Sdtrk: ‘Pull out’ by Death from above 1979

Just so you know, I’ve not deleted all the comments made on ‘Shouting etc etc’; HaloScan appears to be having a midlife crisis right now. The comments are still there, you just have to open them in a new tab to view them. Well, I have to, anyway.

Better post soon. I actually managed to take critical notes on a dream I had!

UPDATE (1.18pm): Well, HaloScan has addressed half of their problem whilst I was writing this, but you still have to open the comments in a new tab. Unless they fix that while I’m typing this hint hint

UPDATE (3.22pm): Nope, the numbers are zeroed out again. Goooo HaloScan! 😛 At this point, I’m ready to go back to Blogger’s comments hosting, but if I were to switch now, I’d lose all of my existing comments. Get back to fucking work, you HaloScan shits

Sdtrk: ‘Melt away’ by Galaxie 500

After much deliberation and furrowing of brows, I’ve gone ahead and added a tagboard to ‘Shouting etc etc’ (lower left in the sidebar, of course), so that humans can post comments without having to shoehorn them into unrelated articles that are currently gracing the page.

My tagboard rules are very simple. Spamming, typing in sTiCKy cAPs, ‘txt msg spk’ or otherwise desperately inadequate spelling, and general shitwickery gets you permabanned. Like I said, very simple!

I’ll undoubtedly be tweaking it over the course of the week, as I want to change the font to Arial, and that shade of green’s too dark for my liking. Nevertheless! Begin posting.. now

Sdtrk: ‘Super shooter’ by RIP SLYME

Many people of all walks of life ask me all sorts of questions*, but the one question I get most often is ‘How do you come up with the installments for your acclaimed “This was the Future” series?’** Well, I’ll tell ya. I have this really ace book perched on my shelf that was given to me by a friend, called ‘Twentieth-century Architecture‘. I’ll just flip through the bastard (at 400 pages, it’s a feckin’ doorstop) and settle on a structure — one that not only catches my eye, but one I think people should know about. Then I hop on the Internets and scour various sites for adequate sites describing my chosen topic, as well as a decent picture. If necessary, I look for a second site that has a passage I can quote on ‘Shouting etc etc’.
The process is rather the same if I cover something that isn’t a building in the volume, only there’s no one particular book I have for reference points. I’ll skim through my copies of ‘Op to Pop‘ or ‘Sixties design‘, looking for the name of a designer that I dig. Repeat the scouring/photo-saving/site checking process, and roughly fifty minutes later, I’m done!

So there you are! Vol.11 of ‘This was the Future’ due soon. Well, soon enough

*not all at once
**lies, scurrilous and unbridled

Sdtrk: ‘An eye for optical theory’ by Michael Nyman

I’m back on the Internets! After browbeating two SBC Amerifuck tech ‘support’ monkeys, who I daresay were calling from India, we now have better speeds than last time. Going back and forth with some tosser named Sam, we assessed that the problem was their fault, not ours, and it’d be seen to before 6pm that Tuesday eve. So after still having hideous non-speeds at 11pm, I called a second time, this time speaking with a different churl, and telling him that nothing had improved. The connection speed was ramped up about twenty minutes after my call. Results!
Just so you have an idea of what I was dealing with, I took a screenshot of the speed our connection was at at its slowest point, after visiting the SBC Americunt speed test site. (It’s kinda helpful to know the URL if you happen to be cursed with their DSL service, so I’ve reproduced the link here.) Anyway, the screenshot is kinda dodgy, but you have to see it. Yeah. Now wouldn’t you agree that’s a reason to be angry?

On the lighter side of things, I have finally found the name of the style of shades/glasses that I love. If you’re a mate of mine that’s actually seen me in person on more than one occasion, you already know that I own four or five pairs of shades. All of them have the same frame, but they’re all slightly different — one is transparent with mirror lenses, one is black with blue mirror lenses, etc. I’ve always wanted to find more variations of those shades, and eventually buy a pair of (fake) glasses with those frames, as they’re the only kind that look good on my face, but I never knew what they were called. Well, now I know — they style is called the browline, and the models are called either the ronsir, or the clubman.

Classically ace! They’re fine frames, fine frames. Now I need to scour online stores and estate sales for those bad boys..

Gonna try to catch Death from above 1979 at the Lager house this Saturday. The more I hear them, the more I like them, even though the cover for their latest Cd kinda scares me

Sdtrk: none

Short and sweet: Both of the computers here are having difficulties getting a decent internet connection. Everything is moving very very slowly. I was online with a so-called SBC technical assistant for an hour last night, whereupon he had me go to their test page to assess how fast my connection was (or wasn’t). According to the test, my current speed is slower than dial-up.

Back later. Angry now. So there you have it

Sdtrk: ‘The cold song’ by Klaus Nomi

It appears that HaloScan comments are now Gravatar-enabled. Huh.

I believe this calls for another microbutton!

Well, it should be plainly obvious when you scroll down this page and your eyes rest on that newly-filled conspicuous space between the Archives and my microbanners, that I’m digging adding apps and devices and other assorted crap to this Blog. Thanx to Rikai.com, now YOU can learn a new kanji per day! Or, at the very least, attempt to learn. Be sure to write them down, as there’s 1,850 of them to memorise!

Also, my non-Criterion copy of the Sid & Nancy DVD arrived today! Y’know how DVDs come with inserts indicating chapter stops or whatnot? My copy came with six. *blank stare*
Guess a few of my mates are gonna be getting some inserts for New years!