I’m sitting here with gritty, sore, tired eyes, watching my hands carefully pick their way over the keyboard (to try to cut down on the number of typos) as my fatigued brain slowly shuts down for the night. All for what? To click the post button when it is precisely 01:02:03, 04/05/06.
Shoot. Me. Now.
We live in a world of product. No getting around it really – from the minute we put on the TV, check a website, open a magazine or look at a newspaper, a dazzling variety of products wait to catch our eye and tempt us to part with cash. An integral part of this process is ongoing development: the products change as time goes on, becoming more and more advanced and adapting to their environment. Just like life, they evolve – one sell at a time (boom boom!).
However, just like evolution, sometimes there are dead ends. Products that have a unique selling point, but sacrifice it and end up changing into the very opposite thing they were created to be. It’s weird, but it happens.
Actionmasters are one such example. The Transformers toyline was, I think it’s safe to say, one of the biggest sellers of the 1980s and continues to do good business for Hasbro today. The gimmick was a simple one – robot becomes car/gun/plane/pretty much anything you like, and can change back again. The gimmick went through several variations as the line evolved to keep children interested, until they came up with Actionmasters. Transformers toys that, believe it or not, make a big point of not transforming at all. And so that product finds itself on the outside looking in – it has come full circle.
Wash & Go is another one. It appeared in the late 1980s as an all-in-one shampoo and conditioner. The solution, they said, to the problem of taking two bottles into the shower (which never struck me as a problem at all, but far be it from me to undercut their selling point). And so it went on, and new versions came out until…you guessed it…they made a version of Wash & Go that was only shampoo, no conditioner. A product set up on the premise of taking only one bottle into the shower ends up evolving to a stage where you need that second bottle again.
Star Trek even fell victim to this process – the first two seasons of Enterprise dropped the Star Trek title entirely. The show went down the prequel route to get back to its visual, dramatic and thematic roots after the wildly unpopular Voyager, and in so doing dropped the title that it was trying to promote. Star Trek evolved to the point where it wasn’t selling itself as Star Trek anymore. The circle, as the man in the black mask said, is complete.
I’m no businessman, but it interests me that even in this modern world, with its fast pace and breakneck speed, we can still manage to run in circles sometimes. We just seem to do it faster nowadays.
Dooce reveals some nasty emails sent to her, and how she deals with the abusive elements of her public. I can’t understand why people would feel the need to write in to say how much they don’t like her, or her site. If you don’t like it, surely the most reasonable course of action would be to…oh, I dunno, not look at it? That said if they did that, it would rob us of the treat that is seeing her deal with the bunch of utter wankers in exactly the way they deserve.
Science fiction fans now have their very own online dating service. Finally, a way to deal with that embarrassing moment when you have to explain to your date why there are 400 mint in box action figures on your shelves. Can you imagine the fights that will come out of such a service? “I’m telling you darling, I only watched Spock’s Brain once! And…and…it meant nothing! Nothing!” (says the guy, I hasten to add, who met his fiancé at a Star Trek convention, and who has at least five other sets of friends who married people they met at conventions too. Bear with me while I enjoy this steaming big cup of shut the fuck up, would you?)
Daring Fireball on the debut of boot camp, the application that allows Macs using intel chips to run Windows as well. It’s an interesting development and the article makes a good point on how this changes the personal computing landscape – Macs are no longer different, but special. Users can now choose between a computer that can run both Mac OS and Windows, or one that can only run Windows. With the introduction of one application the map has changed so much…I wonder where this is all going to end up.
Be careful what you wish for, says Botch, with good reason. Especially if you’re wishing for free zombie porn. Mind you, if you’re searching the net for free zombie porn then I think you’re in trouble already. And robot animal porn? Suddenly I’m looking at Grimlock in a whole new light.
Trek returns, with a movie set during Kirk’s Starfleet Academy days. I really want this to be a good film, but I also worry that it’s going to turn out like Beverley Hills 90210 with phasers and warp drive. I think Star Trek needs to move closer to the feel of the original series and reclaim some of the charm it’s lost in recent years. Interesting choice of J.J. Abrams to produce and direct…wonder if a shuttle will crash on a deserted island at one point in the film?
Waiters, it turns out, lead an interesting life. This is one of the best things about the web for me: it allows me to see things from perspectives I might not have considered, or even known existed, before. I found my way to this blog through a fascinating story about the waiter rule on Kottke.org. I’m pleased to say I always try to be polite to staff in restaurants. It’s good to be polite, and besides, I don’t want sneezers in my salad.
