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Jan 20 2011
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Blast from the Past Day

“Blast from the Past Day” is an idea from Shawn Blanc, which is basically to draw attention to older, cooler stuff on the internet. After all, everything doesn’t have to be new, does it?

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This is a great thing for me, because I was basically stressing over the fact I hadn’t written up the alarmingly big pile of books next to my bed. Or that review of Tron I said I’d hand in to the nice people at Re/Action Zine. Instead, here are a few of my favourite posts:

Other people are amazing too, but I don’t know where to start when recommending something from the back-catalogue. Lucy Knisley continues to amaze me with her comics, and I lost ten minutes just trying to pick one to link to. Charles Stross has written some amazing essays. But the guy who I am probably most in awe of on the internet would be Merlin Mann, and while I can pretty much point at any of the long-form posts on his site 43folders.com, I’m going to pick this amazingly long essay about existing in a niche.

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Oct 27 2010
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Links, Visit

Berlin: And also…

Above: the video for Donna Summer aka Jason Forrest’s War Photographer, whose career took off in Berlin under his annoyingly pseudonym.

The other thing about Berlin is that (aside from being a centre for culture and a big, fun European city) it’s also a place where there are a lot of young people trying to do vaguely hipsterish things. And it’s been this way for ages. Since way before the word ‘hipster’ was invented.

But I believe there’s something of a zeitgeist at the moment. The current economic climate makes it impossible for people under the age of thirty to buy houses across the EU, but they can support themselves doing freelance work on the internet. Hence, to some degree, a large foreign population arriving in Berlin to do arty things whilst working from home on their laptop. And I can see why; if I had a choice of sitting and tapping the keys on my laptop from here in Bedfordshire or in a Berlin neighbourhood, I’d have to pick Berlin.

I hear that Copenhagen has a similar hipster density. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never been there. But there are certainly areas in any city that draw a type of young, stylish person, such as Heaton in Newcastle. I’m not saying Heaton is as interesting as Kreuzberg, but what it does have are people who are interested in bouncing ideas off each other and trying new things. Living in Bedfordshire, as I am at the moment, that can seem like quite a draw. However, when I lived in Heaton, I found myself almost suffocated by the people around me. I guess the trick is to find somewhere that’s a balance between the two.

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Oct 05 2010
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Links

Shush

The argument for comments on a website is something like “it allows you to have a conversation with your audience”, but I’m no longer so sure about that. I’m lucky to get some nice comments here, which makes me very happy when it happens, but in the past few months I’ve been fighting an avalanche of spam. I’m not about to turn off comments just yet, but I have been tempted to recently.

Because, jeez, that spam is irritating. And jeez, the comments on other sites are fucking irritating. In fact, commenting has got to such a stage at this point in history that it’s propensity to turn into a slanging match is well known. But is that the right thing? Should we keep commenting as it is, or is it a system that should evolve?

  • The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory – normal person + anonymity + audience = fuckwad. It’s a truism that you can also get on a slightly-more-polite t-shirt.
  • Engadget Turns Off Comments – when a bear-pit like Engadget, whose business plan is dependent upon page-views, turns off it’s comments, you know something is up. “What is normally a charged — but fun — environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations… and that’s just not acceptable.” they said, because citing the above theory would not have a calming effect. They’re back on now though, but by default casual browsers don’t see them.
  • Speak Your Branes – one of the earliest sites dedicated to lampooning the miserable commentator. The choices are mainly culled from the Have Your Say forums of the BBC, which I’m not familiar with. Sounds hellish though.
  • Help us improve debate on CiF (Guardian) – the Guardian is one of the sites where I feel most dismayed by comments. Some subjects, especially the arts coverage, turn into a spiteful mirror of the message of the written article when the comments start. I think that some of what they are suggesting might help, but I’m not sure that having the author of a piece engage with trollish behaviour will do anything to improve matters there.
  • Antisocial Web Script for Greasemonkey – if you can’t beat ‘em, delete ‘em.
  • A Comment on Comments – from Suw Anderson, a mover and shaker in the media world, who notes that most news websites forums are toxic wastelands, and asks these organisations to reconsider the idea of ‘social’. I actually left a length comment on this piece, maybe you could read that. I only made one spelling mistake (I think…)
  • Why there are no comments on Daring Fireball – one of my favourite blogs on the internet, as much as for the voice as the content, responds to criticism that his site should have comments: “I care about what’s best.” Scroll down to the second half of the post for his extended views, which are worth reading.
  • Anger Management for Trolls – a contemporary piece from Wired magazine, which states that science will stop those pesky humans with their bad thoughts. I dunno, Wired, I’m dubious… maybe it has something to do with human nature?

That is a lot of linkage for now, and I’m going to let you click and mull to your own conclusion.  But here’s one last thing, from Mitchell and Webb, which Suw Anderson used in her piece:

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Aug 26 2010
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Links

Revenge of the (Academic MBA) Nerds

I was saving this bunch of links to write a piece about academia, but I’m in the middle of packing up my Newcastle flat and moving house – made more exciting than I’d like by things such as surprise house guests and exploding car engines. This means I can’t quite get my writing head into gear, so I’m going to linkdump these articles here and let people make up their own minds as to how the UK’s universities are dealing with these issues.

