A Serpent Uncoiled was the best crime novel I read last year.
It has just come out in paperback, and the writer, the very lovely Mr Simon Spurrier would like your attention while he tells you all about it.
Now that you have watched his amusing movie, you must buy it at once.
(Also available in hardback, Kindle, and iBooks editions. Seriously folks, pony up the cash, you won’t regret it.)
Apparently this is by Rashad Alakbarov, an artist from Azerbaijan, and may currently be available to be viewed at the De Pury gallery in London as part of this “Fly to Baku” exhibit. I’m just posting it because I think it’s jaw-droppingly beautiful. Yes, I know this sort of thing is what tumblr is for, but this is just so fucking inspired that I wanted to blog it proper like.
In a hollow, sick sort of way.
OK, the end is nigh. Now we’ve got that bit out of the way, it’s time to think about the coming year. I actually wrote this back in mid December, but then life took a sharp turn sideways, and I’ve only had the time to get back to it now. In my ususal tradition of this sort of bollocks, half of what I’m currently planning won’t happen, because I’ll get distracted by something newer and shinier, but that’s OK.
So this year’s list:
That’ll do for now. Come back in a year, if we don’t all perish in fire, and we’ll see how I did.
Just wishing everyone a very happy mid-winter festival of choice, and to those who don’t celebrate anything at all, I hope you’re enjoying however you’ve chosen to spend the period, and that the rest of us haven’t been too annoying this year.
This will make sense to no-one but me – I can’t seem to find the time to expand this collection of other people thoughts into a coherent post, for which I apologise. But here are a few insights by other people I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks. Some of them aren’t anything you won’t have seen a variation before on here, but they’re something in their phrasing sparked a few new ideas in me.
I worked on TapLynx for about two years, and this meant working closely with a variety of publishers. And most had these things in common:
No money.
No idea where the money’s going to come from.
An unswerving faith in the supreme value of analytics.
A willingness to try anything as long as it’s cheap or free and has analytics. Unless they’re paranoid and afraid for their jobs, which they almost always are, given #1 and #2.
– Brent Simmons “The Pummeling Pages“
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action.
– Maciej Cegłowski “The Social Graph is Neither“
(Context for the above, and despite the quote, and my usual habits, I’m not just singling out Google and Facebook here: We consider corporations immortal persons, and, having granted them immortality, we then allow them to indulge in behaviours that would get a human locked up. Not exactly a shattering insight, but I wonder if there’s something in a model of corporate behaviour that is simply to require them to be sane.)
We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.”
– danah boyd “Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ“
Fingers crossed I’ll have time at some future point to come back and tie this lot together and add a few thoughts of my own, but I just want to make sure I didn’t loose the quoted bits in the interim.
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge’. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. — Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language Of John Wilkins
(via Pasta & Vinegar)
How do you categorise things?
So there’s a post written by a smart lad here. But he leads with a lot of technical proofs that will, I imagine, confuse the crap out of a number of people. So I’m going to bullet point the most pertinent parts of it. I’m not telling anyone what do to here, you understand. I am simply providing the facts as I understand them. You may make your own decisions.
That last item isn’t directly related to the first ones, except in this: how long do you think it will be for someone to think it’s funny to come up a honey trap application with a “post this test result to facebook” and then use that consent to later post someone’s complete browsing history, including all their porn? Yeah. And even if they don’t, do you really want Facebook knowing about all the sites you visit, in order to sell that information on to their advertisers?
If you wish to continue using Facebook, and avoid that risk, my best recommendation is that you download a new web browser – if you usually use Firefox, download Chrome. If you’re an IE user, get Opera (and add your own joke here). If you’re a Safari user, get Firefox. Or really any combination of the above, the point is simply to get a completely new web browser that you have never used before installed on your computer. Clear out all your cookies on your old browser, and then keep using it as normal for most sites. But never, ever log in to Facebook on it, and don’t allow anyone else to do so, either.
And, if you want to use Facebook, use this fresh new browser to do it in. Don’t ever visit any websites other than Facebook in this browser. Treat it like a quarantine zone.
Oh, and don’t ever log into Facebook on any public access computer. Otherwise Facebook will think that all the sites that the other users of that computer visited are sites that you’ve visited.
I hope this proves helpful to some of you.
One in a blue moon, someone who remembers Ninth Art, or who has recently met me, and somehow discovered said site, asks me about comics, either because they’re making conversation, or because they’ve mistaken my involvement with said site as an indicator that I have some kind of taste when it comes to the medium. Or something. Anyway, the subject comes up from time to time.
And y’know, I still buy them – predictable choices, like Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, or Brian Wood’s Northlanders, and yeah, Garth Ennis’ The Boys remains a guilty pleasure. I just don’t suffer from the urge to talk about them in public any more. It does no-one any good.
Except, obviously, for right now. Of late, the subject of DC’s reboot has come up in the sort of conversations I mention. And I think it’s worth saying this: DC’s new reboot, when viewed collectively, is one of the most creatively bankrupt pieces of shit the medium has ever put out, and if there is any justice in this world, it will be remembered as the moment that DC began the death spiral that ultimately lead to the collapse of the American comics industry.
Seriously: if you are buying any one of these fucking pieces of crap, just stop. If you’re telling yourself that one of the titles you’re buying is better than the rest, even if you’re right about that, just stop. Every single week, in addition to a load of titles that are just an undifferentiated mass of bland crap, DC manage pump out a couple of pieces of hideous crap that fall somewhere on a spectrum between “unfortunately sexist” and “outright misogyny”. From where I sit, if DC are managing to publish one or two titles that aren’t complete shit, I assure you, it’s a mistake that they’re bound to be rectifying soon.
And even if I’m wrong about that, you know what: if a few good comics have to fail, just so this reboot can die on it’s arse, and ultimately put the shambling corpse of the comics industry out of it’s misery, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Feels good to get that off my chest.
Or, to use its given name, Livejournal.
So, in the last few weeks, several of my friends have actively served notice that they’re fucking off from LJ – not just spending less time there, but actively saying “bye bye, not updating, not reading here any more”.
Now, it costs me nothing to stay – all of the stuff I post on my actual proper blog is simply auto-reflected there, and as of this post, I’m also punting a notification to twitter, just in the hopes of occasionally generating conversation. Because this is what I miss about Livejournal. The actual conversation with honest to god humans. Now, I know that 90% of what I post is links, because I don’t really devote time to actual write-about-a-topic type posts these days, so I’m not exactly surprised, but still – even if people aren’t commenting on what I write, I used to be moved to comment on what other people wrote, and, generally speaking, I no longer am, because most people aren’t writing very much.
So here is what I’m wondering: how many of my former LJ chums are blogging elsewhere now, and I’m simply not reading? Basically: if you’re reading this, and blogging somewhere that isn’t LJ, this is your excuse to plug said blog in the comments, so’s I can find it and add it to my RSS reader.
And, of less importance, but by no means unimportant: if I stopped cross-posting, would anyone care? If they did, would they start following my blog via RSS, and/or commenting on said blog? Because yes, I do like to get my ego fed, and I like it when people make with the comments.
(NB: anyone who is thinking of saying they’d just use LJ to syndicate an RSS feed from my blog to LJ can, with respect, shit right off. Get a proper RSS reader, that actually directs conversation to a place where people can listen, rather than LJ’s outright content-thieving tools.)
Opinions sought, please. Comment wherever you’d like, I’m sure I’ll find you.