There are many ways to find a site. These are some of the ways that people found mine in the last few hours…
Category: Random
Inspired by kevan.org‘s comment about the Guardian award: “The whole thing seems dangerously adjacent to a World’s Greatest X mug – pointless when presented by a panel of strangers, but quite meaningful and interesting if someone I know is explaining their reasoning. So I’m hereby forging meme #1 of the Subjective Best British Weblog competition, inviting people to nominate their current favourite and tell the world why. No prizes or vote-tallying, just a meaningful signpost to somewhere worth going.” Agreed!
Unfortunately my subjective Best British Weblog is a secret one that a friend maintains and that I’m not allowed to link to. But my second favourite is probably interconnected.org – mainly because Matt writes things that often are just beyond my technical expertise, and he’s almost never flippant or clumsy with language, but thinks through what he wants to say carefully and thoroughly. But most importantly because he’s got a kind of weird visionary streak that means that you pick up on some of the frantic energy that motivates him through his writing and it helps you think more imaginatively as well… And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s all about…
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On the pronunciation of Ancient Greek…
I spent years learning Ancient Greek at University. If challenged I can spout off the first few lines of Euripides’ Bacchae (my favourite tragedy) in a deep and rolling voice – a suitable voice for the god Dionysus who speaks them. But of course no one really completely knows for certain what it sounded like when it was spoken out loud… People have researched phonemes and attempted to reconstruct accents and pitch and rhythms from the intensive application of philology, but no one really knows. Still, it’s fascinating to listen to some of the examples you can find on the net. Here’s some Homer (Iliad 18, 39-96), some Aeschylus (Agamemnon 503-537) and some Plato (Symposium 172ff) from this site, which also includes some astonishingly weirdly assembled Ancient Greek Music. And all because I wanted to know whether ‘noos’ was pronounced ‘no’os’ or ‘noose’.
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This is 'not the best' blog in Britain
Did you decide not to enter the Guardian’s weblog competition? If you didn’t, then why not participate in the Not the best project – a small pod list of people who decided not to take part for whatever reason. You can stick the pod on your site really easily, and if you didn’t enter and want to be listed on it then you can do that too. Have fun with it…
With a little under three days to go until the Guardian’s Weblog Competition closes, I’m now looking for British webloggers who didn’t enter and aren’t planning to do so. If that describes you (for whatever reason), then e-mail me and I’ll let you in on what I’m scheming.
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BBC newsfeeds for all!
Newsreaders like NetNewsWire – like web browsers – get more and more useful as more resources come online that they can read. Which is why it’s such tremendously good news that BBC News has now released a public beta of an RSS feed to the general public. Thanks to Matt Jones for this one.
They’re pink and they’re asking for it and frankly you’ll be all too willing to oblige. It doesn’t seem to hurt the little bitches either… Pink exploding-head doggies courtesy of Anno.
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A murderer's web confessional?
A boy who bullies other kids at school gets hit by a car. Under the pretence of helping him, one of his previous victims drags him roughly to the curb, and while ‘trying’ to get him into the recovery position keeps pushing his body around until he’s convinced that he’s broken his neck. The boy dies shortly afterwards. The previous victim gets away scott-free. Or does he? First things first, because the neck-breaker decides to brag about his actions on Kuro5hin.org, triggering debates on both Kuro5hin and Metafilter about what should be done should the story prove to be true. And in the process they’ve named the individual concerned and posted the local police department’s telephone number.
This situation brings all those fundamental weirdnesses of the internet right back to the fore in my mind – the freedom of expression presented gives you access into the minds of people that were previously completely invisible to you. And sometimes that’s unpleasant, scary even. But what’s the truth here? Who online can know? Is this a talented fantasist’s rantings or an error in judgment by a remorseless man who believes still in the myth of total online anonymity? Is he sitting at home in Cornwall cold-sweating like a pig, or is he ice-cold, suited and booted at work? It’s difficult to know what to think, except that either way it smacks slightly of sociopathy…
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On Nationalism and Masculinity…
I started a thread on Barbelith yesterday called Crises of Modern Western Life in which I suggested that the two fundamental crises attacking Western identity at the moment were crises of nationality and crises of mascunlinity: “Both are fundamentally linked in some profound ways that I’m not sure I’m able to articulate – but are to do with ways of deriving pride or self-respect from some aspect of self-definition. I was wondering if anyone felt they could extend some of this thinking in a useful direction – suggest some linkages, some failures in my thinking or perhaps some other crises that my subservience to colonial middle-class hetero-patriarchal values may have forced me to put under some kind of erasure… ” I’d appreciate any thoughts anyone might have…