our new printer sounds like the end of episode horn in knightmare



01.03.05: the artificial has reached the peak of terrible. and worse, it is the end of everthing. your real world has been methodically filtered out a pixel at a time and you havn't even noticed. it's too late now, and we are all fucked.

meet vivienne rose, your virtual girlfriend, the anti-christ.

i don't really need to elaborate but, incase you don't want to witness the horror first hand, i will. she 'lives' in your phone. you interact with her, you go on role-playing "practice dates" and send her text messages (to which she replies in full sms glory). you buy her presents. artificial presents that you pay real money for ("what, don't you think i am worth it??!!"). she wears designer clothes and uses the latest gadgets (your 18-33 target market will love them). she drinks whichever softdrink the highest bidding company wishes her to drink. if she likes you she'll tell you her secrets and introduce you to her friends, "marriage isn't possible until the more advanced levels of the game". an identical girl on every phone, available every minute of the day. she only wants to be loved.

the first question in the faq is the first question you ask. you ask "can i have sex (or cyber-sex) with the v-girl?". you're no longer a person, you're not even a piece of meat. you are a barely sentient artificial existance. a few questions later and she is delivering the stinger, "i am sure that once you get to know me, you aren't going to want to meet any other girls!".

she is indeed one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, and she's not even real.



28.02.05: we've been having torrential snow here. not to over exaggerate or anything, but it has snowed every day. and yet still the ground remains snow free (no snowball fights for you). the snow makes tiny white spats on the pavement before fading away, like bullet holes in your favourite first person shooter. this isn't a bad thing though, lingering snow is cold.

my weekend was a random string of weird events, markov would have been proud (or turning in his grave, either or). it all started when eating a mars icecream on the way round thom and rachel's (to watch nathan barely - damn chris morris and charlie brooker for making me to watch tv and double destroying me in the process). eating icecream in the snow? you fucktard.

on saturday me and tom somehow found ourselves sitting upstairs in the offbeat cafe. up there, it's a cross between a 60's american diner and your grandma's living room. don't go up there, it will eat your fucking soul. and the worse thing was what the woman said on her way out, "do you want the light on?". just before she did indeed switch the light on. confused. fucking confused.

good chocolate malt though.

a few hours later and we're sitting in the prodigal accompanied by kathryn (this is probably the wrong spelling, but it is the best one), her friend and her parents. what is going on? even weirder is i'm sitting between them. how did this happen?! i don't even know any of these people. i don't even like the prodigal, it's a not very nice baracuda pub. i also really dislike the king and queen, which is probably why we were there an hour later. this was for the pool tables, so jump to me with six balls remaining while catherine (just to be on the safe side) has only two. the pool 'room' is on the first floor balcony and walled off from the rest of the pub, where a huge projector screen hangs from the wall (because football does exist in the world). you can see the screen from the pool area through a couple of windows that open out into the rest of the pub. infact all you can see through these is the huge screen - television where the real world should be. the resulting effect of this is you feel inside a scene from 'natural born killers'. especially since a number of the people there really needed killing (see, the guy who got his testicles out on the pool tables. see, the woman without a face. see, that awful band playing). despite me saying all these horrible things, it was a really enjoyable night. unfortunately, the weirdness wasn't over.

while at the pub some girl (was she called emily?) told us about a party going on up by queens park. we debated this for a while and i finally convinced tom we couldn't not go and investigate. he knew it was a bad idea but i just wouldn't listen. we arrived there at about half midnight, walking straight into the green lit entrance hall. through the red living room, beer cans littering the edges of the room, and into the blue kitchen (no shooting up in here then). apart from the couple sitting on a sofa in the hall moaning about not being able to get pills the whole downstairs was deserted. there was nothing even worth stealing. upstairs and each room has three or four people in, mostly stoned. someone tells everyone went to the music library. at least, that's what i think he said. weirdest fucking party i've ever been to. we make an exit for home and i'm glad for the walk. back at mine we play super puzzle fighter 2 turbo, i beat tom 21 rounds to 1 - a totally unfair representation of his skills. and 5am can sure sneak up on you can't it?

sunday might have been dull had jess not invited me down the cowley for their table foozball championship. i wasn't planning on taking part but an extra team was required. so, me and gabriel, both of us awful, teamed up and managed to win an unlikely three games in a row. a consectutive display of flukes, it's falling with style. we made it into the semi-finals before benoit wiped the floor with us. i also finally sorted out getting myself a membership, it only took me 16 months.

and then we had vegan cake!



