Category: Random

Today on Barbelith: Situationism in a nutshell: “The SI are known to most people through their supposed links to punk rock. However these links are at best tenuous and at worst spurious.”

There have been a lot of responses to Ralph’s article on Barbelith on “Evil Gap Clones”. There’s an interesting piece on Shrapnel.org which includes some strange lines: “If we worried so much about child labor and animal slaughter, we would be seriously depressed and warped people.” and there are no less than three related threads on the Underground: On why shopping in GAP is a good thing for sweatshop workers, On a possible answer to global homogeneity, Gap Clones.

As part of an experiment in ‘Googling’ people – ie. finding out information about individuals by simply putting their name into search engines and intelligently filtering the results, I decided today to take a random name “Leon Fleury” and create a profile of him. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s rather too much (or too disturbing) information about the young man in question on the net, and so I’m going to restrict myself to mentioning that he played one half of a cow in “Jack and the Beanstalk” and that he graduated from the drama department of Exeter University.

Today on Barbelith: ‘The Prisoner’ in a nutshell”: “Episode after episode showed Number Six fighting every attempt to win his secrets and gaining no ground in the battle with his warders.”

A long conversation with a random punter via AIM leads to the statement that I look just like Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews band. I go to the net at once. Do I really look like this man?

Weird evening / Weird party: After which I felt even more as if everyone in the entire world thinks I’m pointless and cruel. Weirdest part of the evening was weighing myself while trying to avoid conversation by hiding in the loo (where I was rung by someone I’d recently wronged ironically enough) and discovering that I’ve lost 12 pounds over the last couple of months – purely from not feeling like eating and being stressed. I’m now a trim eleven stone of firm muscle. Go figure. If it wasn’t for the ever-growing beard, I’d no doubt be having no end of sexual antics.

A strange place to find a link? Infonie.fr posts about Barbelith (translated wonderfully by babelfish: “The libertarian site of a revolutionary series of Grant Morisson: The Invisible Ones. Or how the data base can become political. Cliquez here for accËder with the site.” I particularly like ‘cliquez here’. See the link in context (if it hasn’t been removed already).

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Today, at 1pm GMT, the Barbelith Webzine was launched, after many many months of procrastination.

Destroy the evil GAP clones
“Thus began the GAP’s supervillianous campaign to end diversity and herd the world’s population into marketing categories.”
by Ralph McGinnis

Morrison’s Debt to Moorcock
Gideon Stargrave, King Mob’s possibly imaginary alter ego in The Invisibles, is based firmly upon Michael Moorcock’s ’60s cult hero, Jerry Cornelius.
by Lee Ravitz

Aum Shinri Kyo
“Clad in vibrant pink robes, Asahara preached about the coming apocalypse and how to survive it.”
by Grant Balfour

Chaos Magick in a Nutshell
“Life may be magickal in a nihilistic, incomprehensible way but it is still magickal.”

Queer Theory in a nutshell
“Queer theorists agree that sexuality is a historically specific construct and that our society oppresses those outside its categories of sexual normalcy”
by Jackie Susann

We are now looking for more features and opinion pieces – and for anyone who notices something horribly wrong to let me know (mail me)

A quick question about the BBC. If you read this piece of writing in the Weekly World News, would you believe it? “A Derbyshire housewife has sold what she says is a video of a flying saucer to a Hollywood producer. Sharon Rowlands, 44, from the village of Bonsall, in the Peak District, has reportedly been paid ?20,000 for the footage. And officials at NASA are said to have asked to examine the tape, because they believe it shows the same type of craft once spotted by the space agency’s own cameras during a space shuttle mission.” If not, how come we are expected to believe it when we read it on the BBC?

“Not everything in this magical world is quite what it seems.”