Thursday, 1st June, 2006

Violation

spam tranniefesto

Sometimes, I lose my internet connection through perfectly natural means — like somehow mice get into the circuits, or the Overlords Of Broadband decide for whatever reason that they're going to mess with my head for a while.

Sometimes though, I lose it intentionally.

For whatever reason, last night I was a bit grumpy. But just as the grump was giving way to a general "Meh", Erin started to get flooded with spambots.

I counted about 250 in total, some of which got through. No sooner had I updated my (meagre) defences and deleted comment, another 5 appeared in its place — like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but with cialis instead of of brooms, and a grumpy transvestite instead of Mickey Mouse.

So I shut Erin down.

And then I shut CuChulainn down.

And because the peace and quiet was rather nice, I turned my phones off, and got one of the best nights sleep for a long time

Well, duh

Things To Do In Leeds When You're Dead (Bored)

leeds work

I think it's fairly safe to say, that despite all my futile efforts to retain some air of mystery and anonymity over the years, a few careless links to things that I've done have made it totally obvious which of the two universities in Leeds I teach at.

A Voice From On High™ recently decreed that at the end of this year, despite our personal objections to having a "show", it would be a good idea to get all the art courses together to put on what's being called an "Art Fair".

This has two consequences:

1. It means that muggins here is spending the next few days encoding films and putting them together to form a showreel, along with photographs and text and the like.

2. It means that if anyone actually wants to see what I do for a living, our studios are open to the public from Wednesday to Friday next week.

Pretty things on the wall for all to see. I however, will most likely be in the pub next door.

Nah, it'll be great. Pin the tail on the Rothko, Dali-Dodgems (that melt when you hit things), and you should see what Picasso's Hall of Mirrors makes you look like...

Beyond The Hobbyists And The Bores

blogs rant

In today's Guardian, Catherine Bennet writes about the gender imbalance and 'blokishness' slant of the (urgh) "blogosphere". Now, you can agree or disagree with her as much as you want (I happen to agree — even just a cursory glance at the comments that have been made so far seems to resemble a bunch of sabre-rattling, oafish, gout-ridden buffoons, their monocles popping out of their eyes and their port spluttering out of their pursed lips, at the audacity of this woman to burst into their virtual working man's club and question their authority), but the focus of my internal debates about the piece rested more on how the (urgh) "blogosphere" almost always gets reduced in the Press to the political (urgh) "blogosphere".

That sentence was far too long. Let me try and rephrase that in Short! Snappy! Soundbites!

I depise political blogs. Why I should ascribe 'insight' to the self-obsessed rantings of some faceless, self-authoritised dullard who happens to call a part of blogspot.com "home" is beyond me. The problem for me isn't politics as such — it's more related to what I was writing about "being wrong" the other day. I find the pompous, self-important ramblings of people with bees in their bonnet to be essentially an extension of the Daily Mail's letters page — tiny, petty issues, mixed with rash generalisation about things outside of their own sphere of experience, and a great deal of strutting around like peacocks.

I may be wrong here, but I imagine the relationship between these Bedroom Journalists and Real Proper Journalists to be a strained one — one side seeing itself as the voice of the people, the other looking on in disbelief at the amateurs making a hash of it all — and I can understand why journalistic debate around the potentials of this 'new medium' tend to focus on this subset of the millions of us who call ourselves "bloggers".

But they are just a subset. A vocal and beligerant subset, natch, but a subset nonetheless — and I feel sometimes that this perennial squabbling between the New and the Print excludes those of us who explore the weblog as a means of expression rather than a soapbox.

I must confess, that I find the vast majority of weblogs out there to be intolerably dull things — even those that fall within my own particular 'persuasion'. (What's that? You bought a new skirt today? How marvellous! My life is enriched by knowing that! Do please tell me, in minute detail, about whenever it is that you wear it out in the street...)

Single-issue blogs are only of interest if that single issue is of interest, 'personal journals' are only interesting if that person is interesting, photoblogs are usually only engaging for a while before it all becomes a little 'samey' — in fact, the only things I tend to read are things that are going to inform me, and those of people I want to keep in touch with.

Every once in a while though, you stumble across something — whether through a random link, or a random comment, or a random search result — that takes you into a direction that you'd never normally find yourself taking. That's what I think is the beauty of weblogging — the diversity and breadth of human experience, catalogued and recorded just for the hell of it.

When small cliques form — which is what I think Catherine Bennet is lamenting, perhaps indirectly — closed attitudes breed and fester. They just become the equivalents of online forums — with all the problems that those entail. It becomes more about gleaning pats on the back than it does about asking questions and trying to gain insight.

...

Anyway, I've somewhat strayed from the original idea that I had when I first read the article — that there's more to the (urgh) "blogoshpere" than a few self-righteous, pipe-smoking dingbats.

My problem is that over the (past four) years, I've been amassing a list of predominately (a) transvestite, and (b) techie RSS feeds, and I'm finding it all a little jaded and dull really.

#transvestite {
    attitude: bold ;
    heels: 6" ;
    dress-sense: inappropriate ;
    font-family: "Comic Sans MS" ;
    }

So I was wondering if anyone had any really good recommendations? Preferably (1) well-written (like Mike ), (2) diverse and creative (like K ), and (3) sumptuously gorgeous (like Jon )

Anyone?

doesn't the auto-link code work in comments!?

Well, it does if you type the little trigger properly

I like coming across new blogs by accident, rather than being told what's good to read.

Aye, but there's nowt wrong with a few recommendations and pointers is there?

As a lover of furniture with foliage, I (for example) am forever indebtted to Jessica now

I used to read it, yes, but the sanctimonious, self-referrential and self-congratulating tone of it all eventually got on my tits, and now I avoid it like the plague. The only times it comes into my radar (as it were) is when something on it gets 'reblogged' by a little feed that I came across by accident recently — http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/

It's a secret, but it sometimes turns up in my RSS feed if I use it in the first paragraph of an entry — the same way my smiley-code does.

Oooh Thanks for that. Im going to get lost in your archives for a bit.

(a) Well done Jessica. (b) Thanks Jane and Stephanie — I'll have a gander later

...

(Later)

Stephanie, I love This one