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Procrastination.

Published 28th October 2022

Internet / Life

Hey, everyone! Fed up with your ridiculous procrastinating? Don’t worry, this article will tell you how to stop once and for all.

“Most of the tech industry is designed to turn you into a vegetable. They invite you to click on things until you click ads, and then they try to make you click ads until you click buy. Since many of us work on the screen, it can be confusing to discern between consumption and production. Here is a guideline:

  • No one came back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized.
  • No one peeled out motivated and happy after two hours of scrolling through Instagram.
  • No one ever got inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza.
  • Buying some stuff online is not very productive. It’s consuming.

Hang on.

I can’t comment on Instagram; I don’t use it. But I most have definitely come back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized; I most definitely have been inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza, and I most definitely have been productive through buying things online.

Take YouTube; it never occurred to this person that someone might genuinely be inspired by what they see there. Or, in my case, use it as a proper research tool. Which I do, endlessly. You only have to read my articles on here to know how useful people’s uploads are to me on Dirty Feed; here’s a particularly good example.

Or how about having a “Netflix Bonanza”? Well, there’s a loaded phrase if ever I heard one. So let’s replace it with the rather more normal phrase “watching television”. Now we have the phrase “No one ever got inspired to finish things up after watching television”, which is a self-evidently ludicrous phrase. As though television can’t be inspiring. As though television hasn’t inspired most of the writing on this site. It’s the same old “television is mindless” stuff, all dressed up for a new generation. There are times when I have watched some TV, and not been able to resist the urge to immediately go to my laptop and start writing about it.

As for buying things online? Bang go all the books I’ve bought which have been vital while researching one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, then. Writing that article took the purchase of four books, none of which I could easily access any other way.

Indeed, discerning between “consumption and production” is difficult at best. So much of the writing I do here involves both. I consume in order to create. The two are entirely intertwined. Consumption here is being painted as entirely passive, and I really don’t think that is the case at all.

But the further I get into the article, the more I blink in confusion. Here are some things which have apparently “never ignited any meaningful action”:

  • Discussing with strangers

Discussing things with strangers has lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

  • Reading the comments
  • Reacting to comments

Comments on here have lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.

  • Reading tweets
  • Liking tweets

Tweets have… fill in the rest of this sentence for yourself.

Some of my best work here has involved reading tweets and comments. Without them, the site would be far less worthwhile, as I wrote about recently. “Reading tweets” was responsible for a major update and correction to one of the most popular pieces I’ve written all year.

Now, if you want to argue that writing this site isn’t “meaningful action”, then that’s fine. I feel awkward making the argument that it is, because if you’re a certain kind of person, you’re conditioned into thinking that’s arrogant and self-important. But this site has given enough joy to people over the years for me to confidently state that what I do here is, in fact, meaningful. And all the above would be absolutely terrible advice for me, and I think many others.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful. I presume what the writer is trying to say is that you should be careful about distractions. I get it, I truly do. But trying to entirely silo off “consumption” and “production” is not the way to make your case. It’s not that simple. Nowhere near so, in fact.

And if you truly think that watching television is always that passive, or that reading tweets is always that pointless, I would suggest that you aren’t very good at either watching television, or reading tweets.

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Relative Time Dilation in an Amazingly Compressed Space

Published 18th October 2022

TV Comedy / TV Presentation

It’s Tuesday 21st November 1989 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the first time.

What was I doing? I have no idea. It was presumably a school night. I don’t think I even knew what Red Dwarf was. My Dad always watched the Nine O’Clock News at this time anyway. I had no rights over the television by that point in the evening.

The moment passed, unnoticed. By me, anyway.

*   *   *

It’s Friday 15th April 1994 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the third time.

What was I doing? Something very different than in 1989. This was the famous1 repeat season, where BBC2 showed every single episode of the first six series of the show.2 A lot of fans got into the series through this set of repeats, and I was no different. I quickly became obsessed with the show.

