London’s first Flash mob took place last night. I wasn’t there, as I was doing Important Research (yeah, OK, I was watching Terminator 3 – it was average) but I’m interested in the phenomenon, which, from where I sit, looks to be largely stillborn.

The point of these things (in so far as they have one) is to introduce a moment of random strangeness into the lives of people observing the phenomenon – a bunch of people doing something faintly surreal, and scattering, leaving nothing more than bemused smiles in their wake. This isn’t going to work, if people spot a crowd of people doing something stupid, and mutter “Oh, another bloody flashmob”.

Which, given the level of media coverage that these events are now getting, is what seems pretty likely to happen. They’re not going to be strange and unexpected, because everyone’s going to have heard of them.

Earlier in the week, I was arguing that these things aren’t just a load of artwank – they’re (theoretically) a way of experimenting with new social technologies, part of a process of acclimatization to new group dynamics spawned by changing methods of communication. A chance for people to adjust to them in play, so that they can use them in seriousness, although I note that the technologies employed by the precursor of this sort of thing, the illegal raves of the eighties and nineties never really got much used outside the chemical scene.

I think I’ll have to amend my position, in light of the media circus, and the sheer pointlessness of forcing a shopkeeper to reopen his shop so that they could go and be “random” in it – neither anonymous, or likely to put a smile on the faces of the passing public, who will almost certainly not have noticed. The notion of a flashmob is an interesting one, full of potential, and not just artwank. But so long as it’s artwankers who organise these things, they’re going to remain a load of luvvie toss.

Assuming the heat doesn’t kill us (and there’s a reasonable chance it will) Fin and I are planning on heading for B-movie tonight. Who else is going?

I’m normally an IP advocate. I like copyright laws. I think they’re a good and necessary thing. Still, I am more than a little frightened by this analysis of IP laws being considered by the EU. If it’s accurate (I’m skimming the EU’s legislation website now, then that’s fucking scary.

Our office has three windows. One of them is looking out onto a nearby building site, from where I can hear a variety of species of drilling going on. Another looks out onto the car park, from where the heat is setting off car alarms every ten to fifteen minutes. From the the third, facing toward Battersea Park station, I can hear the occaisional train announcment – a weird electronic warble of a voice.

This isn’t an office – it’s an experimental dance track. Shortly, I fully expect the people at the nearby gas storage drum to start testing the massive “The gasworks is about to explode” alarm that can be heard for miles around, just for the full-on stadium rave effect.

Human Virus Scanner

Viruses you suffer from:

Sci-fi – Stop wearing the stick-on ears.

Goth – Grow up. Let your roots grow out. Listen to Britney.

Gaming – Life is not a game. Roll 3D6. On a 4 or more go out and do something with your life.

Industrial – Everyone likes folk. No, really. Maybe you should listen to the Incredible String Band.

Discordia – Buy a suit. Invest your money. Eat hotdog buns on a friday.

Politics – Stop caring!

Conspiracy Theory – Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that’s quite scary.

Viruses you might suffer from:

Linux (80%), Cthulhu (60%), British (85%), Religion (70%), Brand Names (70%), Computer Games (90%), Hippyism (93%), Environmentalism (70%), Macintosh (80%)

We were just chatting about children’s fiction in the office, particularly the difference between older fiction, of the era of something like the nonpareil Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and modern stuff like Potter. Part of the conclusion we came to is that the strength of something like Milne’s work is in it’s pure charm, while with something like Rowling, you’ve got a more constructed product, with influences and elements visible from all sorts of childrens fiction and fantasy. One of the names that came up was Thomas Huges “Tom Brown’s school days”, that bastion of English boarding-school fiction.

Which, of course, lead to the thought of Flashman. And thus to images of Draco Malfoy as a bully and coward in the Victorian era, shagging hundreds of women and inadvertantly becoming a massively decorated hero of the British empire.

Just thought I’d share.

Andrew’s been away and Marysia’s been t00bing, but what have I been doing?

Well, yesterday I wore a suit all day, which was unsettling, but well worth it. It was my little brother’s graduation (hence the formalwear) – he got an upper second in Bsc Multimedia from Brunel. Our whole family is hugely proud of him.

