Ten From Ten – I Wish Shopping There Was Forbidden
Originally posted on 7th October 2006, after a particularly annoying shopping expedition. This post probably wouldn't be making its second appearance except that it suddenly became topical again while I was reviewing material for inclusion in the Ten From Ten. A visit to the shop in question for the first time in months led to the discovery that nothing's changed, and the level of 'service' remains as low as ever.
I hate Forbidden Planet. Not the film, obviously, but the ’sci-fi and fantasy superstore’ or however they’re styling themselves these days. Shopping there is a thoroughly unpleasant experience, made more so by the recognition that as they’ve cornered quite a large part of their selected market, if you need to be able to walk into a shop and have a reasonable chance of leaving with what you wanted, FP is your best bet. (And I should stress that it’s the London shop I’m talking about here. Apart from New York I’ve never been to another branch, and they could all be fantasy shopper heaven for all I know.)
Today, for reasons that are exactly of the ‘need X in a hurry’ variety, I went in, and while I was waiting for a staff member to appear and lower himself to help me give them my money, I found myself next to a man and his son who were complaining. They seemed to want to exchange something, but the main complaint was that the father, who made the repeated point that he’d been going to FP since 1990, felt that the staff had been rude and aggressive.
To which I can only ask, in all seriousness - how can you have been going there since 1990 and only now realised that the staff at Forbidden Planet are rude and aggressive?
I’ve always assumed it’s part of the job description.
Ten From Ten – Maximum Slayage
Originally posted 8th October 2002. If there's one TV series that defined the early years of this here blog, it would be Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It was a minor obsession that I shared with a number of people I knew at the time, and a very large number of posts here reference the series even after it ended. I remember watching the final episode online one lunchtime at work the day after its US broadcast and posting a very spoiling summary at the request of some of my then regular readers. I knew I wanted to include at least one TV post in this retrospective; I considered a West Wing or an Angel one. I considered something random and one-off, but realistically, it was never NOT going to be Buffy. Selecting the best to use was hard, but in the end I've settled on this overview of Season Six.
(Some spoilers for Buffy Season Six - nothing that hasn’t been covered elsewhere online or in print)
I’ve recently managed finally to see the final few episodes of Season Six, and I thought I’d offer a few observations on the year as a whole. There was a lot of comment (mostly online) about the series having finally lost it this year, and I’m going to beg to differ. Year six was definitely different than the ones that went before, but the same is true of each year. Imagine watching the pilot episode and being told that this same series would one day do episodes as varied and impressive as Hush, Restless, and Once More, With Feeling. Would you have believed it? Because I wouldn’t.
If anything, this year had more coherence than some of the previous ones - every episode added to the overall theme, even when it wasn’t clearly in the foreground. Doublemeat Palace is sometimes cited as the weakest episode, but even there there was ongoing attention to the various relationships and their participants, and attention to Buffy’s downward spiral and the effect of it on the people around her. After I first saw the season opener, I noted of Buffy’s return from the grave that “there were distinct suggestions that there will be ongoing ramifications“, and it turns out there were, for longer than people might have expected. In a sense, the pay-off for all the gloom and negativity that permeated the series was held in the fantastic scene in Gravewhere Buffy finally admits that she wants to be alive, and to be part of the world. I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with a series actually taking the time to tell a story properly and make the character’s redemption really mean something. Redmption has been a theme of Buffy for as long as it’s been around, and it was absolutely present throughout this year. Willow, Dawn, Buffy, and even Jonathan all acheived it to some degree or another, while Warren showed himself to be irredeemable because he didn’t want rememption. (And on a sidenote, wasn’t the apparently buffoonish Warren a truly excellent illustration of ‘The Banality of Evil’? I know it’s not what Hannah Arendt originally meant by the phrase, but I think it fits Warren perfectly. All his big talk about world conquest basically masked a sad little man who couldn’t deal with the stronger women around him.)
