Category: Random

Oh tis a sad tale, the tale of tiny wee iPod. iPod the daring, iPod the brave – now iPod the battered has gone to its grave. Or not to its grave, but maybe to the gluemill – for iPod now only kind of works now. I don’t know why – I don’t know whether the gentle shocks poor iPod suffered were what pushed him over the edge, or whether it was the scratch, scratch, scratch of keys against his face. Oh why did I mistreat him so? No more than normal use, I thought, but now he’s beaten down and broken and I feel so bad.

So we’re sitting at work the other day – the assembled table-age consisting of myself, other Tom, Dan, Phil and Dorian – and someone’s watching the Apple Switch commercials, and then finally hits on the awesome wonder that is Ellen Fleiss. All through her (apparently) stoned dialogue we’re awestruck with wonder. I keep expecting her to say the word ‘borked’, but I don’t think she ever does. At the end she says, “I’m Ellen Fleiss and I’m a student” and the only reply you can really come up with is, “Well duh!”. I mention all of this because apparently she’s becoming quite the cult figure at the moment – hence (and here I’m liberally ripping off Wired for the thousandth time this month): the fan site, the other fan site and the caféshops store. (I’m not going to link to Metafilter because they get linked to too much anyway.) When I grow up I want to be Ellen Fleiss!

I hate it when the one thing you really want to talk about is the one thing that you know you really shouldn’t talk about – the one thing that you entirely can’t talk about. It’s Weblogger Frustration 101 stuff though. I should really know better. When your online friends become offline friends (and almost family), when your offline friends and family finally get themselves connected, then the range of your conversational material becomes immediately more limited. To the person concerned – you should know who you are – I very much hope you’re having a good time and look forward to talking soon.

Probably the most useful newsfeed that the world has yet seen – you can now get get Barbelith RSS-feeds, which can be restricted to any individual forum or groups of fora, and can be organised by most-recently-updated as well as by most-recently-started threads… While I’m on the subject – I’ve started a fairly tendentious thread on the board at the moment, which I’m concerned sounds misogynist. I’d appreciate your thoughts.

I’ve had the tune in my head all day and I haven’t been able to get rid of it – so why the hell not just give in to those darker impulses – why not revel in the wisdom of tacky inappropriately-amusing over-moralising tiny badly-painted people?

Gum chewing’s fine when it’s once in a while
It stops you from smoking and brightens your smile
But it’s repulsive, revolting, and wrong
Chewing and chewing all day long…

I can’t be the only person desperate to see Spy Kids 2. When Spy Kids came out no one would see it with me. I’d say, “but it’s Robert Rodriguez!”. But they wouldn’t listen. Davo wouldn’t go. Meg wouldn’t go either. No one. So in the end time just passed and I didn’t get to see it until I picked it up in a sale one day and thought it was absolutely wonderful. I showed it to Cal as well, and I think he liked it too. I’m very much excited by the sequel. But will anyone come and see it with me?

Everyone I know seems to want to own Lord of the Rings on DVD and yet no one I know is buying it. They’re all waiting for the four DVD set that’s coming out in November. I’m no exception. But if you are looking to buy yourself a copy – the cheapest place I’ve seen them in the UK is at Dixons, where they are £16.99. This compares with £19.99 at Virgin. Should you care…

Blogroots – which started as a metafilter.com style-board with a very narrow focus has gone through a bit of a transformation in the last 24 hours – and now celebrates a new look, a bit of promotion for the book that it’s connected with and two major new features – an ‘about blogroots’ weblog called RootsNews and a BlogPopuli section which is ostensibly for trackback syndication via Movable Type, but which allows you to manually ping the site (which essentially amounts to you being able to self-blog threads you’ve written that you think are interesting). The site looks great, and is gradually coming into its own as a community and information-sharing resource…

Ok. So I don’t want to sound paranoid – because that would never do – but I was walking down Oxford Street this morning and this really tall guy with fluffy hair looked at me, did a moue of recognition, half-smiled/half-laughed and kept walking. It could have been a moue of ridicule rather than recognition – obviously the first thing I did was check my hair wasn’t too bad. But it was fine. Or kind of fine, anyway. He can’t have been moue-ing at that? Surely?

So it’s Weird Buffy News time of the month again at plasticbag.org as once more I prove exactly why I have such trouble finding guys prepared to date me…

• Breeders to guest-star on Buffy?
  It’s hideously-cool-life-collision time as NME reports that the Breeders’ stars Kim and Kelly Deal are likely to appear in an upcoming episode of Buffy – inspired by their incredibly rousing rendition of the Buffy theme tune which is a staple of their life sets at the moment (and which I saw them perform a couple of months ago with Cal). Drool.

• Buffy musical to be released?
  Noise stateside seems to be that they are going to release the Buffy Musical Episode on CD, which would pretty much entirely rock, except that I can’t find any evidence for this on Amazon.com or co.uk.

• Whedoneque still rocks
  And you should all go there immediately…

Didn’t I hear something about Sarah Michelle Gellar quitting?!