Author: Tom Coates

Never been so exhausted in my life. May have found a house in Arsenal of all places. Completely gorgeous little place – only problem is that one of our number has to sleep in a half completed loft conversion.

Ever more Hard Includes. Will the madness never end?

If I told you that I had spent today with my co-worker starting the process of changing 16,000 separate web pages to work with new banner and button ad coding (requiring around 165 separate hard includes), would any of you feel any sympathy for me? Said enterprise (plus last night’s uncomfortable sofa cushions) have resulted in a dull pulsing headache which feels like someone has stuck an air pump into my brain and is slowly inflating it against my skull. All in all, the last 24/48 hours have been completely overwhelming – there has been no area of my life which hasn’t been confusing or confounding or intense. That’s not to say it’s all bad stuff – not by any means – but there’s just too much of it.

So, Project Cool recommended Lockjaw today. I guess I can see why, it’s quite ably put together. I was just wondering about the lo-fi feel of the site – and the preponderance of grainy imagery. It reminded me of a trend in print design a while back for an almost fanzine feel. I don’t know if it translates that well to the web though – I mean there is so much real lo-fi stuff, I am not sure that it is easy to tell when it is intentional.

Evil Nick is off to visit a young woman in Los Angeles. He’s never been out of Europe before. I try and figure out what to say to him about the trip and can only come up with, “you’ll be surprised how alien you feel”. In order to get a flight at short notice, he has had to go via Frankfurt. Total length of outgoing flight – 14 hours. That’s got to hurt.

I don’t love Ben Brown, I just think he’s nice.

At some point in the last day or so (according to my referrer log), Zeldman linked to me. But then when I try and look at his site, I keep getting timed out. What’s that about? Can someone tell me what he said?

Oh, and if you have a minute to spare – have a glance at my latest microproject – the Best London Cinema poll. I’m never really sure whether or not they are any good or not – I mean they work, and they do what they are supposed to, but they are hardly the most attractive of designs. I was much happier with the Eating and Drinking Awards one. But then I had more than an hour for that…

If this isn’t unabashed.com angling for links, I don’t know what is:

“i’m not sure i’ll ever get many people visiting my site… i’m not into that whole ‘blog everybody else’ mentality. i don’t want to post that someone else has a good post… just to get some reciprocal links happening. i have a list of sites that i like to visit… because they’re good. cuz i like them… i’m not looking for anything from them– or anybody else for that matter. that’s it. c’est tout.”

I was a late-comer to haughey.com, but I really enjoyed it when I found it. But with its recent redesign has shifted it into another gear. Very much to be recommended.

And I had a lovely evening last night with Sam and various friends of his. Just in case you were wondering…

Barbelith goes metalogic:

• Who links to me?
  I hadn’t even noticed that you could search blogger until today. The best thing is that you can see when other webloggers linked to your own site. It’s self-indulgent, but then, you know, weblogging isn’t?
• Beebo.org’s metalog
  Beebo.org is almost an obsession to me. It’s a combination of popularity contest and content filtering system. Just to undermine the point of the metalog section – why not visit these popular links: Microsoft Anti-Trust Case [Wired], A Pillow That Looks Like a Penis, The End of the 5k Award, “Bunky, I’m Confused”, Slightly Implausible Microsoft Site, Mount Etna Blows Smoke-Rings. And all of that is doubly meta-tastic, because it will now include the fact that I have linked to them in its stats…
• Hotlist
  The most linked to weblogs, courtesy of weblogs.com.

So I had lunch yesterday with the guy I met at Popstarz, and it really was quite enjoyable. I don’t want to foul things up, so I won’t go into details – except to say that I’m probably seeing him again this evening. It’s all very exciting.

Admin Notice: Regular Nexus people and the like – Hadalis is holding a post-finalé bash in Winston-Salem, NC on May 26 -29. If you are interested, the e-mail address you need is: Hadalis@gateway.net.

Another month, another issue of *spark. This month, the features include the intoxicating (virtual morality), the revolutionary (hacktivism: the new protest movement?), and the inspirational (surfing towards bethlehem?). I am taking the way *spark operates as a form of model example of what I want the new barbelith to achieve when I finally sort out the architectural parts of it – in some ways it is already a project that should appeal to the subcultural elements of the Nexus…

I am becoming very tired of being homeless. Yes, that’s right – I am STILL homeless. A friend has given me permission to crash at his place for a couple of nights (with a break in the middle so that he can have sex with someone without me knocking on the door and asking if I can pilfer some Orange Juice), but there is still only the vaguest notions of new flatishness in the near future.

I went to see Erin Brokovich last night with Katy (soon to be starting her own weblog), and we got so excited by the classiness of Steven Soderbergh that we are going to go and see The Limey tonight.

For those people disappointed by my recent shortcomings on updating The Bomb, I have finally added most of the annotations for issue 3#2 from the Nexus. Should I have missed anything, let me know immediately. [Let Tom know]