25.02.05: the rat has gone. all that's left is a dark stain on the concrete. if you didn't know, you wouldn't think it was anything.

i've been thinking recently, provoked by my internet stalker activities (artistic license pending), how much the internet brings back the mythical powers gained by having someone's name. it's too easy to find information on someone once you've acquired enough small details. this is really old news but i love the return to power of knowing a name. a first name is almost worthless (except good ol' rumplestiltskin), it's your last name that has to be guarded. there's such joy when recieving an email from someone and their full name is in the header, "ha!". it works both ways though, already there's been several occasions where i've felt the need to hide my last name. and i've found myself becoming increasingly cautious when letting some people have it. having said that, last week i was top ten in google uk for 'emo' and 'laurence', so there's no hiding there. but there is a disadvantage in being so google-able. i've always liked being open but this could really bite me on the ass. it's a little unsettling seeing unknown people searching for my name, like the person in barcelona still, it's the choice i've made and i'm sticking to it.

maybe squids were actually created to be ancient aquatic artillery. or maybe this is such a stupid comment i shouldn't have made it.

dragonfly's vanilla rooibos is the shit. also their indian chai, ain't that right tom?

"febuary can suck my balls".



24.02.05: like the dead rat i nearly trod on while walking to work three days ago. and how it's still there, but every day a little more grotesque - this morning flattened by a car as it had parked. when something dies in the city it can't go back to the ground. it just lies there dead on the concrete, waiting for someone brave enough to throw it in the trash or the gutter, where if it's lucky it can navigate the sewers to the sea.

the argus doing what it does best, pissing me off:

"people's choices of diet are made for many different reasons. for many it is a moral questions of animal rights - meat eating is murder. some have religious reasons while others are simply squeamish".

i admit it - i'm squeamish, i am wuss. a big loser. and this is why i don't eat meat (ignoring the environmental and economical reasons of course). the question they are asking is "is it safe to convert our children?", and the research that sparked this article involved feeding spoonfuls of meat to poverty stricken children in africa (who are fed almost exclusively on maize and cassava and "have a poor diet"). the addition of meat into their diet "transformed them physically and mentally". well fucking duh. only it's a shame they didn't have a control in this rigorous scientific experiment, feeding the children happy food like vegetables and pulses.

i never told you (actually i probably did), but i finally got my hands on a copy of vollman's rising up and rising down. i havn't started reading it yet, as it's a bit of an undertaking and my queue of books is already quite long (or wide, depending on how you look at it, literally), but isn't it so sexy? i have nothing useful to say about it at all yet. i just wanted to say i had it. i suck like that.

now all i need to do is work out if my background headache is from intense computer usuage or my caffination tea-totalling.

that or stab you



23.02.05: it's still snowing outside (actually it's snowing upwards, it's unsnowing). there's no snow on the ground as such, but at least it's still trying. snow makes it very hard to get up in the morning, what with it being so cosy in bed. especially when you wake up and your duvet is perfectly girl shaped (that's right, i havn't forgotten).

a really over the top article on blogging. although painfully exaggerated, most of this makes sense (yes, some people are that sad). one comment i do disagree with though is "they spend enormous amounts of time blogging rather than living". when you write every day it becomes horribly apparent exactly how much of a life you do or don't have. after i started my website (latest incarnation) the first thing i did was lose the television. if what you do is get up, go to work, come home, watch television and go to bed - you have nothing to say. it's not so much of a driving factor, but more of a warning system, showing you that your life is trickling away and you're achieving nothing. you put in the extra effort.

anyway, if you know me well enough you'll know i like my juice. alas, another one bites the dust. no worries though, i havn't been drinking pj smoothies since they scrapped the large bottles in favour of the smaller ones (at vaguely the same price). it's also good to hear innocent have "no plans to change its set-up and sell out". i never knew pepsi-co owned walkers either.

this game is awesome. although after scoring 2069 i couldn't be bothered to continue.



22.02.05: snow does have it's problems though. walking home, i can't help but stare up into the snow as it falls through the street's soft sodium lighting, it's the best starfield ever, and every fucking flake goes right in my fucking eye.

we just missed a talk by matthew carter (mr.typography) at the london design musuem. gutted. actually we might be able to make it if we go right now.

the french national library attacks google, an interesting article and vaguely thought provoking. i'm not really sure if it's fair for them to criticise google's plan (scanning all uncopyrighted books from the top five libraries in the world), although it is a reasonable point that the libraries are all english/american. surely making these books availble is only a good thing, and can you blame google that other books are not? i guess it's the difference between not having a choice because there's only one option and because there isn't an option at all. maybe it's a step downhill but in the right direction? also, this is only a problem because google has become synonymous with the internet. if another company had taken on the project i doubt anyone would have cared so much. this doesn't null the point though, the power that google wields is far subtler than that of other global corporations. i also think it's important to consider google's motivation. looking at their history of dealing with foreign languages and culture, i think it's only a matter of time before they scale this project up globally and fairly.

simen johan does some eerie and fantastic photography. why do i like this twisted stuff? and these children just aren't real.

vincent gallo does atp, but i still can't be bothered to go. sigh.

and while i'm throwing out the links, check out m-city. it's probably be the largest stencilling project i've ever seen. this is what you get when you cross graffiti with too much sim city.

also, to be included in the list of comments i shouldn't have made: remember in school when i started telling you to eat your own head? well this kid now can.

sorry.



