plasticbag.org

It was useful, it was fun, it was made by a friend of mine, and it is no more. I present “The Life and Death of Googlematic” – a melodrama in three parts…

Today on Barbelith: We all live in Gormenghast – “For all its thickfisted commotion, the film of Gormenghast does translate Peake’s larger concerns and themes. For all its subplots, which have as many blind alleys as the twisty corridors of the castle itself, the story is fundamentally about change and stasis. “

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.