Had a lot of questions about the new theme so here are a few answers.
It’s a variation on a pro theme called Sketch’d. I say variation when I actually mean ‘broken’. Straight out of the box the theme does some very nifty stuff that creates a blog somewhere between the traditional kind and more magazine-style blogs that seem to be in vogue just now. Being old fashioned and a moron I took it apart, snapped off the cool bits and kind of blu-tacked it together again.
All the bleeding and badly stitched code is down to me and not the guys who built it.
It’s the first WP theme I’ve paid money for after years of swapping out and tinkering with some very cool free ones. The inspiration came from Christian. It just never occurred to me to pay for something until he did. I’m easily lead.
I’m not sure what the blog is called anymore. It’s been Visible Monsters for the longest time (but I’ve also got that space to do something with at some point). I guess Sizemore covers it for now. I have older posts, not archived here, that date back to 2002. I’m still mulling over whether it’s worth importing all that stuff here.
The line I’m not a field agent, I read books is from one of the best movies of the 70’s: Three Days of the Condor. It’s been a tag-line here for a while, ever since Saying The Wrong Thing Since 1972 picked up a life of its own out in the real world.
The Hunter S Thompson quote is from a letter he wrote to Keith Stroup about the lawyers who got him out of some jams back in the 90’s. It’s republished in Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream. It just jumped out at me as something important given the social media world I now find myself a part of. I’ll be writing about that gang aspect quite a bit I expect.
The line This won’t hurt is the final line of Hunter’s suicide note. It’s something I aim to do something else with too.
Categories need an overhaul as does most of the sidebar content. I’ll get to that. Also gonna have a few standalone pages built under those tabs at the top and yeah the About page is also out of date. The fact that Max Rockatansky is looking after my 404 page makes up for this.
And then there’s the bunny. Go track down Pani Poni Dash.
I still dip in to Boing Boing from time to time, but only when I get the same sharp pang I get when I realise it’s been ages since I saw my grandmother. Then I realise she died in 1999 and go back to shooting people in the face on GTA4. Likewise I look at Boing Boing and think that while the old girl isn’t quite ready for a toe tag she may be better off in a home.
But that’s fine. Cory and co are as big as you can get online - which was recently underlined with the kerfuffle over Xeni unpublishing stuff - and they obviously still fill a gap or two. Warren even went as far as saying we should leave them to do all the curating for us, like they’re WALL-E and we don’t get enough exercise and er… ok I see his point:
They have the time, they have the money, they have the setup, they have the audience and they have the momentum of nearly a decade in the job. Nobody needs another linkblog like that. There are already thousands of them. The job of curation is being taken care of. Look ahead.
I couldn’t agree more with the second part. Go read the whole post, it’s worth chewing over.
But I like keeping my hand in with the curating from time to time and to be frank since I started using g-reader the stuff that finally pops up on Boing Boing seems maddeningly dusty. For example, there was this recent find to tie in with the Bat. Great stuff… but also pointed out by The Ephemerist almost exactly a year ago.
Now it’s great that more people are finally tuned in to the more lyrical version of Back to the Future’s theme music, but because so many people still feed their own link blogs from Boing Boing, Jill with the jack hammer is actually helping to populate the blogosphere [*spit*] with cloned posts. In my mind it’d be better if Boing Boing just went away.
Then Cory and co. could concentrate on their own stuff and maybe a bunch of fresh geeks will pick up the gauntlet. Right now there’s no real point because what Warren sees as a benefit (time, experience, money) can also add up to the equivalent of picking up your first baby sword in World of Warcraft only to run straight into some level 1006 bastardfuck who whittles you down to your virtual underwear and forces you to marry a chicken.
Note. I’ve never played a MMORPG. Or even typed it before.
Plus not everyone wants to or can create original content. And the flipside of all this is that I have quite a few readers each week who are brand new to this Interweb malarky and have not yet had the pleasure of being spoon fed by the Boingers. Or anyone else. Or had a go at the handle end of the spoon for that matter.
I dunno. BB just seems a little like season seven of a five season show.
Facial tattoos aren’t that scary, even when that guy with the NHS crutch and full prison-inked spiderweb on his face asks you for a light near Waterloo.
If Kirk has a tattoo it’s probably NO FAT CHICKS placed just above his groin.
Is it just me or does Bana looks more like one of the ‘bad kids’ from Heartbreak High.
Kirk is going to date rape Uhura.
Spock isn’t getting any.
Save us Scotty, you’re our only hope…
Edit: I just checked out the full cast list. There’s a bunch of young Kirks in the mix and a fair number of ‘Vulcan bullies’. I think I may just sit this one out. So far my favourite character is Tony the bartender.
I don’t normally just repost an entire blog entry from elsewhere, but this one is special. I’ve been avoiding all the Batfreak jism sticking to the Internets this week and I’m still only luke-warm to the idea of seeing The Dark Knight at all, even this didn’t rise much of a smile. Then Sean’s post popped up in my RSS reader:
Every superhero movie ever - including Hellboy 2, Iron Man, Superman 2, and the fantastic-looking Watchmen film coming soon to a theater near you - can suck Heath Ledgers dead cock. Screw giving the man an oscar, that would be way too nice a thing to give this performance. I want parents groups speaking out against it. I want copycats.