Boffins manage to accurately model the process of black hole mergers, much to the excitement of the scientific community in general and the amazement of one mediocre Scottish blogger in particular. The potential of this research is staggering, and you don’t need a cardigan, pipe, elbow patches and more letters after your name than a Welsh roadmap to glimpse the infinite possibilities this could offer us. Man, who would need online dating when you had that to drop into conversation with the opposite sex? “What do I do for a living? Oh not much, I just invented a method of seeing back to the creation of the universe.”
Bill Thompson explains why life offline has an appeal even in this world of web services exploding all over the place. Interesting idea, that the services might be there but lack the trust of the wider public. After all, would you want all the files on your hard drive to be backed up onto a service that might go offline, or be hacked? Also, what about connectivity – if you drop out for a few days, are you then critically out of touch?
Over the last week or so I’ve been giving more and more thought to what it means to have a blog, and what it means to be someone who accepts the label of being a blogger. I’ve found some interesting reading on the subject too, which has given me some more to think about. I started off the boiled egg of infinity a little over a year ago with, I admit, no clear idea of what I was going to do with it. I wanted a blog to blog, simple as that. It’s only now as I start to get into it a little more that I realise it’s a little more complicated than that. What do I want my blog to communicate? What direction do I want the information to flow in?
Greg Knauss wrote on Kottke.org a few days ago about this subject and explained his theory that there are two distinct types of blogger – experiential and referential. Experiential bloggers draw on their own experiences and present them to the world, but the focus is always drawn towards the blogger themselves: here is what happened to me, or here is what I want to talk about today. Referential bloggers use the link as the basic building block of their operations – they point to things, and maybe add their own take, but the essential focus is outward: look at what I found, or here is something I found and what I think about it, but go look for yourself. This is the kind of thing I’ve been thinking about lately as I consider what it is to be a blogger and wonder just what the egg means to me after a year of it being in my life (and the lives of other people, no matter how small a role).
I realise that up to now, the boiled egg has been pretty much an exclusively written in the experiential style of blogging. I’ve talked, in my time here, about various aspects of my life, my observations on what I see around me and how I interpret others in their relationships with me. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but lately I have also started to experiment a little with the referential style – the “things wot caught my eye” posts are my initial steps into that area, ungainly as they might be. I’ve also started to think in a wider sense about my blogging experience over the last year and how I’m going to keep going as the egg rolls on into its second season. Stupid as I know it makes me sound, it’s only now that I’m thinking about where I want this to go. Talk about your delayed reactions.
At the moment, I have to own up and say the referential style is one that I feel very comfortable with, but I’m not sure how much stock to put by that gut feeling. Does it mean that I should start to move down that route more? Have I found a style of blogging that fits me? Or is it just an indication of my own lack of confidence in myself? One of the first questions I ask myself whenever I’m about to click the “publish post” button is “why would anyone want to read this?” because I’ve never been all that sure that what I’m writing is what people would want to spend some of their time reading. If I’m going to be a blogger, I want to try to do it right. I want to try to say something. It doesn’t have to be world shaking, it doesn’t have to be massively popular and I’ll even manage to keep my upper lip stiff and get by if it doesn’t turn me into the next big thing. It just needs to be something with a little substance to it, something I can look at and not be completely embarrassed to own up to having written.
This is rambling on a little, I know, and I’m going to wrap up for now. I just wanted to make some sort of attempt to get across the thoughts I’m working through right now. Maybe I’m taking the whole thing too seriously (which wouldn’t be unusual for me) but I want to work out where I’m going as a blogger. I want to see if I can do this right, find a style that works for me and maybe, if I’m phenomenally lucky, create something that will make me smile in years to come as I look back on it. It doesn’t have to set the world alight, just stand on its own as meaning something. All I need to do now is work out how.
The 2006 Presidential election was a close one, but it’s over. The votes are in. The counting is done. The ballots are closed. Ladies and gentlemen of the free world, the United States has a new President. Is there a tune for “Hail to the (fake) Chief” or should we just hum the theme tune to Star Trek and hope no-one notices?
When you’re out of fuel, just steal some from your neighbour. Easy as that, really, and I wish I could follow this example when I’m paying over the odds for petrol. That said I’m not millions of miles across with a terrifying explosive potential, but a man can dream.
