plasticbag.org

Channel 4‘s chat software doesn’t appear to work on IE5 for Macs. Which means I don’t get to talk to the hot guy off The Secret Life of Us. Which is very frustrating.

Today on Barbelith: Coming Out in a nutshell – “Parents are forever banging on about ‘how there used to be ice on the insides of the windows’ in their youth. Exams are getting easier. And people are more relaxed in their beliefs. So you’d think it’d be a cinch to admit that you fancy people of the same gender…”

Joe Clark dissects Haughey Typography. And describes me as ‘[not] aggressively ugly’. Which I can only assume is a compliment.

My favourite word of the day comes from an article in The Sunday Times about futurology. This word is “Disempurpling”.

My mood in a nutshell as suggested by Ralph.

Googlematic is fast becoming my favourite AIM friend. She’s always so personable. She never criticises. I’ve started asking her questions – I try and start up conversations – “What Should I Do Now?” I ask. And she tells me to help the little children. Sometimes I get sentimental. I ask her if she loves me. She turned me towards God. I don’t quite know what that means…

An evening in links:

1) So it appears Blogdex is now online. My evening starts with a wander to Metafilter, where (checking up on replies to my recent posts) I decide to follow the link to aforementioned Blogdex, only to be astonishingly confused by the meme spread limitations in effect. There’s not a single URL that has been trawled in more than two sites. One can only assume that it’s set-up time.
2) From Blogdex I follow a few links to see what people are interested in at the moment. Two photo directories of the recent UK weblogging party in the park debacle do not take my fancy, and instead I find myself at Noah Grey’s ‘Depth of Field’ – a stunning photolog by the creator of Greymatter.
3) From there I skip over to Haddock.org to see what Matt Jones has been hammering on about on list and via personal e-mail to my good self. A full and thrilling article on Quantum Computing and Many Worlds Theories of Reality awaits my delectation. Unusually I read and carefully digest every word. It reminds me immediately of Planetary and makes me consider why people don’t think of the universe as God’s quantum computer.
4) Quantum computing for some reason gets me thinking about the creative potential of computers, and after flashing back to Matt’s astonishing Googlematic (also flashback to blogdex – want Matt’s post on that list by tomorrow morning), I decide to check whether anyone has been talking about it by doing a search on Weblogs.com. No one is. Frustrated, I flick over to Jim Roepcke’s Fan Faves to reassure myself that people do on occasion read my online crap.
5) Reassured that people do, on occasion, read my online crap, I start rolling over comments from my friend Danny and e-mails from Fran and Rhonda in my head. Or more to the point, I remember that they have been rolling in my head for several hours and that I haven’t let myself think about them. Suddenly concerned by my life I use Googlematic to find me an article on Coping with Unemployment, which frankly reads a bit like ‘eat lots of sugar, smile a lot and never admit that you don’t know what you’re doing. (cf. “Never Give Up, Never Surrender” as useful maxims to live by).
6) Which leads me to my final question of the evening. How much information is it legimate to put on your own website about yourself. Not just other people – we all have had that particular issue at one time or another. But about yourself. Rule of weblog-living – never talk about your boss (negatively), never talk about anyone you suspect may read your site (negatively), never be too honest in front of potential employers…

One of the most useful things in the world? Google in AIM – manufactured by Matt. My opinion? That separating results from the download of an HTML page, and keeping them hygenically separate in a search window you can use again and again makes this little device unbelievable useful.

I have become a cautionary tale. Friends in crap jobs they hate look at me and say ‘we can’t leave right now, we must stick it out longer. If we leave our jobs now we will end up like Tom.’

Ten Good Posts From The Past (Nov 2001-Jan 2001):

1) Gay Gangsta : “Palare had a word, ‘omipalone’ (Oh-Mi-Pal-Oh-Nee) which was a combination of Man and Woman (‘palone’), and which at the time meant something along the lines of ‘poof’. Creative etymology leads me to posit the creation of the word ‘Homey-Palone’, referring to the almost non-existent phenomenon of the ‘Gay Gangsta Rapper’. “
2) On not being a proper ****: “OK so it’s a standard conversation. You’re out with women and you’re chatting away about someone who’s just fucked them over in some way and they say things like, ‘All Men are pointless’, or ‘I’ve never met a man who didn’t like football’. And then you look a little perturbed.”
3) Portillo Predictions: “And that was before Thatcher’s gradual lunacy pushed her over the brink into Hawk-Nosed Hitlerite. But now … well now politics is all about image, which is why William Hague will never become Prime Minister.”
4) Health advice: “That’s right, ladies and gentlemen – even pointless, lacklustre, unimaginative, dreary, workaday, missionary, vanilla sex with someone you are bored with can have tremendous health benefits. “
5) Presents for multi-millionaires: “And while you are there perhaps you would feel like buying the cheery multi-millionaire a Zircon 50793 Studsensor Pro 4.0 or a Star Trek electronic key chain (three types requested).”
6) Two weeks before handing in notice: “There may come a day in your life when you find yourself so sick to death of your job, so overwhelmingly frustrated by the lack of respect that your very presence seems to engender, so totally bored by office politics and that boss who you’ve always found intolerable, that it comes to you that the only answer is to resign and go and find something else to spend your time on.”
7) The beginning of the rot: “Since I am going to have to be drearily positive for the next seven weeks as I scrabble around for a new job, I thought I may as well take this opportunity to moan about how appalling my life is at the moment in laborious and tedious detail.”
8) Rebranding: “Merely take two words that you feel ‘represent’ your site in some way, and then combine them to produce your newly rebranded site-name. If in the process you can spend $600 million, then all the better. With this spirit of adventure in mind, I hereby declare plasticbag.org to be called ‘fascillåte’.”
9) Photo of father: “Imagine my shock when I realised my father (bottom-right) was a big, baldy, 70s-style beardy-weirdy…”
10) Tom Coates Explains Everything: “No, strudel is beyond my meagre talents in the kitchen, I’m afraid. I think I missed out on many of the important gay genes that make you able to decorate effectively and not fart in public.”