Write it down

My [other] constant companion is my notebook. The poor thing is beginning to feel the strain. It contains all the general tasks of life, thoughts and ideas that I rush to capture before they evaporate. I always intend to organise them later.

My fear is that it has become an indicator of my mental state; a collection of disjointed scraps and notes associated only by virtue of their collection in a single location. Tattered and frayed, dog eared and overworked it threatens to give way at any moment. Missing pages are missing memories, whole days passed in a blur or torn out, deliberately put beyond recall.

You can see why I'm worried.

Time to consolidate, organise and rearrange. I might sort my notebook out too...

Backwards busriders

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing in the opposite direction to travel. Not those who do so because all the other seats are taken but people that actively choose to do so, they're a bit different (rare too).

Going backwards makes most people a little queasy, these people are tougher than that. They are so accustomed to public transport that motion sickness long ago ceased to be a problem for them.

A lot of people don't always know where they're going or at least like to be able to see their stop to make sure they get off in time. The backwards people aren't worried by this, they have their routine and they know the route so well, they know it backwards.

The backwards seats are the only seats on the bus that force you to look your fellow passengers in the eye, all at once. Other seats grant the comfort of staring at a seat-back but not these. These seats reveal the bizarre theatre of people on the bus, in public but in a confined, unnatural state of locomotion. Sitting backwards on a Saturday night-bus is an operetta.

These people spend their journey looking from their point of departure watching the world go past them with their back to their destination, meeting it only when they choose to get off. In the mornings this means facing back toward home, watching it disappear into the distance. In the evenings watching work fade into the past.

Next time you're on the bus watch for the people that choose to sit facing backwards, they're a bit different.

Curators of a zeitgeist

William Gibson

The place of blogs in the media landscape seems to be constantly up for debate. The paper-published media seems to have been of hugely divided viewpoint and variously to feel threatened, empowered, to reject the technology before finally embracing it.

The Independent and particularly The Guardian newspapers in the UK seem to have taken the concept and moved a lot of their content online, as have The Telegraph and The Times to varying degrees (from what I experienced of The Guardian when I was back in the UK last month this was definitely to the detriment of the newsstand publication). Whilst this probably can't be described as blogging there are many blogs on the sites.

The Internet over here in Oz is slowly coming round as Internet connections speed up and the newspaper sites are publishing things online simultaneously with the day's first edition (The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald).

The US media has various levels of online access but mostly seems to be sticking to the pay for access model to at least some stories as per The Wall Street Journal - now with extra Murdoch - and The New York Times on the East coast, and a free to access model on the West: The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle. The Chicago Tribune seems to have a mixture and USA Today seems to have gone all out for online audience engagement.

Leaving aside that the newspapers are now becoming proto-broadcasters with mixed media online content it is quite interesting that almost all of them now have blogs after some fashion. If you believe in the concept and validity of Citizen Journalism then the lines between the the journalists and the bloggers seems to be becoming blurred, particularly on the level of journals covering specific areas such as emerging web technology e.g. Techcrunch (relevant article). The clear trendsetters in this space were Wired in the US and The Register in the UK, a personal favourite. Both of these two have been blogging as journalism since before it had a name.

If you don't believe in Citizen Journalism then you probably believe that there is still a defined and specific craft to writing and a duty to truth in journalism that it is very hard for your average Joe to recreate (the wikipedia link probably won't have much use for you either). You might find yourself in a minority here, everyone thinks they can write. This doesn't necessarily mean they're right , but it does mean 'me too' writers like me proliferate and litter the Internet with dubious opinion and often unchecked 'fact'. Personally I think this is a moot point and blogging is still an emerging phenomenon that is more interesting in a social context than it is in a journalistic one.

Web logs seem to have begun as link lists of interesting sites with diary elements creeping slowly into the logs as online publishing became easier (strangely pictures of cats seem to have played an important part in this). Many bloggers continue this trend posting links and diary snippets daily, sometimes hourly. Those that do tend to hook into certain trends and, if looked at as a whole, seem to have a kind of Jungian collective unconscious that identifies certain themes and ideas that have the attention of the Internet as a whole, which increasingly means the westernised world.

Oddly the best of this types of blogs seem to be by science fiction writers. I can only surmise that, watching the things they wrote about come to pass, these writers are watching in awe and extrapolating further to another unforeseen future.

What got me thinking about this was an interview with William Gibson in today's Sydney Morning Herald in which Gibson says he has switched his focus back to the present as it is far stranger than anything he could imagine (also see this one in The Washington Post). In fact the present frighteningly close to what he imagined. It is almost impossible to read Neuromancer now without compiling a mental timeline of how this future will occur.

As an example, in Neuromancer Gibson describes a past in which a war is waged as much in cyberspace as it is in base reality. Somewhat presciently the war takes place between Eastern and Western powers. This is dangerously close to happening:

• Beware the Trojan panda
• Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
• Did China hack into Pentagon networks?

The quote below is attributed to Gibson though I can't immediately track down its' provenance:

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed."

It's hard to argue with that.

Back on the point I had somewhere; bloggers like this are the reason for the title of this post. They both catalogue and define the milieu of an age that is increasingly about a 'lensed perception'. In an age where information arrives more quickly than it can be processed it's not so much about what you see as the viewpoint that you see it from and the way that you arrived at it that defines what you understand of the world around you.

For me blogging is this curatorial act/trusteeship where individual examples are probably not significant but a categorised broader view will be much more revealing in anthropological kind of way and over a long period of time. Of course cat pictures are always good too!

