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Digital Spy, there

Internet / TV Comedy

Yeah, yeah, putting the boot into Digital Spy is a fairly pointless thing to do, really. But it’s 3am, I’m bored, and they’ve mildly annoyed me, so what are you going to do?

Over on Ganymede & Titan – the Red Dwarf fan site I contribute to when I’m not sulking because I hate Red Dwarfa quite extraordinary thread has popped up. Short version: there are lyrics to the opening theme, nobody fucking knew about it until now, you can hear them most clearly 14 seconds into this video, we’re all gibbering wrecks because of this, and Darrell is our new lord and saviour.

Long version: read the thread. It’s worth it. Seriously.

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Linkrot

Internet

Keith Instone, writing on the site Usable Web in December 2012, taken from the Wayback Machine:

“I just noticed that Alertbox articles (and other things) from useit.com are now incorporated into nngroup.com”

Ah, two sites belonging to famous usability consultant Jakob Nielsen.

“From a practical perspective, it means different URLs for Alertbox articles.”

Uh-oh. Jakob hasn’t broken a load of links, has he?

“So far, all of the redirects seem to be working (no linkrot).”

Excellent. Well done, Jakob.

Back to Keith and the site Usable Web, today:

500 Internal Server Error

Oh well, maybe it’s just temporary. Let’s take a look at March 2016:

403 Forbidden

Linkrot… on an article about linkrot. Bonus points go to Usable Web for having the slogan “Links to web usability history”. Not much history present there any more.

See also: famous designer Jeffrey Zeldman complaining about a web community being destroyed, and then destroying one himself.

(Don’t look too far in the past on sites I’ve been involved with, though. I definitely didn’t write a pompous article about all this years ago which suffered exactly the same fate. Promise.)

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The Dirty Feed Guide to Good Living

Internet / Life

I enjoy watching other people have arguments on the internet. All the fun of the fight, without actually getting hurt yourself. It can be immense amounts of fun.

After watching one such fight on Twitter recently – which cumulated in a load of deleted tweets and a half-assed apology – the person involved tweeted the following immediately afterwards:

“Spend time with people you love. Interact with the world directly. Climb/lift/eat/enjoy something. Run. Read. Play. Cry. Smile.

Go now.”

Once you’ve finished vomiting, there are all kinds of issues you could take with that. It seems to be a plea for the reader to step aside from the internet and do other things instead… ignoring the fact that on the internet I still spend time with people I love, read, play, cry, and smile.

If we want to take things further, I’d point out that for some people – disabled, physically ill, or with mental health issues – being told to climb, lift, or run instead of spending time online with people who care about you is not only thoroughly ridiculous, but actively harmful.

And to get philosophical for a moment, the phrase “interact with the world directly” sets off alarm bells in my head. As though there isn’t something direct about how we can interact on social media. And I’ve walked through real places that I should have appreciated in a complete daze. Being there doesn’t always mean that you’re there. Some of the most engaged I’ve ever been with the world has been online.

But all that isn’t the worst thing about this tweet. The mistake here is that this person took their own bad behaviour… and projected it outwards. They knew they’d behaved ridiculously, and clearly thought that stepping away from the net for a while was best for them – which is a perfectly valid choice. But to make themselves feel better, they decided to turn what was best for them into some kind of motto for good living for everyone. A motto which certainly suited them at that particular moment… but is not a general guide to life.

To repeat: that tweet is not actually about helping others. It’s simply about making themselves feel better. It’s merely a useless platitude which is too simplistic to be truly useful to anyone.

My advice would be: when you’ve screwed up, sometimes you should wallow in your mistake. Not for long – doing that can get very unpleasant indeed. (At some point I need to stop beating myself up for mistakes I made twenty years ago, but that’s my own issue which I need to work on.) But sitting back for a moment and simply appreciating your error, rather than turning it into some kind of grand teachable moment for the world, is often the best option. Learn the lesson you need to learn, not paper over your cracked ego by giving out useless platitudes.

Of course, I’m not saying nobody can ever give advice for life. That would not only be utterly ludicrous, but considering this article, ridiculously hypocritical. I’m just saying you don’t need to leap straight to the teachable moment when you’ve fucked up… and that teachable moment needs to be carefully considered, not an instant reaction to your own personal circumstances.

Sometimes, when you’ve behaved like a bit of a dick, the only thing the world needs from you is to recognise that you’ve behaved like a bit of a dick.

