ugly
It's raining in London. And it's dark. The white spots on the pictures are where the flash went off, even though
the camera was poking out of the window. "Pissing down with rain", that's another thing we say here.
So. My apologies if this all goes a little ugly and/or disfunctional over the next day or two. I am leaving Blogger. I really don't want to join the long list of Evan-bashers, because he's done a sterling job making it so easy for people to post the mundane details of their lives all over the internet. But. $35 for the privilege of having titles on posts is, frankly, a joke. Being unable to format the date on my post to British DDMMYY or my preferred YYYYMMDD is just pathetic. Lack of search facility is unhelpful. Need I go on?
Actually, yes. I have to mention Blogger's automatic code generation, that makes a line break into <BR>, and a double line break into <P>, sans closing tag. The former isn't valid XHTML, and the latter isn't even valid HTML. Automatically generating invalid code? And view source on any Blogger-generated page; what is all that white space about? What sort of rubbish is this churning out? Might as well use Frontpage.
I've looked into MT. I know some people love it. It just seems a bit... big. I don't need all the stuff it provides. I certainly don't need to do it in such a complicated way.
Plus, I hate the comments thing I have here. I like the way it doesn't use a pop-up window, but I am terminally annoyed by the way the comment box doesn't clear once you've posted; it's just asking for double (triple, quadruple) posts. Yeah, I know: it's a little bit of javascript. But while I'm at it...
I'm writing my own CMS. So, if it all goes a bit weird, you know why. But, eventually, there will be a ping box.
12/30/2002 01:20:06 PM #
gods i love the internet, part 3,962
I half-remember a painting I saw a copy of twelve years ago. I have no idea who the artist is. I think the title might have been The [possibly Big, or Little] Friend. Clickity click. It's here (the middle one on the page). I just love that.
12/30/2002 03:25:46 AM #
thieving bastard
So, this person has stolen my pictures. He doesn't quite pass them off as his own, though I think his readers haven't figured that out. I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Part of me is going "bandwidth thief, death by ants and honey is too good for him". Part of me is just flattered (I'm easy to please). Almost all of me is very amused I managed to quadruple-post my displeasure in his comments.
I've tried the .htaccess thing to block him; for some strange reason that sends the entire of the rest of this site 404, so it's not much of a solution. In a way, I'm pleased about that because it made me stop and wonder why exactly I was so keen to block him.
I fundamentally believe in the webbiness of the web. Interconnected is good; interactive is good; linking is good. Fanfic is good; linkware is good. He links me, he adds a few photos to show what you'll be getting, it's all good publicity. Why does it make me feel so angry?
Of course, by linking direct he is stealing my bandwidth. Arguably, this isn't an issue, because I'm not up to my bandwidth limit, and I somehow don't think that he's going to send me over it. He's stealing something I wasn't using anyway, like something I'd already thrown out. And people who get upset about other people raking through their garbage are just sad.
Even so, they're my photos! Which I suppose is the point. My FAQs say "Can I use some of your photographs? If you mail me, I will almost certainly say yes." He didn't mail me. He played with my toys without asking. And that makes me cross.
Update: he has taken the entire post down.
Update #2: he left me a message.
12/30/2002 01:58:24 AM #
bad
I am more hungover than I can tell you.
And I really hate what this site looks like.
That is all.
12/29/2002 01:58:59 PM #
swing your pants
I need an early '70s music geek. There's a guy playing our pub tonight, who claims to have been a member of Chicory Tip, White Plains and Love Affair. As far as I can see, no name is duplicated in these line-ups; the name that's on the posters doesn't appear to be there either (Rick something-beginning-with-R), so I am forced to assume it's a session musician with an imaginative agent. Does anyone know of anyone who played in all three bands?
And if you're not doing anything tonight and fancy spending it in the Windsor Castle in East Finchley, the way to achieve personal fulfillment and world peace is to go buy the woman with the longish red hair and glasses a large glass of dry white wine. Cheers.
12/28/2002 07:01:51 PM #
what's big and purple and found in children's books?
If you thought it would be Barney, you might just be wrong.
12/28/2002 06:21:37 PM #
control, delete
Anyone who participated in Nanowrimo ought to re-learn how to use the delete key. It's easier to delete a whole paragraph than odd words, apparently. The very scary thing is that this link was stolen from Jakob Nielsen.
