Author: Tom Coates

Sorry about the paucity of updates. For a variety of reasons I don’t really feel like I can talk about much at the moment. Everything will be back to normal in a couple of days. Promise.

I’ve had better days.

The train from London to Norfolk is like Heart of Darkness – the further you get towards Norwich, the louder beat the tribal drums, the more fear enters your heart. I have to do this next week. This week, however, I took the train from London to Bristol, and the effect is quite different. It feels as if a weight has lifted. Passing Bath, fresh from a storm with the sun low in the sky, all the buildings arranged around the hills sparkled. Everything seemed open and friendly, everyone calmer and at peace. When I arrived at Temple Meads, my friend Rachel was busy and couldn’t pick me up. So I walked into town, down past the river and down to The Watershed. Everything was fresh and bright, people even move more slowly. I walked up Park Street to the Starbucks and sat and read The Music of Chance and listened to Ella Fitzgerald until I was picked up. Calmest I have felt in months…

Weirdest coincidences (2): One of the guys working at Arehaus at the moment is one half of the circlemakers.org crop-circle collective that won Guardian Site of the Year a while back.

OK. I really have to get my fat arse in gear, so I’m going to kind of write this in a hurry. Warning: Life Recap [If you are not interested in hearing about what I spend my time doing then stop reading this post (indeed this site) immediately.] Everything is kind of happening at once at the moment. I didn’t think I was going to be working today, but then yesterday afternoon someone at Arehaus asked me to come in for another half-day. Which, you know, is a nice extra piece of money. But it is just the latest addition to a whole mad spectrum of weird shit that’s been occupying my head. From two separate friends wanting me to go to birthday parties tonight and tomorrow night, to a friend in Bristol who has persuaded me to go and visit her instead of going to those parties, to my attempt to rationalise two separate companies working practices, to my father ringing up with advice from my brother’s god-father (an accountant), to my mother ringing up this morning asking if she and my brother could see me today if they travelled the hundred miles from Norfolk, to the builders waking me up with loud incomprehensible conversation on the fourth floor of the scaffolding that is directly outside my bedroom window, to the performace of Romeo and Juliet I went to see last night, which my flatmate worked on, and which wasn’t very brilliant, but had lots of hot men with few clothes on, to the kebab I ate (chicken) which really didn’t work well, and the cold I can’t get rid of, and the fact that I don’t have any dry clothes and have to pack and get to work by midday having paid in two cheques, and gone to the laundrette, to all the bills I can’t pay, and all the ones I don’t want to pay, and all the things surrounding me that I don’t understand and find confusing. I need a social secretary.

In which Tom continues his attempts to rip off every single last piece of content from interconnected.org: So when we were down the pub the other night, and I was being all crapulent and morbid, Matt was busy thinking about the possibilities of interaction between Ultimate Bulletin Board software (as seen on the Barbelith Underground) and Usenet. This is why he will come to rule NewMediaLand and I will sink further into drunkeness and iniquity. But I wouldn’t want people to think that he wasn’t there for my pain. Oh no.

While I’m at it, I may as well go the whole hog and steal his link to this fascinating article on The Great Divide between the US and Europe, along with the Metafilter thread that accompanies it. You know, because I can.

According to the BBC, scientists may have identified genes that lend a higher predisposition towards suicide. An old friend of mine killed herself a few years back. We’d lived together on and off for two years and been friends for four or five years. Nothing anyone did seemed to help her, and her life seemed like a kind of unending torment that she just couldn’t see the way out of. I really don’t know if it makes her death easier to accept if the cause was her genetic make-up. I doubt it would make it easier on the parents either, although perhaps they wouldn’t blame themselves so much. I don’t know.

Our first clue in the Pickard conspiracy comes with Mo Morgan’s feature: “When We Were Very Young”. Are we really expected to believe that the picture purporting to be NotSoSoft is anything other than a nameless child of some anarcho-syndicalist post-revolutionary group? Possibly the most terrifying thing about this infantilist rogues gallery is that Davo hasn’t changed a bit.

The conspiracy is afoot. Could it really be possible that over a year of weblog entries are a complete fabrication? Could it be that the woman behind the posting is not a woman at all, but in fact a team of drunken teen hooligans with a strange, sick sense of humour. Ask yourself now, before it’s too late… Is Meg Real?.

On tiny worlds: So I’m working at Arehaus again, and they have a part of their site which has their top-ten sites on it. I found this out last night by talking to Matt, who has another site (upsideclown.com) which is in this chart. So I ask around the office today about who chose that site, and it’s Emma – who is apparently quite knowledgeable about weblogs in general. She mentions Jason for one and about how she was going to set up her own site at blogging.com. So I mention that I have a site of my own, called plasticbag.org and she looks a bit blank. She’s clearly never been. My ego is crushed, of course. It seems as if my legend-in-my-own-lunchbox-ness has been heavily compromised. I now – it seems – only have enough legend to fit inside an old yoghurt carton, or perhaps a Club wrapper.