“Well the good news, we like the book so much we’re doubling the number of colour pages. The bad news, you’re gonna have to pull your finger out and create some extra content to fill them. Okay? Great, we’ll leave you to it.

Oh yeah, one more thing, it needs to look good set opposite the work of Robert Hodgin. S’that okay? Goooood.”

This, plus a few rejected covers, just added to my flickr stream.

I remember, so clearly, my motives for buying this book. It astounds me that there was a time in my life, not very long ago, when I actually thought an 800 page Russian classic was something worth devoting my evenings to. This was, of course, before Kid A came along and blew both the need and desire for such value-for-money pastimes out the window. I’d already spent most of my twenties reading works of “quality” literature, and watching “important” cinema (the popular definition of which only occasionally matched my own). These days, by the end of the day, I barely have the mental strength to follow the adventures of Batman. But in this I am stupidly happy.

You see, happy families are all alike, which is why they make not only for boring novels and boring blog posts, but they also make for boring people. I’m sorry dear friends, but there are few things more boring than hearing parents talk about their kids. I know this because I have to listen to myself doing it all the time. I’m pretty sure the death of our social life post-parenthood is only in part down to the cost of babysitters, it is also because friends can no longer bear to be trapped across a pub table from us when we’ve had a few drinks and start getting sentimental about the littleuns.

The stories we love only ever end with happy families. If there is one at the beginning you know it is about to be blown apart to give the protagonist something to get upset about. A good tale needs conflict, misery and unsatisfied needs. The happy family is without these. Which is why you only ever see them on TV as something to aspire to in an advert.

If you follow my Twitter you might occasionally enjoy my cynical moaning about the little buggers for comic effect, but on these hot summer afternoons, playing in the back garden, I’m lost to my own of these ubiquitous happy clans. My mental state is that dumb bliss I spent much of the nineties failing to simulate with narcotics (which, by no coincidence, makes for similarly boring people).

These are happy days in the Pearson house. Which is why, for your sakes, I promise I’ll try my best not to write about them any further.

Finally, my book has a cover.

One day, when I’m feeling particularly grumpy, I’ll write a blog post detailing the battle I have had with my (otherwise sane) publishers for a half-decent cover to wrap my words in, including images of some of the horrors that were proposed at various stages. But for now my mood is sunny, as I’m really happy with the one we’ve ended up with.

Naturally, being generative, I have several hundred wildly varying iterations of the cover image. Feasibly, every copy could have had a uniquely generated cover image, but I fear my publishers would have had suffered some form of prolapse had I suggested such an idea.

No release date quite yet (I’d expect it late Autumn), but the “early access” program should be rolling out any day now, if you are that desperate to have a peek inside. And, in slightly related news, 100 Abandoned Artworks is back from its little holiday. There is quite a backlog from my few months of writing, so yesterday I queued up 21(!) fresh generative scribbles, 17 of which include source code for the plundering. I am allowing them to trickle out one every five days, which should keep it going way into September/October. Schedule started yesterday with 71: Super Spiral.

Eightball #22 (Icehaven) Daniel Clowes 2001

Who knew the smile of Gordon Brown could be such a beautiful thing? After thirteen years in power, culminating in the intense three part drama of the televised debates, we had become over-familiar with Gordon’s “TV smile“, a cartoon contortion so unnatural and forced it looked almost painful. So to see, for the first time, the genuine joy on his face in this photograph bought a lump to my throat.

The photo is one of a series taken by a Guardian photographer Martin Argles documenting his final hours as Prime Minister last week, just before handing over to a waxwork phallus who was now claiming the job having won 36.1% of the popular vote. Behind Gordon, figuratively, is the job; over his shoulder are two of the men who may succeed him as Labour Party leader. Before him, and embraced by him, is his immediate future; some long overdue time with his two boys.

I was only dimly aware that Brown even had children, it is to his honour that they hadn’t been paraded out as electioneering assets during a campaign which, more than ever before, was fought on the message boards of mumsnet.com. By comparison, David Cameron wrung every drop out of the unborn foetus he liked to ferry around with him.

Gordon’s two kids are roughly the same ages as my own boys. I miss my boys while I’m out the room, so seeing this photo really hit home what a shitty stick any leader is struck with. I could never say I loved my country more than I loved my family; whether I should feel pride or shame in that I don’t know, but I think it goes without saying that Gordon’s evident joy at the relinquishment of responsibility, and the opportunity to, for the first time, get to see his boys grow up, is very deserved. Particularly remembering that, during his time as chancellor, there was a first Brown child, who never got as far as her first birthday.

