Category: Random

Weekend over. And not a moment too soon. I returned home on Friday, had a brief row with my mother on Saturday morning about the way I ate weetabix, sorted out all my personal belongings into “london”, “storage”, “throwaway” and “sell” piles, slept badly and then drove down to my new flat on Sunday morning. And then I drove back to Norfolk again. And then I got a train back to London again. Exhausting.

Monday was a £150 Ikea fest in full Bank Holiday mode. And I still forgot to buy lightbulbs. Scream 3 in the evening and then Buffy box-set 2.2 eased me to bed. Best thing about new flat: having my own bed. Worst thing about new flat: not having a working telephone (being fixed). Most annoying thing in relation to new flat: being unable to find the telephone number of our local cable TV company.

I went to see Scream 3 with Katy – an old (!) friend and similar devotee to the cult of the web obsessive. She has often expressed to me a frustration at our distance from the webloggers that we read regularly. And so on that note, and with the birth of Katy’s brand new blog “kitschbitch.com“, I hearby declare the beginnings of the London Elite Weblogging Detachment – or LEWD for short. Come forward LEWD boys and girls, and LO! I shalt blog thee…

I don’t want to get too off message at the moment, so I am going to keep my personal commentary log pretty brief over the weekend. Regular viewers will find normal service resumes on Tuesday after the Bank Holiday, after I have moved in properly, and after the current rush of Invisibles people just finding the barbelith family of sites settles down a little bit. In the meantime, Invisibles people, look down the page a little for what you are after.

In the meantime, a little rant from Warren Ellis about the state of the comics industry should be looked at by all people who are passionate about them, or grew up with them and can’t get them completely out of their heads (no matter how they try).

And for the regulars, a little something to keep you cheery: Sissyfight – be a vindictive girl and pick on other people for fun. And watch out for MissyBitch, because I made her mean and strong and sassy as the day is long.

“If you missed the Secret of the Universe the first time around, do what Gideon says on page 8 or go to www.barbelith.com where all those cool eggheads and stoner motherfuckers will do their best to “explain” it to you. If THE INVISIBLES exist anywhere now, it’s on that forum and in your heads. If you still ain’t had your fill of fucked up theories, I can be contacted there with the rest of them in whatever form it takes in the future.”

If you are here because of the above quote, start off with The Bomb, and then proceed to the The Nexus. And stick around because the new revolution is just about to start…

And if you haven’t got the slightest clue what I am talking about, or what the attraction of the Invisibles is, and how I am going to feel about the fact that it has now ended then go and talk to Oh Messy Life, who manages to explain it perfectly. Enjoy.

Very frustrating. People tell me the Nexus is mentioned in The Invisibles this month, but it’s a day late arriving in the shops. In the meantime, some people have been asking how they can get their hands on Fortune Hotel, which includes a piece by Grant as well as Douglas Coupland, Will Self and many others. I have found it on amazon.co.uk, but nowhere else. Sorry!

I’m exhausted but euphoric as things finally seem to be coming together. I’m moving in to my new flat on Saturday, finally catching up on work, and I got some sleep (my first for ages). And it’s sunny! But still, I am still not at peak efficiency. So let’s start the day with some gentle blogging:

Is anyone else bored of Diana, the ever saintly (practically canonised) Princess of Wales? Certainly garden.com doesn’t appear to be. All over the net at the moment I am seeing The Princess of Wales Rose banner ads. Is this really the thrust of the new economy? Should we all buy chintz and commemorative mugs now?

The most amusing thing about Wired’s article about National Phone In Sick Day is that in the UK we get the day off anyway. In fact, next week will be our third four day week in a row. I love Bank Holidays.

And while I am at it, I just thought I should say congrats to Meg for both a highly successful redesign and having an incredibly cool web savvy mother. Jealous much, web kids? I know I am.

You build a website for a comic book, and then get the logo of the website in the comic book and then get the website mentioned in the comic book and then the comic book ends and you think – WHAT NOW? Pick up a copy of The Invisibles today, and then go and visit the Nexus.

Web Queeries (which I write for occasionally) has been named blog of the week over at Blogger. It’s a particularly worthy one because it actually offers a useful journalistic service with an entertainingly personal spin.

Well designed weblogs are a particular fetish of mine. And riothero has gone and found me another one. Mark describes it as a mix of powazek and barbelith, which is rather decent of him. Introducing: sja…

Today is one of those weird days where you blog after midnight (ouch – how Gremlins is that?) and you don’t feel like it is really Saturday at all because you haven’t slept yet, but it is, and you know that your blog will show it to be Saturday. So you can’t say things like “Today I went to see American Psycho with Rhonda and John” nor can you say “Today I travelled up to Norfolk to see my parents and my brother” or even “Tomorrow Gideon is arriving from Mexico by way of Israel, and that I am really looking forward to it because I hardly ever get to see him”, because really it wasn’t today and it isn’t tomorrow, it was yesterday and today. But then you don’t want to confuse people…

My web-hosting weirdness continues unabated. After having been charged roughly $400 for excess bandwidth (and me sending them a stroppy e-mail saying that there was no reason that they couldn’t have automatically bumped me up to a higher level of package (costing me 0.25% of the money I was charged) when I reached the limits of the current one), I have just been sent a concilatory letter offering me an extra Gb of traffic a month, plus doubled server space and 10 more POP3 accounts. It would be tempting if I wasn’t still going to spiral over their bandwidth allowance. Honestly – Netnation are still not in my good books…