Oi, writer types what read this: my friend Del is trying to put together a charity book to help Medcins Sans Frontieres. She is looking for submissions. If you have the time between now and October to write a short story on the theme of healing, you might consider doing so, and punting it in her direction. More details in the link.

I wouldn't like to suggest this is like me, or like anyone else I know. But I often have to do things I don't like.

Jesus fuck. It turns out that I, and many/most of my friends would not be eligible for employment at American apparel because we don't look "natural" (for which one might also read "bland") enough. Be sure to read this, and then click through to the stories about hiring and firing based on appearance. The level of angry fuck you this inspires is staggering.

I can't quite decide what I think of this. One balance, yes, I think I would like to have this calendar on my wall.

Alan Moore is performing live in London at the end of July. Just, y'know, in case anyone's interested. I've got tickets for the Friday night.

Strategies for designing a service, end-to-end. Useful

Why no, there is no practical reason to get one of these. Why yes, I do really really want one.

Key quotes: "we break stuff before we know what replaces it, and we invent things before we know what they are for" and "If I’m thinking as a normal consumer, I don’t really care terribly much about what the future of ink on paper is going to be. I care about what the future of content is going to be."

Useful reference for the reasonably near future, I suspect.

This makes me angry on many many levels. Yes, this looks like total waste, and yes, they got a shitty, shoddy website that was massively over-budge. One the other hand, though, the outrage about serious undervalues my profession. £122,000 is *not* an unreasonable amount to spend on a major website in one year, and headlines that suggest it is are fucking annoying to me. What's unreasonable is what they got for their money, not the amount they spent. (FWIW: their initial budget of £45,000, while it would not get them laughed out of the office around here, would definitely put them on the low end of business that we like to pitch for. Since they're a major department, I'd expect a higher budget.)

Oh bollocks. Looks like Afghanistan is going to fucked for a very, very long time to come, because it turns out we're not just blowing them up as a point of principle any more. Now they've got useful resources, too.

Absolutely superb idea – I've been instapapering stuff left and right, thanks to the new toy, so a site that is geared to recommending good Instapaper fodder is a great niche.

In the course of excoriating BP, a noble end in and of itself, he says this: "You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions." To which I can simply say: Yes. This. Now please all got and read the whole piece, because it's great.

You know, I don't think I have a spare 120GB of storage space. I may need to do something about that. In any event, this might well make things interesting over the next while, as people start digging into how much is spent where…

Interesting piece about the mapping of digital community to real-world local-level community.