21.02.05: the weekend has been nice. mostly due to it being spent hanging out with jess and grilly (but also thom and tom, of course). there was also a lot of game playing (and watching), mainly go, rubik's line up and witch trial. i would have won my first game of that too, but it was called a night and tommy threw the case out of court, splitting the fees and causing a draw. in my dreams she still burnt.

somewhere between saturday night and sunday morning i finished reading blankets - craig thompson's 400+ page epic about a girl, growing up and religion (i could do this description better but i wont). i found it crushing on too many levels. firstly, that people get girls that amazing when i clearly failed so horribly. this is what you could have had. looking at his drawings of raina is like commiting miniture hari-kiri. the panel where they first meet and the panel where they're on the sofa after looking through her photo's, both of these killed me. secondly, empathy with the painful conclusion of their relationship. the thing is (woah, spoilers), they only hung out for two weeks and then he became obessed with her for the best part of a decade, what a total loser (note, because you might have missed the ironic qualities in my sentence there).

also the apostrophe in "photo's" was for the missing letters, not the plural.

it's really really snowing outside. huge snow flakes floating about in the golden sunset light. snow is just too cool.

mogwai, government commisions. gorgeous cover (even if the red is too orange. #b00000 people, you know it makes sense). musically the cd is worth it alone for the beast that's 'like herod', a vast improvement on the 'young team' original (it takes up over a third of this cd). who needs nic endo anyway? helicon one is like going home. i'm a seventeen again and it's summer. the other highlight is a more chilled out version of 'superheroes of bmx' (a long running favourite of mine). there are a few tracks missing though, most notably the (what should be an awful) cover of 'don't cry'. but nevermind. also, it's the first cd i've bought that's dedicated to john peel. the first of many i'm sure.



18.02.05: i'm still not sure if thursday after-work drinks down the pub is such a good idea. plus it meant i missed the final showing of reconstruction (insert miserable looking emoticon here). but it was a good laugh and everything, work colleagues can be too funny when drunk.

we ended up back at dan's where i felt the need to shoot myself several times in the arm with his uzi 9mm. i have the battle scars to prove it, and this morning it doesn't seem like it was such a good idea. anyway, we watched 'hero'. it really is quite beautiful and i enjoyed it far more than other martial arts movies (perhaps i was just disgruntled because i was forced to watch 'crouching tiger' dubbed). i guess i love my music video movies. it also has the most genius use of colours (and wind, yes jon). so then on the way home, walking along ewhurst road, no.14 was lit up all green and no.6 was lit up red. the street lights were orange, but nothing was blue.

i'm not reading doom patrol anymore, it's giving me nightmares (grant morrison, fuck you and your stupid hyper-sigils). last night i was stuck in this dream where there was suddenly no order, chaos has broken out and the universe is slowly disintergrating. we can't get out as everything falls apart (in the style of 'dark city' no less). the streets are full of rioters and looters, people struggling to find food and materials before they literally disappear. running through the city we try to hide behind a church, only to find a brick wall where it shouldn't be, into which the church is tapered creating a false perspective for anyone inside. we took refuge in a bank across the street - since money was now completely redundant only nice people hung out there. we stole several million euros and bought a small airship from someone who should have known better. the plan was to fly away before the ground disappeared, i think, but the airship vanished. then running across walkways and the city was changing more and more. as everything deteriorated reality tried to compensate by interpolating what remained into a weird degenerating fractal patchwork of itself (awkward sentence with too many long words, i know). towards the end, the streets began to flood as sewers and river banks ceased to exist. a random wall or building, or a strained cobble street was all that remained. the last thing i remember was us standing on flat grey sand (neuromancer?) with the sea rushing in at us from every direction, four stories high. i'm not sure if it was us or the world that went first.



17.02.05: i guess it's school half term, and you wouldn't believe how emo some of those school girls look. i was born too early (will such comments get me in trouble? whatever).

halfway down western road there's a guy playing violin. this would be fine if it wasn't for the crazed devil puppet - a sinister marionette hanging from some horrific apparatus attached to his leg. the little satan is jigging about, head lolling from side to side, an evil fucking grin cutting across its face. and yes, there are children crying.

the freebutt last night was yuchi, the blue minkies and blood red shoes. a fine collection of bands clearly worth braving the cold for. warning though, they only take cards upstairs, me and grilly only had enough money for a pint and a half between us (damn him for donating to ladyfest). favourite band of the night award goes to yuchi, just because i can't resist the singy shouty. the blue minkies, also good, but made me wonder what happened to bis and why everyone hated them so much? bis, why have you forsaken us? blood red shoes (see, she was wearing red shoes) were just fucking loud, especially since there's only two of them. the drums are still reverberating inside me. awesome.

now who is coming to the cinema with me to see reconstruction? anyone?



