Category: Random

What a strange, frustrating day. Loads of reporters lurking around Broadcasting House all day, TVs blaring out from all over the building as they report live the responses to the Hutton Inquiry, e-mails all over the place, anxious preparations for meetings that were doomed (before they began) to end badly, lots of snow (plus a couple of snowball fights), the sensation of slowly sinking beneath an ocean of political intrigue and my repeated uttering of at least two sayings which seemed almost impossiby iconic and important to me today: Never get involved in a land war in Asia and An atheist is a man with no invisible means of support. General crapulence eased slightly by long conversations with good friends over AIM and the viewing of insane low-key televisual masterpiece Director’s Commentary on (weirdly) ITV1. Sleep soon to come. Reassuringly, this too will pass.

Dan Hill’s idea for a profoundly useful iPod accessory – as explained in greater detail in his post iPods and the wireless – is rather cheekily presented below. I want one.

I love it when technology creeps from innovation to ubiquity. Or – more to the point – I love that very first set of transitions, when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and suddenly for the first time they’re actually using e-mail or talking about Googling someone. In analysing the sensation, I keep coming back to a mingling of a few different experiences – one is of a private world becoming public, one is of elation and approval and one is (weirdly) a sensation of vindication (even if the technology has been around for years). I suppose there’s something profoundly reassuring about seeing your strange habits and vocabulary represented to the world as being totally normal – exotic or cool even – particularly when it’s done in a form that hundreds of thousands of people might encounter. Maybe it’s a bit like being accepted at school or something.

Here’s an example of one of those moments, from a medium (rock song lyrics) that isn’t exactly known for its take-up and referencing of breaking technologies:

My phone’s on vibrate for you
Electroclash is karaoke too
I try to dance, Britney Spears
I guess I’m getting on in years

My phone’s on vibrate for you
God knows what all these new drugs do
I guess to have no more fears
But still I always end up in tears

My phone’s on vibrate for you
But still I never ever feel from you
Pinocchio’s now a boy
Who wants to turn back into a toy

So call me
Call me in the morning
Call me in the night
So call me
Call me anytime you like

My phone’s on vibrate for you
For you [Vibrate by Rufus Wainwright]

I swear, if someone doesn’t put a bloody save-state function into a browser with tab-functionality in it soon I’m going to snap and murder everyone around me. Even Safari – probably the most stable browser I’ve ever used – still crashes every eight or nine days or so, taking with it about forty or fifty open tabs full of carefully filtered, “I really must talk about that at some point” potential weblog content. Now I know I should be impressed that I basically never have to restart my laptop (current uptime according to Terminal is 5 days and 22 hours since I last shut down) and goddamit I am but allowing me to build up a massive amount of stuff in my browser over such a long period of time and then not giving me simple ways of grabbing all the stuff I have open and putting it somewhere safe – well it’s just nuts. So please, please Apple/God, will someone please do something about this!? Before the blood mists start?

From an entry on Barlowfriendz about the death of Spalding Grey comes this paragraph:

“Among the beliefs that he and I shared was a conviction that making public the intimately personal is a revolutionary act in an atomized society where many feel compelled to play so close to the chest that they can’t read their own cards. Being emotionally naked before strangers extends to them a permission for self-revelation they badly need if they are to loosen the shackles of their own quiet desperations. It is a blow against the pursuit of loneliness.

I don’t care whether or not I sound like some kind of self-indulgent old hippy, but to me this reads like a profound manifesto for weblogging – in which every single post is a tiny act of revolution, a sputtering light that draws others closer for warmth and companionship.

Compare and contrast: (1) Me making a funny at Google’s expense a couple of years ago: Google Pornfinder and (2) The site recently launched to help the world find porn (as reported in this Boing Boing entry): Booble. What next? Should I expect someone to genetically engineer Fifty-foot cat-killing laser-eyed chickens?

From an entertaining post on an interesting Metafilter thread:

The BBC is best when it’s at its least domestic and condescending: its radio and web output is better than its TV news (BBC World excepted) and the World Service is best of all. There’s a reason why people who work at Bush House feel superior: they are superior.

For the record, I work at Broadcasting House, which is kind of like the BBC’s version of the Lost City of Atlantis.

I’ve been meaning to get this up online for the last couple of weeks but keep getting distracted. While I was up in Norfolk for Christmas it started snowing insanely hard and I almost accidentally got about fifteen seconds of it on video. So for your total lack of interest, here’s the view from my bedroom window as the snow comes down (.avi 3.9Mb). I find it strangely soothing.

So the nominations for the the Bloggies are now up and I would encourage everyone to go and explore some of the weblogs that have been short-listed. For good or ill, quite a lot of the old crew have ended up on the nominations again this year, with plasticbag.org surprising me a bit by being up for four categories. Evidently there’s still a bit of life in the old blog yet. If you want to vote for it, then it’s represented in the Best British or Irish and Best GLBT weblog categories and to my delight Weblogs and the Mass Amateurisation of Nearly Everything has a shot in the Best Article or Essay about Weblogs category (weirdly opposite Rebecca Blood’s classic Weblogs, A History and Perspective which actually already won the award a couple of years ago).

Now despite my reputation for being a complete kill-joy when it comes to weblog competitions, I actually have a bit of a soft-spot for the Bloggies. I’m not going to go into too much detail about why I like them (big argument here) but – in a nutshell – it’s because they’re part of the weblogging ecosystem and treat it with respect, they don’t take themselves too seriously and most importantly, because they are open to everyone to participate in, vote in and nominate for. There’s something nice – honourable, even – about nominating someone else for an award that they’d never put themselves in for but eminently deserve. And it’s fun being able (at this stage) point to some of the new sites that I’ve discovered as a result of the nominations process and which I plan to read more often. So – from the nominations list – here are some sites (old and new) that have given me particular pleasure today:

• Brainsluice
• Synapse
• Hunkabutta
• Baghdad Burning
• Giornale Nuovo
• BenHammersley.com
• Textism
• Greenfairy.com
• overcaffeinated.net
• Wish Jar Journal (beautiful!)
• Mezzoblue.com
• Gothamist
• Daily Dose of Imagery (amazing!)
• Heather Champ
• Watchblog (perspectives!)
• Online Blog
• LanceArthur.com
• WhatDoIKnow.org
• Brokentype.com

PS. When does the gay mudslinging start? Because that’s the best bit.

According to Pink in her song God is a DJ: “If God is a DJ, life is a dance floor, love is the rhythm, you are the music”. Which is troubling for me, really, because if life is the dance floor and love is the rhythm and we are the music, then who the hell is dancing? Is no one dancing at all? Is that the point? Is the point that life is empty and pointless – a farce of creation without function or utility? Or is it still worse than that? Perhaps it’s demons and monsters that dance to us, stomping all over life, letting their evil hearts race to the rhythms of our loves and getting sweaty and emotional and copping off and falling over to the music that is us. We’re nothing but the noise that supernatural clubbers take drugs to! That’s your message, Pink!? Well, thanks for nothing…