Despite my political leanings being more toward the Liberals these days, I believe history will be kind to Gordon Brown’s legacy. He steered HMS Britain through some very stormy waters, rather than just catching a swelling wave and riding it home like Blair did in his first term. But, as Iraq, and the Digital Economy Bill proved, when an administration starts to listen to lobbyists more than the people who elected it, the time had come for them to go.

I am cautiously optimistic about the new boyishly handsome civil partnership we now have leading our big gay village. If we have to have a Tory in charge I’d rather it was one so vain and desperate to be popular that he will actually attempt to win the favour of the electorate, rather than just obeying the lords, financiers, and newspaper magnates who gave him his slender lead. Although the idea of multi-millionaire expenses fiddler, George Osborn as chancellor, in such an unsteady economic climate fills me with fear, and may already be the first firm flush of a country about to disappear down the toilet.

Seeing the shiny faced smarm of Cameron, next to the youthful eagerness of Clegg, recalling also the maniacal grin of Gordon’s predecessor Blair, it makes me wonder if we will remember Brown as the last of a certain breed of UK Prime Minister, those with camera unfriendly faces. There is no sane reason for a leader to be required to look good on TV, and, as Gordon proved, some faces shouldn’t be made to smile. Not until there is actually something to smile about.

This is what my Frosti video ended up as. An experiment done in an afternoon has turned out to have a decent pair of legs on it. FutureDeluxe are the folk responsible for turning my austere little sketch into something so sexy.

The original Frosti (see here) is also now one of two films I have in competition at the Alys Beach Digital Graffiti festival next month.

I share the mathematics and methodology behind Frosti in the book, which I’ve now finished (first draft anyway). Hopefully I’ll be able to share with you a release date for this very soon.

LinkedIn represents everything I hate about our box-ticking, tie-wearing, caffeine-addicted soulless capitalist machine – the teat we all suckle to feed our children/mortgages (/narcissism/drug habits/… delete as appropriate). And, ultimately, as someone who only ever takes full-time work for the nihilistic joy of quitting when someone looks at me the wrong way, LinkedIn is utterly useless to me. At least FaceBook has a point (keeping in touch with people you can’t be bothered keeping in touch with).

But when I found myself considering the A word, I knew it was time to get off the bus. Despite occasionally doing work that I call “art”, and writing a book with “art” in the title, and doing the kind of stuff that could only be called useful if it were to cover some discoloured paintwork on a gallery wall, I would never use the A word. And I was only being forced to consider that as job title as a way around the inflexibility of LI’s imagination-free way of ordering its human cattle.

“Artist” is an entirely useless term. Everyone is an artist. To call yourself an artist is about as meaningful and descriptive as saying you breathe air, or that you “work with computers”, i.e. it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t. “Painter”, “Musician”, “Interaction Designer”, “Programmer”, etc; these all have meaning. But “artist”, on it’s own, is meaningless. This is why, whenever I see “artist” as someone’s job description, even those who I respect and whose work I admire, I subconsciously read it as “wanker”. “Art” is something we all do, but only the most perverse individuals like to advertise the fact. Much like masturbation.

Every scribble, gesture, utterance, movement or expression we make can be art if we decide to call it so. The route we take to work is art. The last tweet you wrote: art. Every stool we leave in the cistern of life can mean something to someone. So to say that you are an “artist”, by which you are saying your output is more “art” than the next fool, just screams WANKER.

This in mind, those of you who are hanging on to your LinkedIn accounts, perhaps you might consider changing your current job title to “wanker”. It is not only refreshing, iconoclastic, eyecatching and indicative of a “GSOH”, but is also, frankly, probably more honest that whatever you currently have in that slot.

Being in French, it’s kinda difficult to tell what they are saying about my work. So I asked Babelfish:

Matt Pearson, alias Zenbullet, programmer in Brighton the day, is explorer in “abandoned” creation the night. He asserts this term of “abandonment” on two accounts. “I experienced my programs the night and gives up them, with the clean of term, front direction to be wearied about it. In addition, I approach these creations ‘with abandonment’, without restriction nor inhibition.” Its work, which raises of art generated hair, consists in using mathematical algorithms to produce random forms that model Matt and that it divides on line, thus opening them with other creativities. It does not expose, but dream to make use of a webcam and projectors for other projects.

