Category: Random

And so with a deep sigh I have consigned my beautiful Powerbook (which has been with me a such a very little time) back to the welcoming arms of Mother Apple. My child needs to be fixed. The strange mottling blotchiness of his screen had become worse and worse as the days passed by until they resembled nothing so much as a pair of staring blank eyes – evil eyes – that hovered in front of every piece of work I did, every movie I watched, every e-mail I sent. It’s so difficult with beautiful computers – you love them (like a child), training and working with them until you operate as one (like a family) until eventually they betray you (like a child all over again). But when they turn sour that good feeling stays with you for longer – it’s so difficult to do what must be done but do it you must. They must be sent off to faraway scientists who’ll open them up with strange devices, rooting around in everything that makes them what they are and forcing their silicon biology back to standards that their parents can live with. They must be brought back to civilised behaviour whatever the cost.

Data may be lost – I accept that. The Powerbook that I gave to the rather nice-looking man from UPS may not feel or be quite the same when it returns. It will have been changed, fixed, broken and reformed. But when it returns it will work – and work it must – for I have typing to do.

One thing that I noticed for the first time today was the distinct similarity between the navigational style of the iPod and the horizontal-hierarchy menu-driven interface to Tivos. Is there a memetic forebear to both of these that I’m unfamiliar with, or is this simply an emerging standard in navigating through libraries of content when you only have a few physical buttons and real-life interface elements to deal with?

If I confess to a soft-spot for the Darkness, you won’t come around my house and stab me in the eyes with the sharpened plectrums of proper rock will you? I mean, obviously they’re a bit of a novelty act, but at least they look like they’re enjoying themselves. Of course, on occasion the more cynical and disenfranchised dribbling fool might suggest that maybe they’re going a little too far. As evidence for their ludicrous case, they might point at the creation and release of a Christmas single (the elegantly named Christmas Time: Don’t Let The Bell’s End) complete with lace-up-trousers/laser-gun video action… But they’re wrong goddamit! Wrong! It’s bloody art! And I will be there with my crusty notes at my local Our Price on December 15th desperate for my very own copy…

Writing for a weblog seems to me to go through cycles. At times, words just flow from your fingertips effortlessly. The quality of those words will generally be rather debatable, but they’ll have a fluidity to them and an honesty or playfulness that at least partly compensates for their lack of substance. Normally with me, these periods gradually bed down into highly productive periods of good writing about things that I’m thinking about in greater depth – pieces of writing that I think have some greater utility or worth about subjects that I care about. Normally I’ve been thinking around these issues for a while but not had the mental discipline to drag them into a more coherent shape. During these periods, I do my best work.

These periods – inevitably – do not last. What seems to happen is that the material I want to write gets more and more convoluted, high concept and/or involved, more necessarily rigorous in execution and generally larger in scale until such a point where the pressure to articulate an idea properly overwhelms my ability to write at all. At those points – suddenly – I find myself completely blocked and unable to produce anything. Smaller, lighter, trivial posts occasionally squeeze their way out – but for all intents and purposes, I’m just unable to write. From there it’s a short, unpleasant wait of mounting tension, frustration and irritation until the walls collapse and posts pour forth – this time with little or no discrimination in evidence, full of bad jokes, thrown together collections of links and the like. And then from there the cycle repeats itself as concepts of quality and discernment slowly start creeping back into my output.

As a matter of interest – does this pattern sound familiar to anyone else or is this simply a personal thing?

While I’m speaking of Barbelith, I thought I’d mention the latest craze circulating through its dank and musty corridors. Essentially the premise is this – (i) find an old thread with particularly good and entertaining dialogue in it (ii) go to the Red Meat Comic Strip generator and (iii) represent the thread in question as a Red Meat strip. It’s really capturing some of the spirit of the board (albeit mostly the bits that are most vibrantly foul-mouthed and politically dubious). Here are some of the latest examples of actual Barbelith conversations edited down to the nub (Warning – many of these aren’t particularly work-friendly):

• An introduction to the premise
• Queer Granny’s Gay Bear Experience
• Jack Fear, the Peacemaker
• Moby – Man or Monster?
• An unsettling converastion about rude-words for body parts
• On the counter-cultural spirit
• On losing a moderator
• Now wasn’t that fun…!

Intriguing Barbelith fact: Each post currently costs around 1 pence (UK), or precisely 1.6213519580942878523322524320279 cents (US). If we had more posts, then that cost per post would actually decrease, because – at least at the moment – we’re paying a fixed cost for bandwidth and storage. It’s on that basis (and the fact that Barbelith is now open for new members once more) that I invite you to join immediately. The cheaper we can make each post the better! Although, having said that, only high-quality intelligent posts or highly witty comments are acceptable. Why not consider it an alternative to trying to sign up to Metafilter, only with more in-jokes and a weirder moderation system?

Having finally been forced to join tribe.net by a friend, I swiftly started to build up my personal network. That is until I realised that the connections it helped maintain between people were rather more alarming and invasive than I had initially thought:

I should point out (I have been forced to point out) that Stewart wasn’t the friend I was initially talking about. That was someone quite quite different.

I’m pretty much promoting this one to death at the moment, but just in case someone using RSS feeds to read my site has missed the enormous plug I’m giving this event on my site at the moment, there’s a UK Webloggers Christmas Party to be held in London’s fashionable Farringdon district this coming weekend. Details follow:
→ Venue: Downstairs at the Well
→ When: This coming Saturday 29th November from 7.00pm
→ How do you find it? There’s a helpful map!
→ Organised by: That lovely chap from Funjunkie.co.uk

I think the most upsetting part of having a week-long holiday ‘to get things done’ is that when it’s over and you look back at what you’ve accomplished, you’re inevitably disappointed. When you look at sites that you’d planned to update every day and haven’t updated for weeks even when you had nothing obviously else to do, then that’s just got to be gutting – you’ve got to be failing somehow. I might have to be honest with the world and state that Everything in Moderation is likely to be a highly sporadic venture – a name under which I can put up articles or posts as and when the mood strikes me, rather than something that I can legitimately maintain on a daily basis.

It’s very depressing and I think it’s wrapped up in a whole range of other things that are drifting around in my head at the moment about how people justify less-than-immediately-easy-to-organise social events, plans, schemes, hobbies and the like. Don’t they feel guity about not trying to make / build / write / achieve something? I know that I do – profoundly guilty – which unfortunately is beginning to have the effect of causing me to become effectively totally blocked. My head is teeming with stuff I want to do pretty much all the time – teeming so much that it’s beginning to feed upon itself. Achieving non-work-related mental clarity and useful working states is also becoming harder as the stuff gets backed up, because now every thing I do takes too long when put against the other five things I should be doing at the same moment. I’m perpetually distracted. It’s getting aggravating.

I’m off to Norfolk for a few days to visit my family and celebrate my little brother’s eighteenth birthday. Updates are likely to be vaguely sporadic until Sunday, but hopefully I’ll spend some of the time writing up some of the stuff that’s coursing around my head for posting upon my return. In the meantime, here’s some snippets of Norfolk-related plastic-baggery:

• Information about Belaugh, the village I grew up in;
• Pictures of the North Norfolk Coast;

And just to set the mood a bit more, here are some pictures from around my village, taken this summer (around the time of my birthday):