Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

And now, because I am stuck in the gutted skeleton of this office for a while yet, and because somebody asked after its health recently, the fisrt part of the Matt/Dan conversational topics list:

Upsideclown.

Making somebody drink a bottle of ketchup for Ł50. How much they would have to earn a year for Ł50 to seem a reasonable sum to drink a bottle of ketchup. How the only person who went for it was a student. How it looked, and how they felt afterwards.

Whether this behaviour with the bottle of ketchup made Matt evil.

Masons.

Whether a mutual acquaintance is a cunt or not.

Talking USB ports.

Laser harps. With Pokemon voices.

"You're much cooler than my real dad."

How it is surprising that Matt talks so much shit (observed Matt). Or is it?

Linguistic prescriptivism. Or, to put it another way, being able to talk properly.

Holidays in Selfawaria.

The saddest CV ever.

(The saddest CV ever was received a few months back. It was written, in blue ballpoint, on a piece of paper ripped in half and with lines drawn across in pencil. I just wanted to give the man a hug)

Job satisfaction.

26 wards in a district council. Maybe.

The men with the smallest penises in the world.

Meg selling her old CDs.

Matt's bad techno habit.

Philip Glass and getting into classical music through shit trance.

Hmmm.....spicy.

I don't normally read WilWheaton.net, despite the fame and ballyhoo that surrounded his election as The Guardian's choice for best British Blog 2002. However, this tale of him kneeling over his own action figure, weeping salt tears at the shortness of its relevant span on this Earth, is oddly touching.

I consider him for a moment and tell him, "you know, you look sort of cool in this uniform. You should have stuck around a bit longer, so you could have worn it more."

"Yes, Wil," the action figure replied,"But the fans hated me. They thought I sucked. They called me a whiny little bitch and suspected me of wearing my mother's underwear. Whole communities were set up devoted to concocting new and amusing ways to kill me. It's amazing that I made it off the Enterprise with my limbs intact. And no great surprise that my walk-on part in the soon-to-be-execrated Nemesis was left to die on the cutting room floor."

I burned its face off with a Zippo, but it didn't shut it up.

OK. I may have imagined the second and third paragraph. But I am deadly serious about the first.

Meanwhile, to go from tiny stupid humans to the sublime, Etna has erupted again. It's looking like the simple villagers will be spared the torrent of molten lava onto their homes so indicative of a prima donna volcano, but I guess it's early doors.

This event may leave you feeling very tiny and insignificant. This is because you are very tiny and insignificant.

The previous inspired by a comment, delivered of course over the Internet, that there was an "unspoken rule" that infanticide was common in India, with the exemplum that in Whitechapel doctors attempted to conceal the gender of their unborn children from Bengali parents, because they would abort girls.

Can anyone spot how many ways that comment makes its proponent a fucking moron?

Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there

is. A certain flower or a, a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences...

long forgotten. Books smell. Musty and, and, and, and rich. The

knowledge gained from a computer, is, uh, it... it has no, no texture,

no, no context. It's, it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last,

then, then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should

be, um... smelly.

Or, alternatively,

Some examples of the effect Internet Lies have on everyday lives:

In January 2001, an Iron Maiden fansite posted the address of an upcoming gig as the NEC Birmingham, rather than the Wembley Arena in London. The mistake remained on the site undetected and uncorrected. On the night of the gig, several thousand Maiden-Heads descend upon the fragile local transport system in and around the area of the NEC. Emergency service records for the night in question shows that the increase in traffic congestion led to slower ambulance response times, and to two deaths. One of these was from a road traffic accident, no doubt caused by the unexpectedly high traffic volumes, all caused by a lie on a website.

Monday, October 28, 2002

Well, the hacking of Blogger has made me for one feel dirty and violated. Which is actually quite nice. Hmmmm....

But yes. One of the interesting things about the whole fiasco, exept the comical fratboy hubris that has kept any mention of it off their front page, is that anyone who had stored their FTP password with Blogger suddenly had no control over who could post on their site. In that respect it was very technocratic - anyone with the skill to find out a single password could at the very least put things in the publishing queue of pretty much any blog. I wonder whether anyone chose to abuse this by leaving "Hello. You're a great big twat. And I've had your wife" on some blogponent's "to publish" list.

