Review Copies

Starfall's been out now for ~2 weeks and very rapidly I've found out that I don't want to give people the option of getting a copy free. Actually, that's not quite true, free as in beer I can handle as long as I know who wants a copy.

I worked a long time on Starfall, over a decade, in fact. Over the last two weeks "people" have stopped by my Smashwords page and chosen to "Pay What They Want" for a copy and none of them wanted to pay anything.

Here's what I think about those people who don't pay anything for the book. First, I suspect they're screen scrapers, procedural bots who hoover up anything that's not nailed down, digitally speaking. Second, I think that if they're not, they're worse.

I take free books when those books are marked "free". If I were to release a free book, and I have, I would say, this is free, enjoy it. Pay what you want, on the other hand, means "not nothing". Or at least it does to me. There are many albums on indie music site Bandcamp that are marked "Pay what you want". If an artist wants you not to pay for their music then they add **FREE DOWNLOAD** to the album title. Then you can take the music for free.

No doubt there are some people who take Pay What You Want music from Bandcamp for nothing. I am not one of those people. Even a nominal fee for the music is a way of saying that the work was worth something to you, the listener. Taking Pay What You Want stuff for a sum of zero just makes you look like a giant, unthinking content hoover.

I am not saying that those people - if they are people - who took my book for free are not going to read Starfall. What I am saying is that I don't believe they are. I find this to be like baking a bunch of delicious cookies and taking them out into the street to offer them to people. If the people believed that I was trying to poison them fine. But this is more like people are taking the cookies but they just snatch them on the way past, no eye contact, no greeting, no sense that they are aware that the human being that baked the cookie is standing, you know, right there at all.

Then, it's like those people throw those cookies away, after taking them, without even looking at them or smelling them or detecting that I threw a dash of vanilla in. Like the cookie was good enough to take but not good enough to eat afterward.

That's what I don't like. Take my book for free, or, at least for a like on my Facebook page and a message that says "Hi, I would like a free copy of your book because it looks interesting and I am happy to go on your mail list about future releases." If you want to not pay money for the book on that basis I am totally fine with that.

But I am not fine with you taking the book for literally nothing as if I am just a book writing machine that needs no more acknowledgement than a kettle. Sometimes I write things for a bit of fun, with a "take it or leave it" kind of attitude, then I will say, hey, just take a copy, that's fine. Starfall, in particular, is not one of those projects. I worked too damn hard on that book to have people not even say "Hi" when they have a copy gratis. So that is no longer an option.

If you don't want to engage with me but you want to read the book now the price is $4. A $0 copy is for people who are happy to like my facebook page and go on my mailing list.

Grump over. Have a nice day.

Discordian Vodun Online

Excuse my concerns all leaking together, but my post about the difficulty of making a connection to vodun for someone born and raised in the UK took a little more time than I had anticipated. Even so, this would seem like as fine a time as any to mention that I am writing a good deal about vodun at present as it forms the centre of my upcoming novel.

As it happens putting the book out there now, instead of racing to get it published when it was mostly done a few years ago seems to have been a wise choice. The experience is opening up my experience in ways both Discordian and in a broader spirituality.

If anyone was in doubt that Eris created the internet then the concept that it is a technology that it puts a white mostly-Welsh guy who rarely leaves the UK in direct contact with an authentic Louisiana houngan and you have to admit that the chaos is strong with this tech.

Okay, but as we have to disbelieve everything we read how do I KNOW he's an authentic houngan? Well, how does he know I'm an authentic pope? Here's the thing, I know that vodun is deep and serious because it is dangerous. Not just dangerous in an Angel Heart, bite off a chicken head way but in a sanity bending, perception altering way.

This is the problem the multiple-Pope doctrine of Discordianism is all about. Spirituality should be like knife-juggling or sword swallowing. Before you go to a party and offer to share with everyone your really sweet party trick where you escape from an airtight safe in under two minutes with your hands cuffed you better be pretty sure you're an escapologist. It is evident Houdini was taking more risks than any given vicar.

In Discordianism the whole Pope thing is an illustration that many religions attach very little weight to the assumption of a place high on the spiritual food chain. This is probably an extended hangover from the times when church and state ran in parallel power structures and any corrupt rich asshole could be a power player in the church wielding dogma as a blunt instrument.

