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Raddickal

[13 Dec 02] I mostly don't bother linking to the usual stuff that's doing the rounds, but the Henry Raddick reviews reduced me to helpless laughter:

Raddick review of The Maltese

Also doing the rounds, for good reason: Tim O'Reilly's Piracy is Progressive Taxation [via VM, discussed at MeFi].

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[10 Dec 02] I really should read Dean Allen's Textism more regularly. In recent weeks he's discussed the marvels of gzipping and has given the world a very cool Google search-term highlighter script; and while searching for something else entirely I came across this beautiful parody of the warblogger's preferred method of debate. Advantage: Dean!

Also: Stewart has started blogging regularly again, serving up some fascinating links that reflect his current preoccupation.

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Let the Speedysnail Begin.

[ 6 Dec 02] Random slogans, in order of generation:

Get Busy with the Speedysnail.
The Speedysnail is Mightier than the Sword.
Schhh... You Know Speedysnail.
If Only Everything in Life was as Reliable as a Speedysnail.
Only The Crumbliest Flakiest Speedysnail.
It's a New Speedysnail Every Day.
Can't Do It In Real Life? Do It On Speedysnail.
Sometimes You Feel Like a Speedysnail, Sometimes You Don't.
Speedysnail Really Satisfies.
Is It Live, Or Is It Speedysnail?
You're Never Alone with a Speedysnail.
Speedysnail Keeps Going and Going.
Look, Ma, No Speedysnail!

[via Tense, Nervous, Metafilter?]

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[ 6 Dec 02] MeFi is coming through with the goods today: Show and Tell Music is another glorious album cover site (mp3s, too), packed with classics like Charles Burpo and Mr. Bat. Dangerously addictive.

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[ 3 Dec 02]

It's kind of like eating a small brown crayon every day in December, a practice which I cannot with a clear conscience recommend.

Will Kafkaesque be the next very funny online writer with a German partner to land a book deal?

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Linkobox

[29 Nov 02] Server-hassle fatigue has sapped me of the will to write, but in the meantime here are some things worth seeing:

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Interesting Times

[10 Nov 02] The last month sure has been fraught for some of my favourite bloggers. Shauny has lost her grandfather, Chris has lost a dear friend, Jerry has lost his job, and now Tom and Ed have lost their apartment. Not to mention Matthew's jury duty, Graham's bike accident, Matt's hacked site, Bill's server woes, and Scott's disappearance from cyberspace itself.

Follow enough weblogs for long enough and every peak and trough of life passes before your eyes, one entry at a time. It's enough to make the purveyor of anecdotal trivia feel a little inadequate. Certainly, there were plenty of days last month when nothing I wanted to write about could compare with what my virtual compadres were going through. As often as not, that meant ending up writing nothing.

Of course, it may just be the effect of the suddenly shorter days here at 56 degrees north. This time last year they'd already driven me into weblog hibernation. But I'm determined to see 2002 through to the end.

So in the absence of anything more dramatic, the site gets a few throwaway lines, a growing backlog of book reviews, and glaring gaps between entries. More of those to come, in fact, because I'm off on another work trip on Tuesday. In a sad attempt to eke what suspense I can from my mercifully uneventful life, I'll keep the destination a mystery for now. (Hint: it starts with B.)

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[22 Oct 02] This Public Address:

When you hold a camera, it is a license not to speak. I used to marvel at the way that worked. When I was shooting and intensely involved with unfolding scenes, I seldom spoke. It reached a point, after hours of shooting that I would sometimes forget how. Visual thinking uses different parts of the brain. To be asked to speak, even to respond to a simple question was like disrupting the trance.

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The View From Here

[17 Oct 02] Germaine Greer and Clive James have both been enlisted by the English press to account for Australia's reactions to the Bali bombing. (Greer writing for the Telegraph and James for the Guardian? Shurely shome mishtake?) While both make some worthwhile points, reading their columns—especially online—brings home how close the kinship is between the newspaper column and the weblog rant. James's, particularly, is a blog-like stream of consciousness, with an embarrassing digression about one of his peers, Bob Ellis, that would be more at home on a personal site than in the pages of a major British broadsheet. And both demonstrate some of the perils of commenting on affairs back home as an expatriate. Not in recounting the facts—that's easy enough—but in accounting for feelings.

