Meta – Page 6 – Dirty Feed

“Pedestrian, camp fantobabble”

Published 28th August 2020

There are many pieces of terrible pop culture writing online. I’ve done plenty of it myself. But sometimes, a piece of work is so dreadful, that it lingers in your head for well over a decade. To the point where it actually falls offline, and you need to use the Wayback Machine to find it.

Such was the case with this piece on Knightmare from 2002. And it really is absolutely bloody awful.

The scene is set in the third paragraph, with possibly the least promising sentence ever written:

“Actually, as I write, I realise that I haven’t seen Knightmare for sodding years.”

An admission which leads to beautiful moments like this:

“It got rubbisher, as well: in a desperate attempt to fiddle with the formula, the producers ditched many of the more atmospheric locations and charismatic characters (notably Pickle, Treguard’s wonderful gay elf sidekick) in favour of comic hangers-on and tedious gimmicry. The eyeshield, anyone? Pah.”

Unfortunately, the facts are as follows: both the eyeshield and Pickle debuted in the same series. Series 4, to be exact.¹

After that, deconstructing the article is like shooting fish in a barrel, to the point where it’s pretty much worthless. For instance, take this, on why Knightmare ended:

“It died because its niche fanbase eventually either a) got older, b) got computers or c) got sex – in any case, the market for its pedestrian, camp fantobabble was never going to last.”

This article was published in 2002. Three years earlier, creator Tim Child had already written a history of the show on Knightmare.com, which gave detailed reasons for why the show wasn’t recommissioned. But the writer of this piece isn’t interested in the actual facts; they’re interested in a pithy turn of phrase. Which also explains the bizarre line about “pedestrian, camp fantobabble”, which comes out of absolutely nowhere.

I could go on – what the hell is the bit about the “niche fanbase” all about, when it was an absurdly popular show, and a touchstone for a generation? – but you get the point. The main reason I bring all this up is because I realised the other day exactly how much this article influenced me when it came to writing my own piece about Knightmare, published last month. A piece that yes, has its fair share of reminiscing about the show.

It also throws in plenty of cold hard facts, as well. It transcribes actual sections from the show. It quotes Tim Child twice, from two separate sources. It’s a piece which proves you can still write about your memories, and fact check them at the same time without destroying anything.

That old piece from 2002 makes a point of acknowledging “nostalgia’s rose-tinted eye”, but doesn’t actually do anything about it. The way to avoid nostalgia is to watch and research what you’re writing about. And who knows? You might find that what you’re writing about doesn’t “look a bit, erm, crap”. You might just find it’s still fucking great. And if you don’t think it’s great, at least you can explain why, rather than guessing.

And I write this not because I want to say I’m brilliant. Well, not entirely. But it did shape something in my approach to writing that I think is worth noting: that just because you’re writing about pop culture, it doesn’t absolve you from doing the legwork. Just because you liked a kid’s TV show when you were younger, it doesn’t mean your half-remembered guff about it is enough.

Realising that at least sets you on the right path, however well you ultimately manage to traverse it. I think I get to the start of Level 2 before being killed off, but at least that’s better than dying in the first room.

There’s also no evidence that Pickle was gay, either, but I have no issue with slash being written about him. ↩

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knightmare, writing

“You’re in my way.”

Published 21st June 2020

Meta / TV Drama

Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter, for reminding me that back on the 18th June, it was the 30th anniversary of the Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds”.

“From 1987 to 1989, the voyages of Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D struggled to be anything more than a passable background watch in its creatively-turbulent first and second seasons. (Season two’s “The Measure of a Man” and “Q Who?” being the lone must-watch exceptions.)”

I mean, everyone’s allowed an opinion, even if it is one of the most tedious Trek opinions I’ve seen for quite a while. I’m just going to vaguely point in the direction of “The Big Goodbye”, “11001001”, “Heart of Glory”, “Elementary Dear Data”, “A Matter of Honour”, and “The Emissary”, and fold my arms in annoyance.

