Category: Random

Too many doctorates in the air at the moment – which shouldn’t annoy me but does because I feel jealous even though I know I made the right decision to leave mine. Probably I’m freaked because I don’t seem to be getting anywhere with all the other shit I hoped to do. I don’t rule the world, I don’t get paid for running a site that I care about, I’m not David Bowie yet and I don’t get mentioned in the papers nearly enough. This whole mood was inspired, weirdly, by Freud Action Figures and somewhat ammeliorated by the fact that I’m speaking at a conference about Virtual Communities in a couple of months – alongside some people who recently interviewed me for a job I didn’t get. Sigh.

The most astonishing thing about being without Blogger for a day is not that I was frustrated or annoyed, but that I found myself writing vast selections of little notes and thoughts to Barbelith and Haddock. It seems clear – I have a pathological need to write reams of crap each day – possibly I write so much to stop myself from thinking…

The best thing about writing something for a print publication is that you get this wonderful chunky piece of solid matter to look at when it’s finished. Yesterday through the post came the 2002 edition of the Time Out London guide – of which I wrote all of the gay section (for my sins), with substantial and unfortunately uncredited help from Davo. If you need to know what there is to do in London, then it really is the best guide available. And if you find any glaring errors in my section, then please keep them to yourself!

If you hadn’t guessed from a brief visit to his site, Cal is colourblind. Hey – what can be said – I have no sense of smell, he doesn’t know how to co-ordinate. We all have our crosses to bear. Unfortunately I’m not as absurdly talented as Cal is, so I can’t do something tremendously, world-changingly useful – like make a site which allows you to test various colour combinations to see how accessible your site will be. [Addendum: For those who have asked, Cal is a good friend of mine, and I was merely joking about the colour-schemes at his site. In fact even a cursory glance would demonstrate that the colour schemes are great. And that there are lots of them.]

Thanks to the anonymous punter who bought me a copy of Moulin Rouge off my wishlist! It’s very much appreciated, whoever you are. If only I could find some way of translating plasticbag.org into a way to pay my rent each month!

Ok – I’m in the middle of a big deadline at the moment, so all my thoughts are necessarily truncated. But still – the biggest thing in my head at the moment is my father. He and my mother got divorced when I was two or three and I haven’t seen him or heard anything from him since I was about four or five. My mother had a couple of conversations with him when I was about six or seven, but that’s it. No more.

I’ve never really been even the slightest bit interested in finding out about him – all my friends seemed to think that I should seek him out – but why? What possible connection could I have with this man? At least that was always my position. But now I think it’s changing. The easiest way to tell what’s on your mind is to see how often you find yourself confronted by it everywhere you look – in the books you read, the TV shows you watch. It’s like with theories – if you get attached to a theory about the way the world works, then you see evidence for it everywhere. It’s not so much that you’re making up the evidence, but that your mind is hoovering up associated material left, right and centre…

Anyway – at the moment everything I touch seems to be about absent fathers and having a sense of your own history and about memories. Things as random as Paul Auster novels, films like Memento and TV shows like Sex and the City have all (over the last few days) made me think about my past and my parents. And my father particularly. He’d be in his sixties now – he might be dead. I think maybe I just need to know whether or not he’s dead. Head’s too full of crap today. Will think about this in more depth later – maybe next week.

my %guy;
$guy{type} = ‘underwater guy’;
$guy->control_sea;
kill $guy, “10 million pounds of 
                  sludge from NY and NJ”;

foreach my $monkey (@monkeys) {
    $monkey->gone(heaven);
}

$creature{sky}->suck_into_hole;
$sky->put_in_hole;
$ground = ‘not cold’;
if ($ground ne ‘cold’){
   burn $everything;
   next $turn;
   $mine->too;
}

foreach my $monkey (@monkeys) {
    $monkey->gone(heaven);
}

$joe->rock($me);

if ($man == 5) {
  if ($man == 5) {
    if ($man == 5) {
      $devil = 6;
      }
    $devil = 6;
    }
  $devil = 6;
  $devil = 6;
}
if ($devil == 6) {
   $deity = 7;
   $deity = 7;
}

foreach my $monkey (@monkeys) {
    $monkey->gone(heaven);
}

A while ago I linked to an article about old TV shows having new opportunities for product placement because of the potential for digital alteration before rebroadcasting. But it seems that this is only the beginning of the ‘touching-up’ of the past (for both reasons of ‘taste’ and money). In a recently rebroadcast movie in the US, underwear was digitally altered and indeed completely added on a young lady kissing Mr Bond. The Smoking Gun has the full story.

Oh and if you want to know what I did on Saturday night, then go and read up about it over at Brainsluice. He leaves out how precisely grumpy I was all evening. That’s why he’s my best friend.

The last couple of days have been fairly strange exotic beasts – the job disappointment as ever knocked me for a loop for a good twenty-four hours. It’s always difficult to be rejected, I think, and I wonder if anyone ever really gets used to it. They always say that as one door closes another opens – but this seems to have been happening so regularly recently that after a while you have to start wondering, is this a revolving door? And am I trying to go through it the wrong way? Anyway – a couple of new possibilities have emerged – one of which looks particularly promising. So I guess I’ll just have to try and relax and go with the ride for a little longer…

After lunch yesterday with Cal, Matt and Phil, I ended up wandering around Central London trying t get a bit of perspective on things and finishing off my copy of Moon Palace – which stirred up a lot of thoughts about my father and my (vaguely) impending thirtieth birthday. I went for a brief drink with a friend who was celebrating his birthday and returned home, weirdly satisfied.

Today I’m in much finer form – I’ve got lots of work to do, lots of things to think about. Part of the cheeriness I’m feeling has to be due to the gift of Fahrenheit 451 that I received today from an anonymous donor as well as the delightful irony of having Sauron (from the Barbelith Underground) buying me a copy of Lord of the Rings from my wishlist. Thanks to everyone!