In reality you don't want to represent as something you aren't when it comes to spiritual matters. As vodun represents an apparent spiritual tradition that treats the world of spirit with the respect it deserves. From what I know you wouldn't want to represent as a houngan if you actually weren't.

Hell, I don't go to dinner parties and shoot my mouth off about being a pope, for a start everyone is. Deeper, though, my serious consideration of all things Discordian has only begun very recently. I'm not ready to wear the hot dog belt bucket and golden apple lapel badge just yet*.

There are too many people claiming to be the spiritual hotline at the present time. I do think that the original wave of Discordianism fell at the start of this wave. Marshall McLuhan identified the potential in the mass-media and electronic expansion of communications. But any time before about 1998 was too soon to call the potential power of the internet, which is like the power of the mass media on steroids.

I think that poets and artists have taken a massive beating in terms of their relevance and purpose these days, a time when people can attain some sort of notoriety by doing something vaguely interesting on YouTube. When you consider that Andy Warhol couldn't possibly have known the scope of his assertion about everyone being famous for 15 minutes you begin to appreciate what that purpose is.

Warhol's art attracted attention, that attention gave him a platform. If he'd been doing what he was doing now his soup cans would have been on DeviantArt and his aphorisms would have been mashed up with satirical photo juxtapositions and shared on instagram. The tools to be a prophet have been democratised to the point that they have experienced a severe devaluation.

As anyone can claim to be anything they want when you can only talk to them on social media so the currency of making those claims has taken a hit given all the counterfeit claims. All that's really happened though is a raising of the bar. If you want a platform now building it isn't the problem, the problem is using it amongst the forest of competing platforms that exist.

The current environment of people screaming in echo chambers doesn't nullify the one whispered thread of actual wisdom. A mass of people listening to white noise does not mean that the message has been compromised. All that's happened is that the terrain has changed. Now the whispered message can be delivered to active recipients, listening itself was passive when the availability of platforms was scarce. Rapidly the business of listening has become active and personal, Discordianism has been right there waiting because Discordianism admits we're all popes and that you have to disbelieve everything you read. These are not just idle statements, they are the pronouncements of a prophet who didn't even know what he was seeing and attained his insight through his own spiritual process of chewing on paradoxes and shifting his own perspective.

If we are all popes we all have to do that. Active listening is contemplation of the bigger picture. Learning to separate out the wisdom from the white noise is everybody's job. And then Discordianism reminds us "The white noise is wisdom, and the wisdom is white noise, now what you gonna do?"

From this perspective vodun is another way to approach perception, and as it's pretty unique it's a valuable one at that. I have found my own vodun experiences so far to remind me how little I know and how daunting the change in thought can prove to be. I am grateful. For these are things we should never forget.

* There is no official formal attire that marks one out as a Discordian**, but if I were to set a precedent it would definitely be the belt buckle and lapel badge.
** And if anyone claimed there was it would be the job of all Discordians to refute it.

Why I Am Really Bad At Marketing

If I was an author hip to the world of marketing then I would have really dragged out the reveal of the cover of my new book. I would have "teased" it. I would have built audience anticipation. Oh man, if I was good at marketing you wouldn't have slept for at least a week wondering what the cover of Starfall would look like. You would have had a little calendar on the wall counting down the number of "sleeps" until the cover was revealed.

Man, if I was good at marketing the release of my novel would be the single most important event that has ever taken place in your life. The reveal of the cover would be the anticipatory hors d'oeuvre of the whole thing. I would be the king of author foreplay.

If.

Unfortunately I am terrible at marketing. I'm so bad that the cover of the book has been visible on the Smashwords preorder page for the book for almost a week. I was confident no one would "leak" the cover because no one really cares. This is because I am terrible at marketing.

It's not like I lack confidence in the product. It's taken me over a decade to get Starfall ready and I am confident that the work stands up to scrutiny. If you like dark fantasy, mythology and learning new things then this will be one of the best books you read this year, I absolutely guarantee it.

But that's not really marketing, is it?

This is probably the main part of the problem. I have no idea what the difference is between conversation and marketing. I have no line between self-consciously advertising something and just telling people: "Hey, you know, you might enjoy this, I have to charge you for it, I like to eat."

I do know that authors on Twitter annoy me like you wouldn't believe. At one time I guessed that I too might have to rack up 20 different ways of saying "Buy My Book" on a tweet scheduler and leave it to howl it's robo-sales pitch into the Social Media maelstrom, hating myself for doing something to make the overall intellectual quality of the internet worse than it already is.

