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Strange Things Which Have Happened to Me on the Internet Part #23898372

Published 20th June 2020

Internet

Right now, I’m vaguely thinking of the next redesign of Dirty Feed. (I always get antsy after three years or so.) Don’t expect it until at least 2021; I’m the kind of arsehole who has to start from scratch, rather than using an existing theme. This kind of control freakery is very useful when directing television channels, and very not useful when trying to get anything else achieved.

But all this got me thinking of something very weird which happened to me, well over a decade now. None of this is still online; we have to rely on the Wayback Machine for this one.

Firstly, here’s Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan from 2007, which I designed:

Ganymede and Titan design from 2007

And here’s somebody’s personal website from 2007, which I had absolutely nothing to do with:

filecore.net design from 2007, looking pretty much identical

There’s just some kind of link here that I can’t quite put my finger on. And just in case you think this might just be some kind of bizarre coincidence, a quick poke around Kayak the Planet reveals a reference to http://www.filecore.net/css/gandt.css. Very good, well done.

So whatever, my site design was ripped off, by someone best described as a “forum acquaintance”. That’s far from unusual. I didn’t even really care that much; the design was good enough for what it was, but far from my finest work. It’s certainly not worth bleating about 13 years after the fact.

Except for one other thing.

Scroll down on Kayak the Planet, to the About Me section, and you get the following:

About me
The space for the megalomania to emerge.

Late-twenties. Geek. Grey eyes. Dark hair. Bad skin. No glasses. No fashion sense. But passionate about kayaking and the interweb. Speaks fluent English, passable Finnish and atrocious German.

Oh, recently married too. Can now be considered as owning flat and wife. No car. Excellent public transport except on the way home.

I recently decided to set up my own company to try and make my living as a full-time freelance proofreader and editor. At some point I might even achieve this goal. Until then, I’m mainly just sitting around wanking.

Now, let’s take a trip to ofla.info in 2007 – nothing to do with Ganymede & Titan, but my own personal site from the time:

About me

25. Geek. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Bad skin. Glasses. No fashion sense. But passionate about good telly and the interweb.

I recently left my job at makro in order to try and make my living as a full-time freelance web designer. At some point I might even achieve this goal. Until then, I’m mainly just sitting around wanking.

So this guy not only ripped off my website design for G&T. He then went to my own, entirely separate personal site, and ripped off my “about me” section. My personal description of myself: cut, pasted, and lightly adapted. Wanking gag and all.

Brrrrrrrr.

Deviance.

Published 25th October 2019

Internet / TV Comedy

Currently, I’m going through a load of old Dirty Feed articles, for preparation for the site’s 10th anniversary in January.1 And this particular piece about the now-dormant Dirty Feed Tumblr caught my eye.

There is no polite way of saying this. The most popular post I ever made on Tumblr was a collection of pulp book covers featuring women about to have sex with dogs.

Now, you may not be particularly keen on my bestiality material. You may prefer my in-depth articles about sitcom edits instead. But it was definitely the most popular post I ever made on Tumblr, by an order of magnitude. I mention over 200 likes/reblogs in that previous piece; it had over 400 before it was removed.

Removed? Ah, yes. Sadly, that post is no longer available, due to Tumblr’s porn ban in December 2018. As soon as that ban was announced, I stopped using the site. I never really clicked with Tumblr anyway; the porn ban was the final straw.

But the fact remains: by far the most thing I ever posted on the site was deleted by Tumblr. That’s a mildly annoying state of affairs, even if I’m not using the site any more, and even if the post did feature an illustration of an Alsatian with a particularly lascivious look on his face.

*   *   *

OK, fine. If you want an article on sitcom edits, let’s talk about some sitcom edits.2

Back in 2012, I wrote a series of articles on pre-watershed edits made to Red Dwarf on Dave. One recurring motif presented itself: time and time again, some of the funniest moments in an episode were cut.3 Kryten sticking up his finger and saying “Swivel on it, punk!”; “Rimmer Directive 271 states just as clearly: No chance you metal bastard”; “Santa Claus – what a bastard! He’s just a big fat git who sneaks down chimneys and steals all the kid’s favorite toys…”; “No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero gravity”; “Men! They’re all bastards!”; and by the funniest moment in Red Dwarf VIII:

CASSANDRA: I already told you: Rimmer dies of a heart attack, and then you and all the other Canaries die too; all except Lister, Kryten, Kochanski and the Cat. I’ve seen it.
RIMMER: That’s as well as maybe, but have you seen this?

RIMMER flips his middle finger to CASSANDRA, then turns and storms out.