The writing hasn’t been done entirely in a bubble for the last few months. The book has been through a review process, and a number of people have read various drafts. The feedback has been mostly very positive, although not entirely. Obviously, the more savage the criticism the more useful it is to me, but so far there has been nothing to make me tear it up and drag it to the roaring fire icon on my desktop.

Soon the book will be made available as part of MEAP, The Manning Early Access Program, which will give readers the opening chapters for free, and encourage feedback which may influence the rest of book. And if you pre-order it you will continue to receive chapters in this way as they are approved ahead of publication. There is already a green paper, a 10 page introduction, available as a free download here.

The title is now Generative Art: A Practical Guide Using Processing. I don’t have a cover to show you yet, as this is one element that has been proving a bit of a battleground. I’m so grateful to the various authors I spoke to before agreeing a deal who all advised me to ensure any contract I signed gave me some kind of say in the cover. Something a first time author might just assume to have, but is apparently quite rare.

Cover aside, the content is coming together nicely. The writing is shaping itself into two main threads, a mix of tutorial and theory. The didactive sections teach Processing with a gentle touch, from “hello world” through to OOP, maintaining a focus on the creativity. The theoretical thread complements this, allowing me to explore some of the crazier tangents that may be familiar to readers of this blog, putting the art of programming into a real world context that I always find absent from coding books. There are also plenty of pretty pictures too of course.

The main thrust of the book, my intention anyway, is to make Generative Art something that is both accessible and fun. I believe that the artistic potential of creative coding is barely off the ground yet. It is still stifled by being too exclusive a skill, the main work being done by a rare subset of talented individuals who have an aesthetic sensibility intersecting with hardcore coding skills. Generative Art is only really going to get interesting once it is more widely practised, once the programming can become more intuitive and naturalistic, and less of a barrier. If my book makes even a small step in this direction I will consider it a success.

The scientists keep asking: “is evolution over?” Such a stupid question.

If our society has stopped evolving toward perfecting our survival, instead it selects toward an aesthetic ideal. Material wealth is the measuring stick, and success in this realm is mostly governed by privilege, personality, looks and, occasionally, fashionable skills. It is survival of the prettiest, the boldest and the most charming.

The only problem with these ideals is that they are artificial, they are only relevant within a human perspective of the world, a perspective somewhat warped by our vastly overdeveloped brains. These measures mean nothing to our environment and the elements that shape it.

Deciding if evolution is over is akin to fearing the “end of the world”. The end of the world is not the issue, only the end of human life upon it. We needn’t question if evolution has finished, only if it has finished with us. Our only fear should be that, as a species, we may already be beautiful and dead.

I usually delight in creating unpredictability and disorder in code, setting off processes that are never the same twice, making them as surprising to me as they may be any other observer. But with this one I opted to try creating something perfectly deterministic instead, which I did by ensuring that anything that changes over time has it’s variation calculated relative to the frame number.

This means, unless I change the variables before I kick it off, the animation will be the same every time I generate it. It might be argued that this means it isn’t quite as “generative” as an unpredictable algorithm (as far as you can say any logical process is unpredictable). But it makes my life easier by enabling me to use tricks like edit points, and looping.

Frosti, above, has no edits, but loops at the 1m15s point.

Robert Anselmi is a hugely talented musician. He creates beautifully complex and understated electronica under the moniker Phi Sequence, while also demystifying the dark magicks behind his art in his Reason 101 blog (taking the same share-alike approach to electronic music that my abandoned art site has to generative art).

I’ve greatly enjoyed collaborating with him recently, on a generative video piece to promote the release of his new ambient-glitch EP. I can’t post the video quite yet though as the EP doesn’t get it’s iTunes release until next month (although it is already available from CD Baby)

The cover, above, uses my artwork. It’s from the same fractal I posted here last week.

———–
UPDATE 12/3 – the aforementioned video is now on Vimeo:

Little generative system I’ve been playing with. Not really sure what to do with it. Suggestions welcome. (STROBE WARNING)

This time last month everyone was compiling their lists of the year and lists of the decade. But I wasn’t playing, and when it came to music I just lazily directed folks to my lastfm stats – the warts-and-all representation of what I’ve actually been listening to since 2004, untainted by any consideration toward “cool”. With the help of scrobblepod my lastfm account tracks more or less everything I listen to, be it on laptop, spotify or either of my iPods (how does one manage with less than two iPods?). Discounting vinyl, CDs (which I never listen to now), 6Music and the videos I watch on NME.tv pretty much all bases are covered.

