Steve Jobs R.I.P.

October 7, 2011 Leave a comment

I’d love to say that my first-ever computer was an Apple II, but it wasn’t, it was a ZX Spectrum; I just fantasised about having an Apple II, which seemed like a properly futuristic machine when I read about it in Omni magazine in the 1980s. I never actually got round to buying an Apple desktop, even when I had the money; at some point I was seduced by the counter-cultural charms of Linux, and have stuck with that ever since.

I do however have an iPhone, and I think I can say without much exaggeration that it has changed my life. I guess that an Android smartphone would have had the same effect, and preserved my open-source purity, but Apple got to me first, and, at this point in my life, I can’t be bothered with the dislocation of changing software ecosystems.

I am planning to get an iPhone 4S, despite the lukewarm reviews, since my current model is a 3G, which is getting to be embarrassingly clunky. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s products can retain their cachet now that Steve Jobs is gone, or if people will finally notice that everyone and their granny has an iPhone or an iPod, and Apple are just another producer of (somewhat overpriced) consumer commodities.

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Enmeshed

September 25, 2011 Leave a comment

So, I’ve been working on a couple of other projects, and haven’t had much time for virtual world stuff recently, but I was looking for an excuse to slack off the other night, so I decided to go on to the grid to collect this month’s free premium gift. Here I am, sitting on my fine new sofa, trying to look intellectual:

Moving the furniture around was fun for about five minutes, but to be honest I’ve never found the dolls-house aspect of Second Life particularly interesting, so my attention soon wandered.

I had downloaded the 3.0 viewer, so I thought I would check out some of the new mesh objects that are now available, to see if they really would be the revolutionary force that I had predicted a couple of years ago.

Here’s a ukulele I found at the Mikki Miles Mesh Department, along with various other musical instruments:

and they have some interesting-looking creations at MeshAvatars:

It certainly looks much nicer than the usual prim-based stuff, though I’m far from a connoisseur in these matters. It seemed quite expensive by SL standards, which made me wonder how much trouble it actually was to upload these things, since prefabricated examples can be found pretty easily on the web, and the mesh creation tools aren’t that hard to master (I’m told).

The answer to that turned out to be “more trouble than I can be bothered with”, what with having to register with the Lab as a mesh uploader, take a test in intellectual property rights, and wade through the technical details of the actual process, not to mention paying the upload fees. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with more patience for this than me though, so I still think that there will eventually be an influx of cheap mesh items that will put the old prim merchants out of business. I suspect the relative obscurity of SL might be their best hope of a reprieve.

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Benign neglect

August 14, 2011 Leave a comment

I’ve shamefully neglected this blog over the summer, which I rather regret, since there has been a lot going on which I could and should have written about, like the war in Libya, the News International phone-hacking scandal, the massacre in Norway, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the US debt-ceiling stand-off and, just this week, the rioting in London and other English cities.

I suppose that the world has managed to scrape by without the benefit of my opinions for a couple of months; anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes could probably guess what my take on these events would have been anyhow.

What have I been doing instead? Well, as I’ve alluded to previously, I’ve been working on another writing project, one with somewhat greater pretensions to serious literary merit than the idle musings that make up my output in this space. I’m pretty excited about it at the moment, but, if past experience is any guide, my interest will wane soon enough, when I remember that proper writing is actually quite hard work, and I am far too lazy to keep it up for any length of time.

I expect that things will stay quiet here for the next month or so, and after that it’ll be back to the usual diet of lightweight psychological, cultural and political commentary, leavened with a little whimsical nostalgia. I have managed to read a few books over the holidays, so I may throw in a couple of reviews too, we’ll see.

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Off the wagon

July 30, 2011 Leave a comment

So, that’s me back from my digital sabbatical, though, to be honest, it wasn’t really one of those straight-edge digital sabbaticals that one reads about, since I took my cellphone (though I did manage to cut down my usual rate of calling and texting), and I only gave up the mobile internet because I was in a region remote enough to have no wi-fi hotspots, and prohibitively expensive data roaming charges.

Still, I’ve come back with a renewed appreciation of life off the grid. I was a bit restless for the first couple of days, but after that I hardly missed it at all, and passed my time at a leisurely pace, reading books, listening to music, thinking, writing a little, and even doing some exercise.

I had just about convinced myself that I wasn’t really addicted to the internet after all, but, I’m sad to say, I hadn’t been home more than a few hours before I succumbed to the temptation to quickly check my blog stats, then while I was online I thought I might as well see what people were saying on Facebook… and it was all downhill from there. Last night I spent three hours watching Beavis and Butt-head clips on YouTube. Rapid reinstatement indeed.

Strangely enough I haven’t had any notion to visit Second Life yet. Perhaps the pleasures of SL are too rarefied to give me the quick fix I’m looking for; it’s a fine malt compared with the bathtub gin of social media.

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It’s Summertime

June 11, 2011 Leave a comment

Readers may have noticed that we’ve gone into our summer recess a little early this year. This is mainly because I am easily distracted by fair-weather pursuits like getting stoned and lying in the park, but also because I have a couple of other projects on the go at the moment that have seduced me away from the virtual world.

So, in lieu of actually writing a proper post, I’ll link to some topics that I would have covered in more depth in the last couple of weeks if I weren’t such a slacker.

In the wake of the Ryan Giggs super injunction fiasco, the attorney general for England and Wales has warned Twitter users that they could face legal action if they breach privacy orders. This may sound like an empty threat, since most Tweeters, myself included, are outside the jurisdiction of the English courts, but I suspect that the authorities may try to restore respect for the law by launching some selective prosecutions, especially now that Twitter have shown a willingness to hand over user details without much resistance. (To be fair to Twitter, their TOS have always made it clear that they will rat you out if the Man comes calling). It’s another reason to believe that social media is perhaps not the unstoppable force for change that its most vocal advocates would have us believe.