For yet another year, the single most astonishing thing for me about Buffy is that the writing team Joss Whedon has assembled has pulled off another year of such consistency. It actually takes real conviction, especially in the high-impact, instant gratification world of television, to avoid the splashy, easy solutions, and take a more subtle route. A classic example this year was the point at which Buffy is led to believe that she was brought back ‘wrong’; that she’d been changed on some fundamental level. The easy plot devices would have taken that exact route - she’d become part-demon, or it wasn’t *really* Buffy who was back - but instead, she was just slightly ‘off’ physically, not anything that made a real difference. And that was the most devastating outcome of all, because she so desperately wanted and needed to have come back wrong, as a way of explaining the choices she’d made. Instead she had to face the fact that she was who she was, and had made mistakes that she had to deal with. For a fantasy series not to take the fantastic option takes absolute certainty on the part of the creators.
It parallels the situation with Tara late in Year Four and early in Year Five, when the audience had been led to believe that she was a bad guy, and possibly a demon. Ultimately, it turned out that she even thought she was one herself, but it was a lie that she’d been told by (the men in) her family to keep her malleable and afraid. Again, taking the non-fantastic route by depicting an abusive family situation was far more a challenge than doing yet another “trusted supporting character turns out to have a dark secret” schtick (Angel, Jenny Calendar, Oz, anyone?).
Mentioning Tara brings me on to the biggest gripe I have about Season Six, and that’s her departure from the series. I know that it was the only realistic trigger for the Willow-centric finale, but even so, I’ll really miss her.
That aside - I think the griping about this year was largely misplaced. It was different from last year, just as that year was different from the one before it, but it certainly wasn’t worse, and dramatically, creatively, and possibly morally, it was much better.
Ten From Ten – An Odd Kind Of Failure
Originally posted 13th November 2003 following a few hints I'd posted about some stuff not going so well. At this point I was about two and a half years into the business I'd set up with some friends and while some people had made the connection this was me making it explicit. A miserable, horrible time. The comments on the original post warmed me a little. Thanks again all these years later to those who took the trouble.
So the thing that I’ve *not* been discussing:
We’re shutting down the company.
There: I’ve said it.
It was an extremely difficult stage to come to, but once we reached a certain point in time and perspective, the decision-making took on a life of its own. We’ve given it a bloody good go, mind you - two and a half years is more than many companies manage, and most importantly, we did at least try, which many don’t.
In the end though, reality intrudes, and you have to acknowledge that things aren’t going as well as they might, or growing the way they ideally would. It’s utterly heart-breaking in many ways - the ‘put your heart and soul into something for two years’ way especially, and definitely a curious kind of failure: How many businesses can legitimately say that they’ve got clients who are genuinely happy with them, who without exception and unprompted, keep coming back for more; have services and products that are tested and respected, and a well-established team capable and willing to continue delivering outstanding service? Not one that I’ve worked for previously, that I do know.
So I’ve had to make a group of people I like and respect, and who did their jobs brilliantly well, unemployed, which is one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do in my professional life. Letting down the clients comes second.
Right now I’m in the middle of the wind-up process, while simultaneously trying to work out what happens next, both for myself and for the others. Somehow being able to continue to do the good stuff we do would be the dream of course, but practicalities inevitably remain an issue, and the ways of achieving that are severely limited. I’m not giving up on the possibility, but I’m not putting it at the top of my ‘most likely outcome’ list either.
So hence all the down lately. It’s not the worst news in the world. No one died, we’re all able to pick ourselves up and move on, so perhaps I’ve been overdramatic about it recently. But it’s felt pretty devastating. When you put everything into something over a period of years and it ends up dying despite your efforts, it’s a blow. When it has an adverse effect on other people, it’s that much worse.
But thanks for all the messages of support; they’ve really meant a lot. Anyone who’s emailed and I haven’t had a chance to reply to yet, many apologies - I *will* write back as soon as I can.
Ten From Ten – The Reason For Pride
Originally posted 26th July 2003 - on a Pride weekend here in London. I'd been posting Pride-related stuff all weekend and at the same time engaging in a spirited, mostly intelligent and only minimally homophobic discussion on the subject over at Millarworld. The following was my final post here on the subject, and it builds to an observation I still use in this kind of discussion to this day. Which is a bit depressing, when you come to think about it.