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The Sad State of ‘The Talk Show’ Archives

Internet

John Gruber’s The Talk Show podcast – self-described as “the director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball” – has had no less than four separate homes over the years:

  • First incarnation: As an independent podcast at talkshow.net, with Dan Benjamin (27 episodes1, June 2007 – October 2009)
  • Second incarnation: On Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network (90 episodes, July 2010 – May 2012)
  • Third incarnation: On Mule Radio, solo (80 episodes, May 2012 – May 2014)
  • Fourth incarnation: On Daring Fireball (85 episodes so far, May 2014 – ongoing)

As this piece is published, that’s a total of 282 episodes. Of those 282, a total of 80 are missing – all of the first 27 originally hosted at thetalkshow.net, and 53 from the Mule Radio years. (Depending on what you define as “missing”, of course – but more on that later.) That’s a full 28% of episodes which have disappeared.

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  1. Episodes #9, #23 and #27 were skipped in the numbering. 

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Being Boring

Internet

Recently, a prominent startup founder tweeted the following:

“Twitter seems very boring lately.

Actually, maybe it’s the whole tech industry—there’s less drama, fewer interesting characters to follow.”

It struck me as one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen posted on Twitter. It seems to be based on the idea that they only follow people talking about the tech industry. And if you only follow people posting about the tech industry on Twitter, of course it’s going to get fucking boring.

I follow my fair share of people posting about tech on Twitter, obviously. Speaking purely personally, none of them are the most interesting people in my feed. (The most interesting people tend to tweet about old sitcoms, or sex, or sex in old sitcoms.) But what I love reading about on Twitter is merely my personal preference. The bigger issue here is: if you only surround yourself with voices which talk about tech, do you even care about the things that tech is supposed to be enabling?

You don’t write a blogging platform for the sake of writing a blogging platform; you write it to help people tell a story. You don’t write a messaging app for the sake of writing a messaging app; you write it to help people communicate. You don’t work on self-driving cars for the sake of working on self-driving cars; you do it to improve people’s lives. Stories, communication, lives… which are not about tech. If you aren’t interested in all the non-tech stuff going on around you, why even care about tech itself in the first place? Tech isn’t there just for the sake of tech; it’s there to free people to do a million and one other things.

I work in television transmission. And of course, I have a natural interest in the technology behind what I do, and the processes involved. Hell, I still get excited about counting the news on air. But that can’t be the only thing I’m interested in. I have to care about the material I’m putting out too – what the intent behind it is, and what it means to viewers. Otherwise, it’s a) impossible to do my job properly, and b) extremely boring.

I have to care about the people and stories my work is enabling, as well as the fucking mixing desk. Even if the mixing desk is also really interesting.

If you work in tech, but all you’re surrounding yourself with is voices of people in the tech industry, you’re doing a terrible job. If you aren’t listening to the voices of the people who use your tech, then for a start you’re not getting enough context about life in order to help develop the most effective technology in the first place. But then, I have no clue why somebody would only want to listen to people talking about tech anyway. It’s such a tiny part of what life is.

Only following people who talk about tech on Twitter and then being surprised to find it boring is just the same as only following fishmongers on Twitter, and then getting bored at endless complaints about the wholesale price of cod. At best, it shows a terrible lack of self-awareness. And it does nothing to persuade people who already think the tech industry is far too insular for its own good to think otherwise.

Go and follow writers. Go and follow archivists. Go and follow sex workers. Go and follow people who are just using Twitter to do stupid jokes. Go and follow anyone who isn’t just talking about the latest Apple rumours and Android Nougat. The world may suddenly seem an awful lot less boring.

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A Guide to Social Media Done Right for Game Developers

Internet

I don’t usually write this kind of thing, but I feel I just have to share this with you. Doing social media for games is hard, and media fragmentation makes getting attention for your product virtually impossible at times. If only somebody would write a clear, concise guide about best practices in order to give your game the edge it deserves in this crowded marketplace.

Fear not. @Origamiwars is here to show you how to do social media right. Rather than just give you a dry list of rules, let’s take a look at how this pioneering account did things. If you’re at all involved in social media in a commercial context, then what I’m about to tell you is well worth your time.

Incidentally, don’t worry that the account is currently called “AppleCustomerService”. There’s some spectacularly clever stuff that this account does later on which will explain everything. Suffice to say that until this morning, this account was called “OrigamiWars”. All will become clear.