12/28/2002 05:25:20 PM #
services to literature
Philip Pullman feels as if the story, before it's even taken the form of words, before it has any characters or any incidents clearly revealed, when it's just a thought, just the most evanescent little wisp of a thing - as if it's come to us and knocked at our door, or just been left on our doorstep. Of course we have to look after it. What else could we do? We have to protect it while it becomes sure of itself and settles on the form it wants. ... This service is a voluntary and honourable thing: when I say I am the servant of the story, I say it with pride.
12/28/2002 05:09:52 PM #
on the second day of xmas
You ought to be able to figure out who the guy in the beard is. In which film did Viggo play a Dove?
12/27/2002 10:05:09 AM #
on the first day of xmas
As all true pedants know, the twelve days of Xmas run from Boxing Day until Epiphany (6th January). We therefore present Alan Partridge in a pear tree.
12/26/2002 01:16:13 PM #
gothic
St. Pancras Cemetery is looking very spooky today.
12/24/2002 03:07:20 PM #
next year, you're getting aftershave
I love B. very much. This is why I will buy him peculiar presents, like the arc welder he asked for. But how the elvis am I supposed to wrap it, when I can't even lift it?!
12/24/2002 12:48:54 PM #
what if william mcgonagall had written lord of the rings?
It's almost impossible to pick one of these to quote; Making Light, whence the link, couldn't quite manage it.
12/23/2002 11:08:40 PM #
you will have to get rid of thing one and thing two
This is a very strange but fascinating article about Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, examining its contribution to American literacy, and its bizzare psychology. I remember vividly fearing that the mother would return and discover the mess that had been made, and knowing for absolute certainty that in that event, the Cat would disappear and that Sally and Me would be blamed. The boring, pessimistic Fish seemed a perfect embodiment of my own inner critic.
12/23/2002 07:49:01 PM #
the best best of 2002
Why I Matter, by Christopher Hitchens. A British alcoholic who's switched sides in the culture wars attempts to explain his relevance to the War On Terror. Padded with page-long quotes from V.S Pritchett.
Link nicked from Bookslut.
12/23/2002 07:21:35 PM #
nothing new under the sun
When there was no crisis on the horizon, we were told that objectivity was a good. Now that something seems to threaten our markets--or to threaten perhaps even more than that--we are warned ... that the real fifth-columnist in this country is the critical intellectual. What kind of leaders are these men, anyhow?--snorting through one nostril about the book-burnings in Germany, wheezing through the other at critical intelligences in our own Republic!
Joseph Campbell, December 1940.
12/23/2002 05:16:48 PM #
liberals are poopie-heads
I think it's time we cut off this parental 'welfare system' for pre-adults and got them back to working in coal mines and chimneys, like their forefathers did.
12/22/2002 10:07:28 AM #
messy
My hosts are apparently fiddling about with something today, so anything that requires database access this end isn't happening. Hmm... reason to stick with Blogger. Also reason why the books pages are a total mess. Unless you're a big fan of MySQL error messages, I'd come back tomorrow. Proper error handling costs nothing, but I'd still come back tomorrow.
12/22/2002 09:42:30 AM #
bah humbug (part the second)
I am pissed off. (If you are American, I mean that I am pissed. If you are English, please note that I am very far from being Michael Fished.)
It being the Saturday before Xmas, I switched into seige mentality, imagining B.'s and my imminent starvation because some shops will be closed for two whole days. A frankly ridiculous amount of money later, and our fridge bends at the seams and I dare not open any kitchen cupboard for fear of being brained by a can of bizzare foodstuff which I would never buy in the other 51 weeks of the year. And it was painless! The car park was half empty, the store was filled with people briskly doing their shopping, and they'd left their children at home. What is Xmas coming to if I cannot complain about my trip to the supermarket?
12/21/2002 03:21:35 PM #
bah humbug (part the first)
Meg and Anna are always funny, but especially so today, where Meg demonstrates the use of the important word 'mingoise'. (Now you'll have to read the whole thing to find it.)
12/20/2002 06:01:28 PM #
harry seeker and the chamber pots
I appear not to have mentioned Harry Potter for four and a half days. I do apologise for this terrible lapse in the service you have come to expect. As recompense, I offer Harry Potter fan videos, including the exclusive Prisoner of Azkaban trailer. (There, that should be good for some Googling.) Go and see them before Warner Brothers shut them down.
12/20/2002 05:53:22 PM #
grim
Today's Dilbert is just hilarious.
12/19/2002 08:26:08 AM #
i wonder, said frodo, will good or evil show it to me?
There's been some discussion as to whether the movie The Two Towers stands alone or not, so let me spell it out... It's the middle bit of the story. LotR is not a trilogy; it's all one story. If you didn't see part one, this is not going to make sense; though there is one nice sequence of Gandalf and the Balrog, Jackson has the sense not to lengthen the three hour epic with recaps.