Hey, this isn’t bad. I always feel kind of silly getting into a TV show after it’s become a big thing, but for once I’m glad I made the effort because it really is excellent stuff. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll even start to watch Seinfeld and see what everyone else loved so much.
The new series is almost here! Whenever a trailer comes on TV you can almost hear my inner cynic screaming in pain. “Disdain, you idiot, not excitement!” he shouts. “Yay! Cybermen!” hollers back the majority of my sad fanboy psyche.
Japanese cinema to be fitted to allow for “smell-o-vision”. Man, when they think a movie is going to stink, they don’t mess around. I just hope, for the sake of the people in the cinema that night, that the Colin Farrell movie they’re showing isn’t as big a pile of crap as Alexander.
Just how far can you fire a hamster? My best is about 788 feet for a group of five, with a single hamster best of 306 feet. Hideous animal abuse, or an oddly compelling little flash game? Click the link and decide.
How much are your pennies worth? Quite a lot, it seems, which is the worry for governments in the U.S. and the U.K. If the cost of making them keeps going up, then they’re going to be worth more for their metal content than for their actual worth as money. Interesting – didn’t the West Wing cover a similar point a few years back?
South Park creators get into the Muhammad issue, and criticise their network for banning them from showing an image of the prophet in the show. While I don’t tend to watch too much South Park these days, I still think it’s a good show and I agree with the last point made in the article.
Yesterday, as we were driving back to Glasgow town centre after meeting with the wedding staff at the hotel, we passed a sign welcoming us to Kirkintilloch. “The canal capital of the world!” the sign boasted. Except that someone had put white paint over the C in “canal”. Kirkintilloch, you saucy minx. I never would have known. I swear, if it wouldn’t have meant me wrapping my car around a tree, I would have tried to take a picture.
It’s been a busy weekend, and tomorrow we have the first meeting with the hotel to start to get our wedding organised. I’m pretty frazzled right now, so here are some stories that are taking up some of my headroom at the moment:
Smart brains grow differently says the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. According to this study the difference between a clever person and his/her peers isn’t down to different amounts of brain matter, but the way it developed during childhood. It’s an interesting idea, and surely the first time I’ve ever heard that being thicker actually makes you cleverer.
UK music chart history made as a track hits number 1 based on download sales alone. That Ostrovsky kid? Yesterday’s news. It’s an interesting turning point to reach, I wonder what will follow. If movies move down the legal download route, will this be taken into account when calculating the film’s takings? What about ratings for TV shows available for download on iTunes?
Ethan Phillips in the new Transformers movie? I’m tempted to say that as long as he’s not being Neelix, whatever he’s in is fine by me. Along with the announcement that Shia LaBeouf is negotiating for a role, this is starting to get exciting for me. What can I say? A part of me is still that excited kid in 1986 getting scared as Orson Welles threatened to eat entire planets.
Bill Thompson: Apple hardware has had more of an impact than the Punk culture. I was a little late for the whole punk scene, being but a slip of a lad. I was more into the embarassing shellsuit fashion phase. Makes for interesting and amusing reading though, especially when he talks about a mac being used at a music event. “I couldn’t help thinking that if a Windows desktop had been revealed then there would have been a collective gasp and some of the more sensitive members of the audience would have fainted.”
Fingerprints may give hints as to lifestyle. Who needs the National I.D. card system or the nationwide database so beloved of Charles “1984 is for pussies” Clarke? Let your fingers do the talking…or, in this case, the turning you in.
A roundup of this year’s April Fool’s Day stories in the papers. This year I didn’t even get a chance to search them out. For my money the Panorama Swiss Spaghetti Harvest is still the best, but some of this year’s efforts are worth a look.
Later this week on the egg: time travel and advice to my younger self; the importance of glazed nipples; and all go on the wedding front. Keep ’em peeled and keep that browser turned eggward.
Following on from my recent efforts to clean out my flat, we started on my better half’s place last night. I got off to a strong start, working in the big bedroom cupboard and quickly building up piles of clothes to be washed or donated to a local charity shop (turns out I have more than a few t-shirts I completely forgot I owned, and a veritable mountain of underwear…I am, as my better half kindly pointed out, the Imelda Marcos of boxer shorts) but quickly fizzled, retiring from the bedroom cupboard field and instead working in the living room, tidying up the TV unit and running the vacuum cleaner around the place. I called it sticking to my strengths. Judging by the ever-so-slight look I got as my opposite number dug through piles of unwashed socks, I think it might also be categorized as being a bastard and cherrypicking the good jobs.
