Travails of Friendster, #317a

(Oh, it’s, like, soooo June 2003*. But you’ll find half of diskant’s staff on there for some reason.)

Anyway, one day my inbox tells me I’ve received a personal message from someone I don’t know. And so I go and look at it, and it’s from some girl from Luton, who appears to be somewhat illiterate. It says:

“u ite?”

Now, I know I’m fairly out of touch with youth culture these days, and I don’t really ‘get’ text speak, but what the hell does this mean? And if it means “are you alright?”, why would someone I don’t know, have never met, nor would ever want to meet, ask me that?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address. Or you can just use the ‘comment’ function.

[*comment copyright Tom Coogan 2004)

Very interesting article on The Morning News today, a Roundtable discussion with a group of MP3 Bloggers. I haven’t gotten round to investigating audio blogs but after reading this, I may have to find some time. I’m finding it more and more difficult to discover new music that isn’t made by people I know since all the music magazines went crap (cue Plan B etc) so time to browse some of the current music and audio blogs and see who’s writing about exciting stuff. Hopefully the links menu on the left will gain from this too. Any suggestions of good blogs please stick them in the comment box.

Some new links I have added that you may not have noticed:

Oxfordbands weblog: You might think a blog on a local music website would be cliquey and bitchy and very boring for outsiders but this is looking rather good, and not just because our own Stuart Fowkes actually blogs there (rather than just pretending to as he does here). Nice way to find out about some new bands as well. If only every town had one of these. I’m sure if Glasgow did it would quickly disintegrate into Mogwai/Franz Ferdinand abuse central so well done Oxford!

Guardian Gamesblog: I’m fairly impressed that the Guardian considers gaming to be of such current importance that it deserves a whole blog. What with this, the online blog and the Music and Food monthly magazines, the Guardian is quickly becoming my best work timewaster. It’s also got Aleks whatshername what used to be on Bitz writing for it, sad geek boys. I await her reports from the Edinburgh Games Festival with some interest to see if it’s worth going this year. Last year we just waited 20 minutes to throw some pigs around in Wind Waker and then sneered at the N-Gage.

JGram World: You may know Jason from his columns here at diskant or his marvellous No Pictures zine but he now also has a weblog where you can learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about him. It’s better than Eastenders! Hopefully Jason will be blogging here soon too.

also worth a look for sure is our Asking For Things blog where we’re getting everyone who bought our record to tell us about the random object they got in their box. I’m really enjoying it so far.

I’ve always been a keen believer in the ‘downloading music actually helps record sales’ line and am now realising my mistake. It is true that I download stuff to hear what it sounds like and that if I really really like it then I go buy the actual record so that I don’t have to listen to it on my computer and/or can have it on lovely vinyl too. BUT I see now what I have actually been doing is going to eBay and buying the records I like secondhand! So no extra money for record label or band. I wonder when the RIAA will turn their stupid minds towards eBay, record exchanges and charity shops. You’re all killing music!!

I’m also vaguely bemused by the fact that the most oft-downloaded MP3s from my collection on Soulseek are the Washing Machine album by Sonic Youth and Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble by PJ & Duncan.

Despite being a computer tech geek, I am amazed and astounded by the listen-to thing which I consider nothing short of magic. Look, it tells you what I am listening to RIGHT NOW! I can look over there and see what Ollie’s listening to on the other side of the world. RIGHT NOW! We’ve managed to enlist the help of greg kitten and chrish to the cause where they will cancel each other out as Greg tries to lower the cool quotient and Chris tries to raise it. I’m actually finding this something of a kick up the ass as I’ve been sadly neglecting my records lately but now I feel guilty when I see that I haven’t listened to anything for hours and hours. It’s also going to be interesting to see if/how much we all start pandering to the public knowledge and start pretending we listen to Merzbow all the time. Or that we don’t listen to Girls Aloud and songs by your own band…ahem. Incidentally, thanks to NYLPM for the listen-to tip.

Also to let you know that I’ve just initiated a domain transfer request for diskant so things may go a bit screwy over the next 10-14 days. Not that any of us care – we’ll be at ATP! WOO! (except for Ollie, aww. But that’s what you get for moving to the USA).