“The episode also doesn’t get much credit for how satisfying it wraps up that storyline for Riker. By radically accepting that an extra rank pip on his collar doesn’t determine his status or worth, Riker makes the very emotionally-honest realization that lets him have an arc even though he’s staying put on the Enterprise bridge. (Piller’s script argues that one doesn’t need to move on or change jobs to evolve personally within their profession. Ironically, Piller would stay on the series as well, before leaving to help oversee Star Trek spinoffs Deep Space Nine and Voyager. The former wouldn’t exist without the storyline established by “Best of Both Worlds”, either.)”

How is that ironic? It’s literally the exact opposite. It would be ironic if Piller had written about how you can evolve personally within the same role, and then left the series anyway, but he didn’t.

OK, whatever, I’m bored with picking apart this article. The reason why I’m pleased to be reminded of this little anniversary is because it lets me be massively self-indulgent, yet again. Back in 2018, I wrote a little piece on here called “6 Times Your Favourite TV Shows Jumped the Shark”. A pisstake of clickbait journalism and the entire concept of jumping the shark itself, I have to admit it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written.

It was, however, not originally “6 Times”. In the first draft, it was 10. I’m sure you can already hear the joke wearing thin from here; halfway through the article, the idea just died. So acting on advice from someone used to script-editing comedy or something, I kicked four of the sections out the door. Those excised sections were on Blackadder II (“Bells”), Frasier (“The Ski Lodge”), Happy Days (Season 3, when they changed the theme tune), and… Star Trek: The Next Generation. Guess the episode?

And while the article was fifty times better with these sections deleted, I always had a soft spot for that last little section. My favourite parts of the article were the bits where I was teetering on the line between a bad-faith argument, and something that might be, sort of, valid. I think the below definitely manages that.

So, on the 30th anniversary of that famous episode, here’s a deleted scene from an old Dirty Feed article. I told you it was self-indulgent.

* * *

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Best of Both Worlds

The third season of TNG is often seen as the moment where the show really came into its own. And it’s true: once Michael Piller came on board, the show took enormous strides in almost every single area. Showpiece episodes like Yesterday’s Enterprise and Sins of the Father are the best remembered, but I’m especially fond of shows like The Offspring – quiet, character-based shows that are the lifeblood of the series.

And then, at the end of the season, the show blows it all away.

It’s difficult to count the number of things the Borgfest Best of Both Worlds gets wrong. There’s Borg expert Lieutenant Commander Shelby, forced into the show purely so Riker can worry about his career. Written by Piller, this pathetically reflected his own worries about whether to move on from the show or stay for a fourth season; possibly the most indulgent thing ever written for the whole of Star Trek. This perhaps wouldn’t matter so much if it worked in-universe, but the whole point of TNG was to show that Starfleet officers had moved beyond petty conflict. The famous “You’re in my way” speech is a betrayal of everything Gene Roddenberry stood for.

But I could deal with that, if the resulting show was entertaining. Sadly, it isn’t. The reason Q Who was so scary is that the Borg acted as one hive mind: relentless, unstoppable. To have Picard assimilated, and act as a Queen Bee figure for our crew to talk to kills off everything which is unique about the Borg. It reduces them to stock villans, indistinguishable from the Romulans except for a few tubes sticking out here and there. You can betray Roddenberry’s future, or destroy a great villain: but in doing both, the series doomed itself.

Season 4 started with a perfunctory resolution to the absurd cliffhanger, and then followed it up with the ludicrously self-indulgent Family, a show with no science fiction elements whatsoever, and thus not even remotely within TNG’s remit. I stopped watching, and I can’t imagine I was alone.

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star trek

Great Expectations

Published 27th January 2020

Meta

I try to keep housekeeping posts at a minimum here on Dirty Feed, but I feel the need to mark this one, as I’ve written a lot about it in the past. As of the 25th January, I’m no longer part of Ganymede & Titan. I know, I know, I don’t know why the media aren’t parked out on my doorstep either.