CASSANDRA: Yes, I’m afraid I have.

My analysis of pre-watershed I’m Alan Partridge edits brought up similar points: “Don’t rub your fanny on me!” and “He means his cock!” were gone. And if I ever get round to writing something about pre-watershed Porridge edits on Gold, I’ll be sure to mention that the climax to the episode where Fletch sticks two fingers up to the camera is pixellated, destroying the joke entirely.

*   *   *

This isn’t really an anti-censorship screed, at least not per se. My point is simply this: when things are deleted from the internet, or cuts are made to programmes, it’s worth remembering that the effect of such things isn’t random. It’s not arbitrary chunks that disappear: it’s the outliers that go. The rudest joke in a sitcom episode; a blog post which takes a left turn into filth. And those outliers are often one of the most popular parts of a piece of work.

And slowly but surely, the corners of things get knocked off. Censorship is often talked about – sometimes correctly, sometimes not – in terms of how dangerous it can be. But often, the enemy is the sheer blandification of pop culture. It’s not that anybody dies. It’s not about suppressing important conversations. It’s about which bits of our culture survive in the popular memory, and which don’t. Which is both very important, and not important at all.

And that leads to one of the joys of owning your own little part of the internet. Away from social media giants changing their policies on a whim, and away from UKTV’s bizarre editing policies, you can quietly sit and document things. And documenting these things shifts the power dynamic back towards the integrity of the text, however slightly, rather than companies just doing things because it’s easier. I find it immensely rewarding.

Especially when – just occasionally – you get to stand up for an author’s original intention, when it never managed to make it to the screen properly in the first place.

Though that’s not as important as dog cock, obviously.

  1. Come on, like I’m going to be able to resist writing something appallingly self-important for it. ↩

  2. “Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.” ↩

  3. Bizarrely, not the rhythmic thrusting of Kryten and Lister in Polymorph. ↩

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“The 100 Years War?”

Published 29th September 2019

Internet

I have to admit, Dirty Feed and podcasts is a bit of a sore point. I did three episodes in 2012… and the fourth one has yet to materialise. Yes, a wait of seven years and counting is taking the fucking piss. All I can say is that it will return one day. I’ve spent far too much on jingles for it not to.

I have been involved in another podcast these last few years, mind. Over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite which is unaccountably still running and updated in 2019, we just published our 100th episode of DwarfCasts. The reason we managed to get to 100 episodes is because all I have to do is turn up and speak loudly and annoyingly about Red Dwarf, rather than actually do any of the hard work of getting the show prepped, recorded, edited, and published. So when I say I’m proud of that 100th episode, it’s nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Ian Symes, who put that beautiful little documentary together.1

Still, it got me thinking. Maybe 100 episodes of a podcast made over 13 years isn’t the most impressive thing in the world, even if that is 98 episodes more than most podcasts manage. But it strikes me that there’s something pleasant about devoting myself to the same thing for that length of time. Indeed, take a look at Ganymede & Titan as a whole – I’ve been writing for the site for 16 years and counting, and if you look back at the very first incarnation of the site, it’s been going for a full 20 years. And doing the same kind of thing for so long means that I’ve ended up writing and talking about areas that I never would have examined if I’d done what so many people did.

Because most sensible 90s Red Dwarf fans did the following: got a job, got a family, and stopped thinking that much about Red Dwarf. I managed the first two, but somehow never stopped doing the third. And sure, I’ve written about my frustration about that at times. I do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the show these days.

But if I’d done what normal fans do, and drifted away from doing anything in fandom, I’d never have written some of my favourite pieces on the show. On the development of Holly in the early days of the show, on the very earliest stirrings of Rob and Doug playing with the nature of reality, or about how the glimmerings of one of Red Dwarf‘s most famous episodes can be seen in Hancock’s Half Hour, to name three of many.

All this is on my mind as we come up to this January, and the 10th anniversary of Dirty Feed. In one sense, anniversaries are an arbitrary waste of time. But as an excuse to take stock of where we are, and what’s to come, I find them useful. Over the last ten years, I’ve published stuff on here I love, and stuff which I now think is a bit crap. But the fact that I’ve been publishing stuff in the same place for a full ten years feels meaningful, somehow. As with the DwarfCasts, I haven’t been as prolific on here as I would have liked to have been; other bits of life got in the way. But over the years, it adds together into a really nice archive of fun stuff.

There’s an advantage to plugging away at the same thing for years, without getting bored and flitting to the next thing. You don’t have to give it endless chunks of your time each week. Nor do you have to worry about any kind of long-term plan, or where exactly it is you’re going. And after a few years, you may just look back in surprise.