But the real joy of stats is visualisation. The image above is a slice of my listening habits in the latter half of 2009, beautifully rendered by http://lastgraph.aeracode.org/. This is only one of many free tools on the web, if you want to explore further this list is a good place to start.

Rudy, as part of the resident savvy child collective in our house, acts as my personal futurologist. The way he interacts with the world is the way the world will be when his generation is running it. Rudy fails to understand why all content isn’t on demand, why every screen is not a touchscreen, why his favourite media is not available on every device. And seeing him, after lapping up Decode, attempt to prod, wave at or talk to other inanimate exhibits around the rest of the V&A, I suspect he will now be questioning the relevance of any artwork that doesn’t involve, reflect or interact with the viewer.

Interaction; with our machines, objects, materials, environments, and each other, will soon become something that is simply expected. And anything that we can’t communicate with will have decreasing relevance over the coming decades. Those who snobbishly dismiss interactive art as being “something for kids” should remember that soon it will be these very same kids who will be making the decisions as to what is and isn’t art.

Getting cultures to work together seems to be the tricky one.

There is a lot of good in the bill, don’t get me wrong, in fact it is only the parts on copyright and file-sharing where it falls down. But the proposals in this area are so unbelievably, insanely, dangerously wrong that they over-shadow everything else.

The problem is twofold:

1. Firstly, the powers the government are awarding themselves, to shut off internet access to anyone even suspected of file-sharing, are just plain draconian. And placing pressures on ISPs to enforce them will mean many, many innocents will be punished by threatened service providers forced to err on the side of caution.

Removal of one’s internet connection, in an age where most people bank, shop and connect with their friends online is a severity of punishment seemingly understated. It is certainly far beyond the crime, no matter how serious the copyright infringement.

2. Secondly, the gun is pointing in the wrong direction. The aim of the bill is to safeguard Digital Britain’s future. Not it’s past. The weighting towards the needs of copyright holders, at the expense of the new generation of digital media practitioners (the one’s most likely to be cut off, as their net usage might be greater, and less typical, than their neighbours), serves only to protect a fading status quo, not stimulate the new digital economy.

To most young digital practitioners the problem is obscurity, not a failure to maximise their income. Some digital content owners, myself included, are actually in favour of their work being distributed for free via file sharing. They are willing to adapt to the new “abundancy” economics, because they know scarcity economics no longer have the same relevance they once did.

The software industry and the music/film industry face the same issues regarding their ownership of digital content, yet it is only the latter who seem to be struggling. The (younger) software industry is coming up with ever new ways of thinking about digital economies, none of which is reflected in the Bill. Open Source, for example, may suffer. One consequence on insisting everything online comes with a price tag, is that it gets increasingly difficult to give stuff away for free.

At the time of writing the “Don’t Disconnect Us” petition stands at 27,000 signatures. Which isn’t bad (the successful Alan Turing petition had 32,108), but when you compare it to Lily Allen’s (fast becoming the poster girl for copyright confusion) million+ followers on Twitter, it seems but a drop in an ocean of popular ignorance.

Mine is only one opinion, and one vote, in this mess. But, if you are a UK resident, I can only urge you to consider yourself where you would imagine your digital life to be in ten years time, and if this bill serves your needs. And if you disagree with Mandelson’s vision, express your concerns now while it can still make a difference.

This is my projection from White Night last month. I was hit by bloody Swine Flu so never got to see it live, so repeated thanks both to Sarah Bird and the BANG team for organising, and J4mie Matthews for videoing it.

For the source code, this is how it breaks down:

• intro/outro – Smoking Ribbon. Source code here.
• 0:10-1:20 – AbArt 59. Source code here.
• 1:20-1:45 – Disco. Source code here.
• 1:45-2:30 – Noise Garden. Doesn’t show too well in the vid, but you can see it better (and download the source) here.
• 2:30-3:25 – Orbitals. I haven’t added this to 100AbArts (yet) because I’ve rather overused it in videos recently, so a bit sick of it. But the source code is very similar to this.

I like to open source my generative art code because I would never be so bold as to declare my work the definitive rendering of any particular algorithm. I want others to join me in exploring these ideas and hopefully improve upon my work.