Original relaunch post of G&T in 2003

This has a few implications for Dirty Feed. Firstly and most immediately, I can suddenly spend rather more time working on silly articles for this place, which is a positive thing. More on that shortly.

Secondly, over the next few months, a few selected articles I wrote over on Ganymede & Titan might be republished here, slightly rewritten and improved. Don’t worry, there won’t be a deluge of reheated Dwarf nonsense – there would be no point moving the site’s bread-and-butter posts over to here. But some of the better stuff probably deserves a new home somewhere under my control. And I’d like the opportunity to improve a few of them too.

Thirdly, it would be complete madness for me to leave G&T, and then immediately start writing brand new Dwarf stuff over here. But once I’ve had a year or so’s break from that kind of thing, there are a few things about old Red Dwarf that I’d like to finish off here. In particular, my series of articles looking at the show’s sets has been abandoned halfway through; I’d like to bring that to some kind of conclusion. So for those of you who enjoy my Red Dwarf writing, it’s not disappearing entirely. It is going into hibernation for a bit, though.

Fourthly, I am definitely going to write something about Come Back Mrs Noah, purely to be annoying.

[Read more →]

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my other stuff, red dwarf

A Decade of Dirty Feed

Published 1st January 2020

Meta

5 years • 10 years • 15 years

Ten years ago today, Dirty Feed was launched.

Well, actually, that’s a lie. A site called “Transistorized” launched, named after Kenny Everett greeting his “transistorized people”. It was an obscure reference at best, born out of sheer desperation for a name. Later that year, the rather more sensible moniker of Dirty Feed was coined, and I stopped having to worry about whether the site’s name should be spelt with an ‘s’ or with a ‘z’. A full 302 posts and 226,974 words¹ of ABSOLUTE GOLD later, here’s where we’ve ended up. And you know me by now: I just can’t resist a little self-indulgent look back.²

First blog post on Transistorized

The origins of this site are simple enough. I’d been writing on a group blog called Noise to Signal which had naturally come to an end; there was a feeling from more than one of us that it was time to move on and strike out on our own. Which indicates that I must have had some sort of brilliant plan for what I wanted to do next, right?

Nah. I had no real idea at all. The one rule I had was not to become too much of a personal journal like an even earlier blog I’d written. I wanted to write about stuff, not myself.³ I’d also written a lot about web design and tech in the past, but my interests had shifted to other things during the years I wrote on Noise to Signal: towards television and comedy especially.

The plan, then, such as it was: start writing, and see what happened. I also had one other thing at the back of my mind: not to get too bogged down in perfection. Numerous times, I’d started blogs before, quickly got annoyed that they weren’t “perfect”, and deleted them. Time to stop all that. If I didn’t like the last thing I’d written, never mind: the next piece might be better. More than anything else, getting the fuck over myself in that regard is why there might be some things actually worth reading here, rather than just a blank page.

Ah, yes. Stuff worth reading. Time we got onto some of that. Here are some things I’ve done on Dirty Feed over the past ten years that I don’t feel like invoking the right to be forgotten over. One per year, in fact. And stay tuned until the end for some thoughts on where this place might go over the next decade.

[Read more →]

As of this sentence. ↩
Bizarrely, the name change from Transistorized to Dirty Feed was never actually noted on the site; at the time, I was extremely leery of annoying “housekeeping” blog posts, having read far too many over the years. The article you are reading now may suggest that I have thrown caution to the winds these days.

In fact, my record-keeping in this area is so lax that I can’t even tell you exactly which date the site renamed itself. All I can figure out was that it was still Transistorized on the 12th September and had changed by the 4th October, according to an old email I have. Yeah, I realise that the fact I can’t narrow it down more than this – considering my obsession with archiving – is really bloody odd. ↩
That rule is going brilliantly, obviously. ↩

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end of year review

Dirty Feed: Best of 2019

Published 11th December 2019

Meta

2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020 • 2021 • 2022 • 2023 • 2024

“Hello again, John. Still doing your roundup of all the best stuff on Dirty Feed this year?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t this being published even earlier than last year?”
“Yes.”
“Is that because you’re planning some huge masturbatory celebration of 10 years of Dirty Feed in January, and you at least want to spread out your willy waving to some kind of bearable level?”
“Yes.”
“I really hate you.”
“Yes.”