On a related subject, the BBC have just finished screening All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, a trio of documentaries by Adam Curtis critically examining the effect that computers and their associated ideology have had on popular consciousness. It’s excellent stuff; if you’re quick you might catch it on the iPlayer, otherwise look out for a repeat.

And finally, as we’ve noted before, proof that our municipalities are woefully unprepared for zombie attack.

The holidays are looming, so that might be your lot until July, unless it rains a lot.

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See My Friends

May 30, 2011 Leave a comment

Alarming news in the Telegraph this week; apparently the average 20-something has over 1000 “friends” on social networking sites. It makes the 67 friends of my real-life Facebook account look pretty pathetic, but I’m positively gregarious compared with Johnny, my Second Life avatar, who can muster a mere 20 virtual chums (though some of them are fairly impressive, like Peter Ludlow and Bettina Tizzy). I suppose he could add in his Twitter followers, which would yield a slightly more respectable total of 94. Despite this seeming lack of interest, Johnny is “influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger“, according to internet reputation assessors Klout, but I would take that with several pinches of virtual salt.

At least Johnny’s account seems to have survived Facebook’s latest purge of avatar profiles; being under the radar does have some advantages I guess. The site’s continuing hostility to pseudonymous accounts is mystifying, since they seem essentially harmless, and boost the membership total, which is a key metric in the social networking industry. Maybe avatar profiles use more electricity or something.

It does make one doubt the wisdom of the Linden Lab strategy of encouraging residents to use Facebook though, since anyone who spent time creating a profile and carefully building up a circle of friends, only to see their work disappear in a flash, will, I imagine, be feeling pretty pissed off with the whole concept. Most long-term residents live in a perpetual fog of dissatisfaction anyway, so I don’t suppose it makes much difference.

I wonder how long it will be until Johnny heads across the river…

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Gil Scott-Heron R.I.P.

May 28, 2011 Leave a comment

More sad news; poet, musician, author and activist Gil Scott-Heron passed away yesterday. I don’t have anything to add to the obituaries that have been in every paper today; I’ll just link to his best-known work, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and try to do what I can to follow its message.

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Four Years

May 26, 2011 Leave a comment

It was four years ago today that I started writing this blog, and I’ve managed to keep up a fairly steady flow of posts since then, with the biggest gap being about three weeks I think.

Inexplicably, my literary endeavours in this space have, as yet, failed to bring me fame and fortune. Perhaps sometime in the next twelve months the world will finally wake up to my genius, if my senses don’t fail me.

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Do You Believe in Rapture?

May 20, 2011 Leave a comment

Readers may have noted that I’ve not been posting much recently. This is of course in line with my general slacker ethos, but it’s been even harder than usual to rouse myself to action of late; what with the Rapture forecast for this weekend, blogging seems rather pointless.

I’m not entirely familiar with the finer points of evangelical eschatology, but, as I understand it, Christ himself is going to visit Earth tomorrow, and bodily transport the faithful straight to heaven, while the rest of us are left behind to face the wrath of Satan and his minions.

If this miraculous event does come to pass (the pastor predicting it may not be completely reliable), I wonder if we will actually notice much difference, apart from the sudden disappearance of the most annoying 10% of the population. Humankind is well capable of creating mayhem without Beelzebub’s input, so if the Dark Lord is given untrammelled dominion over the mortal plane he may decide just to sit back and let us go on heading straight to hell in a handcart all by ourselves.

[I couldn’t decide which of two tunes was best to accompany this post; this Sonic Youth track is one of my favourites, but it would be criminal to cover this topic without linking to this classic by Blondie.]

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Caledonia rising

May 6, 2011 Leave a comment

Almost exactly a year after the UK General Election, voters across Britain have returned to the polls, to elect local councils in England and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and to vote in the nation-wide referendum on the Alternative Vote.

To no one’s great surprise the Liberal Democrats have been given a good kicking. The Conservative vote held up pretty well, even increasing in the south of England, showing that their plan to make Nick Clegg the fall guy for their unpopular policies has worked to perfection. What did the Lib Dems get in return for taking on the role of national hate-figures? A vote on AV, which they didn’t really want since it isn’t a proportional system, and which was bound to be rejected by the electorate anyway, since it was closely associated with Clegg, whom nobody trusts now.

In England and Wales the main beneficiaries of the Lib Dem collapse have been Labour, but the real excitement has been up here in Scotland, where there has been a political realignment of the type seen only once in a generation.

The Scottish National Party swept to an impressive victory, hoovering up all the votes of disaffected Lib Dem supporters, but also making massive inroads in areas once thought to be solidly Labour, and becoming the first party in the Parliament’s history to win an outright majority of seats.

This result can be partly explained by Labour’s horribly misjudged campaign strategy – they concentrated their fire on the Tories, and explicitly stated that they saw the Scottish elections merely as a stepping-stone to regaining power in London – but it is also an endorsement of the competence of the previous SNP administration, and a sign that the Scottish electorate may be warming to the idea of independence. SNP leader Alex Salmond has promised a referendum on the issue within the lifetime of this parliament, probably in three or four years’ time, which would represent the biggest challenge to the integrity of the British State in three centuries.

I have no great love for nationalism per se, nor for the SNP, who are pro-capitalist social democrats rather than socialists, but Scottish independence would be a political shake-up on a scale that would provide a great opportunity for the left.

Interesting times ahead…

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