16.02.05: you can't dump an artificial christmas tree. it just doesn't work like that. and it's way past tree dumping season too, you're so not cool. maybe you might think about actually keep it for next year? it is plastic after all, its ugliness will last forever.

so, some photos from barcelona:

i have so many holiday photos i'd like to put up, and i want them to be woven into context, so they're going to take a bit longer. i figured my graffiti photos will do for now, plus they're awesome. the city's reputation is well deserved, it has an impressive display of both local and international graffiti. the best of which is on the west site of la rambla, especially around the 'mercat de sant josep' (the large market) and surrounding the 'museu d'art contemporani'. with far too much to photograph i tried to be a little selective (also in my choices of the photos above). i'd hate to think of what the turnover rate is on these graffiti strips - it's all far too good.

casey jones was cool as fuck, never forget this.



15.02.05: protege moi is running around inside my head. walking to work and i'm thinking about hippy communes, it's thursday on my stereo. sometimes you just can't help these thoughts from surfacing, and sometimes you just can't stop them from effecting you. even after so long. it's true, i'm a total loser.

so in my dream i met this girl, a very confused version of this girl (she's real, i kind of know her, but here i'd never met her before - it's the fantasy of meeting someone again for the first time). she explained to me that two years previously she had met herself from the future. as weird as this event was, she hadn't given herself any significant or useful information. she was now plagued by the physics and philosophies of time travel, constantly trying to understand what had and would happened. was she predestined to met herself again, or did she have free will to end the temporal loop? simply knowing that backwards time travel was possible wasn't enough, it only created new and more complicated questions. and what happened to her after she time travelled? was she able to return to her present or did she continue back further in time? had she even met herself more than once? and beyond this there was the why..

alas there's a new silver mt.zion cd coming in march, full album and everything. hold your breath.

gutted though, peter winn is leaving terre à terre (btw, nice homepage they've got there, complete with a 15 second meta refresh so you can't read the masses of 'useful' content), food for friends is under new management and one of the wai kika moo kaus has gone. vegetarian restaurant purge.



14.02.05: happy fucking valentines day, and welcome back to your shitty country.

fully illustrated tales of barcelona are to come, but until then please don't ask to see my photos. they are works in progress.

my weekend seems all mixed up, i would like to blame this on jet lag but who the fuck am i trying to kid? i've never had jet lag in my life, i'm just not cool enough. but weaving saturday back together i know for sure it ended at the sussex art club, a rather nice hang out on ship street. cheers to astra for inviting us along, it was a lovely and different night out.

then after the sussex art club i had the worst dream since a long time. can i please stop having dreams about my friends drowning? this has been going on long before christmas, and it really sucks. i'm not sure what caused the accident, or even what the accident was, but we were suddenly in deep and vivid water. nicola was nowhere to be seen and johanna was suddenly trapped tight in the ice, half of her frozen just above the water. aimee just sank into the murky depths. from the shore i desperately tried to blow my orange whistle, signalling to the rescue people where jo was before she died of hypothermia. a team of orange men managed to crack the ice and lift her to safety. i could then hear nicola coming up the stairs, frantically asking where aimee was and shouting at people to go and find her. i shut the door to hide, not being able to deal with telling her the truth, but she found me. then aimee was here too and we both hugged her tightly, but as i realised that actually she was gone she faded away. about here is where i woke up. crying in middle of the night, at least i hadn't wet the bed.

seriously though, that really fucked me up.

the highlight of sunday was going to the marlborough. hurray for short plays and a really nice little theatre. it makes you wonder why i've never been there before. i guess it's because no one has invited me. ditto to the new venture theatre, except there i have been invited to. i feel weird about theatre like i feel weird about london, just a couple of words spoken and the whole thing is tarnished with some abstract feeling of inadequacy. that may sound vauge or cryptic, but it's the clearest i've ever been about it.

void shitting beds on the streets of brighton:

and if only i could do an lj cut i'd post this:

emomilk: y'know.. i can't remember us sitting on the beach
roxy717171: it was erased from your brain?
emomilk: maybe i went to lacuna inc
roxy717171: for that? i dont see why? ;]
emomilk: maybe you went too :p
roxy717171: shit...

once upon a time mark linkous broke my heart. but once he saved my life.



08.02.05: y'know i can't believe it's been six months since i went to italy and switzerland. what have i been playing at? anyway, i'm off tomorrow. you have my details, name and number. see you next week..