The 100 works at http://abandonedart.org are not intended to be a gallery, they are meant to be a recipe book. So, please, don’t just look at this video and say “pah, I could do better”. Take my source code and prove it.

Here’s my proposal. On New Years Eve 2009 we close Facebook. Hermetically seal it and drop it in a data mine somewhere, as a noughties time capsule not to be dug up for a minimum of twenty years, when it can be gently mocked on a Channel 4 nostalgia show. We’ll look back on it and laugh at the primitive, puerile crap we used to do back then.

Ok, I still log in perhaps once a week, but I feel a bit dirty every time I do. Even only three years old, it feels hideously clunky and archaic now. And ever since the redesign it has felt to me like visiting my childhood bedroom after suffering a stroke. A place once familiar, now slightly twisted. Even so, I’d now find it difficult to sever all these tenuous connections I have re-established with people I’d once lost touch with (probably for a reason).

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is doing the rounds at the moment, promoting his new book “Delete”, on the value of digital forgetting, how our data trails don’t go away and the dangers thereof. I have talked about this before, and have myself been a victim of private data being used against me, but I still think, having not read the book (uninformed opinion alert) that it isn’t of too much concern.

Although, one thing that does worry me is the effect services such as Facebook have on adolescence and personal development. You can always tell when a Facebook user is of school or college age, because they have a minimum of two or three hundred friends. We wise, cynical old farts might (jealously) insist the majority of the people we knew at this age were probably, at best, acquaintances, but it doesn’t work like that when you’re a kid. It is only when you move on, leave home, go to university, that you grow beyond this stage and start to discover who you really are, and move in more exclusive circles.

Room For Re-invention

An essential part of that personal growth is re-invention. The first thing most young people did when they went to Uni in my day is go through their goth stage, punk stage, emo stage, dope-fiend stage, or whatever was on the fringes that year. This is because for the first time they had the freedom to reinvent themselves, and experiment (and make mistakes) with finding their personal style and identity. This is an important process; it is what separates the individuals from the sheep. It is those without the fear to find themselves who develop both the idiosyncrasy and, more importantly, confidence in that idiosyncrasy, to go out there and change the world.

But surely this is so much more difficult to do while you retain all these virtual connections to the people you went to school with, the people who used to make fun of you of every time you had a haircut, or a new coat. School is all about conformity; that is how the social structure of the playground works. And so is the real world too, if we allow it to be that way. If we enter the world with a status-quo reinforcing web of social connections already in place, it must be so much harder to branch out or grow beyond it.

I may be worrying about nothing. I recently re-read a 10 year old tech-sociology book (for the book, everything is for the book these days) which made a very big deal about how content on demand is going to mean the importance of the 8pm prime time TV slot is going to be lost. The answer that time has given to this problem is: so what? It is simply the way we operate today, from within the entrappings of social media. Hopefully, the iconoclasts of the 21st Century will find their own ways of dealing with it.

It was quite a big deal for me. Public speaking is a long way from my natural habitat, and the prospect of speaking to 1000+ at what is easily the most impressive hall in Brighton, was, I’ll be frank, utterly terrifying. But I got through it, and actually enjoyed it once I was on stage.

For the benefit of those who saw it, the Generative Art blog I was talking about was not this one, but 100 Abandoned Artworks, which is where you can find the source code for all I showed (anything that isn’t there at the mo will be in the coming months).

Much love has to go out to the other presenters I was sharing a session with too. Great slots, all. Below is the running order with links to their work where I have them. There wasn’t one without something interesting to say, so I’ll be keeping an eye on their work and hopefully keeping in touch with a few of them too:

Aron Hallborg
Paul Croft
Chris Black
Trevor Boyle
Robert Turrall

Matt Pearson (me)
Jon Howard
Conrad Winchester
Frank Reitberger
Wim Vanhenden

Jolyon Russ
Nick Kuh
Ian Moreira
Michiel van der Ros
The nice young Kiwi lady whose name I didn’t catch, sorry.

Bartek Drozdz
Sean Randles
Bram Plessers
Andrew Fitzgerald
Iain Lobb

I’ve been to all four of the FOTB conferences, and I reckon this was probably the best one yet, mainly because of the widened range of topics. I saw multiple sessions on openFrameworks, Processing, Film, Sound and Web Design, and only a handful that were Flash specific. It was a great outside-the-box approach. Highlights for me were Joel Gethin Lewis’s inspired session, Jeremy Thorp’s news visualisations, Mario Klingemann’s mathart, and listening to a coding hero of mine (we nerds have heroes too yerknow) Karsten Schmidt.