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# I had a dream on a backlot… #

Internet

Yesterday was the 16th anniversary of the first episode of Big Brother in the UK. And the Elstree Studios Twitter account saw fit to celebrate the occasion:

The tweet irritated me. Not in a “oh shit, what has 2016 got to offer us now” kind of way. Just a mild irritance, like an ingrown pube, or an itchy bumhole, or Steve Brookstein. It took me a little while to work out exactly why, though.

First, let’s eliminate some possibilities. Anyone thinking this is going to be a rant about how awful Big Brother is should probably go and read another site instead. If you think the show is a sign television has “dumbed down”1, perhaps consider that the beauty of Big Brother at its best is hours upon hours of investment in people… where suddenly, a single look shot across the room means everything. The greatest moments can be the most subtle, and take the most effort to truly get – it demands attention and commitment from the audience. The very opposite of dumbed-down television.

But I digress. A more valid point about the tweet is querying why Elstree Studios made it, when the first two series of Big Brother weren’t shot at Elstree at all, but in Bow, near the 3 Mills Studios.2 Still, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they know that full well, and thought that it was still worth linking to regardless. Fine.

The problems come, however, when you actually take a look at the linked-to video of the first episode. This isn’t an official upload, either by Channel 4 or Endemol. This is an unofficial upload by a fan, taken from a VHS off-air recording made back in 2000. Dodgy hiss throughout and all. And immediately, alarm bells start to ring.

Now, I have no moral problem with that video being uploaded – it’s not like the episode has had a commercial release. It’s perhaps slightly weird that Elstree would associate itself with an illegal upload of a show that they’re currently hosting at the studios – or, indeed, would associate itself with any illegal uploads at all. For a major studio to give out a slightly confused message about piracy is pretty strange in itself.

But that’s not what really bugs me about this. Ultimately my problem with the tweet: it makes the world-renowned Elstree Studios feel… small.

When I think of Elstree, I think of professional kit. As we’re talking about television I’ll skip over trying to romanticise 35mm or something, and instead try to romanticise broadcast quality signals being fibred over to BT Tower. (It gets me hard, anyway.) The image I have of Elstree is one of absolute professionalism – of trained crews working together to provide the highest quality final result it’s possible to offer.

What don’t I think of? Someone recording something off-air onto a manky VHS tape, and then years later sticking it on YouTube with a shitty hiss all over it. I just don’t think that’s something Elstree should be associated with.

If Elstree is linking to any televison programme it has even the slightest connection to, it should be an official, top-quality version of it. Yes, it was only a silly, throwaway tweet for an anniversary… but even silly tweets mean something. There really wouldn’t be any harm in Elstree’s Twitter account just being that bit more professional.

Because without professionalism, and a commitment to a quality end result, we can all just upload shit to YouTube that we recorded on our phones… and there’s no reason for Elstree to exist at all.


  1. I do actually have plenty of sympathy with the idea that too much television considers its audience less intelligent than it used to be, but unfortunately many people who use the phrase “dumbed down” don’t seem to say much interesting themselves – just repeatedly spout cliches. 

  2. Incidentally, see the section on 3 Mills on the brilliant History of Television Studios in London site for the full story behind those studios. 

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The Only Post on Dirty Feed Which Will Ever Mention Megan Fox

Internet

Back in 2013, Megan Fox discovered Twitter:

Sadly, it didn’t last. Her last ever tweet:

Never has the question “What is the point?” been so easy to answer. If you check her profile page, how many people was Megan following? Answer: zero. Nought. 0. Precisely none. If you don’t actually follow anybody Twitter, no wonder you got fuck-all out of it. Following other people and reading what they have to say is pretty much the entire point of the thing.

Still, don’t worry! On her Twitter profile, Megan has helpfully included a link to her official Facebook page. I’m sure we’ll get something fun out of that! What’s her latest post, here in 2016?

Megan Fox Facebook post

Great. Thanks for that. Glad you figured out what the point of social media was.

OK, enough sneering. Admittedly, “Hollywood actor doesn’t get how Twitter works, and then gets her people to post a load of self-promotional guff on Facebook” is literally THE EXACT OPPOSITE of news. There’s no insight to be had there, even if I wasn’t dragging out tweets from 2013.

Still, the thing that really gets me is that from the very moment I first encountered the net, I always put a little piece of myself on there. And plenty of the fun was interacting with others. That’s not something I had to learn, or something which I think is difficult: just came naturally. Of course, famous actors can’t do it quite in the same way, but the absolute lack of anything human on those pages just makes my head hurt.

