Yes, yes … I know … it’s been six whole months since my last blog post and you’ve been worrying yourself sick all that time, not knowing how you should think about certain things, or whether I would ever be around again to offer your lives a much needed injection of wisdom and humour that you’re frankly unable to formulate for yourselves. Well, fear not, for I have risen, out of the ashes (well, out of the ramshackle spare room studio playing host to my band’s noise-making activities for most of the past year) and ready to deliver some righteous word-mangling into your eager eye-boxes that they might electrically tickle those parts of your brain responsible for giggling like a loony or getting into a Daily Mail-style froth at what a giant pile of steaming arse this world can be from time to time. As is so often the case, it all begins with an argument on Twitter … Read more “The Mighty Douche”
There’s an old cliche which states that the arrival time of a certain kind of road-based, public transport vehicle has little to do with traffic flow, mechanical problems, and the ever-unpredictable human element all conspiring to exert a negative impact upon the published timetable (and, inevitably, your opinion of the eternal optimist who formulated it). Apparently it is, instead, more like blog post ideas, in that there’ll be extended periods of bugger all followed by a flurry of activity; this time, however, the driver of one such bus forced their way to the front of the idea queue and insisted I ride with them first. This tortured analogy (it’ll all make sense in the end, I promise) is my way of saying that, for the first time ever, this is an “on-demand rant” (making me a bit like BBC iPlayer – “making the unbearable vaguely tolerable”); yes, my fellow Blunt-murderer Aerynne has asked me to say a few loud words about the whole Suzanne Moore-Julie Burchill transphobia, journalists and social media thing, and I’m only too happy to oblige. So, cue the animated circle of interminable buffering! Read more “Less is Moore”
I don’t know about you, but when I heard the news this week that the twin bills SOPA (Screwing Over Proper Artists) and PIPA (Positively Invading People’s Anuses) had suffered a humiliating defeat/climbdown when pretty much the entire world told the entertainment industry to go fuck itself and stop trying to ruin the internet, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, wiped the self-satisfied “Ha ha, we did it!” grin off my face, and then started to wonder just what kind of monstrous form the bills will take on once Hollywood and the record companies had re-grouped and returned to begin the next leg of their “Stealing Freedom Tour 1996 – 2047”. For reasons I can only imagine have something to do with my brain feeling particularly charitable (knowing that I had a blog post to write and no ideas), these thoughts began colliding with ones about the nature of religion versus science and how, as it is with content producers versus the internet, the battle is about nothing more than destroying the competition in order to protect an obsolete business model. Read more “New Model No. 15”
My first thought upon hearing the news this week that Apple CEO, and co-founder, Steve Jobs had died was not that the world had lost an inspirational thinker and visionary who fundamentally changed our relationship with technology (that thought was in there – it just wasn’t my first); I didn’t even leap, as I ordinarily would, straight to the cynical and anti-corporate, “Oh no, who’s going to come up with ideas for what Chinese children should build next?” (although that was in there too). No, my first thought was, given Jobs’ extraordinarily high-profile as CEO of the biggest tech company on earth, how long would it be before the Westboro Baptist Church crawled out of the festering gutter they lurk in to announce that they were going to protest his funeral? As it turned out “less than a day” was the correct answer and, when their infamous tweet came rather ironically via an iPhone (prompting a torrent of amused derision), I started to wonder why on earth theists ever bother to go anywhere near the internet when they so regularly, and completely, get their arses handed to them every time they do. Read more “404 Mage Not Found”
