Not Blogging
I'm aware that I haven't blogged much in recent days, and the reason for that is that the times when I would usually have taken a moment or ten to do so are the same times when I've been redeveloping the site. Hopefully now I can not fiddle with anything to much for a while.
I've been bowling tonight for the first time in at least a couple of months. The lack of practice showed - not a single strike, and a bare few spares. I had to leave a while before the others, so I gave my last game to Dave. I hope that the physical therapy did him some good, but if it felt as painful as it looked......
Courtesy of Toby
Toby mailed round the following link just now, and while I find it disturbing, having visited the States many times and indeed lived there for a while, I can't honestly say that I'm surprised.
Look at the time….
Look at the time.... I really ought to be posting to a late-night blog, but I can't get in. Oh well, let's try again on the sleeping thing.
Right, that’s it
Right, that's it - all-new, all-different, all-live. Will it last? Who can tell?
Nearly there
Well, as soon as I manage successfully to re-import the old blog postings from Blogger to Movable Type, everything's ready to switch on - which I'll do sometime early this evening, so that I can run through stuff later and double check once it's all live - by the time I got in last night, I didn't have time to do the final - up-to-date export. Or to be strictly accurate, when it didn't work with the same glitch-free slickness that the trial one I did last week achieved, I didn't have time to mess around with it.
I may learn – one
I may learn - one of these days...... I've been working on the revised, revamped, all-new, all-different, version of the site on and off today, and of course, once I start playing with one thing, I realise it's an opportunity to tweak another, and the upshot is that although I'm pleased with it so far, there's no way I'm going to get it all sorted before I make an attempt to sleep. *Sigh* Let's see how far I can get.
I picked up The Essential
I picked up The Essential Alison Moyet today, and it's remarkable - I hadn't registered how she sums up an entire era in my life. The Yazoo and the early solo years dovetail entirely with my mid-late teens, leaving secondary school, then sixth-form, and so on. Huge, crashing waves of memory leave me gasping on the shores of yet more nostalgia.
We're moving Dillon (AKA Barrel Cat, Psycho Cat and The Fattest Cat In Christendom) back to Chris's this evening, after her protracted stay at the flat. It'll be weird not having her around, but at least she'll be able to get out and about more. It's a bit unfair when she's cooped up.
I’m reading Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs
I'm reading Douglas Coupland's Microserfs at the moment, which somehow I've managed never to read before. It's interesting, and rather nostalgic, in a 'set at a point in time before Microsoft ever integrated the Office applications into a suite. I'll review it fully when I'm done, but one thing that makes me smile every time I pick it up is that the edition I'm reading contains a review quotation on the cover from GQ which says "About as Zeitgeisty as it gets." - is this really the way to promote a book set in the early-mid 1990s in the year 2001?
Okay – I’m excited about
Okay - I'm excited about this, but I'm completely prepared to be the only one who is:
There's a comic called Zot! that was published a few years ago in two separate runs, the first in colour, then switching to black and white. It was created by Scott McCloud, and essentially told the story of a teenaged superhero from another version of Earth who came to this one, and the effect he had on the people he met here. I say 'essentially', because it's also 'about' loneliness, dreams, hope, despair, beauty, truth, the way an outsider's perspective on your world can help you see it more clearly yourself, the list goes on - it's one of the most thematically-rich comics I've ever read, beautifully written and drawn, and much missed by everyone who knew it. Except it's back. McCloud has created a new sixteen part, weekly-appearing, online Zot! story called Hearts and Minds. It's actually already finished being published, but I've only just found out about it!!!. I've only read the first part so far, but I'm looking forward to the rest, and I have enough faith in what has gone before to be recommending it sight-unseen. There's a full set of character profiles for the unitiated here, and the introductory page of Hearts and Minds is here.
So what are you hanging around here for?
A few people have asked
A few people have asked about my observation the other day that I'd like this blog to be an element of a wider site, rather than all the other bits and pieces here hanging off the blog. Which seems a good cue to discuss where I'm going with it.
Basically, one of the things that having the blog did was get me back into having a site of my own. I used to have one years ago, but it was embarassing, had a starfield background (Hey! They all had them back then....) and was built in HoTMetaL. Obviously, it had to go. BUT.....despite its rather primitive look, that site at least had the advantage of not having a blog to keep drawing in the crowds (*snort*), so I had to make it do *something*. The something that I settled on was that it would be a home for my critical writing. I'd been lacking an outlet for that kind of thing since I stopped doing stuff regularly on the BBC, and even if I was only doing it for myself, it would at least be something I could point to as a body of work.
Now, I have a site that has some critical stuff on it, but it's clearly seen as secondary to the blog - the design does that for it, relegating the reviews to the same level as external links. Of course, I also have the dilemma that based on the way the traffic here goes, the blog is far and away the part of the site that people most want to look at. Most people never look any further. So at the moment I'm working on a redesign that keeps the blog on the 'homepage' of the domain name, but which has other defined sections of the site, index pages for the opinion pieces, etc. It's a fudge, to say the least, but from my own point of view, I'd like *not* to be seen as just another Weblogger, but as someone who does a number of things online, one of which is a journal. Probably a vain hope.
By the time the weekend comes, I may think something different. Any thoughts, observations, comments, welcome as ever.