I wrote a wee piece about impostor syndrome for .net, and it’s made its way online.
The satirical website The Daily Mash has a great slogan on one of its T-shirts. “I’m brilliant,” it says, “and everyone else is an arse.” It’s the perfect motto for anyone working in a creative industry, because there’s a very good chance that they feel the exact opposite.
In 2011, BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2, a Usenet archive. “It’s the first time BT has been ordered to use its Cleanfeed porn-blocking system to block non-pornographic content,” I wrote at the time. “It won’t be the last… [this] turns ISPs into censors, and of course copyright infringement isn’t the only kind of content people would like to block. We’ve had calls to ban sites that espouse extreme political views, sites that promote anorexia, sites that discuss ways to commit suicide. If BT can block Usenet archives, why can’t it block everything that anybody thinks is unpleasant or undesirable – like WikiLeaks, or anti-Scientology sites, or anything that isn’t appropriate for under-fives?”
Inevitably, more blocks followed. The Pirate Bay is (in)effectively banned by UK ISPs. There are blocks on 1337x, Abmp3, BeeMP3, BitSnoop, Bomb-Mp3, eMp3World, ExtraTorrent, FileCrop, FilesTube, Monova, Mp3Juices, Mp3lemon, Mp3Raid, Mp3skull, NewAlbumReleases, Rapidlibrary, TorrentCrazy, TorrentDownloads, TorrentHound, Torrentreactor, and Torrentz, and many more.
And now, we’re going to start blocking things that the government thinks are unpleasant or undesirable. Today, The Guardian reports that “the government is to order broadband companies to block extremist websites” and identify content “deemed too dangerous for online publication.”
The proposed blocking will follow the same model as the blocking of illegal pornography – a model whose aims are obviously laudable but whose processes have attracted criticism over false positives (where legal content is wrongly identified and blocked) and secrecy. In effect, we’ll have a secret, unaccountable organisation looking at the internet and silently blocking “extremist” content.
What does “extremist” mean? Well, it means pretty much anything you want it to mean. Over the years, our governments’ definitions of extremist have included climate change protesters, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the anti-apartheid movement, animal rights activists, environmental activists and the Occupy movement. The word terrorism appears equally flexible, so for example it can be a synonym for journalism and used to detain the partners of journalists who embarrass the government, and it can be used to arrest students too.
I know it’s cliched to talk about slippery slopes, but when you can feel the ice underneath you and you’re shooting downwards, the phrase seems pretty accurate.
I got into New Model Army in Kilbirnie Library, in the late 1980s. I was going through a bit of a punk/new wave thing at the time, and the library’s collection of vinyl LPs included one whose cover was a painted leather jacket, the words “only stupid bastards take heroin” disguised but still recognisable on the shoulders. That’ll do me, I thought.
God knows how many times I played that record, or rather my illegally recorded cassette of it. It hasn’t aged particularly well, but then neither have I.
Lots of bands get described as quintessentially English – Blur, The Smiths, Pulp and so on – and I think it’s a shame that New Model Army don’t tend to get that kind of credit. Where famously English bands tend to be English in a metropolitan sense – chippy Mancs, boisterous cockneys (or mockneys) and so on – NMA are from another, different England. It’s more rural, I think, rooted in being miles away from “that which beckons to us all”, the lure of the cities when you live in a place where all too often Friday nights end up with friends “bleeding, yeah, queuing in casualty; staring at those posters we used to laugh at, never never land, palm trees by the sea.” NMA often connected with me in a way that more critically lauded bands didn’t.
(The lyrics I’m quoting are from Green And Grey, one of my favourite songs.)
This is my son, Adam, who was born six days ago. He already has more hair than I do.
…until you’ve checked that features you depend upon haven’t been removed.
Apple’s done its software thing again: it’s released what’s supposed to be a brand new version of an existing program, but really it’s a brand new program using a familiar name. As this support discussion shows, upgrading to Pages 5.0 means losing a lot of features. And by “a lot”, I mean A LOT.
The ones I’ve noticed so far are the removal of the ability to see a character count including spaces (something I need when I write for MacFormat), the removal of the status bar and its persistent word count (something I need in almost every document I do), the removal of the ability to change the default zoom level (again, something I need on each document), the ability to select non-contiguous blocks of text. It doesn’t remember if you close the formatting panel, the Autocorrect preferences are gone, the two-page view is gone, the… you get the idea.
A fantastic guide to the “6 kinds of unacceptable refrigerators” by Samsung:
There is nothing worse than an empty fridge. An empty refrigerator is the epitome of how disappointment, regret, depression and trauma feel all at the same time. It is hard to continue to write about this particular section, because I’m afraid I might go through a downward spiral for the rest of the day.
I’ve been pretty quiet about my fiction writing lately, and there’s been a good reason for that: I haven’t been doing any fiction writing.
The sequel to Coffin Dodgers has stalled because the central crime I came up with was too horrible for a fairly light-hearted read, and the other, more serious book I was doing stalled too. That latter one stalled for various reasons: motivation, confidence, plotting issues, worrying what the hell I’d write after it was finished, obsessing over Breaking Bad, making music, jumping around the room shouting “this is shit! I am shit! Everything is shit!” and so on.
Hurrah, then, for the Bloody Scotland crime writing festival. I dropped £80 on a day of writing workshops, and over the course of the day the events – a workshop by Liam Murray Bell, another by Alex Gray, a panel featuring agent Jenny Brown and a keynote by Val McDermid – unlocked various book problems in my head. The best way I can describe it is like picking a lock: each bit of the day picked another tumbler until the entire lock was picked.
I’ve spent the last year looking at this word count menu, which has been stalled at 13,000 words. Since Bloody Scotland:
Still a long way to go, but progress at last. I’m excited about it again.
It’s worth noting that I hate workshops, being in a room with other people, having to act like a responsible adult and so on – so if a miserable sod like me can get something out of a writing workshop, then more normal people might benefit even more.
I’m loath to get into politics, but just in passing: with less than a year to go before Scotland votes on independence, one oft-repeated fallacy is really doing my head in: it’s the idea that voting for or against independence is voting for or against the SNP.
The referendum isn’t about party politics. It’s about the entire political system. An independent Scotland may well elect majority SNP governments, but it might equally elect a Labour government, or a coalition, or – and I admit, this one’s pretty unlikely – Tories.
An independent Scotland would arguably have a much more representative democracy than we do now, where we’re governed by a coalition that Scotland didn’t vote for. Devolution has softened that somewhat, but we’re still largely ruled from Westminster.
That’s what we’re being asked to vote on. We’re not being asked to decide whether we like Alex Salmond or David Cameron. We’re being asked how we want to elect their successors.
* Not my pun, I’m afraid. It was one of the placards at the weekend’s pro-independence rally.
There’s a (offensive) joke that really makes me laugh: a small boy is playing outside, and he finds a welding mask. He puts it on and pretends to be piloting a spaceship, making vrooming noises and holding his arms out like wings. The local pervert turns up and calls him over.
“Son, do you know what a penis is?”
“No!” says the boy, and swoops off again.
The perv calls him over again.
“Do you know what a vagina is?”
“No!” says the boy, vrooming away.
The perv calls him back.
“Son, do you know what sex is?”
The boy lifts up the mask and says: “for fuck’s sake mister, I’m not really a welder!”
Business-focused social network LinkedIn really reminds me of that, because lots of people seem to think I’m a welder.
I should probably explain. This is about LinkedIn’s endorsements, which enable people to endorse others’ skills – so if you’ve hired me as a copywriter you might endorse me for that skill, or if you valued a project I did you might endorse me for that. But without fail, every day someone endorses my work in a speciality I don’t have – vajazzling, perhaps, or morris dancing. The people doing the endorsing don’t know whether I have the speciality or not, because they’ve never worked with me or hired me to do anything – so when they endorse me for proofreading or new media, it’s meaningless.
I’m assuming the intention is for me to return the favour, which of course I won’t, because I haven’t worked with those people. But what’s particularly frustrating is that these bullshit endorsements are rendering other ones redundant – so for example the endorsements from colleagues and clients I’ve actually worked for and/or with, endorsements from people whose opinions actually matter and whose endorsements actually have value, are made meaningless.
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re considering endorsing someone you don’t know for something you don’t know they can do, please don’t.
I have a weakness for odd guitars I can’t play very well, and while I can’t really indulge it like I used to – purchases such as my much-missed 12-string Fender Strat were in the days of carefree credit card abuse, and I’m more responsible / have less available credit now – I’ll still find the odd irresistible thing on eBay.
My most recent daft purchase was a Fender Telecoustic, which looks very much like the one on the right.
The Telecoustic is a very odd guitar. It takes everything that’s great about a Fender Telecaster – the solid body electric guitar bit – and replaces it with a fibre glass-y electro-acoustic body. As a result it sounds quite tinny and it’s desperately nose-heavy. But it’s still a fun wee guitar, especially for songwriting: sometimes you want something that’s a little louder than an electric, but that isn’t as loud as a proper acoustic. It plays more like an electric than an acoustic too, so it’s nice and quick.
This one was horrible to play, though. The strings were far too heavy and old, the action so high up you had to stand on the fretboard to play a note. But thanks to a few online tutorials and some guitar discussion groups I’ve found better strings and lowered the action to make it playable. It’s still horrible, but it’s less horrible than before.
I suspect the Telecoustic is going to be rather like my much-loved million-mile Saab estate: absolutely terrible by any objective standard, and oddly lovable as a result.
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