Category: Random

Ok. Next year I want to be a Best Gay Chap nominee again. Do you understand me? I’m not satisfied with just being known for my design skills. I want to be the world’s best homo. I know I don’t talk about it very much, but that’s just because being gay is really boring, not because I’m not any good at it. I’m really good at it. I’m the Leonardo Da Vinci of Big Gay Shit. Am I convincing anyone? I should stick to talking about weblogs really. At least then I know what I’m talking about…

• Jonno’s Cute Dead Guy of the Week
  My personal favourite has to be Louis Lingg, who was not only an anarchist and really hot, but also blew himself up in jail by putting a bomb in his mouth. You don’t get much cooler than that.

• Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful video [real: lo | med | hi]
  You know when pop-stars can be as sensitive as this, it’s almost worth having them exploit our pain to sell records! I hope she gets another really big house. I really do.

• Diesel Sweeties’ tasteful take on gay lovin’
  “I am an eccentric millionaire. Indie-Rock Pete, I will pay you for eccentric gay sex experimentation.”

• Soccer Practice by Gay Pimp
  This utterly terrible song about hot soccer jocks is mostly entertaining for its dodgy gay subversion of ‘ho’-centred rap/pop videos. Also partially entertaining for taking the piss out of sporty straight-boys. Warning: Quite rude, ungodly and just plain wrong.

Being a brief list of the celebrities that I’ve come into fleeting contact with over the last month or so. The gentle reader is expected to bear in mind that said celebrities are unlikely to be of the stature of your major Hollywood Oscar winner, since most were spotted milling around Covent Garden, Soho or Piccadilly Circus…

• The guy with the hair from the Salon TV show.
  For the Americans among us, The Salon is a reality TV show set in a hair and beauty establishment (allegedly just off London’s shimmeringly glamourless Shaftesbury Avenue). The gentleman I spotted from the show was strolling down towards Piccadilly Circus one late-winter’s evening, with a few passers-by taking pictures of him. He looked slightly dumb-founded and as if he was rather enjoying it.

• Matt Lucas, TV’s entertaining man-in-a-baby-suit.
  Matt Lucas (alias “What are the final scores?” George Dawes) went to the same university as me. In fact he not only went to the same university as me, but he went at the same time and was friends with a couple of friends of mine. But I barely new him, and so didn’t feel an urge to reintroduce myself to him when we both found ourselves stuffing our faces on nearby tables in the Leicester Square Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some poor, rather dumb-looking chap tried to get an autograph, but clearly it wasn’t an appropriate time.

• The quite-cute-one-off-The-Office.
  Celebrities are clearly intrinsically grumpy people. I go to this hair place in Soho, and have done since I worked at Time Out. I always knew that it used to be cool, but I’d never seen an actual living celebrity in there before. Today was different, however. Because Martin Freeman (who plays the nice one from the Office) stomped in eager for hair-rescue. The only unfortunate thing about this encounter is probably that he’s not really known (primarily at least) for the quality of his haircuts. In fact maybe a bit anti-known. So in a sense him coming into my hair place probably isn’t the best sign of my continued style.

• Stephen Gately.
  The anaemic butterfly in bizarrely successful prefab pop-group Boyzone somehow managed to defy nature by becoming a weird fat caterpillar-like non-solo-star. But that was then – as the other day my work colleagues and I spotted the bad-skinned and newly-skinny, tiny pop-singing, proto-West-End-starring Joseph-in-his-designer-stressed-denim while on our way to a nice little restaurant in Covent Garden. He kind of had that look on his face that Chandler got in Friends when he came into the room with his new Tom Selleck-alike moustache. Only scarier and much less good-natured. We avoided him. And maybe pointed a little.

So there you go. My last month’s celebrity encounters. Anyone spotted anyone more interesting?

There’s some fascinating stuff around about the relationship of depressive illness to strategies of harm avoidance:

Clinical depression is associated with two modulations occurring simultaneously and chronically, dysphoria and the generalized stress response. Dysphoria is a modulation that is part of the harm perception/avoidance axis. This is an emotion we all feel when we perceive a futility in our current behavior and experience disappointment. In contrast, we experience anger and aggression when the disappointment is perceived as being caused by an external source. When the disappointment causes dysphoria, the modulation shift increases behavioral inhibition, increases anticipation of harm, increases harm avoidance, increases introspection, decreases exploration of the environment, decreases reactivity to external stimuli, decreases appetite for food and decreases sexual appetite.

In short, it coordinates functions that allow us to retreat, introspect and to redirect our efforts in a more effective direction. In this instance, dysphoria facilitates adaptation to disappointment. [mentalhealthandillness.com]

I like that. Dysphoria faciliates adaptation to disappointment. Lots of interesting things fall out of investigations like these, but this sense of harm avoidance is the one that interests me most – that the depressive personality and the introverted personality are heavily connected. That the wallflower reacts to disappointment, attributed internally. Fascinating stuff.

