I took twenty-four hours off from Twitter so I could bypass all the online hilarity that comes up on April 1st.
Remember how in Buffy the Vampire Slayer the demons and vampires shunned Halloween because it was ‘tacky’? Same deal.
A few years ago I was as guilty of this crap as everyone else (convincing members of a punk forum that Henry Rollins had crushed his windpipe in a weight lifting accident springs to mind), but now I have better things to click on than Rick Astley videos and stories claiming that Bill Gates got an iPhone stuck up his arse.
Normally it’s pretty easy to avoid, but Twitter would funnel that crap straight to me. As it is I’ll have to be careful opening my greader tomorrow. A lot of stuff should be marked FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY, Frank Castle style.
But I am missing Twitter. Without a doubt the single most important online app I’ve had the pleasure to use in the last couple of years. Even though a lot of the time it’s not a pleasure to use because it falls over way to often and hasn’t scaled quite the way I think it should of. Such is life. Still a groovy little tool. Trying not to think of just how productive I’ve been today without it, but that’s probably another post…
So seeing as I can’t Tweet right now and Jess is still out at a feminist screening let me share this here. A note I made in bed the other night when both of us couldn’t sleep and we were chatting while playing with gadgets*:
Jess just told me that she once slept in the shadow of a lunar landing module
We’ve been together since 1999, but she still surprises me from time to time…
I’m a lucky dog because of a lot of things, but mostly because of Jess. Hanging with her each day is a constant surprise and that she puts up with my nonsense is frankly a miracle. Those of you that have met me know I’m a bit of a dick at times and those that haven’t can probably guess as much. Those of you that also know Jess know that she must have the patience of a fucking saint.
She’s smarter than me, prettier than me and a hell of a lot more interesting than me. She has a masters degree in journalism, works a beat that actually matters to her and still has time to edit The F Word and do the occasional freelance piece. Not only am I incredibly proud, but also generally in awe that she fits this all in.
Right now she’s marching in the shitty London weather for International Women’s Day while I sit at home thinking about monster movies.
And speaking of The Guardian, my friend Christian popped up in there today. He and Phil are off doing experiments in Austin as part of SXSW (and with a little bit of luck being picked up at some point by Irina).
If Christian isn’t on your radar yet then he soon will be. The guy just has something.
Since getting a cease and desist from Playboy (never a dull moment around here) and Flickr rapping my knuckles with a first and final warning, I’ve been slow to start uploading photographs again. Pretty much all the photos Flickred in January where thrown there by Jess. Some of them I haven’t even looked at yet. This isn’t simply a reluctance to use Flickr - it remains one of the few services that changed the way I use the Internet - but because I’ve been messing around with video more and more since I got back from NYC my regular camera has gotten kinda dusty.
But the warning from Flickr and in particular the line “further action that may include termination without warning” has given me pause for thought. A lot of the content of my Flickr stream are the only copies I have. We’re talking memories here - not only in the sentimental sense, but also in the ‘I’m an old old man and can’t remember where I’ve been’ sense.
Finding an easy way to back up almost 8,000 photos, the vast majority of which were indeed taken by us, in case another copyright infringement leads to account deletion has proven to be a bit of a headache. One thing I should mention is that the Playboy photos were put up on Flickr in order to find out where they originated from. I was curious as to how such a grim little war movie ended up with a promo shoot involving Michael Caine, Denholm Elliott and a bevy of naked ladies.
Playboy let me know in no uncertain terms that the photos belonged to them. Mystery solved.
So as long as I don’t do anything similar within Flickr I’m OK, right? Well this is still a concern as I get sent promotional photos from movies all the time and rather than get them hotlinked from my own server I stick em up on Flickr and change the copyright to the rights holder. All it takes is one over efficient Flickr/Yahoo employee to put a red flag over one of these photos and there go all our photos.
I should also add I have no problem with Flickr regarding this. In fact I’m involved in two upcoming events with them. But seeing as there isn’t a single elegant back up solution I’m now looking at going into my Flickr stream and relocating all the screencaps and promotional crap from the account. Tiresome to say the least.
I really need to replace all these external drives and towering stacks of DVDs with something tidy (but huge) then I can keep on top of archiving my own photographs and videos. And then there are the boxes of actual photographs that we want to digitise…
The last time I was ‘home’ I found a neglected photo album and saved as many of the photos as I could.
