Category: Uncategorized

What’s the best two lines of song lyrics you can think of that will fit engraved on an iPod?

None of this “Happy Birthday” crap. It’s got to fit in the 27 character limit, be two contiguous song lines, and no swearing, cause they won’t let you. But a good pair of lines, as you’ll have to live with them for the life of the beast.

An easy one: “it’s oh so quiet/it’s oh so still”. Or maybe “rameses! colossus!/rameses! colossus!”. Along the same lines: “there is joy in repetition/there is joy in repetition”. Or… “i palindrome i/man o nam”? Enjoy. And if you signed up for one click purchasing, it’s your own damn fault.

Having trouble writing? Try a short story in which the characters share names with the last five “people” who spammed you. For me, right now, that means Joe Whitaker, Jean Hood, Lien Keira, Cornelius Hawkins, and Marco Means.

Maybe I should go to bed now.

Wonder Boys is one of those films that makes you want to be a writer, to create something. Sometimes after I’ve seen or read something like this, I wonder if I’m truly a creative, an artist, or just a person who creates things because the techniques are interesting.

Then I wonder, is the distinction too fine to extract a judgement? How many authors or filmmakers today started out because they could construct a sentence or frame a shot? Is web design a coding chore or a creative act? And I figure it doesn’t matter. Everything’s a sliding scale, what you make it. If you claim you’re an artist, you’re an artist. Anything you create, by virtue of the process, is better than numbing yourself in front of a TV, drifting towards death.

(Offtopic query: Where should I submit the word-free airport animation I finished recently? A contest? Just on this site? Suggestions welcome.)

I should be in bed. And write more. And keep in touch with friends. Get that animation that’s sitting finished on the hard drive out there.

And back it all up.

For some reason, blogger.com’s busy; I’m writing this in OS X’s TextEdit. Time for a bitching session – what else is a blog for? I’ve been too busy recently finishing Maya Fiennes’s website to really do much else, but then I’ve never been much of a diary keeper, so the blog lies fallow. Oh well.

Anyway, back to the bitching. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7, final season, really, really good. And here in the UK, if you want to watch it, your options are few.

1. Subscribe to Sky One (minimum 12 months, Murdoch-owned) and see it a while ago. It finished sometime earlier this year. With ads, some censorship, and maybe not in widescreen – not sure what their policy is these days. Certainly they never used to show anything in widescreen. And since Buffy is made in widescreen and we’ve got a widescreen TV, I damn well want to see it in widescreen.

2. Wait until it’s on BBC. Shown in widescreen, ad free, three nights a week, but even more heavily censored because of the time slot. And this year, no late night uncensored repeats. Not until 2004.

3. Watch it on VHS. Shit quality. Not widescreen. Costs money.

4. Watch it on DVD. Good quality. Widescreen. Unfortunately, because of the appalling business practices of FOX in the UK, the DVDs haven’t been released yet, and won’t be until sometime in 2004. So the crap quality VHS tapes are out, and the DVDs are held back. The only reason I can see for this is so they can sell it twice to the fans who just have to have it right now. Fuck the people who actually care about how they see something for the first time, or who don’t want to watch it over and over. No other new series being released now has similar format restrictions – why should Buffy fans be held to ransom for corporate greed?

No wonder there’s a huge increase in internet-based video piracy. If the studios aren’t going to even offer what people want to buy, they deserve everything they get.

Oh, that goes for the music industry too. I have avoided and will continue to avoid buying CDs that are copy protected. I refuse to be tied to one disc (scratchable, stealable) when I should be able to rip it into the computer, transfer it to an iPod or whatever, and listen to it where I want to. And when you state on the back of the packaging that your protected WMA format audio (not what I want anyway) won’t work on a Mac at all, then you’ve just lost yourself a sale. The CD isn’t too expensive, the assumption that I’m a pirate is not something I’m going along with. So yes, thanks, I will buy a pirate copy in a bar instead.

I have an account with a bank in Australia, and recently, through some form I’ve filled out, they’ve discovered my London address. Unfortunately, the UK address has made it into their system. And they’ve sent a credit card statement out with the UK address, through their standard local mail system, with no postcode, and without “UK” written anywhere.

I wouldn’t know about this at all if at least some staff at Australia Post and at Royal Mail weren’t very clever. Without any demand for extra postage, the letter from Australia was delivered, with only a house, street and number in London to get it here.

Test your postal service today!