Category: Random

Recently, in a visit to Covent Garden’s fashionable Magma graphic design store, my eyes found themselves irresistably drawn to a reprint of a Tove Jansson Moomin picture book from the late 1950s. The book – called unselfconsciously
The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My [cover] – tells the story of how young Moomintroll stumbles upon Mymble, whose mischievous daughter has become lost in the wilds of Moominvalley. Each page is a stunning piece of design and artistry conveying an incredibly atmospheric – and uncomfortably scary – world. I bought the book immediately – there’s work inside that reminds me of the woodcut artist and typographer Eric Gill. This is not the kind of childrens book that people seem to make any more.

There aren’t really enough really good sites about Tove Jansson or the Moomins online – certainly not that convey the full impact of her artwork – but I’ve compiled a few useful links for anyone who wants more of an introduction to her work:

• New York Times Obituary
• Moomin Character Guide
• Original Moomin Art

So how do I do this without spoiling things for people in the UK who don’t know what’s going to happen? And how do I do it without sounding like a total dork? How – in fact – do I talk about Buffy Season Seven (as being shown in the States at the moment) without giving too much away? It’s a tough one, certainly. Perhaps an impossible one… Nonetheless, I must take my strength from the example provided for me by my televisual heroine! Battle on against all the odds! Fight for what is right! Kill all the vampires! Um.

Ways in which Tom increasingly resembles Xander Harris:

• Frankly not as thin or as devastatingly hot as used to be.
• Knows too much about Star Wars, Star Trek, Comic Books.
• Hair unruly.
• Considers Anya to be Goddess but wouldn’t have married her.

Ways in which Tom increasingly resembles Andrew:

• I think I’m kinda gay.
• Knows too much about Star Wars, Star Trek, Comic Books.
• Looks good in black.
• Occasionally kills people to look cool to hot guys. Did I say kills people? I meant gave people lovely presents and help with their homework and stuff. Phew.
• Has never successfully slaughtered a pig.

Dumb Theories about the End of the Series:

• Buffy can’t be a slayer any more.
• Something important – significant – has to be sacrificed.
• There have to be a couple of happy endings. Anya / Xander?
• Buffy and Spike are not meant to be together forever.
• “Cos you gotta have Faith…”

Other ways I could humiliate myself in front of my weblogging peers:

• Tom Coates baby pictures.
• “Why I was wrong” – a series of articles examining every thing I’ve said on my site over the last three and a half years that subsequently turned out to be completely wrong.
• The plasticbag.org ‘Comic Relief’ special?
• Everyone likes stories about digestive problems…

I think maybe it would be for the best if we just forgot I ever wrote this post. Let’s all just move along. Nothing to see here. Just too much caffeine and not enough good TV.

• Björk’s QuickTime Gallery
  Stunning Björkish videos presented in full through the magic and wonder of quicktime. Complete with small amounts of information about what exactly the tiny foreign lunatic was taking during filming.

• The Les Dennis Experience!
  Indescribably funny kind-of-fan-site for the UK ‘comedian’ and Celebrity Big Brother Windbag. “Few people know that Les Dennis owns a big boat that is manned almost entirely by Dwarves! ‘Dwarves are easy to control and don’t expect much pay’ Les told us when we rang to confirm the rumours.” Warning: Stinking Rude Bits Unfit for Young ‘Uns.

• NetNewsWire launches
  $30 for NetNewsWire Pro version 1. I’ll be downloading and paying for that tomorrow then. Anyone on a Mac who hasn’t already got it probably should and if you haven’t got OSX, then it’s worth getting it just to run NNW. In fact, I think it’s probably worth getting a Mac to run it. Excellent geeky goodness for all the weblog family…

Ok. Here’s a funny one for you. Dame Edna Everage – that woman who is you know actually a man (sorry if I spoiled that for you) and who makes a living by saying really funny offensive things that satirise Australia, the nouveau riche and the terminally classless – that same Dame Edna Everage manages to crack a joke in a Vanity Fair column suggesting that a reader shouldn’t bother to learn Spanish because there’s nothing worth reading in it – and it’s the language of “leaf blowers” and “the help”. Rather than finding this an entertaining satire on the kind of ludicrous self-involved people who actually think such clap-trap, Latina magazine gets into a big strop about it (via Gawker) subsequently forcing poor Vanity Fair to actually apologise. It sure is a sorry day for clumsy irony.