Fill your browser with your link-fuel and let’s Easy Rider information interstate 666. Feel the breeze in your hair – fluff-links for the quasi-hip:

• Matrix: Reloaded phones from Samsung?
• Positive Search Engine Feedback with ktheory (via Jason)
• Gay Boyfriend by the “Ukes of Hazzard”.
  I should hate it, but I don’t.

• The Valentineís Day Card Massacre.
  I asked for all cocks, but what can you do?

• Google / Blogger FAQs – funnier than it should be.
• Rob’s Safari Wishlist (via Jason)

So Project Stupidly-Long-Post about this iWire post is taking much longer than I’d expected, and work’s suddenly started taking up my mental space for the first time in a month or so, and I’ve been trying to get some stuff finished for Ben Hammersley and my door’s being fixed (long story behind that one connected to an earlier post of mine). And basically this all adds up to a busy little Tom who can’t think of things to write on his site. Except he’s been collecting things he does want to talk about, and rather than discard them, he’s going to do another linklog. But he’s going to do it shamefully and in full recognisance that he’s basically shirking his intellectual responsibilities to the world. And with the shirking of intellectual responsibilities in mind, let’s jump straight into…

• The Latest Liberty X video
  The were the anti-group-by-committee pop-group that was itself made by committee and managed to come out with considerably more attitude than the demographically-generated Hear’say. Obviously that doesn’t make them any good – but at least they have the class to take the piss out of themselves. This rather high-quality cover features the band mass-producing hundreds of duplicates of themselves in an effort to get high quality mass-culture pop product out to the masses. Highly entertaining and much recommended…

• Katy’s Coccyx
  So this is totally the grossest thing you’ll see on the web today – my good friend Katy Kitschbitch has had an operation on her lower back – and decided not only to keep what they removed, but also to take meaty pictures of it and put them online. Utterly grotesque. Strangely compelling. Get well soon, Katy!

• Tom Lenk on Buffy spin-offs
  “Danny and I keep suggesting that the season finale, which is potentially the end of the show, should end with me kneeling down at Jonathan’s grave, putting blood on my face like Willow did [when she resurrected Buffy]. After I resurrect him, we build a robot of Warren, and then we have our own show. Then we’re hired by the government to use our powers for good, and we’re given a watcher, which would be played by Morgan Fairchild!”

Depressingly, at some point it looks like I’m going to be compelled to go for the full separate link-log option, but at the moment you’re just going to have to make-do with the annotated lists that I slap up every so often…

• Safari to get tabbed browsing
  If you’re a fan of tabbed browsing, then this article (which includes scary looking pictures) is interesting, if not entirely reassuring. Positive feature: ‘x’ on each tab allows you to close it. Negative feature: apparently an entirely new form of tab style – hanging downwards from the URL.

• Daypop Wordbursts & Top Blogs
  Two new toys from the daypop crew today. Wordbursts is the more interesting of the two – following on from the New Scientist article about trend-spotting in webloggery from a few days back. I don’t know that such a shallow analysis will reveal any particularly huge trends at this stage, but there’s no denying that it could in the long-term. The ‘Top Blogs’ thing is more notable for the internal Google-style weighting system – the more heavily linked-to a weblog is, the greater its ‘page-rank’ and in turn the more effect its links have. It’s an interesting approach, but one I have to think in more depth.

This is a post about why mainstream content publishers shouldn’t host weblogs on their sites – and the special circumstances under which they might be able to make it work. Firstly the reasons why they shouldn’t do it:

• If you have an established and authoritative brand associated with the fact-checked information that you publish, you run the risk of diluting that image by having your logo or URL associated with content published by members of the general public.
• This is much less of a problem with discussion forums and community sites than it is with weblogs, because weblogs can use any voice they like (from authoritative to playful) and mostly don’t need to allow any means of conversational redress from other users – ie. it’s easier to confuse a weblog with the brand’s main content.
• There is also an associated problem (familiar to anyone hosting user-generated content) with legal liability – it’s considerably easier to remove a legally dubious post from a discussion board than it is from a weblog, because webloggers view (with reason) the space as essentially theirs, and immune from intervention from on-high.
• There is no reason to assume that being in the position to encourage the take-up of weblogging will mean that you’ll keep the ones you want to keep using your service. In fact:
  1. The longer someone has been weblogging, and the more invested they are in it, the more likely it is that they’re going to want to get a domain name of their own.
  2. These same people are also likely to want to use extended functionality at some point and will probably try and move to a dedicated application or provider who can more adequately fulfil their weblogging needs.
  3. A dedicated long-term weblogger may not wish to be associated with the brand of your service any more and may choose to leave.
• The effect of this is that dedicated, popular and authoritative webloggers will leave your service, leaving behind only new webloggers, and abandoned or ‘low-quality’ sites.
• And the final reason not to host weblogs is that there’s no need to do so. If you publish compelling and blog-worthy content on your site then it’ll get just as much take-up in webloggia as if you were hosting the weblogs themselves.