I worry about it myself, and I've barely been away a year; Greer and James have been away for decades. Of course, moving overseas is hardly the one-way ticket it was a century ago; but going home for a few weeks isn't the same as living there. When you live in a place, you get swept up, for better or worse, in its fads and fashions—by feelings that to an outsider can seem odd or even irrational.

I last lived in the UK for a year in the early '90s, and while I was away our long-time prime minister, Bob Hawke, was rolled in a leadership battle. These things happen; everyone figured that Paul Keating had leadership aspirations. What was harder to account for was the disdain in which he was held by so many Australians afterwards. Even knowing all the facts of the leadership spill (and of Bob ditching Hazel, and so on), I couldn't feel the same way about him—not because he was my favourite prime minister (which he wasn't), but because I hadn't lived through the drama as it unfolded.

Similarly, although I was already a republican, I came back from that year even more convinced of the irrelevance of the monarchy than I had been, thanks to English friends who asked me, not whether I thought Australia should be a republic (which they took for granted), but whether England should be. Even now, there's a lingering sense among some Australians that our constitutional ties to the Queen make us part of something bigger and grander; when she opens a new Parliament House, it means something. Live in Britain, though, where you see plaques on every major shopping centre saying that HRH opened this in ninety-eighty-whatever, and it all starts to mean... less.

Going away changes you, that much is obvious; but it also means that, unless you go back often enough and long enough, or go back for good, it changes your ability to represent Australian opinion. At some point, you can speak only as an expatriate.

Greer clearly passed that point some time ago: anyone who writes "why Australia was so keen to be involved in the Gulf war must remain a mystery" is saying that Australian popular opinion and politics has become mysterious to them, and that really, they have no idea what those bloody foreigners are thinking any more. Which is hardly a crime—but hardly a sign that we're reading current "Australian" opinion.

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Pointedly that the Tooth of a Tail is Possession Ungrateful a Boy

[12 Oct 02] ... is the phrase "sharper than a serpent's tooth it is, to have a thankless child" translated back and forth by BabelFish ten times. Hours of fun—or should that be "hours of the recovery"—at Lost in Translation [via this line with the filter of Méta].

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Slight Return

[ 3 Oct 02] After a month of MovableType woes, the mighty Wombat File returns to its former automated-publishing comment-enabled glory. Hurrah!

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[26 Sep 02] As Jason Kottke says, this optical illusion is amazing. But even better, if you have Photoshop, is to select the two squares using the polygonal lasso, invert the selection, and then delete the background... then undo the deletion... and delete, and undo...

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Wisdom

[30 Aug 02] You have to make plans.

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Trucking Cake

[16 Aug 02] I've linked to band-name generators before, but this is a veritable gold-mine: Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names. Seagull Sensor Drive, Dilate Snowman, Jingle Hams, and Raisin Loudness—to name but a glorious few.

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Virulent Memos

[16 Aug 02] "Due to the huge number of abusive emails I've got re my last email, I'm joining you in cutback corner. I've decided to sell the yacht." [Indirectly via LMG.]

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Let There be Foolishness

[ 8 Aug 02] Been talking about so many amusing shows at the Fringe (and there are a few more lined up for the weekend) that it feels like I'm neglecting amusing weblogs. So here's two: Defective Yeti, which lured me in a few weeks ago with a brilliant MeFi text-ad ("putting the 'pert' into hypertext"); and Funkwit, which I linked a month or so ago and have been reading furtively ever since. Both excellent.

And while we're linkin' to stuff:

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Kill Your Bookmarks II: Binge and Purge

[20 Jun 02] I loved origami when I was a kid, but could have saved myself the trouble of all that folding.

Venn diagrams for today from the Brunching Shuttlecocks.

The personal site to end all personal sites, featuring the entire contents of one person's house.

And what's Oolong been up to lately? Watching the World Cup, of course. When he's not wielding pancake shields against being tickled.

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Kill Your Bookmarks

[18 Jun 02] By bundling them into the sea of blog in a shiny new pair of concrete shoes:

Via the usual suspects.