I was, however, only 12, verging on 13. My Dad still had a monopoly on the television, and still always watched the Nine O’Clock News. Luckily, I had a plan. I’d manually set the video recorder going downstairs, then rush upstairs to my bedroom to watch the episode… on an old black and white telly. It wasn’t as good as watching it in the living room on the proper TV, but it would do. And I could always watch the show downstairs later using my video. Which I did.

Endlessly.

*   *   *

It’s Saturday 14th June 2014 at 9:55pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC Two for the sixth time.

Lots has happened since 1994. I’ve long since been subsumed into Dwarf fandom, or at least, one particular corner of it. At this point, I’d been writing for fansite Ganymede & Titan for over a decade. But I’m not sitting watching the episode at home. And not just because I now own the episode on DVD.

Three months earlier, I’d finally got the job of my dreams: working in BBC presentation, in charge of originating most of the BBC’s domestic channels. And I just happen to be in work that evening. But unfortunately, I’m not doing BBC Two right now. I’m on another channel.

Luckily, just like when I was 12, I have a plan.

At 9:50pm, I gently appear at the door of NC2, the BBC Two pres suite. There is a very experienced director in the chair. The most experienced, longest-serving director we have, in fact. I ask if he minds if I sit with him for the next five minutes. He’s fine with it. I pull up a chair.

I watch, as I Love 1988 ends. The director runs a couple of trails: Shopgirls, Tigers About the House. Then there’s the ident; a special one, for BBC Two’s 50th anniversary. Duncan Newmarch, the duty BBC Two announcer, opens his mic and speaks: most continuity announcements are still done live. The director counts down through the ident. At 0, the picture fades down, then up again, and “Marooned” is on air, for the next 28 minutes and 35 seconds.

And two decades apart, two different parts of my life join together, briefly. Watching the same episode of Red Dwarf… but from opposite sides of the TV screen. And my teenage love of the show, and my brand new adult job, were now properly linked. Forever.

Sometimes, I’m aware enough of what’s going on around me to make sure a piece of personal history actually happens, rather than letting it slip from my grasp. Just sometimes.

With thanks to Christopher Wickham for the endlessly useful Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, and Pip Madeley for inexplicably but brilliantly having the above video to hand.

  1. In Red Dwarf fan circles, anyway. ↩

  2. Minus “Psirens”, due to Craig Charles’ legal situation at the time. ↩

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they’re good blogs Brent

Published 11th October 2022

Internet / Meta

Last year, software developer Brent Simmons wrote something which stayed with me. It’s short, so hopefully he won’t mind me quoting all of it.

“This blog is almost 22 years old, and in all that time I’ve been solid about posting regularly — until this recent dry spell.

I skipped the summer. Last post was in June. There was just one that month, and just one in May.

I have an explanation: while my health and physical circumstances are unchanged and, happily, fine, I have not felt the drive to write here that I always felt.

I never, in all these years, had to push myself. I’d get an idea and I would be compelled to write it up and publish it. It was always that simple.

But I haven’t felt that way in many months, and I’m not sure I will again.

Maybe this is temporary, and there will be hundreds more posts to come.

But I kind of think not, because there’s a bigger issue: I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.

I have no plan. I’m feeling my way to that destination, which is years off, surely, and I just hope to manage it gracefully. (I don’t know of any role models with this.)

Anyway. In case I don’t write here again — in case these are the last words of this blog — thank you. I loved writing here, and you are why.”

Since then, Brent has stayed true to his word, and really has become less of a public person. He’s made just one more blog post since then, and seems to have deleted nearly all of his tweets too.

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Small Fries

Published 8th October 2022

Internet / Videogames

An interesting thing happens to people who are very successful in their chosen line of work. Often, when they retire or just move on, they never want to talk about the field they worked in again. Maybe it bores them now. Maybe they were never truly interested in the first place. Either way, it’s stymied a fair amount of research for Dirty Feed: people who achieved great things, but are more interested in walking their dog these days.