A lot of these are old Polaroid shots of me as a kid - wearing an A Team jumper, Ghostbusters shirt, playing with Lorne Greene action figures(?!), leaning on dinosaurs - so I was a little saddened to read the other day that Polaroid are now abandoning the film business. My favourite camera was always a Polaroid, but the expensive film made sure it was used sparingly over the years. Watching the photograph develop before your eyes was part of the charm of course and it’s a shame to think of that process as now almost obsolete. That said I won’t be heading to eBay to find a ‘new’ camera and the final stocks of film. There’ll be enough geeks doing just that right now.
Sometime around 4am on Friday the power into our building went somewhere else.
It finally came back on Sunday.
This is an old building. The lower part of our flat used to be the rafters of a 250 year old tannery building. The upper part of the flat where I’m writing from is a much later pre fabricated edition. It comes complete with an emergency thermostat so that if I ever forget to put the heating on and the temperature drops too low it’ll kick in and stop the place from freezing. Our heating and the emergency system require electicity to do their thing.
By Saturday the only place that wasn’t an icebox was the freezer.
We spent part of the weekend in a hotel just around the corner. That was weird.
I did a little work on Friday from the coffee shop, but not much. I just about caught up, but I’m way behind.
Few historians know of the heartwarming friendship between French Reformation theologian John Calvin and English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the latter of whom may or may not have been real, considering he was not even born yet.
Stuff like this has kept me sane while I’ve been ill. Coughing up the worst of it now. Gave me a chance to catch up on my reading and a fair few movies that have been piling up.
Small lapse due to an influx of Canadians and single malt whisky.
After a whole month of film I’m now back on the Interweb lark.
This morning I awoke to scaffolding outside the building. Unfortunately it looks nothing like this:
It does have bright yellow soft cladding attached to the bottom legs though, presumably to stop fuckwits walking into them. That’ll still happen, but now the kids across the road will have a nice beacon to aim for.
They’ll either set the cladding alight or fuck the slits in it.
Probably both. If that happens I’ll try and take some photos as my Flickr stream needs a little livening up.
The leg of a captain called Ahab, he took it.
To try and poke this damned whale
Ahab called on Ishmael
But Moby Dick told them all to go ‘Suck it’!
Sorry. That was uncalled for. Following a Tweet from my friend Ben lead me to read a few literary limericks here.
And I couldn’t resist having a go. Besides Moby Dick I penned a quick one for Fight Club too:
No talking: the 1st two rules of our game
But the last thing to learn was my name
Smirking revenge was served cold
As I saw Tyler’s plan unfold
It turns out we were one and the same
Had to check the time. It feels like midnight, but it’s only 10pm here in London. Maybe I’m on Minsk time. Arranging a pre Christmas trip to New York that is long overdue. It’s the only city I’ve been too that makes me look mellow. I love San Francisco and at this point it’s the only place apart from London that feels like home, but I’m in love with the idea of New York. All those marvellously angry bastards…
September has been a nasty month. There were the birthdays of course – always an ordeal one way or another. Having DC Mike and Emily here for two weeks helped keep our minds off just how ill Sandwich could be, so both Jess and I owe a big thanks to those guys for putting up with the occasional funk. As for the cat she’s completely oblivious of course. She’s now the proud owner of two scars. One on her hip where they went deep for a biopsy and now a large garish line along her stomach, freshly stitched, where her organs were exposed, moved around and put back again.
Tough little fucker.
She’s smaller, punk-rock shaved, tinged with yellow (thanks to the jaundice) and now on a morning and evening dose of steroids… but she’s still here.
Seeing as she’s getting back to the business of eating, sleeping and pissing all over the kitchen floor - just to underline the fact that her kidneys are working fine – I can finally get back to the things I let slip.
Lots of reading to catch up on and a great deal of writing to get through. Did I mention the fact that I also gave up coffee at exactly the wrong time? As it was a whim and nothing more I’ve been able to grab a little caffeine here and there over the last three weeks or so, but I miss the taste. Maybe the aroma even more. I don’t have too many vices and have yet to find a satisfying replacement for this one. Can I see myself in NYC without coffee?