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[12 Jun 02] I neglected to post these out of some sort of half-baked notion that I wasn't going to blog as much or something, thus guaranteeing that I would spend longer wishing I'd posted them than it would have taken just to post them and be done with it.

So, belatedly:

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[10 Jun 02] Recent compilations of 1950s and '60s exotica are all well and good—and some of them are very well and good indeed—but they lack that finishing touch of the original album art. Thank the mighty gods of lounge, then, for 317x, home to beauties like Moog Power, I Dig Chicks, Ping Pong, The Plastic Cow Goes Moooooog and Mambo for Cats. [Via I Love Everything.]

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When Links Collide

[ 7 Jun 02]

Its subversive tendentiousness is all the worse when one remembers that the great majority of the ten and eleven-year-old children who are subjected to its influence will not know a single historical date by the time they leave school five, six or seven years later, will not know when the Second World War took place to within the nearest twenty years, and will not be able to name a single significant figure from British history. They will not be multicultural: they will be acultural.

Spencer: "What country am I from? England. The city is called Cambridge, the county Cambridgeshire."
Jade: "So not Kent then?"
Spencer: "Nooooo.... The region is called East Anglia."
Jade: "East Angular? That's abroad. Is there not a place called East Angular abroad? ... Every time people tell me they work in East Angular, I actually think they're talking about near Tunisia and places like that."

Thanks to beebo.org and plasticbag.org for pointers to these passages.

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A. Schadenfreude; B. Haagen Dazs...

[ 7 Jun 02] Go on. You've always wanted to know what it feels like to fluff a question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Well, now you can [via loobylu].

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[ 5 Jun 02] Douglas Rushkoff on writing.

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Good Heavens

[27 May 02] A Star Wars personality quiz tells me I'm C3PO—the same result as a similar quiz last year. I suppose I must reluctantly accept my threepioness.

On the plus side, any of you who gets told you're an ewok has to worship me like a god.

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[23 May 02] KartOO is a compelling new search engine reminiscent of those world maps that distort the size of countries by population: it displays its results as a map, with visual cues to indicate their relevance and conceptual links to each other. An amazing tool for web research—it's gone straight onto my toolbar next to Google.

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[17 May 02] Two years and counting.

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[16 May 02] All I Really Need to Know I Learned by Having My Arms Ripped Off by a Polar Bear. Via MetakineticFilaterie.

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[13 May 02] Boy, I'd love to see NASA's car boot sale [via MetastasizingFilibusterism]:

NASA needs parts no one makes anymore. So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet [to find] electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive... [and] hoarding 8086's so that a failed one does not ground the nation's fleet of aging spaceships.

That's nothing compared to finding the right windscreen wiper blades.

Mind you, making the Mars Orbiter out of old Texas Instruments calculators was a trifle rash.

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[11 May 02] Two years and counting.

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[29 Apr 02] Click.

Click.

Clickclick.

Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick.

Ahhhhhh...

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The Unbearable Linkness of Being

[12 Apr 02] Random link dump: self-referential toast; the Big Lebowski Random Quote Generator (still my favourite Coen brothers film); US critics' list of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 (pish and pshaw to half of them, but it's fun to read); The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks; fun with words from Ed and Bill; and a web quiz post from James that reveals my inner bear.

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[11 Apr 02] Note to self: remember what Chuck Palahniuk says about memory [via the null device].

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Northern Lights

[ 9 Apr 02] Jerry Kindall's link to a beautiful page of Northern Lights photographs reminds me that I never did get around to posting some links to various aurora photos that a friend sent a while back. I saw the southern lights in Tasmania once, but they were pale and indistinct, and there were no erupting volcanoes nearby—just our Hill's Hoist.

The subject of Northern Lights captures my attention because I recently finished Philip Pullman's book of the same name, being in a nostalgic mood to read a fantasy trilogy again. At first it was a jolt to read a work of children's fiction after all these years, but the story soon made its genre irrelevant. By the time it became clear that this wasn't fantasy but an example of one of my favourite genres—parallel-worlds science fiction—I was already hooked. Pullman's characters, children and adult, are masterly and memorable, archetypes rather than stereotypes, and his plots could hardly be improved. As for the gradually-unfolding theme, it's a true original, more provocative than an armful of 'literary' novels. After finishing Northern Lights over a couple of weeks I ploughed through The Subtle Knife in a weekend, left reeling by its dramatic ending. Now I'm afraid to finish The Amber Spyglass too quickly and leave Pullman's world behind.