Without even realising it, you’ve made something you’re proud of.

  1. Shhhhhh. Don’t tell him I was nice about him. ↩

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Wouldn’t You Know? Locked!

Published 7th April 2019

Internet

This is very, very silly. Here is what awaited me when I popped over to Twitter last Wednesday evening:

Your account has been locked. / @mumoss / What happened? We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for: Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. / Offending tweet: @zagrebista WAKE UP YOU FUCKING CUNT WAKE UP WAKE THE FUCK UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT CUNT WAKE UP CUNT / 7:08 PM - 5 Aug 2009 / As a result, we have locked your account. What you can do: To unlock your account, you must do the following: Remove Tweets that violate our rules / If you think we’ve made a mistake, contact our support team.

Just to be clear: “locked” means I can no longer post any new tweets. All my existing tweets can still be read by others, but currently I can’t do anything with my account. I can’t even browse Twitter in read-only mode – all I get is the above locked screen.

A few points:

a) I do not think calling a friend a cunt as an obvious joke counts as “hateful conduct”, regardless of whether you like the word or not. Nor does the person I sent the tweet to, incidentally.

b) The tweet apparently causing all the trouble is nine and a half years old. If Twitter had a problem with this tweet, the correct time to deal with it would have been… nine and a half years ago. Asking for this to be deleted is not a reasonable request from Twitter.

c) If Twitter wants to deal with hateful conduct properly, they should ban more Nazis instead.

For what it’s worth, I have lodged an appeal, pointing out these facts. I could get my account reinstated immediately by deleting the tweet, but – currently, at least – I am disinclined to do so.

I have had no reply as of yet. Four days and counting.

As for what inspired Twitter to drag out a nine and a half year old tweet, who knows? Either somebody stupid reported it, or Twitter are doing some kind of bizarre search for pointless stuff. I very much suspect the former. You’d think Twitter’s algorithms would automatically discard reports for ridiculously old tweets, but that would assume Twitter know what the hell they’re doing, and I think we all know the answer to that by now.

I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll all have to do without my hateful conduct for the time being. Many apologies.

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Goodbye Tumblr (NSFW)

Published 12th February 2019

Internet

A shade over six years ago, I launched a companion Dirty Feed Tumblr. It was really meant as a scratchpad; a place to post various odd things, with the idea that some of the ideas over there might turn into proper articles over here on the main site.

And for a fair while, I kept it updated with all kinds of stuff. A glance through the archives is like a peek into a cross-section of my brain, albeit slightly more pleasant than that sounds. Endless pictures of my obsessions.

But slowly, I drifted away from Tumblr. I never managed to find much of a community over there like I did on Twitter, and I never figured out why that was. Were there less people into the stuff I’m into over there? Are they actually there, but I just didn’t find them? Did I not make enough of an effort to hunt like-minded people down and reblog their stuff? I still don’t really know the answer: all I know is that Twitter clicked with me, and Tumblr never quite did.

In October last year, I quietly said goodbye to the site, and that was the end of it. Well, nearly. Tumblr then announced their ridiculous ban on porn1, so I passive-aggressively updated my last post to make it clear I really was never coming back.

Not that anybody really cared. Which was kinda the problem in the first place.

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  1. I’m not interested in having the debate here as to why Tumblr banning porn is ridiculous; there are plenty of other places where you can do that. I will say though, that the thing which annoys me most is that the ban disproportionately affects women, as Tumblr had become one of the few places online where women routinely went for porn. ↩

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Don’t Be That Person in 2019.

Published 1st January 2019

Internet / Life

You know the kind of person I mean.

The kind of person who wanders into a conversation, sees that the obvious point hasn’t been made yet… and so goes ahead and makes it. The reason the obvious point hasn’t been made is because it’s already been made endlessly, and people are trying to talk about something from a different angle. You do not need to fill in the “gap”.

And don’t be the kind of person who sees somebody dancing around a point… and just blunders in and outright states the point instead. Missing the fact that it was the dance itself which was entertaining. Reading between the lines can sometimes be half the joy.

Conversations – on Twitter, or indeed anywhere – are not an exam paper. You do not need to prove your knowledge to get points, nor does a conversation have to cover EVERY SINGLE THING about a topic in order to be worthwhile. And for the love of all that is good in the world, please allow people to approach a topic with a little playfulness sometimes.

Fun, interesting stuff happens in the shadows. Dragging every conversation back to “the main point”, or stamping down on anything slightly whimsical at every turn in favour of the bald facts straightforwardly presented, is really, really tedious.