But then I thought, no, forget that. Not because I'm better than that, but because I am bad at marketing. I cannot, in good conscience, message all my friends via Facebook to buy my book, regardless of whether I think they'd get a kick out of it or not. I cannot see myself morosely repeating my sales message on my Facebook author page. I am using Lulu for print copies and Smashwords for e-books because I like to support business that isn't Amazon, monopolies are bad for everyone, the monopoly holder included, I am trying to save Amazon from themselves.

All of this because I couldn't identify an effective marketing strategy in a line up if one had mugged me in a dark alley yesterday evening. I'm sorry officer, it all happened so fast, I didn't have time to see how many engagements the perpetrator could convert. I have no funnel strategy. I just wanted some people who might enjoy it to read my book, and I wanted to get paid, because people do cool, creative things, they deserve to get paid. That's what I thought.

Yeah, let's face it, I am bad at marketing. Hey ho.

Apparently My Lance Is Free

Well, sort of.

It has to be said that I have not been busier than I have been in the last couple of weeks for a long while. The up side of this is that I am feeling really positive about the work that I am doing. The down side is that no one is, as yet, paying me for my work. But then it has only been about a week that I've engaged in such activity so early days yet.

I guess this does leave me with something of a quandary. I will need some income eventually, after all. The thing is I am finding that I have more energy and do more useful work when I'm not actually, you know, going to work.

I'm finding the removal of the salary safety net has had, paradoxically, the opposite effect than one would expect on my mood and outlook. I just hope that someone would like to retain my services before I have to return to the haven of being someone else's employee.

The other thing that's been really good is that I have met lots of other self-employed people who do a staggering number of different things and meeting these people is far more interesting than going into a work place and meeting people who are employed by the same employer as you. People, on the whole, are usually interesting for one reason or another, but people who are pulling their own weight and going their own way in life are just more interesting in and of themselves, or maybe it's just novelty.

Before I go I should draw your attention to the new link on the top right to my new freelance services page. I hope to expand this with case studies and examples shortly but it is there and available, that is the main thing.

(By the way, hope everyone is getting along with the new look. Let me know.)

Yay! Social Media Humiliation In The Sidebar

Because it would be silly not to I have added a Wattpad widget to my connect sidebar panel. It tells you how many wattpad points I currently don't have! Yay for javascript used to embarrass and humiliate.

Connection Issues

There comes a time when staring at the same old blog interface becomes... well, a little staid, tiresome, tedious.

It doesn't mean you love the blog any less, oh no, not at all. Just a blogger craves a bit of variety.

I know, I know a blog is for life not just for christmas but still, the tumblr interface promised something blogger seemed a little hesitant to deliver. Interconnectivity. The way I understand it I should be able to publish here, it will appear on my tumblr dashboard and I will be able to then reblog it there with an option to send a summary to Twitter.

The disadvantage of this is that I have less idea how many people are lurking on any of my blogs. The upside is that a blog is supposed to attract comments and as I hardly ever get comments lurkers are unimportant. It's not really how many people you have no idea are reading your stuff that's important, it's the people you do know are reading and commenting on what you write that's important.

I've been blogging somewhere since about 2004, my proper blog first blossomed into existence in 2006. Four years on and I have no idea how to garner comments from the wider world. I sometimes throw a sideways glance at more able blogger's like Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood and wipe away a tear of frustration. I think it's a holy grail to turn a blog into a discussion and I've never known anyone actually be able to bottle that particular species of lightning.

Anyway. I live in hopes that one day I will attract commentators to my blog and I think being more connected is definitely a step in the right direction. Although, obviously, nothing can be proven on this score.

2010: The Year We Got Busy

I wish that the amusing implication of the post title was anywhere near accurate. No, a more literate version of the semantics is to be inferred.

The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.

Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.

We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.

Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!

2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?

P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.

Britain Thinks: Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rules?

Have just decided to show some practical support for new internet site Britain Thinks which looks like it could be jolly good fun. At the moment the interface is a bit sparse, I imagine it's intended to be a sort of social networking site with an agenda of debate. Well, we have loads of social networking opportunities, but debates not so much. So they've opened the site with a number of debating tools.

