Oblomovka

2003-05-27»

• another mesh network. I wish someone would just hurry up and start selling these boxes instead of talking all high-faluting about them.
• the electric car people are really pissed off about the fuel cell revolution
• richard herring is still being very funny
• international mobile phone social impact study - "Americans, once keen on punctuality, are routinely late, using cells to set up new meetings or for last-minute planning... South Americans, where punctuality wasn't a big deal in a pre-wireless world, are with cells more punctual and increasingly less tolerant of lateness."
• at last! rational decision-making - for Mac users!

Everybody else pads out their blog with their life, so I might as well join in. Actually, this is more padding out my life with my blog, as not much is going on (and Cait, yes, this is what my blog would look like if it were a diary.)

This weekend, we went Ada juggling around Baycon with Cory and Martin. Last year's Baycon was my first SF convention ever. Oh, except for that Welsh one a few years back when a bunch of overenthusiastic security volunteers, dressed like Blake's Seven guards, tried to throw me and Dave out for unauthorised filming. We and our pathetic Sony camcorder were being manhandled to the fire-exits when Dave announced that he'd seen another, even more unauthorised, film crew with boom mics and everything heading up behind us into the lifts. Our captors immediately abandoned us and ran up the stairs, doing little SWAT team hand gestures and shouting for backup into their little throat-mics. We went back to illicitly giving publicity to their con with one of their guest speakers, who'd asked us to come. Let no-one say that these tricks only work in comedy action capers.

Now I am world famous, such misunderstandings are a thing of the past. No longer am I part of an underground rebellion of ex-convicts with shitty camcorders. No, this year I was complimentary "guest of a guest". Quinn was a guest of another guest. Ada was a child of two guests of two other guests.

It was all a bit unnecessary - Ada exudes so many cutons these days that you could swan into the Pentagon by slotting her into a giant plastic badge holder and waving her around reception. We were going to dress her in a little Star Trek uniform too, but she was sick over it. I guess there must be cuton toxicity levels, even in the eye of the cuteness hurricane.

Baycon is a very costume-based convention (or "cosplay" as the young, wide-eyed screaming anime fans are calling it). This means that everyone looks like a freak. Especially people like me, who don't dress up. We look like the weirdest freaks ever. Even the hotel staff look like fairly normal freaks by comparison, because they're dressed up in waiter and maid's outfits.

And some people, look like incredible, dressed-like-Lara-Croft-only-with-chains-on semi-naked babelicious freaks. Not that I stare. Or even look, or think about them, or anything ever. I only know about their existence because when these people walk into a room, all the straight boys nearby give out this universal telepathic deflatory pained sigh. It's like the sound of a wolf-whistle, only backwards, sucked in. Ooohhhhhh.

The sigh has a meaning. All my life, it says, I have been told by my superego that dressing like a Marvel superhero will not get me laid. And, here, here and now in this temporary saturnalia, surrounded by other males who are - at best - my equals in the ugly league division table: here is my perfect woman. But the world knows that this mad girl's flickering eyes craves just one thing. A man dressed as Galactus, Eater of Worlds. And not only have I left my Galactus costume at home. I never made it. Worse, I threw those biro drawings of me in the Galactus helmet away the moment I'd drawn them, ashamed to show them even to (say) Dave. And now I know: I'm not a virgin because I'm a geek. I'm a virgin because I have pursued geekdom with a less than pure, directed gaze. I have faltered, and now I'm just another guy at Baycon. And some other guy in front of me will be Galahad with the Holy Grail because he spent two weeks measuring out huge papier-mache clamps to fit on the side of his head. And I did nothing but stare at my Lara Croft pull-out poster, in the belief that she was not real and that I could not ever meet her.

Pursue your enthusiasms. Because if you're doing them right, you know exactly where they end.

Wait, wait, this isn't what I was going to write.

2003-05-21»

My friend Cait has decided to go public with her blog. It's mostly about her pregnancy, but she has wisely started off with a long rant about blogs themselves. She says they're no different from diaries, and they're just called blogs because men don't like to admit to such female pursuits. Oh, and she thinks social software is a load of unrevelatory bunkum too, and that even if it does exist, there's more to it than blogs.

I'm linking to it mainly because I find it really funny that someone should go on about how people just endlessly talk about blogs by endlessly going on about blogs. And, you know, I should point out that people who write diaries also go on about the nature of writing diaries quite a bit. I know I did in mine - and I distinctly remember Cait doing so in her old online journal. Livejournal, similarly, is full of people talking about Livejournal. It's like Children's TV as a frequent topic amongst students; it's popular, because everyone has it in common.

And what about that whole media obsession? Well, I did a search for "blogosphere", as Cait suggests, on the BBC and Guardian sites. The BBC site has two hits. One is by Bill Thompson, poo-pooing the whole thing. On the Guardian site, there are eight hits, two of which are negative, one of which is just the name of an app, and the rest have that excited tone of people using a word they've just heard. It looks like a reasonable percentage of the people talking about blogs in the press are doing exactly what Cait's doing: going on about how much people overrate them, and how there's more to social software than that. Which is to say, Cait's complaining partly about people doing what Cait's doing right now.

The other reason I'm linking to Cait, though, is because I remember thinking similiarly when I started writing Oblomvovka. I think what changed my mind and made me more interested in their more novel aspects is the effect of being linked to, and having people comment on your pages, and seeing things you've discovered percolate around the rest of the world. That really seems distinctly different from my experience of writing diaries, and much closer to the original idea of a weblog - as a commonplace book of interesting links that you've found. It's the meeting of strangers in referers, rather than the internecine world that you meet when you just read blogs and their explicit links, that I find fun. Whatever you call them, writing a blog is a lot more fun than just reading them.

And I don't care how much I talk about that. It's my blog, I can do what I want with it. Nyahhh.

• The Little Elves Problem - ukcrypto invents useful term for one of the teensy difficulties the Total Teletubbies Terrorist Information Awareness will hit.
• Fantastic Warren Buffett op-ed on the lunacy of the dividends tax cut.
• Leonard does a Black & White on Nethack.
• Braiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnns.