Bending Point

Here I am.

Following my last post, gosh! Changes in my life have been smooth but sharp, light but weighty. I am now a full-time editor (of BOOKS, my friend, yes! I am an honest and professional editor of BOOKS), which is an interesting new lifestyle to adjust to. My time is different: no more of the student life for me. Strange and not strange.

So. I've been thinking about this blog. I think it's time to make a change here, too. My personal time is more limited than it used to be, and my non-blog creative commitments (scripting & noveling) have been backburnering for too long. So I think it's time to refocus myself on those other things, and to put these Mistakes Being Made on a more permanent sort of hiatus. Possibly actually permanent, I mean. As in: no more this blog.

This has always been a very casual, experimental & ad hoc little blog – something for my own fun, rather than any serious attempt to build an audience or anything – but I've got to the point where, like I said, things need to change. Focus or no focus, do or do not. Etc.

When I come back to blogging – whether here, or somewhere new – it'll be with a much clearer sense of purpose and focus, I hope. If I decide I want to focus on music, then I'll do a Rage Roundup every week and I'll be an active presence on other music sites to try to actually build an audience, and so on. Or if I decide to do a blog that focuses on some other thing, then I'll focus on that some other thing instead. And if I decide to do another random meandery half-hearted self-indulgent blog like this one, then I guess I'll do it like this again; but at least I'll try to do it in a much more focused and wholehearted way, I think. If you're going to do something, better to do it right; better to try to do it best, don't you think?

(Or, better to do something that will actually get more readers to comment more often, at the very least...)

So, anyhow. That's what I've been thinking. And that's what I'm going to do, I think.

In the meantime: I may be about to give up long-form textual blogging for a while, but I'll be continuing to post beautiful (mostly) wordless content over at my other miniblog, the wonderful looktime.tumblr.com, which is freaking awesome and you should totally be following. (Seriously, go there, it's great. It's mostly not my stuff, it's just stuff that I like. You'll like it too, I bet.)

Thanks for everything.

More later.

:)

Graped In The Face

Q. What's the difference between pinot noir and merlot?
A. Nothing, suckers.

So yeah, you remember how that movie Sideways did so well? It was a fine film: Paul Giamatti drinks a whole lot of Californian wine, rants about how pinot noir is so great and merlot is so terrible.

Mmm. Grapes.

Most people who saw Sideways immediately decided that, yes, indeed:

1. pinot noir is brilliant

2. all other wines – especially merlot – are really just fermented hackjuice

There was thus an instant craze in the market for pinot wine, and a corresponding crash in demand for the less respectable grapes (like merlot and shiraz). So: a group of French wine merchants decided to scam the American market by repackaging 13.5 MILLION LITRES of their excess merlot and shiraz wine as pinot noir, instead.

A couple of years later, French auditors became suspicious of some unusually cheap "pinot" grape transactions; a few days ago, a French court unravelled the scam and found a cartel of Carcassonne wine merchants guilty of fraud.

Mugshot!

In the meantime, how many American wine drinkers had figured out that they weren't actually drinking pinot noir? Here is a picture of them all:

Aw, it was only 13.5 million litres . . .

Top 10 #6: Top 10 Pop Culture References That Will Make Me Feel Nostalgic For My Childhood, I Hope

Okay, people. This one is personal. So personal, in fact, that anybody who reads this list will surely be able to figure out not only just how old I am, but also precisely which elements of pop culture I was most receptive to as a child. And yes, yes, it's a damnably geekish list. (Although, on the other hand – when you're talking about pop culture, what's not geeky?)

So, the latest of my Top 10 Top 10 Lists That Don't Really Deserve To Be Top 10 Lists:

It's
The Top 10 Pop Culture References That Will Make Me Feel Nostalgic For My Childhood, I Hope!

10. The Seven Cities of Gold! (It was actually called The Mysterious Cities of Gold, but that's not how I remember it.) They get this big golden boat, and later on they get this big golden bird-plane thing?

9. The theme from Inspector Gadget. And from the show itself, especially that story where they're in this big house and it gets completely flooded with water. But mostly just the theme.

8. Ulysses 3000. (It was actually called Ulysses 31, but that's not how I remember it.) The crew is frozen, hanging in space, unconscious and just floating up near the ceiling of this big metal room . . .

7. Hot jam donuts, sausage rolls, twisties, icy poles. And sunnyboys, even though I'm not sure I ever actually had one myself.

6. The Mac Plus. Especially when used to play the original Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? game. Especially the "typewriter" sound effects.

5. The original line of Transformers toys (the ones with metal in them!), and The Transformers: The Movie. By which I mean the real Transformers movie, the one with Orson Welles as the voice of Unicron.

4. Doctor Who. Especially any Tom Baker story where someone slowly transforms into a hideous monster. (There are a bunch.)

3. The Super Nintendo. F-Zero, Street Fighter II Turbo, Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart. And NBA Jam, and Super Ghouls 'N' Ghosts, and StarFox. And Castlevania. And all that glorious 8-bit sound! And everything else. And the original NES console and various Segas, too, I guess . . . but most of all, the Super Nintendo, summer of 1990-91.

