The moving finger rants

• Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson
  William Gibson on writing, how and why.
  (tags: cyberspace literature writing interview WilliamGibson )
  
  
• How Facebook's targeted advertising destroyed the life of a young man | Privacy International
  Why Facebook Sucks, part eleventy billion
  (tags: whyfacebooksucks socialnetworking privacy facebook )
  
  

2011 started badly—now I can't even remember what I was complaining about then—and got worse. Eventually I seem to have ended the year in a stronger position than when I started, although I'm not entirely sure how. In 2012 I hope to continue the general upwards trend with rather less of the wading through shit.

The news was interesting, wasn't it? Better men than I have already written screeds about that, so I won't. I've not even got around to watching 2011 Wipe yet.

I've not even got around to watching all of Doctor Who yet. Like I said, it's been a bad year. I plan to fix that in 2012, and to watch the new Sherlock, too. (A review I just read says that the Moriarty-bomb cliffhanger is resolved in a frankly ridiculous manner—LA! LA! NOT LISTENING! It's going to be awesome.)

A very happy arbitrary rollover to all.

Remember George Washington? Father, I cannot tell a lie, I cut down the cherry tree with my little hatchet. On reflection, that's a pretty good model for the behaviour of US presidents. Random wanton destruction without reason or explanation, and he's not even ashamed afterwards.

I suspect I'm not the first person to make this observation, but it just occurred to me.

At times like this I'm reminded of my youth. When I was in the Cadets, despite being located right next to a large body of something which was technically termed water, there aren't many places to go sailing when you live in Hull. Hiking is a possibility. Drawing semi-permanent artworks on the surface of the clayey soup known as the River Humber is a regular pastime. In order to get in a boat that goes anywhere, you have to travel for some distance. To get to Welton Water, where the mire was sufficiently ungelatinous to be navigable, we had to drive for half an hour and go through one of those antiquated level crossings where you have to press a bell and wait for the wizened level-crossing-supervisor to wake up and get out of his little house and determine that no trains are coming so that he can ponderously wind the barrier up for you with a big handle.

And when we got there, there were no facilities. I remember a pissing session up against the wall at the back of the boathouse. There were no toilets in the boathouse so it had to happen at some point. I hate having to do this, my commanding officer said to me as we stood next to each other, pointedly not looking left nor right, and as we waited, as one does, for the streams to emerge; going back to nature, doing as the animals do. Surely, I thought, but did not say because he was the CO and I was young—but mostly because we both had our cocks out at the time—surely, thought I, this is glorious! going back to nature, as the animals do! Let us run free with the metaphorical wind in our hair, and let us piss up against this wall as MEN do, as VIKINGS do!

I thought it but didn't say it, because, even aged fourteen, I wasn't a total fucking fucknut. Male urinal etiquette is awkward enough without introducing naive conceptions of Romantic philosophy into the argument at the point of, for want of a better word, expression. We finished peeing and I went back to trying not to drown in my jeans because I was too young to own any proper sailing gear yet, and no more was said about it. But it's a conversation that has always stuck with me.

And then we get this.

British company Captive Media thinks it has developed a product that fills a gap in the market - a urinal mounted, urine-controlled games console for men.

It calls it the first "hands-free" video gaming console of its kind.

There really is nothing left. When a man can't pee without being sold something, then surely we've lost all conception of what it is to be people.

Personally, I think that civilization ended when they started putting adverts at eye-height above the urinals. All that's left for us now is vomitoria and an inevitable invasion by the Turks. What we're seeing now is just the final decline before we all become a footnote in the history books of future evolved cockroaches. Let the President lead the way!

This blog post brought to you by the letter P and half a bottle of Zoładkowa Gorzka. Poland's best kept secret, it says on this label, which means that my staff have been holding out on me.

Copying ALL my music onto the new mp3 player. They call them personal media players now, it would seem. Quite disturbing to watch 38GB worth of filenames flash past, and to realise that I only recongnize about half of them. What is all of this music that I've been carrying on my hip for the last seven years?

My trusty old iRiver IHP140, bought in 2003 or so, has started getting bad sectors on the hard disk. The only thing for it was to buy a new device with four times the disk space and ten times the battery life, along with the capacity to play videos and a stopwatch feature for no particularly good reason. The new thing is the Cowon X7, a Korean-made Windows-only behemoth with a VFAT hard drive that throws a hissy fit if you try and copy 38GB of assorted media files to it from Linux. I am putting up with this. The sound quality is absolutely stunning.

I have a pretty reasonable sound setup at Apocalypse Laboratories, courtesy of scotm's old Speakers of DOOM and an amplifier the size of Russell Brand's ego. Nonetheless I am only now, as of seven o' clock this evenig, discovering new subtlety and nuance in my old audio tracks. And this includes a lot of the late-1990s trance I own (hey, some of that stuff is actually quite technically adept). I just played Jean-Philippe Collard's rendition of Rachmaninov's Prelude in C♯ minor and I had to sit down.

I haven't even tried playing my Beethoven FLACs through it yet. O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

The thing has thirty-nine preset graphic equalizer options. You may not hear from me for a couple of weeks.

Sirs,

There's nothing I like better than to look at pictures of a bloodied, brutalized corpse before breakfast (your front page, Friday 21st October). Despite this, I presume I'm still not allowed to say fuck in these pages.

Yours aye,

pajh

...yeah. Take that, The (Scots)Man.

(Appropriate credit for inspiration where it's due—but having seen that picture on his Twitter page, I rescind the offer of kisses.)

I do have to observe, howevs, that the Hootsmon's prior tautologous reasoning was bang on the money. Now cue the comments telling me that that wasn't technically a tautology.

Cutting-edge political insights, as ever, from The Scotsman:

Mussolini was hanged from a Milan petrol station for public display. Such a scenario would ensure that Gaddafi did not have to face a court.

Goddammit. Some bastard told me that the Comic Relief Doctor Who thing this year was a trailer for the new series, so, fearing spoilers, I didn't watch it. Apparently I was lied to. Or maybe I was thinking of the Children in Need thing instead. Damn.

I realise I'm probably the last to the party on this one, but that just makes me cool, like bow ties. Last to the party like the last of the Time Lords, only with less total command of time and space and more Youtube videos.

Part One: 

Part Two: 

There. Now Amy has fantastic legs in canon and there's nothing you can do about it. (You know who you are.) And let's note that fantastic legs are established, in canon, not necessarily to be a good thing: in fact, in certain circumstances, can lead to totally-wrong big-emergency universe-goes-bang-in-five-minutes. That's almost philosophical. I've known legs like that in my time.

Doctor Who: addressing the important issues since 1963.

As for the rest... we'll see.

Same cliff face as The Time of Angels and the same castle as Amy's Choice. Nice.

• Mapping the fall of communism
  Sometimes, a very simple animation can go a long way. Remember that, while we were complaining about Maggie, the Poles were defeating Communism using nothing but photocopied leaflets.
  (tags: news politics)
• The Ian Tomlinson inquest was justice seen to be done
  Or, Why We Have Social Multimedia. Gets a little circle-jerky towards the end, in true Graun style. But, just before that, it has this: "citizen-generated content [...] can determine the direction of due process and shape the pursuit of justice". YES.
  (tags: news politics)
• BBC - Archive - Modern Writers - Tonight | John Wyndham
  John Wyndham Lucas Parkes Benyon Harris speaks on the Tonight show, 1960.
  (tags: tv sf)