3 Recommendations with links from the sites below them.

William Gibson

• Russian ASCII goggles
• KKKlouraphobia!
• Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes

Bruce Sterling

• Planetary Imagery: 30 years from Voyager
• Days of cheap food are over
• Hookers swarming on Cragslist
  

Warren Ellis

• Only $11.99
• One species' genome discovered inside another's
• Memories of a massacre

"...dread and ecstasy at one and the same time, this is the modern condition."

A mistake realised

First there's the moment of realisation, the open-mouthed shock. This is swiftly overrun by the hot prickling up of sweat from your scalp that instantly cools to an icy chill. Starting as a trickle down the back of your neck it gains momentum and becomes a freezing torrent that rushes down your spine before diving into your guts and viciously squeezing the life out of your stomach. The blood squeezed from your viscera is pushed to your face causing a hot flush and the cycle begins again.

If the mistake is bad enough this feeling won't just be a temporary one but a near continuous loop that makes it difficult to fall asleep and impossible to stay that way. It will last as long as it takes to fix the mistake.

Overthink

There has been an absence of more verbose postings on here for a little while as more and more often I seem to be triggered into thinking about concepts that I bring up in the longer ones. For example after the post on Music and Thinking I started a piece on browsing that has taken on a life of its own and had me sat around looking pensive for some time (people thought I was constipated, I was just confused).

I keep returning to philosophical ideas that I covered at University to do with contemporary life, self and identity and trying to contextualise these with working life, the internet and the idea of personal happiness. It's producing some interesting thoughts. They all seem a little obvious at the moment but I'm going to keep following them and see if they produce anything insightful. I haven't had any time to write any more fiction and I might try and make some time to do this too as I've had some half decent ideas, however these are all tied up with the ideas so they may be a little pretentious, but that's never stopped me before!

Drink writing

Never ever drink and write, ever.

A week?!

How can it be a week since I last posted? I need to get my act together.

The truth is I am still petty damn busy. This is a good thing because it means at least my life is pretty full, and I'm not wasting any time with pointless crap (like watching Aussie TV).

It is also bad because it means I am trying to fit having a life into my life whilst actually having a life. Which is difficult. It also means that you end up living a backlogged life where you are constantly catching up with yourself.

I have taken to carrying a notebook with me on public transport and scribbling away at top speed to try and get some writing done in the travel time between activities. These are usually filled with staring vacantly into space. My brain normally copies over these areas of memory like you'd record over a bad TV program on a video. This has the odd effect of timeshifting me to new places. I emerge from the bus blinking in the sunshine thinking: "Now how the bloody hell did I end up here?"

The notebook is obviously a laptop substitute but laptops don't have the other side-effect that I quite like, keeping the seat next to you free. Nobody wants to sit next to the lunatic scribbling away at top speed in an unintelligible scrawl. I may take to giggling as well and in extreme casses drooling. Updates as they happen.

Spam

Normally I don't get spam but a few emails seem to be creeping through the net recently. I thought I would share the one below as it has a kind of Haiku like poetry to it:

here mischievous beautiful motor? here slow did. love mischievous friends am letters companion?
reply make wife slow bought.
slow is different nothing goes.
beautiful sandwich immediate leader. reply rich yours am? we make anybody least off.
companion here turning he shining.

I suspect it is piece of oriental spam (sweet 'n' sour? spam in black bean sauce?) may have been translated using a crap piece of software.

Maybe I should think up a reply:

here forlorn motor none. mischevious rental driving. already least off. easily companion shining. innadequacy beckons strongly.
improved sin wife no. all bought before.
fast is better everything passes.
reply blog rich are.
beautiful breakfast eventual domination.

It'll do for the moment.
I am sat at home waiting for people to take away the washing machine, I'll think of something good to write in a minute....

Filed under:

• garbage

R/evolution

The revolution when the revolution comes will be televised
It will have syndicated news feed from coast to coast, every coast.
It will have a PR campaign, a jingle and a website.
It will whiten your teeth and freshen your breath whilst you work rest and play with yourself.
The revolution will be a tee-shirt, a soft drink, a meal deal and a running shoe.

The revolution will print logos on your french fries and send automatic updates to your mobile phone.
It will be bought, sold and bartered. There will be pin badges posters and viral campaigns.
It will sell more washing powder and will come in sixteen fruit-flavoured colours. There will be stickers to collect and swap.
There will be a stick-shift and an automatic.
The revolution will have tinted windows.

The revolution will take place at the expense of the black and the white, the hungry, the disenfranchised, the sick, the poor, the tired and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
There will be no-one in the streets looking for a better day because they will all be watching the revolution on TV.
The revolution will not make a blind bit of difference, it will go unnoticed. There will be arguments afterwards about whether it really happened. It will have profound implications for consumer confidence, far reaching consequences and international relations will be strained.
The revolution will be by intelligent design.

The revolution will have security patches, updates and bug fixes.
There will be plugins and dockable toolbars, XML output, a spellcheck and popups.
It will be an enterprise level fully customiseable end to end solution with advanced knowledge management systems.
It will be XP compatible but Mac users will need to download additional components proir to installation.
There will be a revolution 2.0

The revolution will have trailers with voiceovers, preview showings and re-runs.
Its' outcome will decided by focus groups and creative consultants.
Its' format will be sold and reproduced, copied and imitated.
It will be themed and have a strong moral message. It may star David Hasselhoff.
The revolution will be broadcast on your wetware.

The revolution will be sponsored, there will be ad breaks and interuptions.
You will be able to tune out, change the channel and grab a beer.
There will be news bulletins and a ticker accross the bottom of the sceen. There will be a narrator.
There will be edited highlights and a late showing with unseen new footage.
The revolution will be a pre-recorded event, it will be pay per view and shown "as live".

The revolution when the revolution comes will be televised, and you will miss it.

based on "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron