Category: Random

So I’m wandering through my referrers and I come across an exact replica of all the content of my site only on livejournal. And I think to myself – why that’s a little strange. And it has comments, which my site doesn’t. So in many ways it’s actually better. It’s been pulled out of my RSS feed as far as I can tell. I wonder – is this automation happening with other people as well? And who is the sinister presence behind the scenes that pulls the strings? Update: What a funny old world – Culprit / Punter found and all is well with the world…

This might come as a bit of a shock to some of you, so sit yourselves down. From the book of Internet Revelations: “It is possible for a website to have a function to users above and beyond the making of interesting or pretty graphs out of its usage statistics”.

Three comments about films…

• So I went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with Cal a couple of days ago. It’s kind of a complicated story as to how that ended up happening. It certainly wasn’t planned. It’s far from an awful film, but it’s far from brilliant either. The special effects are pretty stunning – considerably better than in the first film – but the pacing is leaden, the characterisation pretty slapdash and threadbare and, well, it’s still a bit long… It’s worth seeing, but don’t get too excited…
• Harry Potter’s length might have been a disappointment, but I went and bought the extended DVD of Lord of the Rings [US | UK] a few days ago, and that’s substantially better than the film that was shown in the cinema. It’s a full half an hour longer than the theatre version – mostly exposition and character-development – and it feels substantially richer and you feel more invested in it as a result. Most interestingly, I think, it exposes how odd the pacing was on the theatrical version, particularrly in the Cate Blanchett / Lothlorien episode…
• While we’re talking filmic nonsense, I’ve put a very old review of The Patriot online – mainly because I was talking to Meg about the film yesterday and because it’s such a revisionist piece of crap that someone has to stand up and be counted and say so…

Well it’s swiftly approaching that time of the year again – and that means it’s time for Cal, Denise and I to throw open the doors of Secret Santa 2002!

“The idea of Secret Santa is very simple – you pull a name out of a hat and buy that person a present. Your name is in the hat as well, so someone buys you a present too! Everyone gets a present! Everyone’s happy!”

I think there must be nothing I’d rather do at the moment than pop over and spend a couple of nights in Paris with Jason and Meg. Money and time are stupid things and annoyingly scarce.

So again – I don’t know if this image is accurate or whether it’s a piss-take, and I can’t tell whether it’s offensive or incredibly funny. It’s probably doing the rounds of e-mail at the moment so I’ll apologise straight-off if you’ve seen it dozens of times before. But whether it’s true or not, thanks to Davo for sending me an image of this receipt – apparently given to someone who’d ordered a Bacardi Breezer…

You’d never know it to look at the amount of writing I’m currently pumping through plasticbag.org at the moment, but I’m currently experiencing a fairly alarming creative block. I have three pieces of longer writing on the go at the moment – three pieces that are addressing issues that I often write about on this site (the relationship between personal and mainstream publishing, the relationship between weblogs and journalism, and the implicit politics of the discussion board). None of them are going well. Each and every one of them is in my head in an essentially complete form, but there’s something between my mind and my fingers that is interfering with their transcription. This is yet another one of the reasons I left academia – because the process of writing became a painful and difficult one – a situation rife with angst in it’s literal Old High German sense… Eurgh…

I finished reading Elements of Typographic Style a couple of weeks ago now, and I’ve not stopped raving about it since. It’s truly a stunning book – a bible of technique – that encompasses the whole range of typographical behaviours from the appropriate use of hyphens, the most functional and effective page layouts through to a detailed examination of elements of individual type-faces, glyphs and the art of being respectful to the writing you are type-setting… More importantly, I think it gives a degree of insight into a man’s belief in the integrity, intelligence and quiet dignity of artisanship – which is something that may sometimes seem inflexible and uncreative, but which is a sure mark of absolute and total quality. Very much recommended.

This was pointed out by a friend of mine. It seems now that Amazon is so worried about offending it’s naturist clientele that it refuses to even imply that all its customers might be wearing clothes. More worrying is the concept that you can buy unclean underwear from the web’s largest online store. And perhaps more disturbing still is that the customers who buy this stuff are the same customers that decided to buy Licence to Kill on DVD. The image of Bond-watching, clean-underwear-sniffing, spy-lovin’ naturists is almost enough to put me off my fascinating daily workload…

So I’ve been being all creative recently. First I redesigned Venusberg.org for Dan, and then Phil and I helped out Mr Webb with his CSS. Designing Dan’s site was particularly interesting for me – it’s my first design that’s based entirely around typography (although of course that doesn’t mean that some of the typography isn’t rendered as an image). Mostly I’m very happy with it, except a few irritations have crept in – there aren’t enough date formats for me in Blogger, so that doestn’t look as classy as I might have liked – and there are some irritations with the way it translates line breaks as well that meant I couldn’t do the half-em paragraph breaks that I wanted. But otherwise, I’m pretty happy with it and I hope he will be too… My favourite part? The font for the logo is based on the letters at the base of Trajan’s column…