Please don’t be That Person. We don’t build a better world by being boring.

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WordPress Not Currently Viable, Says WordPress

Published 30th November 2018

Internet

WordPress – the publishing software used as the backend for this very website – is undergoing a few growing pains at the moment. Either that, or – depending on who you believe – it’s blowing itself apart, much as Movable Type managed to do back in 2004.

Not that the outcry about WordPress is to do with pricing – it remains free. No, the outcry about the upcoming release of WordPress 5.0 is to do with Gutenberg – a brand new Editor, which entirely changes the way you write your posts. To say it has been controversial is putting it mildly. Just check the ratings on the current plugin version.

I’m not making any judgement on Gutenberg – at least, not yet. I’ll have a play with it when WordPress 5.0 is released, and see if I like it or not. If I do, great. If I don’t, I’ll go back to the classic Editor (available as a plugin), and think about my options. No, my issue is with how it’s being sold to us.

Take a look at this testimonial, on the official page on Gutenberg:

The editor is just the beginning
“This will make running your own blog a viable alternative again.”
— Adrian Zumbrunnen

Question: what do they think people have been doing with WordPress for years? Feeding the cat with it?

Gutenberg is a serious change to the very heart of the WordPress experience. This is a tricky proposition at the best of times: and it needs selling to people who already love using WordPress. WordPress’s answer to that? By quoting someone who says that using WordPress isn’t currently viable.

It’s literally one of the most tone-deaf pieces of advertising I have ever seen. People use WordPress because they love using WordPress. It’s one thing to tell someone what what they’re currently using is going to be improved. It’s quite another to tell your own users that what they’re currently using is shit, and not a viable choice.

Or, as one reply has it:

Quite.

Buried.

Published 26th November 2018

Internet / Meta

Dear Reader,

I try not to patronise you too much on here.1 I write the literal opposite of clickbait. While it’s lovely when something I write gets a few clicks, chasing that leads to utter madness. Writing Dirty Feed is supposed to be fun.2 However, I have to confess that sometimes an element of… calculation comes into the timing of what I publish. So it was with my collection of April Fools jokes played out in the pages of old BBC Micro magazines, published on the 1st April, because… of course that’s when you publish it. And I thought it was something that might gain some traction and find a little bit of an audience.

So I sent it out there, back in 2015. And it did… fine. Not spectacular numbers, even for this site – I thought it’d do more – but fine. I linked to it a few times on Twitter in subsequent years, updated it a little in 2017, and job done.

Until something interesting happened over this last weekend, that is. The piece got linked to in the latest b3ta newsletter. And just take a quick look at my stats for the April Fools article, especially the number for this month:

April Fool stats. April 2015: 255. November 2018: 559.

More people have just read (or at least clicked on) the piece than at any time previously. In fact, over twice as many people have read it this month than back in April 2015, when it was originally published. This was a piece designed to be linked to on April Fools Day to get a bit of interest. b3ta get hold of it just now, nowhere near April Fools and… bang.

You can never tell how stuff will end up being read. All my careful planning meant nothing.

And all this is exactly why I keep bleating on about keeping the archives of what you make online. If I’d yanked that piece offline after a year, for whatever reason, it would have lost the majority of people who ended up reading it. As it was, it was just sitting there… waiting to be discovered, and to have a little moment in the spotlight. Just a little moment – it’s not like it racked up thousands of hits. But that’s fine. I don’t need a piece to get thousands of hits.

Because I love people reading my old articles full stop. I think of Dirty Feed as an archive. What’s on the front page isn’t the most important thing about the site. It’s what’s buried in the archives which makes me happy.3 And my favourite thing is when someone tells me they’ve just spent ages in the archives, clicking around on things which looked interesting to them. I think of the site as a complete entity: the last ten posts are a tiny part of the whole.

There’s far too many things competing for people’s attention these days. Even if it’s a piece I’m really proud of, there’s no guarantee people will react to it straight away. But that doesn’t matter. It can just sit there… waiting. Some of them will be found eventually. And that’s enough.

If you found this piece and enjoyed it in 2028: hey there. I love you.

  1. I just failed with that sentence. ↩

  2. Although I often don’t find writing that much fun, which means I’m exactly as brilliant a writer as Douglas Adams. ↩

  3. I should probably do a better job highlighting some of that older stuff; the best of link in the navigation is fine, but not enough. I should get round to finishing the random selected articles feature for the front page, really. ↩

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Support for Serial Comes From…

Published 11th November 2018

Internet

When Season 1 of Serial started near the end of 20141, it inspired many serious pieces of analysis. Whether it was taking on the subject matter itself and probing further, or discussions about whether the podcast was even a moral thing to produce in the first place, the world was not exactly short of Serial thinkpieces.