Because I never tire of boring people stupid with little tweaks and quirks around the site, here’s an update about three small changes to the way the site is operating:

• Taking my cue from Dan Hon, plasticbag.org’s commenting interface has been changed in accordance with the recommendations from Antipixel (that are shortly to be integrated into the default Movable Type templates), which provide a simple, space-friendly and usable alternative to the standard templates I was using. [Spookily this coincides exactly with Paul Mison making the same decisions.]
• While I haven’t as yet been totally thorough and systematic in their implementation, I’ve also had a go at making the site slightly more usable for people with accessibility issues. I have – of course – been using diveintoaccessibility.org as a guide for this process – which I will complete more thoroughly at a later date.
• On the bottom of the individual archive pages of this site you will find a small panel called “BBC: On This Day”. This is essentially a piece of meaningless fluff that directs you to the BBC’s On This Day entry for whatever day the post was produced. It’s far from perfect, and it’s not particularly useful as yet, but it’s connected to larger ideas I’m having about providing context and timelines for weblog entries. More about that soon, hopefully. In the meantime, if you want to know how the link is generated in Movable Type, the code is here.

Typically – just as my body decides that it no longer has any need for any form of valve, sphincter or fluid control mechanism of any kind – my ability to write has been confronted by what can only be described as an enormous blockage. I have all these things I want to write about and no idea whatsoever about how to approach writing them. It’s as if – shock of all shock – digestive collapse can make you think about things other than writing crap for the general public. What a strange idea.

Today’s microcontent votes – to be recorded in turn by Blogdex, Daypop and Google (thus resulting in a certain increase in the statistically measured ‘worth’ of the linked-to artifacts in the world-wide infosphere) go to..

• New Kids on the Blog
  A facile quotation from this profoundly trivial article: “Blogs are sparking lively debate in media circles about whether they constitute real journalism and whether they will siphon readers from traditional news publications, but that seems like hooey to me.” [via Megnut]

• A dictator on the web
  It’s always nice to get a nice review, and I’ve got a particularly nice review over at an Australian news site today: “Plastic bag is a good name for this blog, which is a grab-bag of topics, ideas, personal and professional observations from one Tom Coates”. The only thing I’m uncomfortable about is being described as an ‘avowed anti-war blogger’. If only it were true – it would be nice to be so certain of things! The only things I’m definitely against are short-termist thinking, nationalism, cheap arguments and sloganeering.

• Blackcore Weblog
  Since I got a nice review, I think it’s only fair to pass on the good vibes by giving someone else a pat on the back. So I’m going to recommend that everyone go and wander around Blackcore, which is a well-designed, well-structured and well-written weblog powered by Deep Black.

• Cal builds too much
  The monstrous creature responsible for the backend of Barbelith, City Creator and Secret Santa is my mate Cal Henderson from iamcal.com. Turns out he’s also responsible for every other page in the entire universe as well! Who knew!?

• Outrage on Homophobic Bullying
  Of all the issues that bug the hell out of me, homophobic bullying at schools and the lack of education and support for young gay people is one of the ones that drives me most insane. Lots of worthwhile resources here that should be read by anyone seriously interested in making the world a better place in what should be relatively simple, easy ways (if it wasn’t for bigots and extremist religious idiots).

