Category: Random

Of all the terrifyingly heart-breakingly funny cartoons I’ve seen on Salon, Cold Pursuit is probably the one I identify with most. It’s the story of two people in love with each other who individually conspire not to be with one another. My favourite line: “Which made him wonder why she had never succumbed to his indifference”.

Update-monitors of yesteryear beware – the dark-times have come for your kind. For Phil Gyford has shown the way of the future with Haddock Blogs. It’s a very simple premise – a web-based interface that collates the various RSS/RDF feeds from a group of weblogs and assembles a contents page from them that updates each and every hour.

The potential for this kind of first-stage weblog content aggregation is huge – particularly for interest or social groups. Haddock being, in this case, a community of friends based around a mailing list. But you could do the same thing for all weblogs with an RSS feed if you wanted, or use category fields or clustering to form highly focused sites about anything from Buffy to PGP…

“Right now, fruit pastilles are plotting to carve runes on a forking brogue. My Tipp-Ex bottle is darkly-dressed, and Penny Blacks that I work with may be rotten. I’m Federal Agent Jack Bauer, and this is the hairiest gearstick of my life.” Genius Surreal 24. And now for your complete vialog: Darren, via Sore Eyes via As Above.

Some songs make you burst from sheer weight of emotion. Some make you want to dance like a coked-up electro-shocked duck in the mating season. Some, on the other hand, are dripping with ludicrously stunning lyrics… It’s even more fun reading them when you haven’t got a clue what the song is…

1 Picked up a boy just south of Mobile
Gave him a ride, filled him with a hot meal
I was sixteen, he was twenty-one
Rode with us to Memphis
And papa woulda shot him if he knew what he’d done

2 I drank the portion she offered me
I found myself on the floor
Then I looked into those big green eyes
And I wondered what I came there for….

3 There was this boy who had two children with his sisters
Who were his daughters, who were his favorite lovers
I got no lips, I got no tongue
Where there were eyes, there’s only space
I got no lips, I got no tongue

4 Well you can’t live with em
Or without em
You never really know a thing about em
It’s hard to believe that all that’s there…
is a rag and a bone and a hank of hair…

5 The ladies buy their ice from me
They dig my fast delivery
They love the way I move about
I don’t make a mess
I get in and out…

6 Hey goombah, I love a how you dance a rhumbah
But take a some advice paisano
Learn how to mambo
If you gonna be a square
You ain’t a gonna go nowhere

A few months ago I moved house. I was living on Morshead Road in Maida Vale and I moved to a thirties block of flats on Shirland Road. Anyway – various things happened to me when I moved into the new flat – things that I had to spend time while at work sorting out. Things like my gas being cut off and my locks being changed. Annoying stuff. So I’m at work and this woman hears me talking on the phone about my block of flats and comes over and says that she lives there too – although she’s just about to move out. We have a laugh about it – it’s funny, it’s a nice little coincidence, and then forget all about it. Until today I hear her on the phone and she’s moved into my old flat on Morshead Road. The exact same flat. Possibly even the same room.

There’s a weblogger of some reknown called Mo Morgan. Mo has created a useful resource for webloggers which is very much worthy of a link. I heard about this resource because Mr Morgan sent me an instant message mentioning that if I wanted to blog it, I could. He insisted that I didn’t have to link to it, or anything. Just that I could. So I asked if he wanted me to blog it. And he replied, “Not particularly. But if you wanted to, you can.” So I kind of leant back and said, “So you don’t want me to link to it, then?” And he come right back with, “No”.

So what’s going on here? Clearly Mr Morgan did want me to link to the resource in question. But it appears he’s too proud to actually ask me to do it. I pressed and I pressed – just ask me I said, and I will link to it. But he consistently replied, “No”. In fact by the end of the conversation he said, “No – Please don’t link to them…” So if Mr Morgan mentions his new resource to you, you know what to do… Let’s cure him of this sinful pride – make him beg…

Metaspore n. A bastardisation of the word ‘Metaphor’ with semantic cross-over with the concept of the ‘meme’ – the metaspore being a violently self-propogating meme with particularly little interest in the survivability of its hosts, with propogation being of such a speed and virulence that conceptual spread is maintainable even though long-term prospects of communication disintegrate when the meme spreads globally. An example of a highly dangerous meme could be the suicide cult, or the concept of teenage suicide itself (cf Micronesian suicides in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’), while the most obvious contemporary candidate for status of ‘metaspore’ might currently be global capitalism in its full environment-damaging form.

London’s Underground system is as frustrating as it is iconic and vital. It’s the world’s oldest underground system, it’s teeming with people whenever it’s open – which (ironically) isn’t as often as it should be. The tunnels are too old and small to allow the trains to have any kind of air conditioning, and it’s prone to radical over-crowding. Daily use of it drives most Londoners to a state of vengeful apoplexy several times a week – standing up next to some sweating warthog of a man, crammed on platforms like self-canning sardines. So perhaps it’s hardly a surprise that all over the tube at the moment are these extraordinary adverts…

For reasons I don’t really want to go into at the moment, I’m looking for screencaps of iCal for a little project I’m working on. If you’re unfamiliar with the application, it’s Apple’s new calendar application that you can download for free (once you’ve installed MacOSX.2). E-mail me, if you find anything…

I’ve been collecting links for a few days now – things that I have really wanted to talk about, but just haven’t had time. So rather than get weighed down by them, consider yourself lucky – all the links, none of that bloody burbling preamble that you normally have to suffer… Be warned – what follows is jotter-style commentary at best – and completely without style or class…

• Buffy gets advise from Dr. Laura
  A frivolous piece of fun: “That’s not the point. The point is, it might not seem like a big difference now, but when you’re 77, he’ll be over 300. How can you get married and have children – and notice the order I put that in – with a man 224 years older than you?”

• Barbelith reopens its doors for new memberships
  I’m not making a big deal out of this one, because it might not last for long. With no publicity at all, we’ve had over a hundred new members in the last three days. I don’t want to swamp the place.

• Pixellation – the way of the pixel
  Discussion community of pixel artists and pixel enthusiasts.

• Badgerland
  Thanks to John Watson for sending me to a site full of information about badgers.

• PixelArt Tutorial
  So you want to be a pixel artist? From The Almight Grass Tile to Animating a basic attack (and lots of stuff in between).

• Riothero Redux
  I’m kind of hiding this link down the page in the hopes that I won’t scare him off – Mark ‘Riothero’ Olynciw is back, and has started personal publishing again. I’m a little nervous about the prospect of him quitting again, so I don’t want to go on about how great he is yet…

• Spy Kids 2
  Go and see it, because it’s really good fun. Cal and I went to see it last night and bloody loved it.