Did you come back to find anything daubed on your walls? Or, if you did leave your FTP password inside the car, did you come home to find that somebody had used your blog to tell fibs? Tell me.

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

I think my casual mention of the top 50 sexiest cartoon characters page has broken Matt. He'll be found with a shattered heart and a Battle of the Planets DVD yet, I fear.

The problem is, I'm a backpacker at heart. Backpackers aren't good at insights. They can tell you what something looks like and how they got there. Their stories are of interest only to themselves and their mothers.

Regrettably, after this moment that almost seems to approach self-knowledge, Alex Garner carries on writing. Twat. Twatpacker.

I love zombie movies, but something tells me, pace Kevan, that 28 Days Later is going to suck like a chest wound.

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

And, in our continuing pop-art experiment to pass the mourning of Glogs, except it isn't actually dead, only sleeping, thanks to Ben and gbloogle, the day in palinoptic links.

The Future Bible Heroes' new album is in very real danger of being a good deed in a naughty world, as this interview suggests. This is partly as a result of my unrequited love for Claudia Gonson, and partly my massive crush on Stephin Merritt. I'm not proud. But if we can have one more hoovering-the-flat disco classic like "I'm Lonely And I Love It", then surely it will all not have been in vain.

Meanwhile, Dan Hon and Tom Plasticbag discuss the possibility of an immersive Buffy gaming experience in a series of very interesting posts here and here. Which chimed in a way with something I have been vaguely percolating as various people I know wandered off to Blood, Text and Fears, somewhat surprisingly the first academic conference devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer on these isles, and which concretised as I sat in Borders watching a group of academics fresh out of Norwich (not as in, "sorry, dearie, but somebody had the last Norwich just half an hour ago," obviously) discuss the Buffster, with frequent interjections from a tight-knit group of people, all of whom appeared to be on first-name terms with the academics (groupies?), and who might be described as the kind of people you would find down the back of the sofa when all you need is another 10p piece to have the price of a packet of fags. Scary, scary, beirdy people, all insisting on calling Joss Whedon "Josh", as if they were best friends. And he was round their house. Every Thursday. For a cup of tea.

Later, one of those having attended of Blood, Text and etc confessed that the temptation to refer to him throughout the conference as "Jeff Whedon" was almost overpowering.

Anyway, yes. Two programs that Buffy was being held up against were the X-Files and Twin Peaks. The X-Files, it was generally assumed, had eventually betrayed its fans (what?) because Chris Carter did not care about the characters. I have no idea, having not really watched it, but there seemed a real undercurrent of anger going down. Twin Peaks, of course, went out on a high, and one suspects that its cancellation was the best thing that could have happened to it.

Buffy appears, if anything, to be taking on the opposite of the Carter malaise - its writers are fans, and as such it is becoming fanfic. Which means in turn, since fanfic occupies the offscreens and gutters of the narrative, that everybody is unrelentingly miserable, and weird shag-combinations are spawning like sexQuake.

It's fascinating. I'm just waiting for the Xander/Spike hurt/comfort scene.

With cocks.

Monday, October 21, 2002

http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3838/justify3838.html

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2002_10_13_archive.shtml#85572637

http://www.danhon.com/ec/mtarchives/000185.shtml#000185

http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3838/justify3838.html

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2002_10_13_archive.shtml#85572637

http://www.danhon.com/ec/mtarchives/000185.shtml#000185

Well, don't look at me. Just this once I had nothing whatever to do with it.

However, it is an interesting thing - what is changed by this? I remember Matt telling me that I had to update my weblog frequently, as it would then appear on the Gblogs updated lists more often and more people would read it. And I have vaguely been contaminated by the notion that failing to update regularly is somehow bad. But I must confess that, although I lived under the yoke of the gblogs list, I don't think I'd actually been to the page for a year or so.

Has blogging changed? Or have I changed?

Well, what a difference a week makes. Still waiting for the Webb transcripts, and in the meantime I've been to a proper grown-up party, and blown out a conference on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Meanwhile, from our "so, so wrong" pile...

Blakes 7 Fight Club.

