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Apr 05 2011
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Irregular, Writing

“If you haven’t wasted huge chunks of your life on art, booze, and soft drugs, then you’ve wasted huge chunks of your life and we don’t want you around here.”

“Maybe some of you know politicians. Maybe you hang out with them, went to school with them, exchange Christmas cards with them. I’m guessing not, though. Politicians tend not to hang out with people like you, almost by definition. Typically, someone interested enough in the arts to be reading the Believer has spent a lot of time doing things that disqualify you not only from a career in politics,  but from even knowing people who have a career in politics. While you were smoking weed, sleeping around, listening to Pavement, reading novels, watching old movies, and generally pissing away every educational opportunity ever given to you, they were knocking on doors, joining societies, reading the Economist, and being very, very careful about avoiding people and situations that might embarrass them later. They are the people who were knocking on your door five minutes after you arrived at college, asking for your vote in the forthcoming student-representative election; you thought they were creeps, and laughed at them behind their backs. Meanwhile, they thought you were unserious and unfocused, and patronized you irritatingly if you ever had cause to be in the same room. I hope that, however old you are, you have already done enough to kill any serious political ambition. If you haven’t wasted huge chunks of your life on art, booze, and soft drugs, then you’ve wasted huge chunks of your life and we don’t want you around here. Go away.”

Nick Horby, the Believer, March/April 2011

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Mar 29 2011
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Irregular

Does it still look like this outside?

Spring getting sprung

Because, I tell you, it’s been awesome. This is the period of the year when you start looking at the weather forecast again, because for about four months it’s just been a variation on “it’ll be cold and horrible today”, and who needs more news like that in winter?

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Mar 16 2011
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Irregular

SPRING!

In your face, winter! You’re over!

Feb 12 2011
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Irregular

Shut up shut up SHUT UP!

I use a number of different browsers on my main computer, and when I fire up Chrome this video starts. This usually leads to me finding it and stopping it from playing, even though I’ve been keeping it because I intend to stick it up on my blog. But that was ages ago, and now I just find myself scrolling through tabs muttering “shut up!” trying to find it.

Funnily enough, I like to imagine that “shut up shut up SHUT UP” is also the Conservative reaction to this sort of logically talk on “austerity”.

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Dec 28 2010
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Irregular, Writing

Nice One, Dan!

“A man named Dan killed himself in 297 BC but was released again from his tomb three years later, after much digging by a numinous white dog. It seems that he was not really meant to die at that time and it was the ‘result of faulty record-keeping by the netherworld bureaucracy’ was was subsequently rectified.”

The First Emperor of China, by Frances Wood

I’ve been reading Frances Wood’s history of the first Chinese emperor, which can basically be boiled down to “the first emperor was a bit of a prick, but on the plus side he really got that China project up and running”. However, it is full of strange comments that make very little sense to me, and taken out of context – like the above – seem amusing.

On the other hand, good for Dan!

Apparently, suicide was a bit like appealing to an ombudsman in those times – if you offed yourself at the house or workplace of those who “did you wrong”, the officials would investigate. However, the officials were often incredibly busy killing vast numbers of people, such as during the emperors edict to ban all books which were considered of no use to the empire.

460 scholars were killed in the capital alone, which must have taken some work. Ancient scrolls recording the killing states that the First Emperor tricked them into coming to admire his “unusual winter blooming melons”, which were just over a hidden pit. Other accounts say that the reference to melons is actually a misspelling of “killed”.

Although the emperor might have been a melon-loving murder, one of his great actions was to standardise Chinese – at the time he was around, Chinese was a fiendishly complicated language of local spellings and pronunciations. I’m not sure if he did this before or after the fruit-induced death of scholars, but I like to think that might have made it a bit easier.

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Dec 08 2010
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Irregular

Biggleswade Park

Park, frosty day

This park is opposite my house. Today I woke up and it looked amazing, with frost on every tree and leaf.

When I walked over to take a picture, the effect was somewhat ruined by the pumping garage music coming from the fairground.

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Dec 04 2010
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Irregular

Fuck You If You Don’t Like Christmas

And fuck you if you don’t like antiques.

Also see this t-shirt, by the same artist, which has a delightful (non-seasonal) message.

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Nov 27 2010
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Irregular, Technology

Banelings! Banelings! Banelings!

Sometimes I come across something that is so far out of my experience that I am fascinated. This is a video made by “Husky”, who is internet-famous for his Starcraft 2 commentary. The piece is a parody of a Justin Bieber song.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Bieber song, nor have I played Starcraft. I’ve heard of both of these things, and poking around Husky’s back-catalogue of Youtube videos is interesting as it exposes me to a lot of expressions I’ve never heard before (rage-quit? Gibs?), but I’m not too interested in searching out the original song.

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Nov 26 2010
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Art, Irregular

Boats! Boats! Boats!