(video not entirely related, but you should probably watch it anyway.)

2. LEGO. Glorious, brilliant, spectacularly wonderful Lego.

1. The Rage outro, on a Saturday morning at first light.

So, did these references actually make me feel nostalgic for my childhood?

Hard to say.

What about you?

And what are you nostalgic about?

Beware! - The Ghost Fleet of Singapore!!

The most evocative and exciting news story I've read for ages:

"The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination ..."

Isn't that a spectacular introduction? Great article, too – check it out. If you haven't already.

Some day soon I'll blog something that's more than just a link to something else . . . but on the other hand, right now I'm on a break, so some day soon isn't tomorrow. Also, it looks like I'm writing a script for an actual movie, did I tell you that? Busy times, my friends! Busy times!

I did tell you about the script thing via Twitter, but I haven't actually told you that I am a twit before now (because, look, all this tweeting is still just an experiment, and it still leaves me feeling kind of . . . dirty . . . ), so, um, anyhow. There you go. Whatevs. Vive la communique ;)

Mondays Can Be Disturbing

But not today! Check it out: have you ever seen an image more charming, more sweet, more heartwarming?

Aww yeah!

It's the wand that really makes it, I think.

I found it here, but it's originally from here – an odd site called TeeFury. Yeah, tons of sites sell novelty tee-shirts, but this TeeFury place is unique in that it puts each shirt on sale for one day only! By the time I discovered the Unicornasaurus, I was already too late . . .  :(

Heck of a hook to grab regular traffic & impulsive sales, huh?

MICHAEL JACKSON IS UNDEAD

>20

I've talked about this sort of thing before.

It's not too original. Its returns diminish on repeat viewing. It's probably much the kind of manatee humour that many simply people don't like. Nonetheless: great stuff, huh?

There's a whole bunch of these around, actually – they're all fun – but the mysterious introduction makes this first one the best, I think.

PS: I know, I know I shouldn't have. Roman numeral puns are the lowest form of pun.

Baa

You'd say that cynicism is negative, wouldn't you? If you had to pick a side.

That cynicism is inevitable, and maybe it's often useful, but also that it's essentially sad, somehow. It's the side of the coin that you pay but don't receive. When someone expresses their cynicism, hearts are not uplifted. We don't feel that cynical people are better or more fortunate than others, for their cynicism. If we usually discover our cynicism in adolescence, then we usually react against it later on. And even if we stay cynical (more or less), we soon lose respect for cynicism as a general outlook, I think. After all, so it goes: what does cynicism do to improve our lives? What good is it? Isn't it somehow tawdry and grim and wrong? Dishonourable, even? Wouldn't the world be a better place, if nobody was cynical? 

And okay this is all true or whatever, but: there is one particular upside to cynicism that I've never heard anyone pay much attention to, and I reckon it's a great one. (And maybe it's not even cynicism exactly, maybe it's something else, anyhow, but I'm still going to write it.)

See, the one crucial aspect of culture that most adults are especially cynical towards, across the whole spectrum of the educated modernity? Advertising. Our thresholds for paying attention, for believing, for caring at all what an advertisement says – these thresholds are higher now than they were before. (This is one reason why advertisements from earlier decades have such kitsch value – so many old ads seem so absurd, so transparent and unconvincing. Plastics! New! Duck & Cover! Extra White! – we're cynical towards it, now.) Our higher thresholds, they're higher now because people are generally more cynical about advertising than they used to be, right? And so the advertisers are now so desperate, to grab our ever-more-cynical attention (& affection), that they've had to respond with relentless innovation. Viral marketing, immersive reality games, ads filmed like artsy short films, all of this craft and technique and effect and interest – it's all just a massive effort to trick past our endlessly-renewed cynicism.

And as a result, we have an industry of marketing and advertising that's now hugely more entertaining than it ever used to be. Funnier, more inventive – you might even want to say more intellectual, sometimes. There are ads you might even want to call art, if you were interested in calling things art, I guess. People watch the Super Bowl just for the ads: that's not just a cliche, it's true. And all of this, it's because we've been too cynical to keep paying attention to Sale and New and Value and celebrity endorsement, that same spin forever. If we've seen it before, we're cynical about it already. Give me something else.

Have you watched the youtube of the sheep yet? It's kind of neat, yeah?

It makes you think about things to do with sheep that you hadn't thought of before. New possibilities, new perspectives on an old context. Your mind has changed as a result, has literally expanded the complexity of its structure, now! That's what this advertisement has done for you, in its own small way. It really has made you a better, smarter, wiser person.

(Do you believe me?)

And so anyhow my point, I guess:

If the only cost of a new thought is a quiet reminder to maybe buy Sony afterwards, then I really don't mind the sponsorship. Cynicism can be a force to impel creativity! Isn't that remarkable? Hooray, I think.

(Wait, did I say Sony? I just watched it again, this sheep video is actually for Samsung.

Ah! & there you go, huh :)

So, yeah, sheep. Lots and lots of sheep.

--Sleepy Afternoon Thoapsl