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Speaking of Prandy, he was supposed to have my back at Brave New Word, but, having persuaded me to overcome my morbid fear of public speaking, then disappeared off to the dark places and left me if not in then certainly near the lurch.

Ultimately, I drafted in a friend to help me out. This friend did a sterling job, but is probbaly the only person I have ever met who would heckle their own reading partner. Bless.

Anyway, yes. Reading. In public. I'm not sure how much of this is a fear of cocking it up, starting to hurl a bombard of tourettes-style abuse, tripping over the same word five times, and how much is just an awareness that the concept is basically a bit wanky. None of these people paid to see you, after all. Well, except for the ones who did. And possibly at the very least everybody was giving their consent to hear you, and perhaps therefore paying a measurable fraction of their entrance fee for you. Or possibly there was a Dan discount, and one of the other nine or so performers was worth 60p rather than the traditional 30, therefore being rendered to an acceptable level by the anti-ballast of my negative thirty pence value.

Yes.

That's probably it.

For more such sums, you must must must see Look Around You. Last week's episode was nowhere near as good as the original "Short Film about Calcium", but still rocked very hard indeed. Ah, for those days of sitting on scratchy carpets in the dark, watching small dots marching around the screen to explain mathematics. What a wasted joy it is to be a tiny.

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

By request, that link to The Very Secret Diaries of the Lord of the Rings, again.

And meanwhile, er33t is a goth with a taste for Starbucks and Leicester Square eating. Little things like that make my life altogether more worth living.

Speaking in turn of Leicester Square eating, Prandy has broken the sad news that the Angus Steakhouses are to close. The major loser in this sorry event will be...well, Robyn, actually, who apparently always wanted to eat at one and now perhaps never shall. But also the food reviewers of broadsheet papers, since barely a year seems to pass between one deciding to go to an Angus Steakhouse and be bamboozled by the incredible price and terrible food.

The West End will look very strange without those red velour banquette seats, all completely empty, as if ready for the dinner theatre of the damned.

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

From AnglePaul, Beestung is packed to the gunnels with obscure snippets of Kristen Hersh and Tanya Donnelly. But not in a grotesque way.

The Throwing Muses never had that much of an impact on me - jangly college rock, thought I, so it was an enormous surprise when I became a fan of Kristen Hersh around about the time of "Echo". It felt a bit like anamnesis, or similar - one of those classic "you have been describing my life for the last decade or so, and nobody told me? Well, gosh" moments. Which, given that her songs are completely fucking cakerack, is not necessarily a good thing.

Monday, October 14, 2002

Oh yes - there is a UK NRA also, which is obscurely amusing. I imagine that the search results of searching their site for "Michael Ryan" would throw up perhaps as many hits (if you'll pardon the infelicitous expression) as searching the USNRA's for "Columbine". Four, in case you're interested.

The UK NRA also have a link to the Muzzle-Loaders Association. This sounds like a truly disgusting perversion, but apparently isn't, but does in fact refer to people with muzzle-loading firearms.

The Americans get armour-piercing semi-automatics. We get the arquebus.

Once again I find my mind drawn to the USA, and what a wery wery strange place it is. As Bush's reliance on the consumer spending bubble looks increasingly threadbare as a strategy, Michael Moore is sharpening his claws again, this time on the NRA, and in general on the US' culture of fear. Now, to be fair, if I were the only nation ever to be invaded by Canada, I'd be pretty twitchy as well.

However, it turns out that most of the 11,000 people who die from firearm-inflicted wounds in America per year are not in fact Canadian, or the English oppressor, but American. Which seems somewhat wilful of them; a sort of ongoing mass suicide. Plus, Charlton Heston will get all spunk on him, which is never good.

So, problem. Guns are really sexy. Just ask the American equivalent of White Van Man - very much like our own, but with a penchant for leaving tarot cards and little notes saying "Dear Police, I am God" lying around rather than crisp wrappers (and I love the insouciance of the declaration. "I am God. Hope the family's well. Yours Aye, G."). And guns don't kill people. Bullets kill people.

So, why not make bullets incredibly rare and expensive, so that anyone will have to be really pissed off with you before they shoot you? That way we can increase the piece/peace, without totally ruling out the possibility of civilian militia skirmishes around Niagra Falls.