Hold Fast from Moxie Marlinspike on Vimeo.

I’ve recently been obsessing about boats again. The internet makes it easy to obsess over things; if you have a craving to find out everything about a particular topic, you just need to do a few Google searches and suddenly you’ve got thrimity-thrum tabs open and Firefox is using up 75% of your processing power.

When I was about 18, a friend of mine took me across the channel on his parents yacht. This was an amazing experience, going from flat, closed-off and conservative Bedfordshire to the world of harbours and ocean-going types. Technically, this means I have some sailing experience, but it was so long abo, and I was such an annoyingly lazy goon at that point in my life I think the only thing that I really took away from the experience was the memory of being at sea.

Coming across the above video reminded me of that, and the narrators vision of freedom and mobility is something that I find very attractive at the minute – I’m still too ill to hold down a job (no matter what the government said), and the idea of independence and travel that Hold Fast talks about is very attractive. Indeed, it’s so attractive that I ignored my NaNoWriMo effort for a few days, alternatively playing an Elite-style game while researching boating. I now have an enormous word-debt to get through if I want to finish NaNoWriMo this year, so I want to link-dump and move on until some point later.

  • To Mexico and Back – the narrator of the Hold Fast’s first trip out, which gives us some interesting views into how “Moxie Marlinspike” got into sailing in the first place
  • Instructable: How to get a free yacht – similar to Hold Fast and the above piece, this long instructable is the story of somebody who found a cheap, possibly dangerous boat, and put a lot of time into it to make it seaworthy.
  • Build a Dinghy – I was surprised to find that there are several sources for free boat-building plans on the internet. This links to a dinghy design that could be built if you were reasonably good at woodwork.
  • Times Up Boating Association – my friend Pippa built a dinghy as part of a residency with this arts/boating group, but some of the other projects they have been involved in are much more far-out, such as the use of a caravan as a diving bell. Not that building a boat looks easy, but caravan + submerging sounds deadly.
  • That man who keeps sailing around the UK with a roadmap – also see BBC coverage – is symptomatic of the split-nature of sailing. On one hand, it’s a clear set of skills and tools that keep people alive. On the other hand, there are people who are willing to throw themselves out into the sea with their hope and stupidity to keep them alive. While I am dubious of the amount of money the “proper” sailing world insists is needed, I also think it’s important not to be an idiot.
  • The cautionary tale of Bas Jan Alder – Bas Jan Alder was an artist who attempted to sail across the Atlantic in a thirteen-foot boat. He died.
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Nov 05 2010
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Irregular

The Mystery of the Five Coffee Shops

I should be writing my NaNoWriMo novel right now, but I’m finding it hard. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you about my scribblings; the reason I’m finding it hard is because it was a year ago that I went into hospital. That was the start of the trail of events that led me back to my hometown, Biggleswade, where I am forced to visit the five coffee shops.

That hospital trip a year ago saved my life, and I am eternally grateful to certain individuals who bundled me into a taxi and made me go to hospital. However, the illness itself was so severe that I have only now just come off the medications I was put on, and it will still be a long time until I am well enough to work. Because of this illness, I now live 250 miles away from nearly all of my friends.

Like I said, it’s been a year now. That year has been a long time for anybody in Newcastle; they’ve all been busy, and where I’ve been watching Star Trek: Enterprise re-runs in my pyjamas, they’ve been working hard. I have had literally nothing to fill my time this year, and anything I have done has tended to make me exhausted… leading to more time on the couch in my jimmy-jams.

Let’s just say I have high hopes of completing NaNoWriMo this year.

One of the pieces of advice that NaNoWriMo headman Chris Baty recommends working in a coffee shop, where you can pick up interesting stories about characters. This is completely not the case in Biggleswade, where there are an amazing five coffee shops within two minutes walk of each other. It’s like a vortex of coffee, but not in a good way!

The mystery of the five coffee shops is that none of them are particularly good. I cringe when I write this, because I expect my favourite shop – the one on the corner, that used to be an off-license where I used to work – to find this humble blogpost and beat me round the ear next time I pop in. However, I would like to assure them that they are much better than the rest, especially the small one on the other side of the town square, who made me a coffee so bad that I almost couldn’t finish it.

I miss my old life in Heaton when I think about this. I miss being able to bump into people I knew and liked in local coffee shops. I miss being able to have conversations with people about the things we liked, such as art. And coffee. I’ve tried to get to events ’round here, but they are too few and far between and to hard to get to – there just isn’t much to do without resorting to going into London, which is extremely tiring and quite alienating.

I’ve worked out it’s going to take me at least another year or two here before I can leave. I’ll need to work, and save up a war-chest, in a town which doesn’t value any of my skills apart from “could lift heavy boxes” (the Bedfordshire region does not need any trained gallery assistants). Maybe by the time I can leave this mangled idea of a town, I’ll have managed to solve the mystery of the five coffee shops.

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