  • The Big Lie about the ‘Life of The Mind’ – Article in a US Universities website about the effectiveness of postgraduate humanities education in the job market, and employment as a humanities graduate within universities.
  • Wanted: Really Smart Suckers – In the US university system, there seems to be a tradition of employing graduate students as teachers of undergraduates. I’ve not come across this as much in the UK, but this might be because of the institutions and subjects that I’ve studied at/of. This article inspects the way that the postgraduate community is used.
  • The Last Professors – blogpost from a left-wing perspective about the end of the American usage of ‘professor’, as inspired by the book by Frank Donoghue.
  • Waiting 20 Years for Tenure – A personal account of one individuals life as a travelling lecturer. I know a number of people in a similar position, except I doubt that most of my friends expected to become “house” staff.
  • Review of the Last Professors book – Another look at the Frank Donoghue book

From my time in academia, I’d say that there is a real focus on money-earning activities in the UK, and this is corroborated by what happened to the Middlesex Philosophy department, which closed down recently. Perhaps my view is different from the norm, as I’ve mostly been in Fine Art departments (a subject matter that is perennially squeezed by it’s budget and the material requirements of it’s students), but I’d say that in the overwhelmingly capitalistic society of today, academia’s notions of knowledge and learning were bound to be a casualty.

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Jul 27 2010
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Links

The Five-Ball Flash Links

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10179130&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1

Above: the retro/Victoriana/steampunk video for “Flush”. I like the giga-Victoria.

I’ve been learning to juggle five balls recently. Four balls is pretty boring; essentially, it’s throwing two balls in one hand simultaneously – something that’s hard, but not impossible. Throwing five balls is something other entirely, requiring a serious amount of practice and training. Thankfully, I’ve got the internet to help out.

I don’t read all this stuff a lot, because it’s maddening to think about it at the same time as trying to do it. There’s a certain about of mindful meditation, but after a while I’ve just been listening to music. When not throwing balls into the air, I’ve been catching up with my reading or watching movies. It’s not all work work work, y’know.

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Jun 29 2010
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Links

Conan! What Links are Best in Life?

Conan advised that crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentation of their women was the best thing in life. You can now hear this sage advice as the chorus for the musical version of Conan.

With that in mind, let’s run through some links I’ve found interesting recently:

Mar 10 2010
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Links

Links (and an Apology)

I’ve really slowed down on writing things recently, as a lot of energy has been directed towards getting the state to pay me benefits. Unlike my friends, it seems that governance is totally unimpressed at my near-death experience, and I’ve been forced to spend a lot of time filling out forms, making complaints, and talking to call centre staff in Luton.

Which wasn’t quite how I planned to spend my recuperation.

So my apologies for not cranking out grist for this particular mill on a more regular basis. I’ve been busy. I’m probably going to keep on being busy. Here are some links to keep you busy:

Five Creepy Ways Video Games are Trying to Get You Addicted – excellent article about the tricks used to get you playing computer games from cracked.com, which I thought was just a dumping ground for brash American humour. If you read this, you’ll know why you’ve been distracting yourself from work so much.

Idle Words tackles Scurvy – a long and thoughtful article about scurvy, in particular scurvy and the Scott expedition. From Idle Words, which has a great and very long archive of interesting stuff that could keep you distracted for a while.

The Battle for Britain’s Libraries – the Guardian tackles the new library culture spring up, namely a question of if we should have super-libraries (like Newcastle’s new city-centre library) or regional branches (which don’t have gee-whiz stuff like the internet). Contains this amazing factoid – “Since 1997 there has been a 1,150% rise in lap-dancing clubs in Britain, and a 6% decline in the number of libraries”.

The Terminator’s Gun – it must be scifi gun season, as Ars Technica gives us the behind-the-scenes tail of Arnie’s laser-sighted pistol, while Boingboing gives us the making of a replica Blade Runner gun. Frankly, I stopped giving a shit about Blade Runner after the third directors cut, and would have preferred a spin-off, sequel , or TV show rather than continually re-working the same thing. The Terminator franchise might have been worked into the ground, but at least they told a new story while they were doing it.

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Jan 23 2010
2 Comments
Links, Newcastle, Technology

Briefly, Links (23/01/10)

Genevieve Valentine is a writer and essayist, working in the SF area. She also has an obsession with Catherine Cookson TV movies, where high levels of snark are to be found – although this mainly seems to come out on her Livejournal blog.

Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but more interestingly he’s a short-tempered essayist on elements of internet culture who has no truck with shibboleths. His blog might occasionally throw up a few nice pieces, but it’s his essays that are really interesting.

Mark Fisher has been linked to by a few people whom I enjoy reading, and I just finished his book. Thankfully, for a heavyweight leftist political tract, it was really short and kept referencing SF.

The Meat License Proposal by John O’Shea – imagine if you had to take the equivalent of a driving test to eat meat? One of the projects that, when I describe it, always has people volunteering to take a meat license test, where they would learn to kill and prepare their chosen meat.

The AV Festival is back again, with various installations and talks across the North-East. Some things are harder to locate than others on the sprawling website, and some feral trade coffee sounds good, but is this an open workshop or is it something else?

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