And I liked it. I liked it very much. Especially when it was telling JRRT's story, which it largely was. It stops slightly before the end of the book; Pippin and Merry are still with the Ents, Frodo and Sam haven't met Shelob; presumably in order to balance the brevity of Return of the King in comparison with the other sections. Films of books fail too often because their directors miss the subtle balance between what works as film (action, visuals) and what has worked as literature (dialogue, internal monologue, other unfilmables, usually). Not here; the battle of Helm's Deep, a chapter I always skip in the book because descriptions of battles are just boring, becomes the most enthralling, compelling, edge-of-your-seat piece I've seen for a very long time.
What let this down was the crude attempts to modernise JRRT's work. We need sex, and there aren't any women in the book, so let's introduce two dream sequences about Arwen. I mean, please. It would help if Liv Tyler wasn't such a fuckwit, but she was totally outshone by Eowyn anyway.
What was worse, was the cod psychology. I've always loved the Slinker/Stinker scene, where nice Gollum and nasty Gollum make an uneasy truce; Slinker and Stinker are still there, beautifully portrayed, but the scene ends with Gollum performing some kind of exorcism of his evil side, which twenty minutes later he has to summon back to save himself. Apparently the script writers thought that moral ambivalence was above the majority of their viewers, and had to give Gollum overt black and white hats instead. And perhaps it's just that this came out so soon after Chamber of Secrets, but I really wish that Gollum had looked a bit more hobbity, and a lot less like Dobby.
Heavy handed characterisation was there in the preceding scene too, the one where it becomes obvious to Sam that the Ring is taking over Frodo. Tolkien's beautiful dialogue, including Frodo referring to the Ring as precious, is rewritten to soap opera standards. Pervy hobbit fanciers will be pleased to hear that there is very nearly a snog between Sam and Frodo; hey, at least I'm not the only one who thinks so. Hmmm.
Naturally, no epic is complete without its comic relief, and here we have Gimli, stooge, fall guy and punch line. Enough already with the short guy jokes! By the time we got to dwarf tossing (I kid you not), they had worn very thin indeed. Fortunately, this was counterbalanced by the Ents, which came so close to being ridiculous with their Jah Jah Binks gait, but avoided it; an addition from the book was our watching the destruction of Isengard, and it was terrifying.
So, go and see it. The New Zealand scenery is as beautiful as ever, the soundtrack is sumptuous, although, on the gorgeousness stakes, nothing quite beats this
12/18/2002 11:45:53 PM #
the cold hard lands, they bites our hands
we're gone... speak to you later...
12/17/2002 11:40:33 PM #
a local site for local people
If anyone so desired, they could now find me at www.suebailey.co.uk as well as .net. Why you'd want to, again, is another question.
12/17/2002 08:32:46 AM #
sad
Taphophiles cancel Xmas. Bastard cemetery photographers...
12/16/2002 11:59:14 PM #
funny
Pointless telling you if you're not in the UK, but Dead Ringers is the most hilarious thing I have ever seen. Ozzy Osbourne as the new Dumbledore was just beautiful.
12/16/2002 09:24:17 PM #
more potter gumph
According to the fount of all knowledge, this chap is going to be in the next Harry Potter film, though as whom, they don't say. I don't know about you, but in my imagination he is the spitting image of Sirius Black. (If his geocities page is out, there are pics here or here.)
12/16/2002 09:01:37 PM #
who buys this stuff? #3
Hairy Cat Soap. It comes in an airtight bag but once opened, after a few days, grows hair. I have to confess that mouldy-looking, mutant shaped soap is what I've always wanted. Sadly, Santa, I've been a very bad girl...
12/16/2002 04:39:09 PM #
who buys this stuff? #2
The pendant contains the entire genetic code of a reindeer. So if, in the future, you had the technology, you could, in theory, reproduce a whole reindeer. Assuming, of course, that you wanted one.
12/16/2002 10:55:00 AM #
who buys this stuff?
George W Bush can actually speak 17 different phrases. It ought to come with a Tony Blair doll that repeats what it just said.
12/16/2002 08:39:57 AM #
buried treasure
Cairo Museum exhibits the stuff they've had buried in their basement for the last century. I never thought I'd say that I wanted to go back to stinking, sweaty, salesmen-filled Cairo, but I do.
12/15/2002 10:23:11 PM #
doomed domesday
Another argument in favour of standards, if one had been needed. Still, it'll save you having to scour eBay for spare parts.