I’m not here to talk about any of that. What I want to talk to is altogether sillier, so by all means click away if you’re expecting anything about the main topic of the podcast itself, about which I can offer no insight. We’re nowhere near any of that territory.

What I want to talk about is: Mail…kimp?

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  1. No, BBC News, it wasn’t 2015, which you could have figured out really quickly if you’d fact-checked that piece at all. ↩

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Twitter Isn’t Killing Blogging. You Are.

Published 19th October 2018

Internet / Meta

Andy Baio, “Middling”, 16th October 2014:

“Twitter’s for 140-character short-form writing1 and Medium’s for long-form. Weirdly, there really isn’t a great platform for everything in the middle — what previously would’ve just been called “blogging.” Mid-length blogging. Middling.

I think that’s partly why seeing Matt Haughey, Paul Ford, and Michael Sippey restart regular blogging on Paul’s delightfully retro tilde.club is so refreshing to me. I miss seeing people I admire post stuff longer than a tweet.

So I think I’ll try doing the same thing here. In the early days of Waxy.org, before I launched the linkblog, I used to blog short posts constantly. Multiple times a day. Twitter and Waxy Links cannibalized all the smaller posts, and as my reach grew, I started reserving blogging for more “serious” stuff — mostly longer-form research and investigative writing.

Well, fuck that. I miss the casual spontaneity of it all, and since I’m pretty sure hardly anybody’s reading my site again after the death of Google Reader, the pressure’s off.

What do I have to lose?

Update: Nice, Gina Trapani’s in too.”

Four years on, how did all this work for Andy? Since he posted the above – and forgetting about his linkblog – he’s done 38 posts on waxy.org. An average of nearly 10 a year, although in fact the rate has really slowed – he’s only posted two so far in 2018.

Sadly, all three tilde.club sites he mentioned stopped updating by the end of 2015. As for Gina Trapani, whose post also contained lots of great ideas? She also stopped updating at the tail end of 2015, and her blog isn’t even online any more: it redirects to her professional site instead.

In contrast, since 16th October 2014, Dirty Feed has done 137 posts, including this one, with 23 posted this year. And I don’t even update this site nearly as much as I would like. Moreover, although the posts range from deep investigations to “hey, look at this”, there isn’t a single one which doesn’t have at least some kind of analysis of sorts.

*   *   *

OK, OK, I know. This looks like some kind of pathetic macho pissing contest. So yes, I fully admit: “how often you update your website” isn’t exactly the most useful metric when it comes to judging how your life is going.

I bring up the above just to point out: when it comes to keeping a blog updated, I have at least proved I know how to do it. And it’s very easy to blame social media when it comes to people finding this difficult. Hell, Andy Baio does it in the post above: he says Twitter “cannibalized all the smaller posts”. This seems to be a common thread: I’ve heard endless people talk about how the more they used Twitter, the less they blogged.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think this should be an either/or situation. Twitter is extremely good for coming up with ideas, thinking things though, and getting feedback… and then you can use all of that to write something a little more permanent on your own site. (And perhaps most importantly: under your control.)

A good example is my short post yesterday on why all television deserves a little theatrical sparkle; it all comes from this Twitter thread I posted a few days ago. I didn’t mean to come up with an outline for an article – I was just thinking aloud – but huge chunks of the language in those tweets actually ended up verbatim in the resulting post. Moreover, the post didn’t even take very long to write, because I’d already done a lot of the thinking behind it when writing that set of tweets.

And to me, the above seems obvious: obvious to the point that it seems weird even writing and publishing this post. But it always seems that Twitter and blogs are put into opposition: that Twitter is taking up all the time people used to spend writing on their own site. That might be true: but it doesn’t have to be the case.

You can have the best of both worlds: the ease and immediacy of Twitter, and the more thoughtful and permanent record of your own blog. It just involves you getting round to actually writing up that post, once you’ve done your thinking on Twitter. If you don’t want to do that, then fine – nobody is obligated. But blaming Twitter for it probably isn’t the best idea.

Personal sites will only die if we let them. Of all the many, many things we can currently blame Jack Dorsey for, this isn’t one of them.

  1. Of course, since Andy wrote this post, Twitter now allows 280 characters per tweet. I don’t think this fundamentally affects his point, though. ↩

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