concept and practice can be central to one of the most important political / cultural / aesthetic problems of our time: is it possible to create anything new? Deva inquires.”

Another month, another set of overuse charges for barbelith.com. Thankfully, these have been the lowest such charges for a while, possibly due to my burn and purge attitude to heavier web graphics recently. Still, even a supplement of $16 is a pain in the arse when you can’t pay the basic $30.