For the rest of this week I will be de-teching a little and only speaking languages that human beings understand.

It’s been over three months since I was first invited to pitch an idea, and has taken a lot of negotiation to get a contract I was happy with. But rather groovily I have managed to get consent to release a significant portion of the book under a Creative Commons license, so some chapters can be reproduced and distributed as widely as the winds will carry them. This means I will be able to publish large extracts here as we get closer to publication, as will anyone else who wants to.

Already I’ve got a list of people I need to thank for getting my idea this far, but I’ll save it for the book. But to those who know who you are; cheers to you, you and especially you, I feed on your enthusiasm.

Watch this space, and my twitter, for further updates.

MC Escher’s Relativity gloriously rendered in Lego by Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu. Full size version here. Read the ‘making of..’ here (they made “widespread use of SNOT – Studs Not On Top – techniques” apparently.)

See also their other Lego Eschers:
Waterfall
Ascending and Descending
Belvedere
Balcony

But one way in which Twitter is killing blogs is this new form of lazy writing, whereby a blogger just collects the oh-so-witty things they have said on Twitter that week and calls that a blog post. I won’t hyperlink to any of you, but you know who you are.

So, hypocritical bandwagoneer that I am, I thought I would allow myself this indulgence as I hit my 1000th Tweet milestone. A good time for a review my last year and a half of micro-narcissism (March 2008 is when I first succumbed, which was late, but still six months before Stephen Fry). Surely out of 1000 carefully constructed pithy missives there were at least a few 140-character gems.

I can’t believe my first three-word tweet had a spelling mistake …

surcoming to Twitter.
Fri Mar 14 15:33:24 +0000 2008

I’m finding I’ll buy anything the new French President is trying to
sell us as long as he has his wife standing next to him. Tue Apr 01 10:24:00 +0000 2008

Munching marmite on toast. The zinc helps quell my homicidial urges
Wed May 14 11:12:26 +0000 2008

conjecture: Public Enemy had an entirely white fanbase, all of whom believed the band had an entirely black fanbase.
Mon Jun 09 14:49:43 +0000 2008

conjecture: Today’s senior web programmers all started on ZX Spectrums, while the web designers all had Commodore 64s.
Mon Jun 16 10:10:23 +0000 2008

Sending out some love to @curious_debs, who is carrying my second
child, while looking after my first, and doing a splendid job of it. Wed Aug 20 11:43:46 +0000 2008

The Geri Halliwell diet and workout – you too could have a body like
mine. For those who aspire to looking like a weird muscular child. Thu Sep 04 11:00:54 +0000 2008

Overheard in the local – old codger trying to explain who Thomas the
Tank Engine was: “It’s like Starlight Express, but for kids”
Sat Sep 06 19:35:00 +0000 2008

Unaltered be to appears reality, live gone has collider CERN the.
Wed Sep 10 10:01:46 +0000 2008

Loving how every report of the Channel Tunnel fire I have heard feels the need to point out it was at the “French end”.
Fri Sep 12 14:29:05 +0000 2008

Caught a whiff of CKOne on the tube today and was briefly transported back to the late nineties.
Wed Oct 08 11:22:51 +0000 2008

@CulturalSnow Godel in a nutshell: We cannot prove 2+2 always =4. Any system above a basic level of sophistication will always be flawed.
Thu Oct 09 08:56:05 +0000 2008

I need some new swear-words.
Tue Oct 14 14:34:44 +0000 2008

@antikewl You don’t know how close our firstborn came to being named “Thor”. Seriously.
Thu Oct 23 09:54:42 +0000 2008

Still not exactly clear on what a “hockey mom” is. Great name for a band though.
Thu Nov 06 15:14:23 +0000 2008

Can’t believe there are gentlemen out cottaging on Dukes’ Mound in this weather. Have to admire their dedication. Don’t they have jobs?
Wed Dec 10 14:38:43 +0000 2008

Realising, for the first time, that Friendly Fires and Fleet Foxes are two separate bands.
Fri Jan 02 22:43:54 +0000 2009

Just bought 3 Stewart Little DVDS, rather than have to explain how
things seen on telly over xmas cannot always be viewed again on demand.
Thu Jan 08 14:21:53 +0000 2009