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Speaking of Matt, we met for a drink on Tuesday night with my beautiful wife, his girlfriend. and, having agreed that we did this far too infrequently, he then proposed that we ressurect the tradition of taking notes on our conversations. The result is perhaps the most enlightening document of our times. Especially if you find the word "cock" enlightening. I will begin the transcription ASAP.

And on Thursday night I had a dream in which Guelincx was involved. This is slightly odd.

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

Speaking of Upsideclown - and there's a new one up today, as per - reminds me; Jamie the Clown received an email from a devoted fan of Ritchie Neville, re: his piece Ritchie Neville is Dead. I quote:

What are talking about? Ritchie
can't be dead! Is this some kind of joke or
something like that? I can't believe that Ritchie would be dead...
Tell me the truth...

Please...

As Matt observed, "why can't Richie be dead? Is he some kind of immortal mesoamerican river god or something?"

Of course, this is all much funnier when you imagine the poor, deluded creature, going through exactly the same set of thought processes - denial, rage, terrible poetry - as the many admirers and lovers of Richey Manic went through. And yet funnier again when you email her back saying, "I'm afraid it's true. Richard Neville is dead. But, on the bright side, no other single man had a greater impact on the balance of power during the Wars of the Roses. He went out on a high."

Monday, October 07, 2002

Susie looked up as though she sensed his urgency, and flashed Geoff a naughty, horny grin. Taking his hand away from her face, she moved it down, down to the body lying between them and placed it on the neck. Geoff was shocked - he'd never had a lady be so forward with him! Sending a quick prayer skywards for what he was about to receive, he reached forward to scoop a handful of the brains out.

To his surprise though, Susie reached out her elegant slim arm and stopped him. "Not like that - that's not how I want it..." she murmured. Geoff stopped in his tracks, confused; her actions were saying yes, but to stop it now?...

He watched as she reached back into her pink fake-fur rucksack and pulled out a shining silver spoon. Under his entranced gaze Susie brought the spoon to her decayed lips and ran her tongue down the length it.

Frozen with lust Geoff could barely respond as she leaned in close and whispered "I don't want it like that, Geoff. I want you to feed me - with the spoon..."....

It isn't easy eating brains in a climate of fear. George is here to help us practice safety for the CJD generation. Don't die of ignorance. Or of "bad brains". Be safe. Be sensible. Be a Safespooner.

Saturday, October 05, 2002

Lesbian Celebrities index. Or, more correctly, "celebrities who have ever expressed an opinion on the attractiveness of another woman". I'm not quite sure whether this site is a well-intentioned attempt to present lesbianism as perfectly natural and common, a genuine if rather Catholic attempt both to celebrate out lesbians in showbusiness and pressure closeted ones, or a 14-year old with a sore wrist trying to write Real-People-Slash with real people...

Tuesday, October 01, 2002

I notice the faint sounds of the ingress ports opening, on schedule, as they do every 10 minutes or so throughout the day. They hover just on the edge of hearing, but I am so attuned to this environment now that I note them especially. They mark the passage of my day.

One of the interesting things about UpsideClone is that, whereas the Clown (link to Matt's rather touching recent comment on it rather than the site itself) is organised along basically social lines - although the members may not all know each other well, they all know of each other and any given person knows at least one other Clown well.

Upsideclone is more of a creative writing outreach project for technoids; a loose alliance formed on the basis of technological enablement, and having come across either the site or a site connected to it. It receives a fascinatingly broad range of submissions, from the excellent to the unbelievably bad, with no connection beyond the Internet connection. And the latest one, the Message Centre, is interesting stuff.

Venusberg.org finds Blogger very attractive...

elsewhere:

Interconnected
Plasticbag
Oh Skylab
Barcablog
Orbyn

moreover:

Brainsluice
Mo Morgan
Mothninja
Tajmahal
Wherever y'are
Prandial Post

thereafter:

Toby Kay
McCargow
Blogadoon
LinkMachineGo
Methylsalicylate
Hammersley
Joeblog
Grayblog
the Collective
Nick Jordan
Kooky Mojo
Betty Woo
Moth
Mr. Thomas G

the author:

danATvenusberg.org

and finally...

the archives