Seriously, it’s like A Clockwork Orange, but with less rape and more rocket propelled grenades.
I’m seeing it again.
Should probably go book some IMAX tickets… They did film this scene, right?
This website follows Bryony as she attempts to make the world’s first UGC zombie movie.
What’s a UGC movie?
UGC stands for User Generated Content. That means it’s a film that’s made entirely by contributions from the online community…
So what’s the BBC’s involvement?
The Zombie movie is entirely up to Bryony – we’re just following her as she makes it…
The Beeb are actually doing a bit more than that. By choosing to follow the project and committing to having a documentary by the end of it the BBC are in many ways legitimatising what Paperlillies is up to. At least in the eyes of BBC viewers who think YouTube is nothing but a place to watch old episodes of Doctor Who or ‘that video with the monkey’ (take your pick).
It’s an interesting step for a channel like BBC 3 and I think the correct one. Just recently I watched Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX and while I’ve always enjoyed his work and he’s obviously very in tune with the Internet this came across as a tad dated and way too obvious. Disturbingly he also suddenly looks a lot like Documentally.
The other show that promised to play in the world I live and work in was Delta Forever:
This was a pilot for a proposed show about an online community whose lives revolve around a very Harry Potterish series of novels. Some things the pilot got absolutely right (the Scottish character defending the original title of the first novel over the bastardised American version rang some serious bells for this Dark Materials fanboy), but the most obvious failure was the idea that these kids needed a visual cue to help them stand out as Internet nerds. The cast had to suffer a tedious amount of OTT makeup. Horrible to watch, which was a shame for the few good performances that got buried. But there was something there that to me at least warranted further viewing and I’d be interested to watch the concept develop if it gets picked up for a series.
That may of course have more to do with the pilot revolving around an advance geek screening of a film that the fans will either love or loathe. Something I have a certain familiarity with…
The zombie project though is an entirely fresher idea. First and foremost this is a project developed by an already popular online community member and something that was set in motion before the Beeb swung a beam on it. I think an organisation as big and respected as the BBC getting involved at this stage of an online madcap idea is very important and the payoff for everyone involved is accumulative.
There is of course the danger that if handled improperly the YouTubers will come off as a little irregular, but to survive on YouTube you need to be pretty thick-skinned so I’m not too worried with that angle. It should be win-win for the Beeb as this kind of thing makes them look web savvy at a time when they need a leg-up in that area. The worry is that they’ll cut corners on this in the way they have with the iPlayer (great concept, horrible realisation - note the two show links above now have nowhere to go which will now instead send you straight for a torrent).
What they could have on their hands is something as vital as say the upcoming We Are Wizards or at the very least an interesting companion piece to it. It also comes at a time when Joss Whedon is putting a fork in this space too.
Oddly enough this seems to be the summer for home-made zombie projects. I’ve been made aware of a small pile of them currently in production with budgets ranging from the very modest to the very respectable. This however is by far the most interesting. The plot for once is the least of my concerns as I’m far more interested in how a community comes together to pull this kind of project off.
It’s the kind of thing that was talked about a lot in the early days of Seesmic but it came to nothing. While some of my more succesful recent projects have been built in a similar way by finding the right people with the right skills in my own social media backyard (which handily stretches across the globe), but nothing quite on this scale.
Getting the right people together to land an interview with Stephen Spielberg is one thing. Beating him at his own game is quite another…
Toby Moore’s Cool Curve presentation is now online:
This is the presentation he gave both at the Tuttle and Reboot from an original concept worked out with David Terrar and David Tebbutt. The video is a cleaned-up version of this talk, but now filmed (properly) by Laura Kidd, further tweaked and distributed just about everywhere by Phil Cambell.
The content of the presentation has been refined through lots of feedback, but this is the first chance to put it in front of as wide an audience as possible.
I’ve been hanging out with the Cool Curve for a couple of months now, testing it on people, catching reactions to it and generally building up a picture of what it covers and where it still needs a little TLC. I’m very interested to track the feedback on this so if you can free up 20 minutes and a coffee please give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
At 19+ minutes it obviously needs editing down and I also think there’s a couple of natural pauses in the flow that will allow us to split the presentation up. The latter part regarding Chris Brogan’s “conversations are rivers” and how that should be developed feels like it’s going to grow into something that works as a stand alone piece. I’d love to see The Cool Curve refined a little more and given to the guys at Common Craft to play with.
That said, I’m a big fan of Toby’s drawing over powerpoint style and this makes a great jumping off point for conversation.
When I first started talking to DT and Sleepydog about the Cool Curve I was immediately struck by how my own creative (and not so creative) endeavours fitted within the structure. That’s something I want to discuss further as I’m not usually comfortable being pigeon-holed between two axis, but this is such a resilient little idea that it’s hard to dismiss, even for a contrary SOB like myself.
More to come once the video has been digested a little further… (it’s also up on Google Video and Vimeo)
