Category: Random

A piece of contract work that I was semi-relying on has just fallen through, leaving me frustrated and having to fall back upon freelance writing, which – although fun – pays ridiculously badly.

Matt reveals his fetishes: “The subtle interplay of media and peer pressure, the slow progression into adulthood, quiet sexual play through the teens — all of this is dwarfed completely by televised pornography, dirty magazines found in skips, and pissed fumblings in the park (or, in the case of Americans: MTV, a box of Kleenex, and massive sublimated guilt that is liable to explode at any time in a shower of bullets).”

My evening with Big was pleasant, but frustrating. I suspect that’s the last I’ll see of him – a fact that I find depressing. [Hi to Ian who I bumped into at Barcode while with Big.]

I am to be a pizza delivered when you’re not in the mood to cook. I’m not to be a cinema, but straight-to-video – and rented not bought. I am to be a public convenience (20p) in the middle of the city on a Saturday morning. I am to be a hand-shandy – nothing more – on a grey day, while bored, in front of Neighbours.

So having spent much of Friday afternoon in the gym, damaging myself, I then decided on Saturday to spend most of the day helping Meg, Luke and Davo (Hi Catherine!) move into their new place. This involved moving many many boxes. Not as many, perhaps, as if I wasn’t still hurting from the gym the previous day, but many nonetheless. So today I have this cumulative body collapse thing going on, where pretty much any kind of movement of any kind causes me tremendous pain and makes me want to go immediately to bed. I do, apparently, look quite nice.

Desperately Seeking Support for the Barbelith Underground which is throwing up errors and error messages 24 hours a day. Read about the problems in full at the Ultimate Bulletin Board Support Forums. E-mail me if you have any suggestions.

My escalator incident yesterday triggered a whole range of thoughts, which on my return to the flat I had to commit to paper immediately. The feeling of forward thrust that I hypothesized might be a direct consequence of imminent disaster made me think about ‘catastrophe’ as a concept.

I have spent a great deal of my life working on Ancient Greece, in fact I’d had over eleven years of study of the classics when I left my incomplete doctorate aged 25. Since then my knowledge has decayed a fair amount, but I can still tell a word with a Greek root when I hear it and I was also expecting theatrical resonances because of the term ‘strophe’, which is often used to describe a type of choral ode. I was nonetheless fascinated by the results of a search on the web:

From Dictionary.com:

1. A great, often sudden calamity.
2. A complete failure; a fiasco: The food was cold, the guests quarreled – the whole dinner was a catastrophe.
3. The concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy, following the climax and containing a resolution of the plot.
4. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; a cataclysm.

Last week I posted Cal’s novel solution to my little riddle – completely written in Perl. Now Ben has refined the code still further: plasticgame.txt

Congratulations to Prol on being mentioned (with link) on Wired.com: “Hitching a World-Wide Ride on Web”.

“Beware the bottled thoughts of angry young men. Secret compartments hide all of the skeletons.” [Jeff Buckley: Nightmares By The Sea]