Then there’s the other type. Those successful people who still clearly love what they did. People like Ed Fries, who writes an amazing blog about vintage arcade games… and was Vice President of Game Publishing at Microsoft for much of the initial XBox years. The kind of person who shatters any notions that huge success requires a destruction of your soul.

Ed’s pieces are fascinating; just read his brilliant pieces on the first arcade game easter egg, or fixing old games like Gran Trak 10. Each is a wonderful mix of research, history, and practical electronics. One of my favourite things about his writing is his acknowledgement of other people in the research process. It’s something I always try to do here on Dirty Feed; to point out that this kind of writing doesn’t always spring out of nowhere, but is often the result of people working together.1

But here’s the real reason I want to link to Ed’s work here. His blog currently consists of just six articles, written between 2015 and 2021. On average, one a year, although there was some concentrated work in 2017, and his writing has slowed recently. But each of those articles is wonderful, and each of them forges new ground in our understanding of its topic. You won’t find six better posts anywhere on the net.

And it’s a reminder that blogging – or just writing, or whatever you want to call it – can take many different forms. Despite my occasional sarcasm, it’s not something you need to show up every day to do, or even every month. One in-depth post a year, if that’s the best way you write, can result in something amazing.2

Owning a blog doesn’t need to take over your life. Nor does it need to be at the technical level that Ed Fries is working at. You can still contribute something worthwhile.

All you have to do is attempt to say something new. That’s all.

  1. To read some people’s writing, you’d think they were the only people who ever did anything. This kind of self-aggrandising gets my goat. No, I’m not going to give examples. But it’s truly pathetic. ↩

  2. Frankly, it’s how I’d prefer to write myself, but I come up with too many silly things I want to write about. ↩

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Mmmm, Nice

Published 29th September 2022

TV Comedy

Hello there. Welcome to another exciting instalment of “interesting studio recording dates for audience sitcoms”. And if you’ve managed to get past that sentence and onto this one, I’m presuming you find them exciting too. Hey there. I like you.

Previously, we’ve taken a look at recordings for So Haunt Me, where part of Series 3 was shot just nine days before transmission. We also proved wrong some nonsense on Wikipedia about Series 5 of Are You Being Served? being shot the day before air – in fact, it was a week. Still close to transmission, but rather different than a mere day.

That particular situation is far from without precedent. Huge chunks of Series 3 and 4 of Dad’s Army were also recorded in studio a week before transmission1; “The Day the Balloon Went Up” was recorded on 23 October 1969, and broadcast just a week later on the 30th October. A couple of weeks later, “Menace from the Deep” was recorded on the 7th November, and broadcast just six days later, on the 13th November.

All of which is worth noting. But there is a vague disappointment that I couldn’t find a normal sitcom which really did record the day before it was due to air. Sure, we could cheat and just say Drop the Dead Donkey, but that’s no fun. That was a topical show specifically designed to be shot close to transmission. The joy here would be an otherwise normal sitcom being made surprisingly down to the wire.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have one. Regular helpful person to this site David Brunt stepped in, and gave us a brilliant, highly unexpected example.

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  1. As referenced in Graham McCann’s Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. ↩

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“I Don’t Need a Brolly, You Wally!”

Published 20th September 2022

Adverts

The greatest crossover event of all time? There’s clearly no contest. It’s Star Trek and Hi-de-Hi!, of course.

This early 90s advert for National Power and Powergen – specifically, for the sale of shares as part of the privatisation of the UK electricity market – exists in a weird hinterland for me. I don’t remember it from the time; I only really got into Star Trek in the mid-nineties.1 So who knows when I first saw it properly. All I know is that once I finally saw it on YouTube, it hung around in my head, ready to drop into conversation at a moment’s notice.

Even if you’re not keen on the main body swap gag – which is still more tasteful than “Turnabout Intruder” – there’s still plenty to enjoy. I’m a particular fan of Scotty’s paper aeroplane. The ad justifies its existence with Simon Cadell’s “Good afternoon” alone. But as I watched it recently for the 1,585th time, I started to wonder something. Exactly when was this advert shot?