* * *

And Finally…
Firstly, a little tale of Anna Soubry presenting Central News, and some naughtiness that seemingly only I remember. (I have to admit, I was hoping a video of this might surface, especially once a few media figures retweeted the article. No luck, sadly.)

Listen. Does This Sound Familiar?
Looking at glimpses of a lost song by the Shangri-Las. I have a fondness for this as being one of the first bits of writing about music I’ve ever done; this year I’ve tried to push myself outside my comfort zone a few times with my writing, and this piece definitely qualifies. Also: listen to the Shangri-Las, do it, do it right now.¹

Night Network
If there’s one thing I want this site to achieve, it’s to post things that nobody else would ever post. Whether that’s because nobody else is capable of writing something so amazing, or because nobody else would fucking bother, is a judgement call. Whatever your answer, this piece – about the nightmares TV channel directors have to endure – most definitely counts.

Identity.
In which I spin an incredibly personal anecdote from the BBC Two Toy Car ident. You heard.

KYTV: Challenge Anna
My first really substantial article of the year: a look at one of my favourite episodes of comedy ever, and exactly what changed between script and screen. (Watch out for the practical joke Geoffrey Perkins and Angus Deayton planned to play on Anneka Rice… and then chickened out on.)

Tales from a Dystopian Future
This little story is another example of how I tried to push my writing into some different areas this year. It’s certainly like nothing else on the site. It didn’t get much reaction, and I think it has its faults. But after writing the KYTV piece – which I think turned out well, but is entirely within this site’s usual ballpark – it was nice to stretch myself with something I’d never written before.

Beyond Grace Brothers
Having done a full watch of Are You Being Served? this year, I vaguely have in mind the idea to write a book on the show. This article was a test to see if I could write about the series in any kind of entertaining way. I think it turned out quite well, tackling an area of the show that I don’t think has been talked about before. (Fuck knows when I’ll have time to write that book, though.)

Fawlty at Large
Hands down my favourite thing I’ve written all year, and certainly the one to get the best reaction. This set of four articles starts off as a look at the origins of Fawlty Towers… but halfway through, turns into something else entirely, and for my money something far more interesting. John Cleese has never written anything more terrifying.²

* * *

A few other brief thoughts. I really struggled with the site at the beginning of the year, with the first four months especially yielding the odd fun post, but nothing truly substantial.³ Having realised I was going to let the year slip away entirely if I wasn’t careful, the second half of the year was a lot better, cumulating in the aforementioned set of articles which I’m thoroughly proud of. If you read nothing else I’ve written this year, I’d really like it to be that.

I’m also going to make my usual plea. I make a point of not having a tip jar or Patreon on this site; I don’t need them, and your money would be better spent on others. But if you’ve enjoyed any of my writing this year, I urge you to consider donating to the Internet Archive if you can. I realise that at a time when the UK seems to be going to shit, then they might not be the first organisation you’d think of for donations. But the Internet Archive do a great deal to hold people, organisations, and governments to account, and I think that’s more important than ever. Just $5 would mean something – especially as they currently have a 2-to-1 matching campaign running, which brings it up to $15 without you doing a thing.

That’s pretty much it for Dirty Feed this year; there will be a roundup of all my Red Dwarf writing later on this month, but aside from that, that’s your lot. Thanks to everyone who’s read, liked, or shared my stuff over the past year; I really do appreciate all your kind words. One person who takes the time to tell me they enjoyed something I wrote is worth 1000 anonymous hits. And people who clearly haven’t read what I’ve written but feel the need to tell me their ill-informed opinion about it on Twitter deserve 1000 hits.⁴

And as for next year… what’s this I see on the horizon? Could it be the site’s 10th anniversary? And do you really think I can resist the urge to bang on about it at length until you all escape to Digital Spy in desperation?

