Year: 2002

My flatmate is buying an iBook. Just to tease me, you understand. I went into town with her today to decide what she needs. Sigh.

There’s going to be an announcement tomorrow regarding Blogger. Could it be that we’re finally going to have to pay for the damn thing? Could it be that there’ll be some kind of increased functionality? Could it be that Ev has found a business partner who’s going to splash millions of dollars in his lap to make the service horrifically amazing?

Looks to me like Wil‘s onto a winner. He’s selling personally autographed Next Generation stuff at the moment – and seems to be making a fair amount of money on it. Poor old Wil. Forever labelled by a character he played in an old sci-fi series.

Speaking of which, he was in the episode of Next Generation that I watched this evening on BBC2. The lines they gave that man must have been enough to drive a young man to suicide. His character was the lamest creature in fifteen star systems. Is it surprising that everyone hated him? Tonight some female character commented something along the lines of, “It’s just as well you’re cute, Wesley, otherwise you’d be insufferable”. If I found him cute I’d be some kinda pervert. So I’m left agreeing with her other sentiments alone. I keep thinking that maybe an older actor might have been able to play these lines in a less annoying way – but I’m not sure it’s possible. If you had Wesley for a child, you’d be continually encouraging him to act up. You’d be begging for it. You’d be going, “you want to have sex with a prostitute, son?” or, “Daddy’s got some heroin…!”

Me? I don’t love anyone.

On the cover of a book I’m reading there is this statement: “Triumphs of imagination such as the person you love is 72.8% water”. Which made me think – is it a triumph of imagination to visualise the person you love as over a hundred pounds of water, or is it a greater leap of the imagination to look at said hundred pounds of water and decide to love it?

But the stuff that makes you human is the other stuff. Right? The 27.2% that isn’t water. But that’s clearly untrue. You might as well say that the person you love is one fifth coal to four fifths water. You’d still be way off. The person you love is a self-organising generated string of information that has mutated and transformed and lengthened and retransmitted itself over hundreds of millions of years. They are the latest holographic representation of a stream of information broadcast from the ancient past. They are the carriers of chinese whispers passed down from a universe of different creatures that have watched the world change – that have changed the world. And they are the only people that carry this message. Now that’s something worth loving.

The one of my heroes that isn’t Steve Jobs has been interviewed and is his normal dazzling brilliant self. When asked what the world needs now, he replies, “More soldiers”.

Are you ready to go back in time? Want to read lots of old plasticbag.org crap from before it was even plasticbag.org? Do you miss this?Think every design I’ve done in the last year and a half has been crap!? Well screw you, mister. Like I give a damn what you think! Or alternatively, check it out!

• Flashback!: Riothero’s prom!
• Flashback!: Tom gets a haircut!
• Flashback!: Celebrity Big Brother Quake Castaway Deathmatch!
• Flashback!: Tom’s fucked-up dream life!
• Flashback!: Regular Ivan Massow updates!
• Flashback!: Powazek quits. Riothero’s Batman!
• Flashback!: Mark had a dream!
• Flashback!: Tom gets into serious trouble…
• Flashback!: Relationship gets to “I run a website and you are on it” point!

I write crap nowadays. I was much more fun then.

Blogger is down again. But wireless.blogger.com seems to be working just fine!

If I’m honest, I’m grumpy because I’ve got toothache again. And everything that follows (although all relevant complaints) is probably borne of dental pain. It’s toothache like this that started most of the world’s major shitstorms, if you ask me. Certainly at the moment I’d cheerfully fuck the world for some free dental work. Damn you Thatcher for screwing up the NHS dentists.

And while I’m at it, I think it’s about time I griped about Blogger. It’s a wonderful democratic piece of software that I’ve used without paying a penny since the day it launched (apart from a tiny donation once). I love it. It’s changed my life.

But will someone please explain to me why you can’t do a permalink for a day instead of just an entry?! It makes no sense! You have a variable for the archive page’s file name. You have date formats that would work well as internal links on a page. Why then is it impossible to put the archive page tag in the date header!? Why doesn’t that work!? It should work! And it would immediately increase the adaptability of the service!

And it would mean we could all make site’s that work like Jason’s if we wanted to, without killing ourselves fighting with bloody Movable Type, which I also love but is still frustrating me beyond human belief.