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  1. Blame my Dad wanting to see the 6 O’Clock News on BBC1, instead of me being allowed to watch BBC2. ↩

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Yet More Crap to Clog Up Your Inbox

Published 15th September 2022

Meta

a) One of the aims when I relaunched Dirty Feed earlier this year was to give people more ways to keep up with what this site is up to, without relying on RSS or Twitter.

b) It takes me bloody ages to get around to anything.

c) Twitter has been so utterly atrocious this week that it has finally spurred me into action.

d) This site’s subscribe page now has a form where you can enter your e-mail address, and get posts from here sent directly to your inbox. (Or just follow if you’re already logged into WordPress.com.)

e) Because I really want to make it easy for you to do this, so I can stop relying on Twitter so much, you can just do the same here:

f) Your address will not be used by any site other than dirtyfeed.org and wordpress.com, or used for any other purpose other than to email you site updates for Dirty Feed, or any other sites you specifically sign up for.

g) For those of you who would rather have a more curated newsletter-style thing, I’m aiming to start one of those in the next few months.

h) If you’re one of the very few people who already get email updates from me, without me bothering to make it easy for you to sign up to them: congratulations, you’re great. I hope this makes up for this pointless email you’ve just received.

i) That is all.

Mind the Gap

Published 12th September 2022

Meta

On Thursday September the 8th, at 12:09pm, I tweeted the following.

31 minutes after this tweet, BBC One broke into Bargain Hunt, to report on concerns about the Queen’s health. Around 15 minutes later, I finally learnt about the story, from people DMing me on Twitter. I had no idea about it. I was calmly sitting at home, well away from my job working on a certain popular national television channel.

And yet, doesn’t it look like I was trying to drop a huge hint about the upcoming news? I wasn’t. I was scanning through various Red Dwarf episodes for potential articles, and saw the opportunity for one of my silly “Current Mood” gags, which I’ve been doing for years.

That’s all.

*   *   *

Yes, there is a lesson here on the danger of conspiracy theories. But that’s a boring point. The problem with all this is that it actually hits far closer to home.

Because anybody who misread my tweet above isn’t actually doing something particularly unreasonable. They know that I work on a certain TV channel. They know that a royal obituary is one of the most stressful parts of working on that certain TV channel. And half an hour before news of the Queen’s health breaks into Bargain Hunt on BBC One, I post an alarming image from Red Dwarf which indicates I am in distress. Of course I’m hinting that I knew something, and there was something big coming. Except I didn’t, and I wasn’t.

But the problem is: on Dirty Feed, I attempt to make these links all the time, when talking about television. I’m leaping back, 30, 40, 50 years – sometimes more – and trying to figure out exactly what happened. This involves taking disparate facts, and trying to draw links between them. But as the above proves, sometimes things which look like they’re obviously linked, are in fact complete coincidence.

Let’s be clear: things like this happen in my job all the time. People often leap to conclusions about something that happened on TV which I was involved with. Sometimes, they can be entirely wrong… and it’s about a subject I can’t even remotely talk about, for confidentiality reasons. It’s infuriating.

And then I might go home, start writing, and do exactly the same about a TV show from 30 years ago.

So, what’s the solution to this? There isn’t one, really. When you’re trying to reach into the past, making your way through faulty paperwork and faultier memories, being forced to leap between gaps is inevitable. And it’s inevitable that I will get things wrong.

The only thing I can do is try and be as open about my procedures as possible. I really try not to write this site from a God’s-eye view, where I state what “definitely” happened in these situations, when we can’t be sure. The best I can do is try to make good guesses, clearly label speculation, and have as many facts to hand as possible. And most importantly, show my workings so the reader can come to a different conclusion if they want.

