Journals

Here's food for thought.

Thought: once we get to this stage in new activity of some kind, where it's obvious that the activity has become classifiable into various genres and can be broken down in a humorous way, we've reached an inflection point. The activity is no longer 'shiny and new', so it either begins its slow decline (because it was just a fad, and there's nothing deep to it, to make it worth continuing with in the long term) or it starts to dip in another way - it seeps into the background and becomes another part of the culture.

You can see this happening in numerous cases - online quizzes for one - they arrived on the scene, everyone was doing them, then came a few quizzes along the line of 'which online quiz are you', which pushed the self-referentialness as far as it could go, and now they're in definite decline, the frequency slowly dropping off.

The same thing happened to web pages, as an example of the opposite, with the sudden spurt of 'everyone has to have a homepage!' back in the mid-90s, when the web was shiny and new, the eventual backlash ("This site permanently under construction" images, and spoofs of the various kinds of websites put up by newbies), and then having a web page became just another thing that people did. Some people did it, some people didn't, but it very much slid into the background. Having a web page wasn't something cool or special, it was just another hobby/activity, like owning a dog or souping up your car.

Journals and Weblogs have now reached this stage. Which of the two paths they take is anyone's guess, but I suspect they'll take the latter, soaking into online society as another method of communication; not quite a diary, not quite a discussion forum, but something unique, that bridges a gap that nobody realised was there.

Gay!

Apparently I'm 43% gay.

It says so here.

Hero Machine

The ever fantabulous Hero Machine seems to have been updated.

( Click for an example )

Talking to myself

When I'm elsewhere and happen across something I want to read but can't (because I'm at work, in an airport, or whatever), I send the link to my 'at home' address.

I usually intend to go through them that evening, but it usually takes me weeks to get to them. Or in the case of 253 of them, never. I have items in there going back to June 2001.

So I'm finally going through them all, and wondering why on earth I thought half of them were worth keeping. And wondering how much I annoyed all my friends by sending them these links.

Go on Nick, say something cynical and witty about never reading them anyway...

Lyrics du jour

Green light, Seven Eleven
You stop in for a pack of cigarettes
You don't smoke, don't even want to
Hey now, check your change
Dressed up like a car crash
Your wheels are turning but you're upside down
You say when he hits you, you don't mind
Because when he hurts you, you feel alive
Hey babe, is that what it is

( click for the rest )