plasticbag.org

Oh thank god. Metafilter is back.

I just went to see a press preview of Joy Ride at 20th Century Fox’s offices in London. It’s not the best film ever made, but it’s a pretty terrifying piece of scary cinema with only a few on-course embarrassments. Imagine Scream without the humour smacked together with a more than sizeable dollop of Duel and you won’t go far wrong. More on this later.

Ongoing battles in America over privacy rights have taken a new turn with the introduction of face-scanning cameras. In parts of England this has been implemented for several months in Newham, with little or no protest whatsoever. I love Big Brother.

According to Dave, Google is now spidering many weblogs every single day. That means lots of timely content from your favourite sites can be found immediately via your favourite search engine. Doesn’t appear to have been indexing plasticbag.org, but hey.

So I’m really hungry, so I go to the shop to get some kind of reasonable food and I get a big bottle of coke and some frozen pizza and a packet of cigarettes and some little foamy strawberry sweets and I get home and sit on the sofa and I heat up the oven and eat all the strawberry sweets and drink lots of coke and watch TV and then I get my pizza out and eat about a third of it before I feel full and slightly sick and ill. The point of this story? Nothing you tell people as children sinks in even the slightest little bit.

Mark on stuff: (1) “If fruit tasted so good that they artificially flavored candy like it, why don’t people eat actual ‘green apples’ or ‘watermelons’?” (2) “I partially spent the night outside on a hammock. I say partially because I fell off in my sleep and spent part of the night on my concrete patio. And then another part, from 4:40am onward, I came inside, because the flowers were making popping noises and I wanted to be where it was safe. ” (3) “I’m fascinated by how tic tac toe evolutionized into the game Connect Four.” (4) “I’m flying to Missouri for a bigmac.”

A lot of people recently have been doing work based around entirely CSS-based sites. Some of the latest tricks and tips have been written up over at A List Apart. My question with a lot of this stuff is where it ceases to be useful. Take the design of plasticbag.org for example. I think it makes clear and logical sense visually, but it doesn’t necessarily only have components within it that translate well into structural markup. When you reach the edge of what CSS can do (and retain the point of CSS – to be cross-browser, clear, elegant and more importantly STRUCTURAL) don’t you inevitably end up with tables again? Isn’t that inevitable at the moment? And possibly long-term as well.

So I’m at home watching television and I’m really excited about watching Will and Grace because I’m obsessed that the two main characters can’t really be as dull as they actually appear to be, and I’m consumed with the sense that they might even one day be able to make me laugh. But no. They’re just there. Neither of them are people I’d want to hang out with. Supporting cast is, of course, another matter. But Will and Grace themselves? No.

And it’s the Halloween episode and it’s kind of shit and I start counting how many times I’ve laughed by about half way through the program and it isn’t difficult because it’s ‘1’ time and it remains one time until the end of the episode. Which is depressing. And half way through the damn episode they put an advert for the new Angel boxset on. And I listen and I get all tweaked because it’s out on Monday. Not that I want to buy it you understand, but because the Buffy boxset is also out then and I MUST HAVE IT. Who can I sell, I’m asking myself. Who can I sell to buy that. And then Will and Grace comes on again and rigorously sucks arse for another twenty minutes.

Buffy. Our love is god.

Ralphy old chap, you’re missing the point. It’s not that we make fun of Americans. It’s just that we make fun of each other, and the first thing we noticed about you is that you’re American. Love ya, baby.

Live: At this very moment, Zeldman is playing Photoshop Tennis. Much cooler and more geeky than you can possibly imagine. The game’s only half-way through. Check back tomorrow for the final results.