I have to say I had great fun with the hose attachment for the vacuum cleaner. My better half has one of those fancy Dyson things, which always looks to me as if it’s been nicked from the cleaning cupboard on the starship Enterprise. The proud boast of the Dyson brand is that their cleaners, because of their clever “cyclone” design, never lose suction. No matter what you try to pick up. Well I ask you, what was I supposed to do? Such statements cannot be allowed to stand untested. We live in a scientific age. Of course I had to hide my experiments whenever you-know-who went by with another pile of dirty washing, but that’s nothing unusual. True pioneers are often persecuted and unappreciated in their own times.
For the record, Dyson vacuum cleaners will pick up pennies no problem. Balls of paper, easy. They don’t like pens and tend to spit them back out after a second or so of angry clattering sounds, but they can even have a go at decorative glass beads. The ping-pong ball I found resulted in the best fun, even though it blocked the hose completely and made the vacuum cleaner make the most terrifying “HHOOOOO” sound as the tube was blocked.
That was when disaster struck. Again, like all true pioneers, my own curiosity and devotion to the scientific ideal was my downfall. The ping-pong ball, I reasoned, is round and shiny. So, alas, is my head thanks to a defective consignment of hairline genes from my dad. Shiny ball. Shiny noodle. Not much between them when you look at it. If the vacuum hose can hold on to one then surely it can…
HHHOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
It took a surprising amount of effort to pull the hose attachment off my forehead, truth be told. The overall effect for that magical moment was a bit like the scene in Starship Troopers where the guy gets his brain sucked out by the huge fat bug. Still, flushed with amusement and a fair sense of having contributed to the body of human knowledge, I put the hose back in the cleaner and went on to do other stuff. That is, until my better half pointed out that my “work” had left me with a memento to treasure. Where I grew up they were always called “nookie badges”. I think Americans call them “hickeys”, and I’ve heard them referred to as “love bites” by other people. Whatever you call them I had a spectacular (and perfectly, absolutely circular) one dead-centre on my forehead all of last night. Even today it’s still visible, though thankfully faded quite a bit.
Just watching a celebrity poker game on Challenge TV and one of their commentators just made me laugh out loud. Willie Thorne, one of the players, lost heavily on a hand and one of the commentators (who had been overexcited all night) said that he looked “…like a wounded Ibex” out on the table. For the record I’d just like to point out that Willie Thorne doesn’t look anything like an Ibex, wounded or otherwise. He looks like Super Mario. Go check out his website and see what you think. I’m telling you, the guy looks like he should grow ten feet tall any time he eats a mushroom.
Now if he had said “Willie looks like a fat Italian plumber who just got kicked in the nuts with a full house” I’d have agreed, but an Ibex? Nah.
Today was an odd day all in.
Following a dispute about pension rights (more here) some unions called a strike and as a result I found myself driving into work today past several of my colleagues on the picket line. One of them politely handed me a leaflet headed “Help save our pensions!” and gave me a quick smile as I went on into the car park. I liked this very British approach: we might be angry, we might be walking out to a picket line to make a stand, but we’ll be polite, we’ll hand out leaflets, and mind how you go now. Even when I was in the building the surreal atmosphere kept going: every now and again someone inside would peek out a window at the picket line. Sometimes someone out there would look back. It was like an incredibly genteel siege.
Now I have time to think about it I should have brought them a flask of tea and a book of old wartime songs to get the spirit of the blitz really going. Actually much as I might make jokes I admired the people standing out there in a line. My union wasn’t involved and I had to go in, but there they were, standing up for each other and fighting the good fight, sticking it to the man and all that. Sure, they all lost a day’s pay, but they stood up to be counted, and it seems they weren’t alone. It’s estimated that more than one million people walked out today. Makes me wish I was with them. Not that I would have been out on the picket line, but I have Babylon 5 DVDs to watch. Priorities, people. Gotta watch out for the important stuff.
All through the day the building was weird. Because so many people were off, staff were being pulled from all over the place to fill essential positions. The overall effect was like one of those Star Trek episodes where the crew are thrust into a parallel universe. Spock? At reception? Aren’t you the science officer? Well, not quite that bad, but in that general area. I kept expecting to see someone with a goatee beard and a general “evil twin” air about them.