Author: Tom Coates

Today on Barbelith: Echelon (I): History and Politics – “The first part of our Echelon series takes a look at the background of the top secret surveillance project that has the European Union in uproar.”

I am contemplating running a parallel campaign to the barbelith one. I’m wondering if I can persuade the world to contribute dollar by dollar towards getting me a G4 Ti Powerbook. I’m dribbling at the propect, but it occurs to me that I could be here waiting for it for quite some time…

Because of the sheer weight of running barbelith.com, I have decided to start to take donations from people for its upkeep and maintenance. 300,000 page impressions a month, CGI heavy-bulletin boards and up to 700Mb of bandwidth a day wasn’t quite what I had in mind when I started the site, but never mind – everyone seems to enjoy it.

Can you guys find some pretext to link to http://simon.fneh.net ASAP? I linked to him and he bet me that he’d get less hits today than yesterday just in order to spite me. So now it’s a matter of honour that I find some way of at least doubling his traffic. All ideas gratefully received

So Simon’s redesigned minor 9th but wouldn’t beg me to link to him. So I have linked to him anyway, just to prove that having nerve is sometimes worth rewarding. As long as you all remember that you are all my bitches, that is. You’ve got that, right?

Mark’s new haircut makes him look like a Beatle. And he’s started posing more. Which is, you know, fun.

I remember saying to myself in March that if I hadn’t found a permanent job I wanted by my birthday, then I would seriously consider either mass slaughter or suicide. I’m no longer comfortable with the stresses and insecurities of freelance work. Well, one month from today, I turn 29, and while the industry does appear to be picking up slightly, I’m increasingly concerned that I’m not going to be in my dream job by that magical date. I’ve done some stuff during the last couple of months that I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve done some stuff that I never want to do again. And while I’ve done a lot of good work (I think barbelith is coming together very well) I just don’t ever really feel able to relax and I’m always thinking about where the next work is going to come from. Tonight, I really do feel so very very tired.

Read this and then read this and then come and join us at Smolensky’s for a drink this evening from 7pm to 9pm – all welcome, from regular readers to first-timers.

Today on Barbelith: Marquis De Sade: Profile – “Being a comprehensive guide to the life and work of the world’s most passionate and depraved libertine and lover.”

I took a break from the nightmare reinstallation from hell in order to catch the last half hour of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s weird – Simon and Mark probably weren’t even born when I last saw it.

The weirdest thing about the whole experience was seeing how many images, sounds and effects in Close Encounters have become representative of the whole alien phenomenon. There are traces of Close Encounters in pretty much every film about contact and aliens made since. Particularly weird, though, is the way it’s represented. Exactly the same music and imagery is used in Independance Day and the X-files to convey horror and anxiety, and yet in Spielberg’s original the whole thing is approached with wonder. There’s fear in there as well, of course, but the general spirit is one of awe. It makes all those bizarre claims that Spielberg’s movies are designed to educate and reassure the American public about the actual presence of aliens vaguely plausible. Extraordinary.

When I was 18 I visited the place in the desert where they filmed the movie. At the campsite opposite they show the movie every single night – projected on an screen in an outside theatre – with nothing around but desert and tents, and nothing above but clear skies and hundreds of millions of stars.