For instance, take the following paragraph from this piece on some unbroadcast Fry & Laurie sketches:

“Therefore, I would suggest that there is a high probability this unbroadcast sketch was shot on the 17th December 1988, with an outside chance that it was shot the week before on the 10th. It almost certainly wasn’t shot later; there’s no evidence that Radio Times photographer Don Smith was present at the final four sessions of the series.”

I hope you can all figure out what the words “probability”, “chance”, and “almost” are doing in that paragraph. And if that makes my writing woolly and annoying, it’s better than the alternative.

When leaping across gaps on here, I fully invite you all to come up with alternatives. Together, we might inch our way towards some kind of truth. I sure can’t do it by myself.

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“A Silly Little Website”

Published 8th September 2022

Internet

I always find it interesting when you read something that makes total sense, which helps you understand why people feel a certain way… and expresses something which you’ve never felt personally at all.

Take this piece, “This is what you’re nostalgic for“, by Jay Hoffmann. It’s about the discomfort I see from many elderly statespeople of the web: that some of the fun has gone out of it all. The whole thing is well worth reading, but I want to highlight the following key section:

“And for my small group of relative outsiders, the web fit right in with what all of the other stuff we were doing. So when I experience wistful anemoia1 thinking about the earliest years of the web, I’m reconnecting with the part of myself that built a silly little website for a handful of scene kids I hung out with that might think it was cool. I think it’s that same feeling that grips others as well.”

And I begin to realise one reason why I’ve been so unsympathetic in the past with people complaining that the web has lost some of its magic. It’s because I never had that particular experience when I was younger. It’s describing an alien experience.

Sure, I have some very fond memories of my early years online, over two decades ago now. There’s the early years of Knightmare.com, where I found out for the first time that other people remembered that show as well as me. Or similar early days discovering other people were interested in TV presentation. And then there was talking to the same person across two different forums, meeting up, and ending up going out with each other. We’re still together. So don’t get me wrong: the web bringing odd people together is one I fully understand.

And then, sure, I went on to make things. I wrote for Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan for years, and set up general telly/film/comics/whatever site Noise to Signal. But it always felt, in the main, like I improved over the years, rather than there being some magical time in the past where I did the best work I’d ever do. I may have done less of it, but my writing in 2019 for G&T was surely better than in 2003. And my writing here on Dirty Feed in 2022 is most certainly better than I was doing on Noise to Signal in 2006, and that’s not even a close-run thing. It’s miles better.

The question is why I feel differently to many, of course, and that’s a difficult one to answer. The fact that I actually continued writing online when a lot of people found other things to do is one. Maybe the fact I never went into web development for a living is another.2 I actually think the fact I never had kids is a huge factor; it means that I’ve had time to continue doing fun things online, rather than wistfully look back on the years when I did that kind of thing, and was forced to stop.

Or maybe it’s simply because I don’t have a lot of fond memories of myself when I was younger, and prefer the kind of person I am now. To look back on those early days for me is to look at wasted opportunity, not some kind of golden age.

But while I find it difficult to identify with Hoffman’s piece personally, that’s not to say I think it doesn’t have useful advice. Because I really think it does.

“I’m not sure we’ll be able to shake off this anemoia. We yearn to be outsiders again. And we won’t. And that’s ok. But, we might be able to direct this feeling to something worthwhile now that it has a name.”

“Outsiders” is a loaded word, and to be fair, the article is rightly wary of anybody aiming to become one.3 But I think Hoffman is right in that by identifying this feeling, people can use it to create something worthwhile.

Because while aiming to become an outsider is a bit icky, aiming to create something unusual, or for a very particular audience, is perfectly safe ground. It’s what I do on here all the time. Going into Red Dwarf‘s sets in this much detail is a very silly thing to do. Just as silly as Hoffman’s site from years ago, aimed at a bunch of scene kids.

But there are people out there who want to read it. You might have to work a bit to find them; it’s easy to get lost in the noise these days. But they’re still there. And that’s what we can all aim for. If you don’t think the web is fun enough any more, it won’t magically get better by sitting back with your arms folded and complaining.

