QI - which interesting dead person are you?

I am Mary Kingsley, Victorian explorer and writer. Sounds about right. Some of these things are crap, but this one's good.

blogging dying?

Anything but blogging!

I've definitely been writing less on my personal blogs, and it is partly because I'm loving Twitter and getting deep into feeds on GoogleReader, but I certainly don't think blogging's dying. It's just evolving. On many of my favourite blogs, posts are shorter, more immediate, and provide little more than a jumping-off point. As people's readers become stuffed with feeds and their follow count rises and more commercial interests muscle in, there's just less room for updates and fully-formed opinion on absolutely everything.

How many tabs do you have open right now?

And then we get on to the subject of concentration span and how long one web page will hold anyone's interest these days…

Hmm and this one says it even better. I do feel that my ramblings on what a great surf I had are now no longer relevant to anyone, and I update and post much more frequently on the professional blogs I maintain. So often, in fact, that I often have to pretend I am one of my other colleagues so I don't look like a total geek. And to make them look good.

brain droppings

Gosh, where have I been? Head down on SurfGirl, mostly, and dreaming up a fantasical magical fantasy novel.

Seren's new catalogue popped through my door, and I want…all of it. But especially the Mabinogion retellings. Another idea that I never quite followed through on. Literally cannot wait for the Niall Griffiths one! (I am determined to make it to his Ty Newydd workshop.)

Death of the iBook is also making life difficult. I dream of a backlit keyboard and unibody, 13 inches and 250GB of Apple goodness…

The Surfing Tribe

I did some work on The Surfing Tribe, which is out now. It's turned out amazing. It's such an epic bit of work, so many facts and figures, stories collated, never-seen photos sourced. It caused untold amounts of heartache, rows and headaches, but now it's here, I'm proud to have had a (small) hand in it.

More info here >>

(Signed copies available… I know this all sounds like just a plug but not really, I'm just impressed with how it came out.)

Headline Analyzer

"What is the Headline Analyzer?

This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score."

Cool huh? I must be a pretty poor copywriter, because I'm not getting very high scores! And I'll admit, I was actually looking for a headline generator. When your editor has decided that a good title for an article about Europe would be, er, 'Europe' and you have to think something up at the last minute, boy would a headline generator be useful. I'll keep looking…otherwise I might have to use my brain, and it's not co-operating today.

Oh this is fun too - word association. I had it passing after 105. (Why do my threads always turn to filth after about 20? Hmm.)

language conforms

Language is conformist in the profoundest sense; even objective reality yields to its pressure. The so-called factual is brought to dissolution, because it is shaped and constrained by the limits of language. Under its reductive force, we forget that we don’t need symbols to be present to meaning. The reality of pre-linguistic social practices is screened from us by more than the practical, empirical limitations of access to time past. Primal existence has been ruled irrelevant, and indigenous life-ways are everywhere under siege, because of civilization’s pervasive over-valuation of the symbolic.

–John Zerzan: Too Marvelous for Words
(Language Briefly Revisited)

Something to get further into...a thousand concepts to wrestle...

Brits and the weather

‘the sun’s shinning’

One of my all-time pet HATES. Shineing is better…no, I’d also chop hands off for that.

Shinning, though? Rustles up images of skinny, pale, overshaved shiny (‘shinny’?) calves, stacked up in the sky, desperate to get their fix of shinny-ness… (‘shinne’?)

Apologies for randomness…it must be Friday afternoon…