It's intriguing to wonder how his work will shape the outlook of its child readers, who bombard the writer with questions at every opportunity. But the plaudits are no surprise: His Dark Materials really is that good. [Pullman links via LinkMachineGo, which probably did the most to convince me to read the books; thanks, Darren.]

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[ 4 Apr 02] Sorry for the silence the past few days. I would have posted earlier, but was enjoying staring at the chicken. That, and posting to a couple of threads over at MeFi: on the latest half-baked blog-bashing newspaper column, and on deaf culture [excerpts mirrored here]. MeFi has been covering some compelling subjects lately: the threat to a priceless cache of Roman scrolls and the computer modelling of social events among them.

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[27 Mar 02] John Scalzi just hit my regular-reads list. Not for his I Hate Your Politics column that's doing the rounds—an amusing rant, but hardly a revelation to this world-weary 30-something political scientist (although the follow-up is fun)—but rather for his run of columns on writing online: Professional Life: What Writing an Online Journal is Good For; Influential Writing on the Web; and Scalzi the Blog Killer. It's enough to make a world-weary 30-something who's feeling guilty about not having written his Madagascar travelogue think. See also How to Write Hate Mail and Hate Mail Redux, a call to arms if ever there was; and his first and final Oscar predictions, where he picked 4 out of 6 and then 5 out of 6 in the main categories.

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[20 Mar 02] New zine Microcontent News sets out to cover "weblogs, Webzines, email digests, and the entire personal publishing sector" and trump the YAWNs ("Yet Another Weblog Newsarticle").

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By Jupiter!

[14 Mar 02] My vague sense of emptiness at the lack of regular japeries from old friend James is finally dispelled by his triumphant return to blogging at Gas Giant. And what better way to make a grand entrance than wearing dra... um, Roman gear. And make-up. Caesar meets the Cure. I came, I saw, I was lost in a forest.

Observant readers will notice that James is grappling with the myriad joys of CSS, with a little help from yours truly—namely, in discovering that for some reason the <p> tags after the first one inside the middle div were inheriting the 'left:40px' and adding it to the left:40px of the div itself, causing no end of mess—but only in IE5 for Mac, not Netscape 6 or Opera (the fix was to use 'margin-left:40px' instead, which works in all three). And, secondly, in working out that Netscape 6 and Opera both add padding to the width of a div when calculating where to put a border and any divs positioned to the right, whereas IE5Mac includes it in the width of the div. But you probably already knew that, ha ha, if you're One of the Damned. The fix for that is to include an appropriately wide image—like James's line of dots between blog entries—to push the border out to the same place in IE as it is in NS and Opera (do I hear transparent gifs raising their ugly invisible heads?). Neither of us has had a chance to check whether any of this works in a PC, though.

But now he's dabbled in fixed positioning, and it's all gone pear-shaped (or should that be <div style="shape:pear;">). Tssh.

Anyway, to separate oneself from the presentation for a moment, it's the content that matters. Welcome back, James.

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[ 7 Mar 02] Don't read weblogs any more? Too many good ones to follow? With the aid of this miraculous bookmarklet which follows a random link from the page currently loaded in your browser, your blog-reading experience will dramatically improve. Add to your toolbar, then use on any handy blog-portal page and watch the seconds fly by. Brighter! Whiter! Now with extra cheese.

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[17 Feb 02] Link-o-rama: the remarkable mutant tetrachromats; testing to see if the fundamentalists are right about Harry Potter and D&D; forty thousand words of Neal Stephenson non-fiction that had somehow escaped my attention; One: A Space Odyssey, a retelling of Kubrick's classic in sixty seconds that premiered here in Edinburgh; what should I put on the fence?; and, yes, it's yet another site full of cheesy old songs, but too much is never enough.

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[14 Feb 02] Congratulations! You're reading the best website in the entire universe.

