Category: Random

“I go through all this, before you wake up, so I can be happier to be safe up here with you.”

All around the web at the moment: How Coca Cola tries to stop people asking for water in restaurants.

Matt Haughey talks to Derek Powazek about designing and running community sites [excerpt from Derek’s Design for Community book]. Many of the conversations ring very true for my relationship with Barbelith, including this one: “Don’t underestimate the commitment required. Done right, a community site will take a lot of your time, and the payoffs, in whatever form you set for yourself as goals, may not come for a very long time. I put in hundreds of hours and nursed the site along for six months before anyone really noticed. Looking back at the start of MetaFilter, if I were as busy then as I am now in my personal life, I doubt I would have had time to properly launch, build, and maintain the project. If I knew how much personal free time I’d give up for the site going in, I probably would have had second thoughts about it. Also remember that once you get the site going, stopping it is almost out of the question.”

Today on Barbelith: The Body Fictive – “As fanfiction becomes more popular on the internet, does anyone stop to think whether professional writers find the use of their characters and worlds painful and debilitating? Is creativity a technology of identity? Nick C investigates.”

Via Blogdex: Such an amusing piece of entertaining flash animation that it’s amazing that Matt hasn’t already linked to it: Bunny Hunter.

Oh thank god. Metafilter is back.

I just went to see a press preview of Joy Ride at 20th Century Fox’s offices in London. It’s not the best film ever made, but it’s a pretty terrifying piece of scary cinema with only a few on-course embarrassments. Imagine Scream without the humour smacked together with a more than sizeable dollop of Duel and you won’t go far wrong. More on this later.

Ongoing battles in America over privacy rights have taken a new turn with the introduction of face-scanning cameras. In parts of England this has been implemented for several months in Newham, with little or no protest whatsoever. I love Big Brother.

According to Dave, Google is now spidering many weblogs every single day. That means lots of timely content from your favourite sites can be found immediately via your favourite search engine. Doesn’t appear to have been indexing plasticbag.org, but hey.

And now for your aprés-Blogadoon: The Telegraph reports that the police have been told not to call gays homosexuals. Couple of quick addenda to that – I’m not entirely sure that the word ‘gays’ is particularly appropriate either, thanks very much. Anymore than ‘blacks’ would be. In fact if everyone would just get used to calling poofs and dykes ‘sir’ and ‘madam’, everything would probably be much more entertaining.

Aside: ‘Homosexual’ is a really grim word, associated with saying ‘you have a disorder’. It’s like saying you are a ‘influenzal’ – both defining the person by their sexuality and simultaneously defining the sexuality as a defect. And before anyone says anything, “heterosexual” is both a later word and a later concept and was mostly only used in cases where someone had to assert that they weren’t gay or when the goal of heterosexuality was enforced on poor deviants via electroshock, aversion therapy and hormone supplements.

Second aside: I feel a bit sorry for straight people on this one actually, because they can’t call gay people “poofs”, “fags”, “dykes”, “queers” or any of that stuff without people thinking they are weird facists. Whereas I can. Except of course that I seem to have an anti-gay reputation in some of British media because they didn’t know I was a big smelly poof and think I’m being serious. Which of course I am.