Basically you can go to a topic, there's voting buttons and a neat flashy type widget that plays videos. Obviously the videos are all, or mostly, the starting content, mostly minute long soundbites, but I saw one sort of documentary style piece as well. Inevitably there's a comment box and lots of rating facilities and so on and so forth.

So you watch the videos, you read the comments, you vote on the voting panels and you do so having signed up for an account.

Initial thoughts?

Well, I'm a bit disturbed that for a substantial site, or at least a site that purports to be all about the substance of debate about everyday issues, it seems quite bitty. In my cursory inspection it seemed quite difficult to flit from clip to clip, the tumult of opinion seemed quite random. As someone who likes a good organised debate I was quite dismayed that there was nothing there to get your teeth into.

I have to say the site was only launched on Monday, as such it's probably a more technical achievement at present than an instant classic of web design. Things I would hope to see in the future:

• I am a user, but I have no acces to edit my account profile! Oh noes!
• There are other users but they have no visible public profiles.
• The debate pages are designed cleanly from a graphic design POV but this masks an underlying incoherence in conceptual structure. Is this op ed Twitter where statements of length are to be frowned upon?
• I think I would like to be able to aggregate debates and even run them from within the personal profile I don't yet have. This would help enormously with, my final point...
• The content is grouped by topic and videos are star-rated but the arguments are not streamed like an essay, you just get assaulted by a little bit about this and then a little bit about that. The topics are huge and being banged around in an opinion pinball machine is weird. If topics had administrators who applied some sort of taxonomy to the issues this would help a bunch. For example in a debate about education comments could be labelled "teachers", "exams", "government", "parents", "students", "curriculum" so that you could watch streams of comments about one sub-topic.

Having said all that I think the idea of using the web as a speaker's corner is a great idea. Usually the forum for issues are controlled by government or some half-baked subset of functionality offered by a social networking site built, primarily, for other purposes.

I would love to see Britainthinks become something that gets referenced on the news when emotive news stories arise, I'd love to see its clips being used in Question Time and things like that. If the man on the street can vent a sophisticated opinion at home and be watched by people who are going to entertain his ideas seriously and respond in kind that's a great leap forward in net based political interaction.

I imagine it will also be a home for people to vent shocking stupidity and vile hate speech, but that's as important.

If you are reading this, and you're British I urge you to support this initiative, I think it's a winner. DISCLAIMER: In 2006 someone sent me an invite to link to their profile on something called "Facebook". I looked at the site, decided it was rubbish, it would never work, so I never accepted the invitation. My powers of prediction should be measured by that opinion...

Why... won't... you... DIE!

The autopsy of the Rage vs. Robojoe incident continues with the entirely unsurprising conjecture that the whole thing was a viral scam. The glee with which the author of this piece by turns "exposes" the web of coincidence that panders to the most cynical view of the whole affair and then, knowing full well that the showboat piece has done its job, heartily retracts it is evident in every smug, calculated word.

I used to be of the opinion that a position of advocacy for the devil was a worthy cause indeed. However the devil's advocate game is not immune to being hijacked by banal thinkers who merely continue to operate within the rat runs of our everyday thought patterns. Dichotomous thinking has its place, if only people weren't so bad at it.

The central problem with Mr. Lyle's analysis is that it plays to some common presumptions in popular culture that don't help anything and force from others reactions that implicitly buy into these presumptions. As the task of Lyle's expose, as far as I can make out, is to promote his blog, and his way of thinking, it doesn't matter whether you buy in to the expose or wish to refute it the point is you've bought into the presumption that this information is in any meaningful sense relevant to anything.

Don't make the mistake that I'm trying to act above the whole gossipy nature of this entire story; if I were above that I wouldn't have been writing my X Factor pieces since I began my journal revivication programme. Gossip is good when applied to products, services and entertainment, I wholeheartedly endorse anyone's right to gossip about any aspect of the developing story. I, myself, had toyed with the idea that it was Sony BMG behind the whole incident and passed comments to that effect to co-workers and the Mrs.

The Mrs really is an excellent barometer of the likelihood, relevance and importance of such notions. She shrugged at my conjecture. This was my cue for how to treat my conspiracy theory. Essentially, even if all of Lyle's piece were true, so what? The facts are the facts, to quibble about how they came to be so is only important if it somehow forced a result that is a gross misrepresentation of reality as it stands.