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[13 Feb 02] One of the best weblog posts I've seen in a while. Thanks for the reminder, Matt.

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[ 8 Feb 02] Jorge Luis Borges wrote hypertext fiction long before it was fashionable, and now some of it has been turned into hypertext code in this beautiful web adaptation. Of course, every Borges reader knows that the entire web is actually an incipient Library of Babel. [Via MeFi, which is still turning out gems between bouts of withering 'Whither MeFi?' angst, thank God.]

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Trouble at Mil

[ 5 Feb 02] Long-time readers, or even readers who glanced at this site briefly eleven months ago and didn't return until today, may recall the following link tucked away in a side-bar:

Things some guy and his girlfriend have argued about. Schadenfreude is Fun!

Low-key, yes? So low-key that you may have missed it. Well, click on it now, because Mil Millington is one of the funniest writers on the web, as demonstrated on the rest of his site and in his weekly zine. Nowadays he's also the funniest writer in The Guardian's weekend magazine, where his acid anecdotes are condensed into a single burning column. A three-book deal surely can't be far behind.

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[ 1 Feb 02] Another entry to the Mirror Project, and why not. (My first one is here.)

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Oh, What a Blow

[30 Jan 02] Back in the mid-1990s, when the Internet still meant email as far as I was concerned, I used to put quotes from random sources—newspaper articles, books, TV shows—into my email signatures. This was one of them:

[On 9 February 1971 in California,] one newspaper reported that a welfare recipient, accused of wasting money on a colour TV set, replied, 'But I didn't want my children to grow up not knowing what colour was.'

It's from Edmund Carpenter's Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!, an early 1970s classic of what would now be called postmodern anthropology but would better be called 'an analysis of the effects of global culture on local culture written in an eclectic style'. Since I had just written a thesis that was also an analysis of the effects of global culture etc., I liked the book enormously.

The complete text is now available on the web, but it's more than just the text: in the spirit of the book, it's a multimedia text with illustrations, maps, links to commentaries and so on. A fine example of how the humanities can and should make use of this medium, and a fine work in its own right.

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[29 Jan 02] Been a bit of a linking day, hasn't it. Here's some more: William Gibson writing insightfully on Japan and England; and, for those who've long been waiting for a sequel to William Shatner's infamous LP Transformed Man, his performance of Elton John's 'Rocket Man' at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards is guaranteed to satisfy.

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[22 Jan 02] Since we're all part of a big ol' weblogging community here, it behooves us to bestow our beneficence upon those beheld having a berth, uh, birthday, before we run out of words beginning with 'be'. Particularly those that have taken our fancy ever since we stumbled across them among the evanescent 'recently updated' links at Blogger. So happy blogday, Wombat File.

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[22 Jan 02] A few tasty links in lieu of the long and thoughtful pieces I want to write but don't have time to yet: taking ironing to the edge; the folklore of homeless children; and why didn't the Romans invent photography? (Via various blogs whose names I've promptly forgotten, all of which can be found on the new links page.)

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[18 Jan 02] Snow crystal photographs of amazing clarity and beauty.

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[17 Jan 02] Hey now! Twernt is back after a five-month hiatus, and I didn't notice until now. Also recently returned: Sylloge; Spoonfed (and gone again, rather fatally this time); and Wetlog. Dammit, my new links page is going to be another back-breaker.

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Snail Trail

[16 Jan 02] Two months of wandering the web like a virtual David Carradine and not much kung fu action to show for it. While I was away I spent too much time staring at the blue screen and the grey, but on reviewing my posts find that I said precious little worth noting here. So that was a collosal waste of valuable thinking time. (Except when I helped to spread the KPMG meme; but that was my sworn duty as citizen of this noble virtual land.)

Then there was my attempted coup over at One Day Soon, thanks to still having posting rights from helping James first set up the blog. I also chipped in a wombat for the mighty Wombat File, and left various comments at the sites of the usual suspects, some of which were a little too tetchy in hindsight.

Meanwhile, those of you who checked in here may have enjoyed my bandwidth-munching experiments. More of those to come in the next few weeks.

There once was a wee speedysnail
Who left a most curious trail
Without reason or rhyme
He wasted his time
Chasing around his own tail

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