Now the special cases – the ways to approach something like this if you’re determined to do it:

1. There’s value and utility in the information you can glean out of a database of people’s weblog posts. These can help inform editorial decisions and make it possible to spot emerging news / public interest stories. This information (and the multiple ways it can be used within your site) is simply valuable. If you have an established brand, you are more likely to be able to get a decent amount of it.
2. Probably the best way to implement it after this stage, then, is to use an associated brand and publicise it heavily on your main site. That way you’re putting in that element of distance that stops you being quite so heavily associated with what is written, while still reaping the benefits from it…
3. And to counter natural migration from your service (indeed to capitalise upon it and monetise it) then:
   1. Firstly, make it possible for your webloggers not only to leave, but also to come back. People resent being put into a position where they are ‘trapped’ into using only one personal publishing tool, and may publicise this as a reason not to use the service in the first place.
   2. Secondly, give them a clear upgrade path – give them various levels of functionality which they can move between. You can try and monetise this if you wish. If the functionality is good enough, people will pay.
   3. Thirdly, use the fact that your running a high-profile publishing business as an opportunity to reward the weblogs you host that you think are particularly good. This is a hell of an incentive to be ‘one of the fold’.
   4. Fourthly, not only don’t try and force people to stay within your design and branding, but make it possible for people to migrate from the branded presence completely. Many webloggers will want (at some point) to purchase a domain name of their own and get more powerful server functionality and access, but many won’t know how to approach this kind of stuff. If you can build mechanisms to keep this process as simple and as easy as possible, then you can keep your webloggers happy, keep them using your service, and in the process get a cut on the price of the domain name, charge for the enhanced hosting (or the removal of adverts, if you’ve used them) and you still have access to the content they’re producing.

There’s a great big thing in my head at the moment – all conceptual and wiggling – that I’ve been trying to write all day. So far, no luck. I’m stuck about two-thirds of the way through. So to pass the time, here’s a few links from around the web that I’ve been meaning to write up for ages.

• Not only has Cal redesigned, but he’s also put in place a wide variety of CSS skins. You can now get your Cal experience in kottke, b3ta or plasticbag flavours…
• Next month at the ICA: Grant Morrison in Conversation. From the programme, “The night kicks off with Morrison in conversation. The discussion will focus on the form, content and history of comic books.”
• Along the lines of my BBC On this Day feature comes Macdaraconroy’s Word of the Day bar using Movable Type date formatting to make the link.
• Co-inspiration for much of my initial enthusiasm with web stuff, Derek Powazek has just redesigned fray.com. It’s a really nice new look – my only anxiety being that the colour scheme seems coincidentally to suit the most recent entry on the site. I don’t know how good it will look with more disparate material…
• I got Freeview! At home! Extra channels of mostly mediocre less-than-yummy not-very-goodness, but a few (BBC3, BBC4, BBC News 24) definitely worth the price of the box. And no monthly fee. Good job.
• And finally… Blah, blah, blah, weapons of mass destruction, New X-men 2 trailer, good commentary on the lazyweb, Dan Hon on the Inflection Point, Ceci n’est ce pas une potato…

The only news today in the blogosphere is that Google has bought Blogger. I have an almost infinite amount to say about this subject, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have time to say it for a few days. Apologies…

It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, that most accursed of all days. Accursed for all time because of the way the saint in question was beaten with clubs and beheaded for worshipping the ‘wrong’ super-powered fantasy figure. The same day of disaster and terror that saw the gangland executions of seven mobsters in 1929. This day of poisonous snacks and symbolically ripped-out bodily organs. Like the Roman Saturnalia only without any of the fun and with a hell of a lot more Meg Bloody Ryan, is there really anything worse than Valentine’s Day?

Well I can’t make the stupid day go away, but I can distract you with frivolous trivia and trashy links!

• Interview with IHT.com’s designer
  I spent ages trying to find out about who built iht.com when it first launched, and now there’s a whole interview with its creator over at new-favourite-weblog ordinary-life.net.

• Faith – the TV series?
  As Buffy approaches what seems like it should be an ending, what comes next? Could it be a Faith TV series – maybe with support from Willow the witch? If so, count me in…

• Rogue Semiotics on UpMyStreet Conversations
  Now this is why we build Conversations in the first place: ‘”How much do I love UpMyStreet? Well, a decent amount, particularly as it serves the basic but essential community function of being like standing in the greengrocers for five minutes.”

• Sea Lions Guard US ships
  ” The sea lions have been trained to carry a special clamp in their mouths which they can attach to a suspicious person, Commander John Wood, Special Operations Officer Naval Forces Central Command, told Reuters” [Thanks Meg]

• Poor Old Adam loses his job in Apple Store
  “When I went to pbzone.com my heart sank, my knees went weak. it was that oh fuck feeling that you know when something really bad has happened.”

• Sharon and Grant get married
  The nicest site I’ve ever ever found in my referral logs.