Today on Barbelith: The Body Fictive – “As fanfiction becomes more popular on the internet, does anyone stop to think whether professional writers find the use of their characters and worlds painful and debilitating? Is creativity a technology of identity? Nick C investigates.”
Via Blogdex: Such an amusing piece of entertaining flash animation that it’s amazing that Matt hasn’t already linked to it: Bunny Hunter.
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.
And now for your aprés-Blogadoon: The Telegraph reports that the police have been told not to call gays homosexuals. Couple of quick addenda to that – I’m not entirely sure that the word ‘gays’ is particularly appropriate either, thanks very much. Anymore than ‘blacks’ would be. In fact if everyone would just get used to calling poofs and dykes ‘sir’ and ‘madam’, everything would probably be much more entertaining.
Aside: ‘Homosexual’ is a really grim word, associated with saying ‘you have a disorder’. It’s like saying you are a ‘influenzal’ – both defining the person by their sexuality and simultaneously defining the sexuality as a defect. And before anyone says anything, “heterosexual” is both a later word and a later concept and was mostly only used in cases where someone had to assert that they weren’t gay or when the goal of heterosexuality was enforced on poor deviants via electroshock, aversion therapy and hormone supplements.
Second aside: I feel a bit sorry for straight people on this one actually, because they can’t call gay people “poofs”, “fags”, “dykes”, “queers” or any of that stuff without people thinking they are weird facists. Whereas I can. Except of course that I seem to have an anti-gay reputation in some of British media because they didn’t know I was a big smelly poof and think I’m being serious. Which of course I am.
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.