plasticbag.org

A reconstruction of how cool it could look:

So I’m watching this TV program rather than do any work, and it’s about properties that are for sale around the UK – the slightly weirder, more beautiful, stranger places to buy, live and work in. Suddenly this incredible place comes up on screen. Am underground fort – victorian in origin – later used as a kind of way-station for troops in World War Two. Full of underground rooms, and over three miles of tunnels and rooms which were previously gun placements. My mouth hit the floor. I was in love with Fort Borstal.

It didn’t take long for my mind to start working overtime, imagining corridors lined with cabling, huge underground server rooms, places to live, places to work, places to play. A huge, underground hi-tech geek utopia of weird thinkers, dreamers and weirdos. I talked to Matt about it immediately and he got just as excited as I had. But how much would it cost? How much would a disused, run-down underground metropolis cost? Three million? Five million?

No. One hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds – an amount of money that you couldn’t buy a two bedroom flat in decent parts of London with. It would cost hundreds of thousands, millions even, to get the whole thing up and running, but for an initial outlay, it’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was sold, in the end, to a woman from South London who wanted to buy goats.

God, I write crap. Every so often I look back at what I produce – what I write – what I put out into the public arena – and I’m ashamed of myself. I can’t tell whether it’s because my thoughts are stagnating, or because I’m too stressed to think things through properly, or whether I have got used to using plasticbag.org as a braindump rather than as a notepad. But I look back at the kind of writing I’m producing and it’s just awful. Why do any of you people read this stuff? What possible benefit could you get from it?

Barbelith bandwidth bills for September look like they are going to be around the $120 mark. Which is not completely unreasonable, I suppose, and likely to be met by the donations that I’ve already received from the people who regularly use the site. But is this any way to maintain a site long-term? I can’t keep scrabbling for cash every month to pay the escalating bills.

An American in LA has just watched Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and insists that I must watch it immediately. Except of course that I doubt very much that I’d be able to. Amazon.co.uk doesn’t appear to have it, and it doesn’t appear to have been released in the UK for cinema or video release. Every so often I forget that the US and UK are completely different countries, half a world away from one another. I somehow assume that everything that you can get access to in the US can be bought or found here somewhere. But it’s just not true.

Tom, rather poorly, reviews Superman II: “The film’s message may be a clichéd staple of comic books – with great power comes great responsibility – but it’s handled with sincerity and skill. So much so that even Richard Lester’s lapses into camp humour and cheesy patriotism don’t derail the feel-good adventure fun.”

After a certain amount of deliberation, I’ve removed infoshare from plasticbag.org. My reasoning? The news is gradually turning towards an update on the potential war situation we find ourselves in, rather than being a way of keeping people informed about a very specific disaster. It’s ceasing to function on Saturday anyway.

Regular lurkers to Barbelith may have noticed that I’ve instituted a procedure that means that you have to be registered in order to read the site. I didn’t want to have to do this, and hopefully it will be a short-term measure, but I’m testing it to see whether or not it has substantial impact on the bandwidth that the site takes up. At the moment, the only alternative to this process is a system of rolling blackouts, whereby the site is taken offline for the last week of the month to alleviate running costs. On the bright side, a good thirty or forty people have registered overnight, which suggests there always were a good block of people who read but didn’t register. It’s nice to have some confirmation of that…

Ah. Ah well. Nope. No job for me with the BBC.

Last Tuesday morning, before the disaster at the World Trade Center, I had a very different anxiety on my mind. I had a job interview at the BBC for a position as online producer for BBC films. Everyone I knew was going ‘apply for it, Tom – it’s ideal for you’ – and I basically agreed. It seemed like the kind of job that my experience was designed to fill, and in a really good company with lots of opportunities for development. The night before I was shivering with fear – there seemed to be more than normal resting on getting this job. It had been the first major opportunity that I’d had to work somewhere that I was actually excited about for months. On the morning of the interview however I got some slightly startling news. Two other companies, EMAP and Captial Radio, were keen for me to come in and do some freelance work for them. And in only a couple of weeks’ time as well.

Interviews are interviews, and they’ll always be hellish and I’ll never be any good at them. I’m completely incapable of regulating my tone – I prefer discussions rather than Q&A sessions, and so I was immediately wrong-footed when they asked me what my favourite movie was. A question that may seem obvious to people, but has little or no bearing on whether or not you are actually good enough at running a film site. When the interview was over I felt strangely confident, although that confidence faded fairly swiftly. I met an old colleague from TimeOut.com for lunch afterwards – he’d been in the interview before me, and we talked about the job and tried to relax and have fun.

Now it’s a week later and I haven’t heard anything from the BBC at all. Normally this wouldn’t be a worry, but because I have to inform these other potential employers about whether or not I can do their contracts, it’s beginning to alarm me. I asked them when I’d hear at the interview, and they told me the beginnng of this week, but I’m sure that events around the world will have had some impact on their schedules. In the meantime, I’m feeling increasingly nervous about my future prospects once I get past this patch. No one is employing, except for contract work. People are being let go left, right and centre. I really need a break…