‘fternoon,

May I present a brief tonic for the Sunday “morning” blues associated with going out last night: the Buddyhead Best & Worst list of 2003. Before I was blessed by the Broadband Fairy, I used to avoid Buddyhead and the 15,000 years it took the homepage to load up like the plague. Now I’ve been elevated to the status of bandwidth snob, I’ve only just got around to discovering that it now only takes the amount of time it takes you to boil a kettle to load up. But just click on the link and you can bypass that to some pure, unaldulterated Buddyhead humour.

As ever, I agree with about 20% of their positive comments, but it’s the slatings that always hit the nail home. Choiciest quote:

“The legion of mall-emo grows every day, and this crap is the soundtrack for it’s [sic] followers who cry when they see dolphins and rainbows, and have an “online journal”, and a Friendster profile. More or less a mutation of the common hippy, but instead of beards, dreads, jungle muff, and armpit stink, it’s bad star tattoos, pierced lips, and studded belts.”

That’s almost as beautiful as having to point out to my housemate on Friday night that a picture in a “punk rock” bar (a whole other kettle of fish not worth getting into here) was of Joe Strummer, not Lars Ulrich. But then he’s a Thursday fan.

The IKEA Walkthrough

I’ve just been astonished for the second time in two weeks in relation to the work of Robert Tressell, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. You’ve probably never heard of this book but it’s possibly my favourite ever book and it even made it to #72 in The Big Read (where the BBC had great trouble finding anything to say about it, not surprising since they also managed to destroy the original tape of the dramatisation of the book after broadcasting it a mere two times). Anyway, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is one of the few books about working class life written by the working class, being the (semi-autobiographical) story of a group of house painters in Hastings at the turn of the century and the attempts of Owen to explain to them the principles of Socialism as a way of ending their poverty and powerlessness. It’s a great book, you should read it.

But to get back to the astonishment. Last week, I wandered randomly into a charity shop and discovered up on a high shelf a range of trade union and communist books, no doubt the past possessions of a recently departed relative. Among them was a copy of One Of The Damned, the biography of Robert Tressell which has been long out of print and which I have been trying to find a copy of for literally years, since reading the copy hidden in the vaults of Aberdeen Library. And here it was for the stupidly tiny sum of £2.75! Having now re-read the book, I’ve been filled with a sense of pained sadness and frustration as Fred Ball unravels the sad tale of Tressell’s life – his death in the workhouse, the butchering of the manuscript to cut it down to a shadow of the original, the loss of much of his murals and signwork and the general lack of recognition for his writing and artwork.

So then to discover this evening the TUC History Online website where they have scanned in every page of the original manuscript of this remarkable book, in Tressell’s handwriting with all the orginal amendments and self-censorship and all the later cutting and pasting (quite literally) and restoring, has quite knocked me over. Even just to see the original front page has practically made me want to cry.

It’s always been one of my main hopes for the internet, that you’d be able to find out anything at all in the greatest of detail and be able to see and read all the things currently hidden away in the archives of museums and universities. My heartfelt thanks go out to the TUC and all involved for making one person very very happy.

[I hope everyone enjoys the juxtaposition of today’s postings]

An article on John Peel’s Home Truths website entitled Middle-Aged Groupie has a link to diskant at the end. WHY? It also links to the Obsessive Fan Sites website which trawls the web for horrendous fansites and pokes fun at their use of frames, java and enormous photos and is quite funny if you’re bored. Which I’m not, obviously.

Some nice random links for you from my IE history, none of which involve reading about me for a change:

– Pixel Decor – (lovely lovely retro patterns for desktops and backgrounds)

– NeeKlamy’s Zelda fairy trapped in a bottle plush. I want one!

– Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics take an in depth look at The Core (“It’s the worst physics movie…ever….”) and end up showing exactly why it’s such a great movie. Thanks to BBC News for that link.

– Children reviewing indie music (william: i feel like i might say “hey hey” and i was thinking about a robot). Thanks (again) to TMN for that one.