@shardcore Jeff Minter, Matthew Smith, Mel Croucher, Lloyd Mangram. Actually, I have no idea what any of these look like, then or now.
Tue Jan 13 20:34:23 +0000 2009

Staring at long list of [NOT MY CLIENT]s films while I wait for an
upload and thinking [NOT MY CLIENT] haven’t half done some shit.
Fri Jan 16 16:01:42 +0000 2009

Yay, the final day of the Bush regime. We should all invade our nearest oil-producing country in honour.
Tue Jan 20 09:29:35 +0000 2009

Just had my guitar playing described as “disgusting”.
Sun Feb 01 13:46:35 +0000 2009

If I had simpler tastes I wouldn’t waste so much time keeping up with
obscure bands/films etc. Then I might get round to fixing that blind
Wed Feb 04 10:00:10 +0000 2009

Reiterating @edsilv, one thing Twitter teaches you is that the lives of
your mates are so much more interesting than your fave celebs.
Mon Feb 09 09:04:13 +0000 2009

Croydon Ikea Car Park in heavy sleet – can you imagine anything more beautiful?
Thu Feb 12 23:16:37 +0000 2009

@edsilv According to the Sex and the City film, women don’t care about brains anymore, they just need huge walk-in wardrobes.
Sat Feb 14 09:25:49 +0000 2009

Can’t find anything on the CBeebies website explaining what happened to that girl’s arm.
Mon Feb 16 18:01:31 +0000 2009

@leifkendall Her family must be [sniff] so… proud… This is the house mummy’s cancer built.
Tue Feb 17 10:35:43 +0000 2009

We’re now five days overdue and both nervous wrecks. Getting rather eager to meet my second son now.
Wed Feb 18 08:43:11 +0000 2009

Full of love.
Mon Feb 23 00:31:11 +0000 2009

Ok, that’s enough. That last one was Tweet No.530 – the birth of my second son.

The full history of my first year and a half of mindless chatter can be viewed here. If you want to play with the Twitter API, start here. If you want to hear my next 1000 micro-brainfarts, you can follow me here. And if you are wondering if this is the most self-indulgent blog post I have ever written, the answer is probably “yes”.

I have to confess I have only ever seen one episode of Britain’s Got Talent. I say this not out of snobbery, but in admission of what a poorly researched knee-jerk rant this post is going to be. The only reason I made the effort to endure an hour of this insanely popular shitefest was Chris TT’s awesome appraisal in his Morning Star column, which gets right to the nub of what the program is about; power games and homogenising public opinion.

“It is a parallel to the corporatist vision of the owner not just possessing everything but possessing everyone’s values too and overseeing what is regarded as acceptable.”

While BGT may appear to be new nadir of prole patronisation as entertainment, I have to say I have seen worse. Probably the ugliest example I can recall was ITVs Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway, (”a cross between Jim’ll Fix It and Dragons Den“) where worthy causes juggled, danced, or gurned for our entertainment, then held out cloth caps to a panel of millionaires, in the hope they would toss them a few scraps. It was truly appalling, and not just because the panel included loathsome twat Lord Archer (I struggle to find a kinder adjective).

But I have to take issue with Chris on one point, or more accurately two words, in his article – “The Apprentice“. This programme cannot be dumped in the same shitbox as Britain’s Got Talent, Big Brother, 10 Years Younger and American Idol. Chris has questioned how so many of his seemingly intelligent friends are devoted to this crass reality show. I am one of this faithful, so allow me to stage a defence.

The crucial difference is context. The candidates on The Apprentice are not dreamers with a desire to find an audience for their meagre talents. They are comically extreme devotees of the Capitalist dream. These people are whoring themselves for the ‘prize’ of commuting to Essex for the rest of their lives. The ‘winner’ gets a nine to five job where they can continue to kiss their hairy master’s arse FOREVER.

The contestants on Britain’s Got Talent are victims. It is truly tragic that the only platform they have found that will allow their decidedly average faces on the gogglebox is one where they are manipulated and abused in some kind of emotional pornography.

Whereas the comedy we get from the candidates on The Apprentice is purely down to their own warped ambition, misguided self-belief and unshakable faith in a capitalist road to happiness. These people are exactly the kind of freaks our society SHOULD be ostracising. They should be in the stocks to be ridiculed, as to mock them is to make their shallow capitalist ambitions less socially acceptable.

The Apprentice is a capitalist comedy, it one of the few antibodies in the face of our biggest cultural disease. It is also bloody good telly.