One more for the theme of the weekend, then I’ll shut up about it, I promise.
The question of whether we need Pride anymore is one that occasionally comes up both within and without the LGBT communities. Such great strides have been made, the argument goes, that there is little reason for us to need to make our presence felt through special events.
In response to the thoughts I posted last night, the online debate took in many points, but one was this:
"Okay, I’m going to preface this with the statement I don’t object in the slightest to gay/bi pride, but I’m going to say I don’t understand it. It’s my understanding that it’s generally accepted in the gay community that homosexuality is not a choice, but something you are and are born with. I can understand that, as I couldn’t choose to be gay any more than you could choose to be straight. But that’s where my confusion comes from. How is it you’re proud of something natural that you have no control over? To me, if it’s something you’re born with and is natural, saying ‘I’m proud to be gay’ doesn’t seem any different than saying ‘I’m proud to have two eyes.’ "
I understand this viewpoint completely, but it misses some specifics of the experience that informs Pride.
Discussion followed, some of which I extract here (note ‘extract’ - I’m missing a fair bit out).
"For me it’s about being able to stand up and be who you are. You’re right, it’s not the same pride you might have in something you’ve done or achieved, but it’s pride in yourself.
You won’t have experienced this, but to be told all your life that what you are is wrong, or evil, or unnatural… look, you’re attracted to women. That’s not something you’ve chosen. If I told you that it was wrong, that you had to be attracted to men, you couldn’t do it. This is the fundamental misunderstanding straight people make when they talk about our ‘lifestyle choices’. A townhouse is a lifestyle choice. Homosexuality, Bisexuality, Heterosexuality is part of who you are.
Personally, I’ve gotten this from both sides. Straights who tell me it’s wrong to be attracted to other women (and they offer my appreciation of men as proof that I’m just ‘in a phase’) and lesbians who tell me I should have the courage to make a choice, or to stop pretending to be straight.”The questioner replied:
” I think I get it now. You’re proud because you’re doing what you should despite the fact people have been known to go out of their way to make that difficult. That applies to a lot of situations. I personally wouldn’t be proud if I were in any of them, because in my head I would just be doing what I should be doing.But then it falls back to what you believe. I’m not a proud person, so I have a hard time understanding when other people are.”To which the respondent hit the nail so firmly on the head I was embarassed not to have managed this summation myself:
"The word Pride is generally taken to mean some sort of conceit about yourself, or about something you’ve done. We don’t use it that way. Nor would we (most likely) consider ourselves ‘proud’ people.
I didn’t choose the word, but I think we use it not for its Dictionary meaning, but for its Thesaurus meaning: It’s the opposite of Shame."
I mean, really, that’s it, all of it, in one sentence. I’m awestruck.
Ten From Ten – Finally Coming
My original plan was to revisit one old post from the first ten years of the blog a week in the ten weeks leading up to the anniversary. As the anniversary is this coming Saturday, that's not going to be happening. But I will be packing ten old posts into the next few days.
These will be a combination of fond memories, stuff that now makes me go "what the fuck?" and other stuff chosen pretty much at whim. There are one or two which are simply defining moments in my blogging history, such that it is. In most cases I'll just repost the content of the original version with a note on why I selected it. In some cases it's the discussion that arose out of a post that's noteworthy so I'll do the note and then link to it.
I hope the whole exercise will provide an opportunity to reflect a bit but also for anyone who does still stop by from the old days to remember some of the stuff that used to go on around these parts.
Yes, All Right
I know I've once again been crap about updating here. I had all the good intentions, and there are two quite long posts sitting in my drafts which I left long enough that they ceased to be topical, and another even longer one which I was writing in a separate text editor and accidentally deleted. That one, I'll rewrite, because I think it speaks to my recent activities and frame of mind. This evening if I can. Watch this space.