When it comes to a pop music chart, a few pop music artists, a record label, a corporation and a million people participating in a retail battle orchestrated by both mass and social media reality in an essential sense is so thin on the ground as to be negligible. What smug commentary questioning the purity of the grassroots campaign fails to take into account is the question that if the whole thing was a set up who does that really make a difference to? The only people it really effects are the imagined ninja viral marketers who instigated the whole shebang at the grassroots level.

If the campaign was pure then the whole thing for two normal people who started a silly social networking scheme became a bit of a laugh and a lot of a headache (as the comments refuting Lyle's article indicate). If the campaign was a Sony masterminded viral advertising campaign then it remains a laugh for the ninjas but they also collect on a hefty pay day in exchange for a campaign well orchestrated.

The litmus test of the likelihood of the "RATMgate" conspiracy being an actual thing is to ask if the viral campaign would have been worth the money before the event. If I were speaking to a massive corporation from the position of egotism it would require to guarantee I could pull off this fake campaign coup I would want that corporation to reward me in proportion to my skills.

This isn't a Western or a gangster flick, all of this would have to be mediated via contracts and statements of expectation. The contract would have to guarantee the viral ninja some recompense even in the advent of the scam being uncovered by heroic reporters such as Mr. Lyle, or in the advent of the entire thing being an enormous flop.

Here's the sticking point. I don't for one second believe that Sony would buy into any such contract. What people fail to take into account about businesses it is that they have neither a sense of fun nor a sense of humour. They may well have coffers deep enough to throw money at speculative viral marketers willy nilly but I could throw a snowball and hit a couple of people with "a really neat idea for a viral marketing stunt".

Sony are far more likely to sit back and ask potential viral marketers to prove themselves before they'll even enter talks. The problem for the viral ninjas being that the execution of a successful viral stunt kind of lets the genie out of the bottle. The science of the viral meme is more akin to alchemy than Newtonian Physics, flash viral successes are usually found to have originated from the pan.

So overall common sense and intuition tells us that the campaign was genuine. This does not present people from using the spectre of some imagined corruption stemming from the idea that the whole thing was engineered exploiting this fear to gain attention.

I just find the whole thing quite manipulative and unhelpful. What we know is that radicalism doesn't help, conformity doesn't help, bickering over authenticity doesn't help, fear doesn't help, mud slinging doesn't help. The only way to gain a sense of clarity, it would seem, is to put the whole thing in a perspective that makes a kind of pragmatic sense. The whole thing was a jolly good laugh, it's funny, that's all that really matters, who cares why it came to be. If Sony engineered it that means the company is way cooler than I'd thought it was, so they should be proud to have brought us Christmas care of Rage. If not, then still good, it remains funny.

The only people who might feel aggrieved about being duped by a multi-national corporate entity are those who resent the fact that they can't afford a new car or a bigger house while the people at the top of the corporation have both. If they duped you then that tells you, as the dupee, why they have all that money. If you genuinely handed your money to them while they didn't lift a finger it also drops you a clue. If you choose to look at it this way they duped you either by doing something or doing nothing. In that frame of mind they dupe us all a hundred times a day.

From another perspective, stuff happens. Systems exist. Learn to game them and you will succeed, fail to game them, or refuse to participate and you won't reap what the people who accept those systems consider to be the rewards of participation. Really you have to ask yourself, what's more important? Having a good laugh about a song with naughty words in it invading a cultural institution? Or worrying that you're laughing while others are accumulating vast wealth from your laughter? I picked my answer.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

P.S. This is officially my last post about the Rage debacle.

Fate? Free Will? Facebook?

Before we begin let's just hold in our minds that in the metropolitan area of London there are approx 13 million residents. There are 61 million people in the United Kingdom.

This week 1 million of those people were involved in a tussle over the number one selling song in the United Kingdom this week, the winner would be declared the number one song in the UK on Christmas Day.

I am attempting to provoke a Naked Lunch moment for those of you embroiled in the current "RATM vs. RoboJoe" = "Revolutionary Anger vs. Cow-Like Capitalism" frame of mind. By which I do not mean I am trying to convince you that insect/typewriter hybrids are organising meet-ups with mugwumps. Rather I am, in the strictest sense, trying to get the cultural diner to really appreciate what's on the end of the pop music fork.