07.02.05: it's actually so cold outside. the sun is trying to trick you into going out in only a shirt. it's cold like you can't breathe. the elements are teaming up against us people. we are all doomed.

wow, looks like i'm number one for emo in google uk today.

friday was all about watching the warriors ("come out to play-e-ay). turns out everyone thinks this film is awful - you're just plain vanilla wrong (i was going to say "maybe you're just going faggot", but if you havn't seen the film you'll miss the reference and hate me). it's awesome and not only because of "riffs yeah, can you dig it". in my head it also has parallels with pi (the darren aronofsky movie). i bet if you play the two films side by side the subway scenes align and they reach coney island together. all the fight scenes will match up with max's fits. also clint mansell's songs will overlay the pwei samples perfectly.

we (meaning mostly grilly) also taught tommy a bunch of rebessica songs. i reveled in watching someone elses pain while struggling to learn them (actually he picked them up much quicker than i did). two guitars are going to be great, and not only so the songs don't die when grilly's guitar cuts out again.

yes, we had a house party. yes it was fun. no i don't mind that you didn't come. the prize for best costume goes to aimee with her white pajamas and banana. my costume (matt white badge) may have been slightly lame, but it was a well thought out concept perfectly executed. i helped with jess and grillys costumes (spray painting tshirts and sowing sock/tentacle masks) so i am forgiven, right? anyway, thanks to everyone who came, you were all lovely.

sunday was the first day of summer. in january. i know, who would have thought it? me, dancing to dreaming (blondie's) topless in the living room. it's not 'mirror in the bathroom' but it's still good cleaning music. we had various eating out experiences and they were all great. my favourite new shop is the fossil shop by the inside out cafe. if only i had £600 i could own my own dinosaur egg. could i start an appeal? some of their fishy fossil are gorgeous too, and for just under £6000 you can get the biggest hunk of amethyst i've ever seen. i actually used to have a pretty large trilobite collection (mostly picked up in morocco near the sahara desert), nothing quite so posh though.

out of the blue, this guy in the corner shop just asked me if i was russian. vot dom? "no, sorry" i said. he laughed "oh, i thought you might be". weird.



04.02.05: i know you havn't noticed (no really), but there is a bit of a google update going on. checking google.co.uk i'm at six for "emo" and twenty for "laurence". it's the best update ever (actually that probably has more to do with my new domain and recently acquired back links).

so anyway, could the haggis and the vegetarian haggis be any further apart? they're almost on opposite sides of the food spectrum (now i know that doesn't make sense or mean anything like what i'd mean't it to mean, but i wanted to write it). for example, your typical haggis contains:

lamb's stomach, lungs, heart and liver (offal), kidney leaf fat, oatmeal, onions, spices etc

while your vegetarian haggis contains

oatmeal, water, kidney beans, lentils, nuts (peanuts, almonds, walnuts), carrots, turnip, onions, mushrooms, salt, pepper & spices

wow. do us vegetarians rock or what? it's also worth noting that you won't find lungs in an american haggis, as lungs are an illegal ingredient in the states (i couldn't find any more information on that, sorry). macsween wont ship to the usa, canada, australia, new zealand, japan, china, switzerland or eire due to 'import restrictions'. ack.

the weirdest sight i ever saw last night. i was walking up towards the train station and two cars, travelling in opposite directions, both suddenly decided to do a three point turn. it was like a crazy pisces dance. what i would have liked to do now is a classic grant morrison symbolic thing, where aquarius is the sea, aries is the train station (er?) and i am the sun. it doesn't really work does it? nevermind.

on the way home i also realised i'm too good at suck-popping. one of these days i'm going to suck-pop my gum and it's going to blow a hole through my teeth, like a golf ball would if you had really good aim.






03.02.05: i'm feeling boring and 'webmastery', so stop reading if you're uninterested in things like google spidering and traffic analysis.

i havn't lost many visitorsduring my recent move. the graph show a very steady but slight decline in visitors but it's nothing significant (from a one month sliding average of 62 to 60 visitors/day). google has been indexing my pages as per normal and slowly attributing them to my new domain as it finds them through it (terribly worded sentence, make do). it hasn't resolved the domains but it has been indexing the homepage content under the old domain. i guess it will continue to do so until the next link update (as i've managed to get the majority of them changed and pointing to the new domain).

the only thing i've really lost is all of my referal data. because google has been ranking the old pages (that meta refresh to the new ones) all of my referals come from them. i supposed it'd be interesting to see what would have happened had i not used a meta refresh, rather i'd just left a link pointing to the new domain. i guess google would have dropped most of those pages as soon as it found them, but picked up the new ones much quicker. the problem is that these wouldn't have been ranking until after the next link update - i would have lost most of my traffic.

i've mentioned the link update twice now, this is where google recalculates the value of all the links pointing to your pages (well, all pages), and is something that directly affects your rankings. still waiting.

about referals though, what really bugs me is when i get one from a private forum or password protected site area. it's a perfect example of how i can't stand not knowing things. who put a link to my site? what were they saying about me? it's not paranoi, it's just another character flaw.