And crucially: I find it odd that an actor wouldn’t feel the same. Because being an actor is all about understanding people. And having an online presence which is nothing to do with people just feels incredibly odd. Fair enough if you have a job that allows you to be an automaton. But as an actor, I expect… more.

Megan Fox. I don’t understand you. I’m sure you’re gutted about that. Now, do you want to hear about Quatermass edits?

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“Just as soon as the material is produced…”

Internet

Please join me, as we take a trip back in time through to the early days of the web. Mind your head on that <blink> tag.

Old websites which have (brilliantly) managed to cling to being online have been endlessly discussed; the Warner Bros Space Jam site from 1996 is the classic example. Abandoned projects online are nothing new either, although they endlessly fascinate me. The saddest example I can think of is the Save TV Centre Studios campaign – last updated in 2013, with absolutely no admission that hey, it didn’t work out, but they tried their best.1

I think I may have found the most perfect combination of both, however. Behold: Exposure, “The How-To eZine Covering The Art Of Illusion”. Oh, it’s all there. Six illusionists listed on the front page, all promising to give their secrets… only two of which are links. And when you visit the David Copperfield section, you’re greeted with a list of all his tricks… precisely none of which are clickable, or have any content whatsoever. In fact, there is only one single piece of content on the entire site.

But the real beauty comes when looking at the What’s New page. Please forgive me if I just quote all of it.

October 9, 1997 – EXPOSURE gets an overhaul. A new home page now shows some of the magicians that will be featured. Although David Copperfield is an active link, there are no illusions available for viewing – just a list of his television specials with a sub list of the illusions in each special. The illusions will have active links just as soon as the material is produced. The David Blaine link now includes an illusion breakdown of his recent television special, Street Magic. At this moment, the only available illusion is the Balducci Levitation. Others will be made available just as soon as the material is produced.

September 15, 1997 – EXPOSURE goes online, thanks to free web hosting from GeoCities. The Balducci Levitation is the only illusion available.

Yep, that’s it. A grand total of two updates… both done in 1997. Nearly 19 years ago.

And that’s odd. A site going online in 1997, having a total of two updates, and then being swiftly abandoned wasn’t exactly rare. But the fact the site is still online certainly is. Even more weirdly, the site was obviously originally hosted on Geocities, which has obviously long since closed – but the author bothered to find new hosting, buy a proper domain name for the site, and then continue to do nothing else with the site. Not even remove the little Geocities GIFs. Just to make things even stranger, through checking archive.org it appears the site had some inconsequential changes made in 1999, but the currently online site is an earlier version!

A bit of research indicates that the domain name was bought in 2005, although it seems to have only been active since 2010. Geocities closed in 2009. So it seems that the site was created in 1997, sat idle on Geocities for years until Geocities closed, then moved to its own hosting… but still with no updates whatsoever.

An old site falling off the web is a shame, but understandable. An active site moving hosts and continuing to be updated is understandable. Even an inactive site which has a huge archive of material moving hosts and staying online is understandable. But a website with no content, which is never updated, suddenly moving hosts after years, but still completely abandoned?

That’s just weird. Maybe someone’s got a magic trick up their sleeve and are just playing a really long game.


  1. I have never abandoned a project online, of course. 

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The New Journalism

Internet

Boing Boing’s entire article:

“This inquisitive fellow was unable to keep his hands off a delicate museum piece hanging from the wall at the National Watch & Clock Museum. After breaking it, he lost interest and walked away, leaving his companion to clean up the mess.”

Description on the video, posted directly by the museum itself:

“This is why we beg and plead with our visitors to please refrain from touching objects in museums. The couple did notify Museum staff immediately.”

A few points:

  • So in fact, after breaking it, the guy didn’t “lose interest and walk away”, but actually went to notify museum staff. Which means Boing Boing managed to get the story entirely wrong.
  • Getting the story entirely wrong is especially impressive when it consists of just two sentences and an embedded video.
  • From this, I think we can safely say: not even bothering to read the description attached to a video when you intend to write something about it is not recommended practice.
  • The incorrect information has been pointed out in the site’s comments, but the article has not been corrected or updated to reflect this.
  • Oh, and the article is a duplicate of one posted on the site two and a half weeks before. Except that the original piece got the details correct.

Still, aside from that, excellent work Boing Boing.

Oh, and did I mention that the writer of the piece works as a Research Director?

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