Write or create something you want to see in the world. Everything else comes after that: how to get the right people to notice it, or indeed how to get the right people to ignore it. But without that initial act of creation, nothing else will happen. The web will only be fun if we make it so.

But we can. People do. Every single day. And you don’t need to be young and intense in order to do it.

  1. anemoia – n. nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. ↩

  2. Apart from a brief, year-long adventure running my own web design company, which ended in complete failure. ↩

  3. “Bit of a maverick, not afraid to break the law if he thinks it’s necessary. He’s not a criminal, you know, but he will, perhaps, travel 80mph on the motorway if, for example, he wants to get somewhere quickly.” ↩

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Not Well Done

Published 4th September 2022

Internet

Hey, here’s a list of some of the great things which have happened on Medium over the past decade! Let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?

Matter, Medium’s original flagship publication, joins the platform.

Matter last published on Medium in December 2016, and never said goodbye.

The Message — a self-described “anarcho-collective writing group” featuring authors such as Sloane Crosley, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Virginia Heffernan — launches on Medium.

The Message last published on Medium in May 2016, and never said goodbye.

Former Minnesota Viking Chris Kluwe weighs in on Gamergate for sports publication The Cauldron.

The Cauldron last published on Medium in February 2017… although they did finally say goodbye two years later.

We spin up the Medium Coronavirus Blog to share expert analysis, and The Verge dubs Medium “the best and worst” place for Covid-19 news.

The Medium Coronavirus Blog last published on Medium in June 2021, and never said goodbye despite the fact that this is an ongoing news story.

For OneZero, Matt Stroud exposes the CEO of Banjo’s neo-Nazi past, leading to his resignation.

OneZero last published on Medium in April 2022, and never said goodbye.

For Marker, Will Oremus explains why all the toilet paper went missing (and goes on MSNBC to talk about it).

Marker last published on Medium in April 2022, and never said goodbye.

When memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel passes away in January, GEN publishes her final year, in her own words.

GEN last published on Medium in – guess what – April 2022, and never said goodbye.

*   *   *

I’m sure with some of the above, you might be able to find a goodbye post from someone who worked on them. But that isn’t the point. The goodbye should obviously be on the publication itself where everyone will read it, not hidden away in a post elsewhere.

So, why is the above important? Let’s take a look at Medium’s about – sorry, “Our Story” page:

“The best ideas can change who we are. Medium is where those ideas take shape, take off, and spark powerful conversations. We’re an open platform where over 100 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Our purpose is to spread these ideas and deepen understanding of the world.

We’re creating a new model for digital publishing. One that supports nuance, complexity, and vital storytelling without giving in to the incentives of advertising. It’s an environment that’s open to everyone but promotes substance and authenticity. And it’s where deeper connections forged between readers and writers can lead to discovery and growth. Together with millions of collaborators, we’re building a trusted and vibrant ecosystem fueled by important ideas and the people who think about them.”

Authenticity? Connections? Trusted? All lovely words.

But how can you be authentic as a publication, if you just disappear without warning? Was what you were saying worthwhile, or not? How can you build connections between readers and writers, if you suddenly don’t hold up your end of the bargain, without explaining why? And how can you be trusted, if… well, I think you get the point.

Time and time again, the above happens on Medium. And let’s be clear – a load of publications suddenly disappearing at exactly the same time is nothing short of hilarious. But it is also an absolutely fantastic way to make it look like you have utter contempt for your readers. Sure, just abandon them without even telling them what’s going on. Again. And I would point out that Medium isn’t just a place where normal writers show up, write, and then get bored and drift off; many of the above publications were edited by people who work or worked for Medium.

If you never bothered to say goodbye to your loyal readers, did you ever really care about what you were doing at all? If you don’t want to communicate with your intended audience, can you really call yourself a writer? And if that’s unfair to individuals – and actually, the weight of evidence seems to suggest that it probably is – what the hell is the institutional problem at Medium that allows the above to happen over and over again?

And for what it’s worth: yes, I do practice what I preach.

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