I think this article may be the first ever time a picture of the Shangri-Las has appeared next to the logo of Central News East. If any fact sums up what I try and do with this site, it’s this one. ↩
With thanks to Tanya Jones for inspiration and help with this; so much so, in fact, that the pieces really deserve a shared byline. ↩
Fun game: try to figure out which piece I was sure was going to be great, but I’ve since decided really isn’t, and was misguided and pointless publishing in its present form. ↩
To the face. Specifically to the face. ↩

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end of year review

Dirty Feed: Best of 2018

Published 30th December 2018

Meta

2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020 • 2021 • 2022 • 2023 • 2024

“Hey there, John. What’s this?”
“It’s a list of all my favourite articles I’ve published on Dirty Feed in 2018.”
“But don’t you usually wait until the 1st January to post that?
“Yes.”
“Just so you could anally point out that you only post your yearly roundup once the year is actually over, unlike everyone else?”
“Yes.”
“Does this mean you’re dumbing down your material to chase a more mainstream audience?”
“Yes. Could you go away now, please?”
“A mainstream audience that you’re never going to achieve, incidentally.”
“Fuck off.”

[Read more →]

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end of year review

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.

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

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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social media, writing

Dirty Feed: Best of 2017

Published 1st January 2018

Meta

2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020 • 2021 • 2022 • 2023 • 2024

Look, I can’t pretend the last year has been much fun. It doesn’t even seem to have been much fun for all the various fuckweasels around the world considering their general mood, let alone if you’re the kind of good and decent person who appreciates in-depth articles about sitcom edits.

But that’s no reason why you can’t grab a cup of tea, stick your head in the sand for an hour, and read some of the best stuff I’ve published here over the last 12 months. I will even ALLOW you a biscuit or two. Go on, meet you back here in five minutes.

The World is Burning
A piece which stood as my mission statement for the year, answering the question: in a world of Brexit and Trump, how can I justify writing about my silly obsessions, when there are more important things to talk about?

Our Little Genius
Looking back at the fate of an unbroadcast Fox game show from 2010. I really enjoyed doing this piece, and it’s quite atypical of my stuff – essentially a compilation of contemporary reports. (Though it’s a bit of a shame that the exciting conclusion is a little anti-climactic.)

‘Allo ‘Allo: Pigeon Post
An examination of the edits made to the ‘Allo ‘Allo episode shown on BBC One to commemorate the death of Gorden Kaye. (My favourite memory of that episode being repeated was how laughing at Nazis suddenly seemed massively useful again. Which is depressing, but nonetheless cathartic.)

Frasier: The Good Son
One of my favourite edits pieces I’ve ever written – all about what was cut from the pilot of Frasier between script and screen. When you’re writing about such an amazing half hour of comedy as the Frasier pilot, it’s incumbent on you to actually do the show justice. I really hope I did.

The only post on the internet which uses McDonald’s to talk about the intricacies of television playout
The clue is in the title. I love writing this kind of article, as it’s the kind of thing nobody else really writes about online, and hopefully gives a bit of insight into a world which is rarely talked about. (I’ve since been informed that my digression about whether local TV channels are staffed was irrelevant – they are staffed, which backs up the entire point the article is making.)

How Strong Are Your Moral Values?
About how your BBC Micro can judge your moral code, and find you wanting. This is a piece I’d planned for years, and only wanted to publish once the new site design was in place as it’s very image-heavy. I hoped it’d do really well, and be an attention-grabbing relaunch piece… but it ended up going pretty much nowhere. I’ve been writing stuff online for years, and I still can’t really predict how any given article will do.