02.02.05: don't forget our fucking house party this saturday. i'm not inviting or telling anyone other than here and now. this way no one will be offended and hate me because i didn't invite them. don't worry, i didn't invite anyone.

crossposted from the rebessica blog:

rebessica destroyed my leg. or perhaps it was simon quinlank with his stupid weak lemon drink. or perhaps it was just grilly with his stupid riffage. there's a 'riffage' that should be in bold though, the riffs are coming together. all christmas we've been stuffing them full of pudding and now they've gotten fat.

lookit, rebessica finally has structure and coherence. riffs have beats. chords have bass lines. songs have titles (well, sort of). it's starting to make sense.

we were in the goth room. my memory of it includes red silken drapes, an ornate chandelier and a huge mosaic of naked people. i'm also going to remember a huge luxurious sofa, a drinks bar with free chocolate and a pool. more lush than scary innit. my memory rocks.

songs pretty much nailed include 'love', 'kid in the girl a top' [unsic], 'quinlank' and 'milkshake' (bash smash trash mother fucker). songs worth an honourable mention are 'pretty girls make cakes' (is this a working title?) and 'all the time a sunny beach' (once laurence actually learns the riff - writing in the third person reference). we also did 'idioteque' and 'myxomatosis' which both have potential (to be honest i think idioteque has the most).

like kilroy silk said, "we no longer control our own borders".

is it typical of me to want this? just look at the packaging!



01.02.05: my site has now had vistors from every country in europe, even the really small ones that people don't even realises are countries. all of them except luxembourg of course (this is not a lie). i guess they just really hate me in luxembourg.

so while i'm on the subject of 'europe', here's the itinerary:

Tuesday 08 February
London Gatwick (South Terminal) To Barcelona
flight 5135; dep. 13:40; arr. 16:45

Residencia Australia - Ronda Universidad Nº11, 4º1ª,
Tel: 34 93 317 41 77 Fax: 34 93 317 07 01
Arrive/Depart: Tue 8 February 2005 - Fri 11 February 2005

Friday 11 February
Barcelona To London Gatwick (South Terminal)
flight 5138; dep. 22:10; arr. 23:25

short but sweet, but which also kind of rhymes with cheap (less than three easyjet).

the only thing is, someone in barcelona has been googling me (someone in catalan accessing through the university pompeu fabra, to be precise). i find this quite disturbing. it's perhaps the first time i've wished i wasn't quite so googleable. my own internet stalker skills are way above par, but i still don't like it.

moving swiftly on, i hate 'funny' internet videos. it's the product of a culture i despise. they're not amusing in any way. all you've done is reduce the internet to the lowest quality of television ("you've been framed"). i spit on you. and now having said that, the only thing that made me laugh yesterday was an american kid singing the line "orange juice raped my rather". please don't click on the obligatory link.



31.01.05: my weekend i were miserable, how were you?

friday night wasn't so bad (for the concorde), really it wasn't. i know i left in a "huff" but whatever. saturday wasn't so bad neither. it would have been great but like i said, i was being miserable (which isn't the right word, but it is one i'm comfortable using). tilly, thanks for the latte. i definately had an early night. it goes on like this..

maybe i should just eat a piece of shut the fuck up pie.

i had my first dream about dave's comics. steph had bought a huge section of the mall beside the shop (yes, it was in a mall). this was something akin to tate modern's turbine hall, except made of marble and with fountains (which i'd clearly stolen from the queen victoria memorial). also included in the insane purchase was a number of large marble chambers, featuring the most impressive architecture i've ever dreamt - the guy has taste.

later on and dave's comics is a stall at glastonbury where we tried to get warm soup. by now the dream was really fucked up. the carnival had come to town and erected tents over our houses. half of my friends had been killed by megatron and we were hard on the run. racing down the wet neon streets and everything went lime green and tangerine. johanna was also featured, speeding away from danger on her giant skateboard. she had been an extra in the original film and they had decided to give her a more important role (in a bid to make the 'twist' looked planned from the beginning). i believe her friend got shot and drowned. horrible i know, but jo made me watch that movie so it's her fault. it's not like i've been reading doom patrol before bed and playing too much transformers or anything..

alexandre orion, and a well good music video for shitty bum. recognise.

and then there's the rebessica blog or course.