• Map of the Muslim World
  If your taste in humour extends to the ultra-jet black as mine does, then you may find this cartoon map of the Muslim world organised by how ‘dangerous’ they are entertaining in a hollow laugh kind of way. Look out for the part ‘preoccupied with starvation’…

I should have posted about this before Christmas, but I got distracted and disorganised and forgot all about it. If you’re a weblogger in the UK, and you want to meet and talk to other UK webloggers, then you might like to know about UKBloggers. It started as a mailing list for webloggers in the UK and has now split into two distinct sections – a weblog discussion list and a social list for chatting and mucking around.
As a parallel announcement, there is a bit of real-life weblog aggregation happening this Friday evening at a pub near Great Portland Street tube. Likely candidates to be present include: Cal Henderson, Meg Pickard, Mo Morgan, Matt Webb, Nick Jordan, Michael Leigh and myself. The evening is currently expected to get going around 7.00pm and you can find all the details on the social list. Hopefully we’ll see you then…

Today’s very serious and unflighty link-dump consists of three stories of particular interest to commercial editorial sites – particularly those that started as print ventures and have transferred some (or all) of their content to the web. Not the most fun set of links for anyone else though – I got really involved in print-to-web transition stuff and concepts of editorial publishing online while I was working at timeout.com a few years back

• Deep-Linking in the World Wide Web
  I remember the first time I heard about a site getting angry about someone deep-linking to their content. It made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now. However, this article manages to clearly explain (and hopefully in a way that’s clear to the general public) why it’s a foolish idea to put restrictions on deep-linking into law. The most crucial point is that if one wishes to restrict which pages are accessible via a link, then it’s a trivial operation to do so via one’s server settings. [via kottke]

• Newspaper sites move to registration model
  “It once was the Web bogeyman. The idea of making users register before entering newspaper Web sites gave everyone the willies. Surely this would lead to a huge drop in audience. Maybe The New York Times could survive that, and The Wall Street Journal could even charge for access, but those are very special cases.” Before anyone starts waggling fingers and saying that people should have been registering for sites years ago, it’s important to keep in mind that the web audience has become more savvy and skilled over the last three years. Secondly it’s important to remember that your traffic may only drop by a quarter, but that quarter represents all the people with whom you haven’t yet got a strong relationship – an market that’s identifiably one you would want to expand into. And before you all start getting ideas, you should remember that people will register for sites because they’re either curious or because they have a significant need or interest in the material on the other side. You have to offer content that’s more interesting to your potential audience than the stuff they can get easily elsewhere, and it helps to have a more established and respected brand as well.

• New Biz on the Blog
  I’ve been meaning to write about this Guardian piece on making money from weblogs for a while now. I’ve been particularly interested in what Nick Denton has been doing with Gizmodo and Gawker because (unlike a lot of other people) I think there are legitimate business possibilities in niche weblogging ventures like these. Quite apart from advertising and affiliate revenues, there’s the possibility of building legitimate grass-roots brands that could then syndicate or write bespoke content to larger publishing ventures (a gawker.com column in Time Out New York perhaps?). And then there are the possibilities surrounding the extension of these initially low-cost bleeding-edge brands and developing them then across other media – a gawker TV show could work exceptionally well. In fact my only problem with these enterprises? My personal antipathy towards the odious Mr Denton himself. Still, never mind…

So here’s an interesting fact for you… ‘Muzak’ – that most despised of all musical genres – isn’t in fact a genre at all. Nor is it a derogatory term or insult – it’s actually the name of the company that thought of the idea of playing canned music (to soothe the dangeourously rebellious instincts of factory workers) in the first place. The Muzak company is still going to this very day – its name derives from the combination of the word ‘music’ with the name of the company’s founder’s favourite company, “Kodak”. [Thanks to Fenner for the link.]

“When Gen. George Squier patented the transmission of background music in the 1920s, that is music from phonograph records delivered over electrical lines, he soon found out that it not only soothed the minds of his workers, it enhanced their production. What the general never knew is what his idea would become circa 1998: Muzak. All 2,000 employees, all 250,000 subscribers and all 80 million listeners worth.”