Doesn’t Time Fly
While recognising one or two significant breaks in the archive, in a few months' time, this here blog will be ten years old. I'll probably do a proper retrospective of the last ten years on or near the anniversary, but one thing I've decided to do is a 'Ten at Ten' series. Each week for the ten weeks leading up to the anniversary, so starting at the beginning of February, I'm going to repost a past posting. Maybe one from each year, maybe not, but what I want to do is not just repost, but also provide some commentary - give myself a reason not just to be nostalgic, but to reflect on what that posting said about me at the time and how I look at it now. I'm sure it'll be very dull for anyone else reading this, but I hope it'll prove an interesting exercise to undertake.
First task towards this of course is rereading ten years worth of this stuff.
Since We Last Saw Our Hero…
... a great deal has happened.
First things first - the apparent eighteen month gap below is at least partially covered by my temporary settling at Suddenly San Franciscan (which should also tell you where I physically was a chunk of that time). I moved blogging activity over there because I wanted to create a specific narrative of my thoughts, views and activities as a transplanted Brit in the City By The Bay. To some degree it worked, but for reasons I won't go into here, as I went into them there, it wasn't as successful a move as we'd hoped. I'll keep that site up for the foreseeable, just as a record.
So now I'm back, and have been for a few months. I didn't restart blogging until now because I had this slightly mental idea of taking a break - time off work, quiet time with The Mrs, a removal from pressures including even those I applied to myself to write stuff online. The reason this was slightly mental is that I should have known better. I've been kept busy with various things, this period coincided with The Mrs being on a deadline for a book, and any number of other things have meant that not only am I not feeling especially chilled after a decent interval off, but I'm now feeling new stress because I need to find a job.
Fortunately at least on that last front there are some irons in the fire which I'll pull out to talk about when the time is right.
In the meantime, hello again world. For anyone new to me blogging (hello Twitterpeeps); a quick summary before we resume regular stuff:
44 years old, London-based, married with cat, previous form in corporate management, radio and TV production and for the last twelve years or so, all digital, all the time. Been leading teams in digital businesses, developing online communication strategies and generally trying to be as good at it all as possible.
Blogging on and off (mostly on) since April 2001, with what I laughingly like to think is an eclectic subject range that certainly takes in digital stuff, comics, film (I used to do film and TV reporting professionally), books, etc as well as regular diversions into politics and current affairs. Also whatever else I find briefly of interest.
When I set up the San Francisco blog I set down some ground rules for the stuff I wanted to talk about, etc. This time I'm going to let things evolve as they go and see what kind of flavour this place ends up with. I've done a quick tidy of the blogroll to trim out anyone who appears to have stopped for good, but haven't yet got round to adding in new people, which I will over the next few days. I also need to give the template a complete overhaul and add in some new widgets - possibly a job for the weekend.
Anyway - that's what you missed last time on Glee.
The Ground Rules Going Forward
So - further to the random comments I've made recently about moving this blog forwards, I've set myself a framework for what I write on here* in the future. These are as follows:
1) Most postings should be me observing/commenting on things in the real world, which should help get me back to the kind of blog I originally set this out to be.
2) At least once a week I will post a serious review of something, which will help reinforce the original intention of also having an outlet which will help my critical faculties not atrophy. I reserve the right for the 'something' to be a book, a film, a comic, a play, a game, a website, or anything else which I feel lends itself to my interest. This is in lieu of reinstating the entirely separate part of the site for reviews that I used to have.
3) Where I write about 'stuff that happened to me', it should wherever possible be in relation to the specific experience of being an alien in a strange land. That should offer plenty of scope for anecdotal posts that are at least more interesting than just me, being me.
I think that abiding by that should keep me (you'll forgive the pun considering where I now live) on the straight and narrow.
* Important note: 'on here' is what we would technically term 'entirely inaccurate'. I'm moving to a new URL for the term of my life as a resident of The City By The Bay. I figure, new location in real life, new location in blog life. I'm currently tweaking the new home, so the next posting here will consist of a big 'Go Here' notice.