28.01.05: what i like about kingfisher is they sell all of their toothpastes with and without fluoride. it's nice to be given the choice of whether you want access/exposure to things that have debatable affects on your health. also see mercury, mobile phones, fast food, cigarettes and guns.

on a similar theme - the other day, while on a 'business excursion', i discovered that starbucks actually do a fucking killer latte. i didn't need to know that and nor did you. but why can't nice coffee places do a latte that good? i guess it's probably because they don't put so much crap in them. (a starbucks latte costs the same as a bigmac did you know? pfft).

hang out with me tomorrow is probably my third favourite punk song of all time.

last night i dreamt she had zoids, she even had a dimetrodon. then she explained to me that love is suicide. i told her suicide is painless. "no" she said, "it's pointless, like your efforts". and yet she was the warmest person you'd ever meet, i swear.



27.01.05: my teeth are fucking vibrating.



27.01.05: i've spent the last month thinking keith duffy is a posh tory twat, but actually it was nick griffin the whole time.

i just had the perfect sentece. this was before i discovered the danger of using my power supply as a foot warmer. whoops.

so last night we went to see 2046. written and directed for the 'mtv generation' it moves at two hundred miles an hour, barely have you figured out what's going on and the plot has zoomed off in another direction. you are constantly bombarded and the film seems to end before it's even begun. none of this is true. it's the slowest film i've seen in a very long time. like grilly said, it's not that it's a bad film, it's just too much film. and the sci-fi bits are just a tease, i want to see casshern so much.

i really like google's new (very badly titled) video search. unlike the yahoo video search it doesn't search for videos on the internet, it searches television. your google man says "it's just different philsophies; instead of looking for video on the web, we record television programs, index them, and then return pointers to the exact place in a TV program to where a query is mentioned". i think that's pretty impressive. for it to be worth using you really need to be able to watch the programmes, but i'm sure it's all to come. and if it did what yahoo's did then what would be the point?

this animation is amazing.

giant squid can weigh up to one tonne. how amazing is that?



26.01.05: on the way to work and it starts snowing, it tries its hardest. there's tiny specks of white wisping about infront of my face. this, just before the sun rears its beautiful head into the crack between the sea and the clouds, probably the only glimpse you'll get of it all day, and you can almost hear the falling snow flakes squeal as they burn.

i got hit by about three snow flakes, does that count as it snowing?

so pwei were fucking awesome of course. there's not much i could say that isn't being said in the forum so i'll keep it brief. they basically played all the songs ('runaround' wtf?), the highlight for me was probably 'their law' or 'dance of the mad bastards' (which until that moment i never really liked). other highlights included 'not now james' and 'urban futuristic'. lets fucking have it, indeed. you should see the state of my shoes, savages in london i tell you. the only extra song i would have loved them to have played was underbelly. so can't complain at all. the back drop was amazing too, like a huge led screen thing, a bit of a designers republic pastiche/homage. nice to see the old logos flashing huge and bright. also, cheers to the pweination peeps that i spoke to, and if anyone is missing their hat give me a shout (i have it). getting home was almost a nightmare but we eventually made it back to ben's foodless house, thanks ben.

the next day me and martin got up and ate pasty. then vaguely headed to the natural history museum, via st.james park, buckingham palace, green park and a whole bunch of embassies. i blame martin for making us get off at the wrong stop (which was shortly after i made us get off at the wrong stop - you'd confuse westminster and waterloo too if you only looked at the first letter). the natural history museum is a great building though, and you get to look at lots of dinosaurs. less than three dinosaurus awesome etc. i also learnt about giant squid, which are fantastically terrifying, but also quite sad. there's something very sombre and lonely about them. they're definately one of my new favourite animals. they can grow to about 18m long but no one has ever seen a healthy living one. and doesn't the darwin centre just emanate coolness? (even though there isn't much there for the casual passer-by)

on the train back to brighton i met one of the most unpleasant men ever. coming down the train with his burgerking and coke, why does he have to sit opposite me? his food smells of grease and dead animal, stuck in this cramped train and it makes me want to vomit. how he stuffs the fries into his mouth machine gun style without pausing once. his little mouth twitches so fast and he sucks at his fat greasy fingers. he has these staring aggressive/nervous eyes. then he eats his burger like a fucking animal. all this makes me dislike him instantly, but what happened next is what really got to me. another man is led down the train by the conductors (kontrol, y'all) because he was sitting in first class. there's a polite argument going on, he was happy to move, he doesn't want to sign this form, he doesn't want to pay, they havn't explained anything at all. i felt for the guy, and first class on these trains isn't marked well at all. the 'authorities' were being reasonably unreasonable. there are threats to call the police. there is all this shit he doesn't need to deal with. he makes a few calls, one of which is to make an official complaint/appeal (the process of which they wouldn't explain to him, they were just going to call the police). while he is doing this, this guy is staring at him with a sickening grin on his face, teeth slightly bared. he was almost laughing, reveling at this guys misfortune. the pleasure in his beady little eyes is vile. the whole time excitedly looking around for someone to share his fun with. part of me wishes i'd spoken to him. all of me is glad i'll never see him ever again.

that'll do for now.