A Public Service Announcement on Trev and Simon
About how one of the rudest jokes Trev and Simon ever did was censored… and the cumulation of something which has been going round my head for nearly 25 years. Probably the best-structured thing I wrote on here all year – my pieces sometimes have an unfortunate tendency to tail off towards the end. This one saves the best revelation for last.

Writing for Fun and Zero Profit
All about how to enjoy writing online, even if not many people read it. The last half of the year didn’t see many big updates to the site, so it was nice to sneak in something at the end of the year which got some nice feedback. Completely coincidentally, it also works as a nice bookend to the first piece listed above, which was also about how to feel comfortable with your writing.

A few other bits and pieces, then. Firstly, the above doesn’t include the most popular thing I wrote all year. For that, you have to turn to this piece on brokerage company Customs Clearance Ltd, which got nearly three times the hits of anything else… despite being really really really really really boring. That’s what happens when a company makes itself look so dodgy that people keep googling the fucker to find out whether they’re being scammed or not.

One article from last year which I really found myself liking when I reread it this piece on the incomplete archives of online game Layer Tennis. I couldn’t bring myself to list it above, as it’s highly improbable anybody reading this will care about it. But it talks about something that I expect most people who followed the game haven’t noticed, and fills in a little bit of the historical record… something that sadly even the creator of the game himself doesn’t seem that bothered with. I try my best to write things on here which nobody else would bother writing, for good or for ill, and this is definitely one of those.

This is where I usually make my excuses about not finishing the long-promised redesign of this place, and not restarting my podcast. Podcast excuses will have to continue for the time being, but unexpectedly I actually managed to launch the redesign of Dirty Feed last year. There’s still plenty of room for improvement – hey, anyone fancy a logo which doesn’t just look like it was ripped off from Adult Swim? – but at least you can now browse this place on your phone without wanting to stab yourself in the genitals.

And finally: what have I got planned for the year to come? While there’s lots of stuff I like from last year, I think the balance of the site has been a little off, especially in the last six months. This year, I’d really like to do less throwaway stuff, and drag the focus of the site back to something I’ve neglected a little recently: some proper, meaty articles, especially about telly. So you can probably expect fewer updates this year, but hopefully a little more of substance, whatever that means around here.

Now, where did I put my copy of this?

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end of year review

On Ostentatiousness.

Published 11th August 2017

Internet / Meta

I’ll admit it. Whenever I write an article I’m particularly proud of, I enjoy going on Twitter and yelling about it at the top of my voice. I don’t know whether that’s a particularly brilliant side of my personality, but it’s there. I’d be a bloody liar if I said I didn’t enjoy people telling me something I’ve written is good. TELL ME SOMETHING I’VE WRITTEN IS GOOD, DO IT.

And yet sometimes… that’s just not what I’m aiming for. Sometimes I write something I want to write, but I know most people who follow me on Twitter just aren’t going to be interested. Or sometimes I write mainly to work a few things out in my head, and if anyone else enjoys the piece, that’s a bonus. Or sometimes I just want to write something small – a piece which might be fun for a reader to come across randomly when browsing a site, but not something anyone would want to visit a site just to read.

When I first ran a blog – now stupidly deleted off the web, but partially available on The Wayback Machine – things were different. Social media was far less of a thing: people would see you had written a new piece through your RSS feed, or even – shock horror – just from visiting your site. Amazing. These days, very few people see any of my stuff unless I tweet about it, or somebody links to it on Facebook.

I can deal with that. But sometimes tweeting about something I’ve written feels right… and sometimes it just kinda feels wrong.

Some pieces don’t want to be tweeted about. Some pieces don’t want that attention foisted on them. Some things absolutely do not warrant me waving my arms around above it, yelling “Look at me!” Some pieces just want to exist… ready for the right people to stumble across them. That used to be so easy. Now, it isn’t. Social media is about yelling to get attention in a way that an RSS feed is not. These days, something has to be made a fuss about… or it disappears into the ether. And that’s a shame.

I will not be tweeting a link to this post.

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social media

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