Prior to that, at the weekend, I took deliver of a new PC. It’s the first time I’ve built my own, and more importantly, it’s the first time I’ve owned a desktop PC with a seriously high-end spec – the onther desktops I’ve had have been budget models that were good enough for what I wanted at the time, but little to no futureproofing. This thing, on the other hand, goes like a bastard. There are a few wiring problems with the top panel on the case that I need to smooth out when I have the time, but I can safely say I’m delighted with this, not least because it gives me that dual monitor set-up I’ve always wanted. :)

I also fear that I may be about to lose a large chunk of my time to Neverwinter Nights – it never quite ran properly on my old machine, so I’ve hardly done more than give it a quick once over, but it goes like shit off a shovel on the new one, and looks ace, so if you don’t see much of me for a while, that’s why.

I signed up to emusic.com in the end, and am hoovering down MP3s at speed with a clear

conscience. Got the new Dropkick Murphys album on the way, for example, and a small shitload of Thelonious Monk.

Oh, and somehow I have to come up with a script for a three panel strip (that format, at any rate) that’ll work as a trailer for “Take a Walk” – specifically for “Camden”. Since Camden is, in large part, an introductory piece, a trailer for a larger concept, this is going to be an interesting exercise.

In other news: Starbucks are less evil than I thought. The corp-culture stuff is a little scary, but interesting rationalised, but it’s the bit about how people from Oxfam say that the third world would be better off if more coffee buyers were like Starbucks that’s interesting (link lifted from Dan).

A friend of mine just pointed me at emusic.com, a subscription-based MP3 download service. The cost to me would be about 7 quid a month. I had a look through their artist listing. It’s fucking huge, and while the don’t have complete back catalouges for all of their artists, they’re pretty fucking good. (Tom Waits, for instance, only has his three most recent albums on the service, while they appear to have the complete back catalogue of The Fall, including live albums.) Just about every artist I like has something on there, and there’s scads more that I’ve been meaning to check out.

So, essentially, I’m being offered the opportunity to download an unlimited number of songs, legally and legitimately, without ripping off the artists, for less than the price of a CD a month. Can someone please tell me what the catch is? Is there anyone reading who knows more about the service who can tell me if there’s anything dodgy going on?

And getting what I deserve. I’ve just been re-reading the opening act of RUST, all that ever made it on-line. Half of it makes me cringe beyond belief, although there are still bits I like, even though it’s 4 years since I started it – I still don’t think anyone else has tried much of the storytelling techniques we took a crack at in that, and a few of them really do still work, even if my browser resolution is now too high to actually make the general layout behave quite like it was supposed to – the big reveal is blown, for example, although the splash page works much better now, especially with the improved load times that broadband provides (and the “Cult Of The Burning Clinton” sight gag still makes me smile), over that ones that were such a fucker when you were trying to do anything image heavy back in 99, and couldn’t even afford to assume 56.6 as the slowest speed to cater for.

I’ve had this weird itch to go back to webcomics for the last few months. My own purists “text and images only” thing, nothing with flash, or anything like that. But y’know, to tie them up with databases and PHP as well as javascript and CSS…

But y’know, the thing that still fucking haunts me about RUST is that tagline, that opening image. An angel, with wings of chrome, bleeding out, surrounded by decaying machinery – great corroded cogs, dead junction boxes and the last breath of digital angel.

Angels Rust.

I’ve still got to do something with it.

Half of the first of the “Take a Walk” shorts I’m doing with Sean Azzopardi is now online. “Take a Walk”, which I think I’ve mentioned here before is my loveletter to London. Each installment is going to be twelve pages – two six page monologues, the first of which is a conventional comic set in the present, a high speed runthrough of the area’s mental topography delivered by a nameless narrator.

The second of them, though, is where Sean gets to go to town. A short monologue delivered by somone out the past, a short fiction. A ten-second summary of a London life. I write the words, and Sean sets them to whatever illustrations seem apt, and he came out of the gate with all guns blazing in Camden.