24.01.05: if you've noticed that i'm answering my phone less and less and it's taking me longer to reply to your text messages, then i'm very sorry. i always have my phone on silent (you know this, it's almost eerie) and i rely soley on its menacing vibrations, i am entirely at their mercy. so as my phone slowly dies, and the keypad becomes less and less responsive, the vibrations are also become fainter and fainter. these days it's nothing more than a weak struggling buzz. if anything, something akin to a death rattle. it's in a pretty lonely place.

so my point is this - i'm in desperate need of a hand-me-down. if anyone is about to get a new phone and doesn't have a girlfriend/boyfriend who usually takes the old one, i would really appreciate it. i have my own sim card in my apartment, and lubricants and amyl nitrate.

the weekend was as follows (start your vcr now). the pain of a street fighter photo shoot. breakfast in the greasiest cafe in brighton (porcupine). fooly cooly purchase. exploring the indoor market, abstractly similar to my dream of mystical sculptures and moroccan/indian ruins (surprisingly well kept crimson glazed walls, grass carpeted corridors and a perfect pool of shiny black water) in the mountains that surround and shadow brighton. sheltering from the rain inside the inside out cafe, well good latte and cake. pizza from infinity foods with aimee, she hates carob and should have bought her book round my house. oh, apparently nothing.

shortly i'm off to london to meet up with people and see pwei (yes, pwei). i'll be in london all tuesday also, so if you see me on the road - eat me drink me love me kill me.

(possibly the most referential post ever)






21.01.05: so tired this week and my fruit tea smells like sick. sick i tell you. it tastes about right though, i'm just going to have to drink it as quick as possible. also the window is open and the breeze is gorgeous. it's almost spring (er, right).

i thought it was 'interesting' how google use meta refreshes for linking to other sites on the google blog. why don't they use the new 'nofollow' tag, huh? huh?

so last night we caught 'team america' at the crappy odeon in town. it's worth seeing but not especially at the cinema. some of it's proper funny, and some of it is really clever, but the puppet jokes get boring really quickly (we all love the cats obviously). the uber-gore is all good. but it's a little unfortunate about the 'tsunami' scene. the long shot of puppets floating face down in the sea is just painful. it made me think though, remember how the spiderman trailer was pulled because it featured the world trade center? whatever. and if you're wondering, they stuffed michael moore full of ham.

grafedia is a fascinating project. you scrawl your 'hypertext' somewhere (i.e. on a wall or whatever) and email them the word and an image. when someone sees your hypertext (identifiable by being blue and underlined) they can email a message to @grafedia.net to retrieve the 'linked' image. i'm not sure if i explained that very well, but hopefully you get the gist.

i had a dream that efrim from 'a silver mt zion' died. i was with my ex-girlfriend at the time and it made me cry.



20.01.05: the big blogging news yesterday was google introducing a new tag attribute for href links - rel="nofollow". what this basically does is discount the benefits given to the site being linked to (seo-101: the more links you have pointing to your site the higher you can rank in search results). the thinking behind the new attribute is to stop the 'comment spam' which has been plaguing blogs and journals. both yahoo and msn have agreed to acknowledge the new tag attribute (making it pretty much an instant web standard - w3 who?) and the major blog software companies are also all on board, such as six apart (who own moveabletype and more recently livejournal) and blogger (actually owned by google, so a no brainer there).

the people at livejournal have done a particularly nice implementation though, a link posted in your comments/guestbook is only given the tag attribute if the poster is not on your friends list. hence anyone spamming your guestbook will gain nothing and links from your friends will still count (if you care, i suppose). if this is how the new attribute is universally treated then there shouldn't be a problem. if everyone uses it in a sensible manner then comment spamming will become futile. however, if only 50% of blogs, journals and guestbooks use the attribute then spammers will simply double their efforts and the problem will get much worse (for bloggers, not for search engines. natch)

and of course, the new attribute isn't limited to blogs. you can also use it in your directory to stop people submitting their spammy sites purely to boost their link popularity. whether anyone will actually bother submitting their site to your now dying directory is another question entirely. the attribute is also another way to trick people into 'reciprocal' linking without actually reciprocating, although this is only a worry if reciprocal linking is a major part of your online marketing strategy (you big lamo).

i don't think the attribute is such a big problem (as some people have made out). linking isn't over, the internet isn't dying, and nor is search. the only people that this can hurt is the people who rely on acquiring crappy links to improve their search engine rankings. if your website is good and people like it then people will link to it properly. the most intriquing thing about it is how google, yahoo and msn all united (that's a lot of power they're throwing around) to implement what is basically a hack to their algorithms. and following on from its introduction i imagine there might be some very interesting changes in search results (but that will require a link update, sigh).

anyway, enough about search engines already

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