12/15/2002 12:53:42 PM #
write to dissent
This is probably one of the best anti-war pieces I've ever read, long by the normal standards of web articles, but worth it. It probably helps that my own views are almost identical with the author's, but don't let that put you off if you call yourself a patriot.
Link nicked from kd.
12/15/2002 06:45:07 AM #
you know what's really scary?
Jonathan Hart looks really young.
But my very first crush of all, Aragorn, from the animated LotR, just looks plain [and] peculiar.
12/13/2002 11:30:16 PM #
i am sad
(Did I mention I'm drunk? Or did you figure it out for yourself?)
12/13/2002 10:04:26 PM #
smart moves
The fight scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies are made up with digitally generated agents, each of which has an individual ability to make decisions for itself. "In the first test fight...we set off the simulation, and in the distance you could see several guys running for the hills."
12/13/2002 04:20:00 PM #
a word, if you please
One word. So little time. If the thought of writing a novel in just thirty days appalled you, how about something with no word limit, upper or lower? You have one minute to write on today's chosen word, whatever comes into your head, the idea being, of course, to actually have something written at the end of the minute. No prevarication, no editing. Great fun.
12/13/2002 03:47:03 PM #
must i write?
I am immensely relieved to discover that I am not the only person who has doubts about their writing. My head thinks, "I'm ridiculously self-critical, to the point where I think what I make is rubbish, simply because I made it." My heart thinks, "No, I'm just rubbish. I ordered the t-shirt that said Writer, and got the one that says Self-Deluding Fool instead."
Blogging is normally a non-threatening genre. Little paragraphs that say "this is funny, or interesting, or exactly the same as everyone else is posting" reveal almost nothing to anybody. And yet, I discover that people I know from Real Life come here, this scares me witless. Why is this? Why am I delighted when an increasing number of random strangers wander in from their peculiar Google requests, and yet horrified when people who know me in meatspace, come looking for me on the net as well?
Probably there is a conclusion to come to here, one that goes something along the lines of "there's not much point writing if you won't let people read it". But it's not a conclusion I think I'll come to just yet.
Link stolen from Bookslut, whom you should be reading anyway.
12/13/2002 01:06:41 PM #
separated at birth
12/12/2002 10:22:34 AM #
bah humbug
happy holidays, fellow slytherins.
12/10/2002 02:34:41 PM #
and finally...
and on the twelfth day of christmas, my true love gave to me
twelve drummers drumming,
eleven pipers piping,
ten lords a leaping,
nine ladies dancing,
eight maids a milking,
seven swans a swimming,
six geese a laying,
five gold rings!
four calling birds,
three french hens,
two turtle doves,
and a partridge in a pear tree!, which is where it all began.
with thanks to google image search, drummerworld.com and my rock chick husband for their inspiration.
12/10/2002 12:12:58 AM #
messy
brandy thinks her desk is messy. bwa ha ha, we laugh in the face of your messy. this is messy.
12/9/2002 11:23:59 AM #
a season in hell
argh. i had no phone line from thursday night until now. therefore no internet. british telecom sent an engineer round at 8.30 this morning, without any sort of prior warning, so the house is still full of decorating debris, and i was in bed, in the middle of a quite incredible dream about having sex with someone i used to work with. poor engineer, i bet he dreams about bored housewives in negligées, who lead him to their spotless living rooms and ply him with chocolate biscuits, not bleary eyed harridens in old t-shirts who tell him to unbury the phone line from a pile of ironing himself.
so, what'chall been doing without me? i'll be round in a minute...
12/9/2002 10:50:30 AM #
a velma moment
has anyone seen my glasses?
12/5/2002 11:25:31 AM #
do you want a clue?
on december 12th, sothebys will auction a card, on which j k rowling has written 93 random keywords from harry potter and the order of the phoenix.
the auction is being held in aid of book aid international, a charity whose vision is of a world in which everyone, whatever their economic status, has access to the books and information they need.
the leaky cauldron is going to bid, so that they can publish what is on the card. these 93 words should be available to all those of us who have waited months, if not (oh gods, and it is too) years for this book, not just to some private collector.
and this is where you come in. give money. if we don't win the card, at least the cash goes to a worthy cause. but we must win the card.
12/3/2002 03:47:58 PM #
to amazon we will go
oh look, i have new bookshelves...
12/2/2002 09:40:50 PM #
j.k. apud romanos
i dreamed that harry potter five came out, and it was written in latin. maybe that's why it's taking so long?
12/1/2002 11:23:12 AM #
