Category: Random

As a female friend once said to me about penises, “It’s like carrying a remote control with you all the time on the off-chance that you might want to watch some television.” [inspired by Bart]

Can someone please explain to me why Interconnected isn’t read by everyone interested in the potential of online technology and interfaces? It should be. It really should.

The Anne Robinson of the weblogging world, David Pannett, blows the lid on Genie’s appalling customer service. Next week on Watchdog – Pop Tarts that kill.

It may be an amusing cartoon that displays a son’s reaction to his father’s record collection, but perhaps more worrying is that the clearly teenage boy has never entered his father’s private ‘back room’ before. What sick activities go on behind this family’s closed doors?

As of this morning, I’m worth $45,262,148.52 on the Hollywood Stock Exchange. How much are you worth? Not that I’m competitive or anything.

Ethical dilemma of the day: Compare and contrast kottke.org with obscurestore.com. Do they look similar? Yes. Very. Is this a problem? No – they both work very well and, moreover, were both designed by Jason Kottke anyway.

I have been thinking seriously about starting up another site recently – a site that I’ve been thinking about on and off for a few years now. I don’t think it would be particularly labour-intensive to maintain and I think it could be useful and would be good for me. Now in essence it’s going to be very much like obscurestore.com except with a different subject matter.

The longer I think about it, the more that Obscure Store has got everything right – they list a few major stories with details, a few lesser ones without – there’s a bar with links in it to all the major sources of information on his subject matter. The design is so clean and simple that it almost doesn’t appear to be designed at all. Which surely is the mark of truly great design?

So the question comes down to something as simple as this – when a design has got right to the simple essence of what a ‘thing’ (in this case a website) is about, then is ‘copying’ appropriate? Clearly I’d be furious if someone copied plasticbag.org without my permission. Even if they changed the colours and fonts and stuck a different background image in place… I suppose what I’m asking is whether or not Jason has refined the design essence of the weblog down to it’s basics in the same way that Amazon has for e-commerce sites. And of course now a great many e-commerce sites (even the largest ones) look exactly like Amazon. I suppose what I’m asking is how much of this design can I steal?

I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again – quality is politically unjustifiable. A lack of talent is the only egalitarian way to be – and I have it in spades. So let’s celebrate not the artistically great, but the creations that should not have been created – for these are the products of everyman: The 100 worst films of the 20th Century.

Are you nuts? I know, I know… It’s so difficult to tell nowadays. I wish I could provide you with an adequate test online to answer that age-old question, but instead I’m going to present you with some Rohrschach tests, courtesy of the other plasticbag…

Closer to home, and following the recent spate of publicity that this plasticbag has been getting, Davo has suggested that maybe this quote from Ian shouldn’t just be about Mr Massow after all: “It’s genuinely difficult to decide whether he’s an over-enthusiastic fantasist with a flair for self-publicity, or a charmed boy-wonder who simply needs to learn a few lessons about the way the world works.” When I find him I’m going to give him a firm thump.

Speaking of Mr Massow, the Guardian managed to mention the word “pillock” twice in today’s article about him. Poor chap’s handled this one a little badly, I fear – I don’t think anyone would protest if he said that he thought it was time that the art world readdressed itself to the needs of the general public. But instead he had to go and say that he wished art could just be “nicer”. Ouch.

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