As to the actual autopsy of the event within the context which it's been presented I'll leave that to the ever incisive Charlton Brooker. But beyond all the people bickering over the result and the fact that everyone was swelling Sony's coffers are those who wish to urinate on everyone's parade by pointing out that doing what your told because of Facebook is no better than being told what to do by X Factor.

To those meta-meta whiners I would urge you to go into the kitchen, slap on the kettle, and prepare yourself a nice hot cup of shut the fuck up. If you wanted to be more self-serving and pathetic you couldn't possibly have chosen a more irritating, ignorant, deluded and intensely stupefying way of doing it.

I know, I know you wanted to slap those smug Facebook-worshipping goons in the face and point out to them that there's nothing big or clever about organising yourself via a combination of virtual Walls and Twitter tweeting. This only says you have a problem with Facebook and Twitter. So many do, yet they continue to exist, learn to live in harmony or shoot yourselves.

If you wanted some perspective on the whole thing then you might have to go on a journey zooming out from the pop culture phenomenon that sparked the whole incident in the first place. Let's look at X Factor, and if we're going to examine that let's look at the face of X Factor Simon Cowell.

Is Simon Cowell Satan's cousin? No. He's a rich bloke and he got to be a rich bloke by playing a game called: What will pop  music fans buy if I release it as a single? To those of you who think he is "ramming X Factor winners down our throat" because he loves pop for any aesthetic reason I refer you to his efforts to get pop music fans to listen to opera. In aesthetic terms Cowell would probably rather listen to La Traviata than either Killing In The Name or The Climb. He's a game player. Pop music is a game. Business is a game. Pandering to the market is a game with substantial cash rewards. People who moan about his vast wealth because it's aesthetically bankrupt are missing the point mostly because they're most dreadfully, awfully, evilly jealous of what he has managed to make out of what they consider to be mind-numbing anaesthetic for the idiotic masses.

I don't. The man's made money by winning a game. Not only that but pretending that his product sells to "the idiotic masses" leaves aside the fact that if you're using the words "masses" and "majority" as if they're equivalent are woefully misguided. The population of Britain set against the number of people buying the X Factor winner's single in any given year tells us that the majority of the people in Britain couldn't give a flying one. So the masses are not idiotic, or if they are it's not measurable by their music choice.

So, if we take the next step out, Robojoe's win. As I hope I  have made clear I appreciate the game of the X Factor. Not every pop song it produces may be my cup of tea but I appreciate what it is and I think it's jolly good fun. However, even given the narrow margin by which he undersold RATM he undersold Alexandra by even more. All this does is prop up my earlier conclusion that a donkey won the X Factor this year. His appeal next to last year's strong winner is already waning. As a professional and hugely rich game player I believe Cowell knew Robojoe was going to be a One Hit Wonder the minute he won.

Robojoe's loss actually saves him from a worse fate. If he had won the rumours of chart-fixing would have been loud and unfounded. Unfounded or not he would be a pop artist trying his best to battle against a huge drift of ill-sentiment in the wider world. As it is he lost like he should have and the RATM contingent probably wish him no ill-will. Still doesn't mean his career's going to live any longer though.

Zooming out even further. So the two artists in this two horse race are signed to the same record label. The body of commentary upon this fact has grown too large already for me to add anything. So let's skip straight to the people who are doing the slow hand clap and berating the two halves of the "idiotic masses" for buying into the whole shebang.

All these people are saying, in an unpleasant pissy, moany, joy-annihilating fashion is that the whole "machine" by which these campaigns were mobilised are equally terrible, soulless and evil. So imagining that RATM are xenomorphs (AKA Aliens) and the X Factor are Ya'Qui (AKA Predators) who ever wins, we lose.

This presumes that our culture, the means by which we enjoy our culture and the aesthetic tastes of those who participate in that culture are rotten, decadent and necessarily a bad thing. It also, condescendingly, says that the one and only reason why people bought either song was because they were told to; the implication being that no one would listen to either song by choice.

To all thee the smacked-arse of face I congratulate you. You win at arguing on the internet and inherit all the bounty that goes with such a victory. You have successfully pointed out that there are 60 million people who didn't want to participate in this fight and the chances are the majority of them feel no love for the two songs involved. You and Simon Cowell can enjoy the opinion that both are a bit rubbish and not your choice of listening.

And finally, there's the rub. We live in a world where everyone with access to the internet has the means to understand certain things which go spectacularly not understood. Things like, in terms of the population of the UK one million isn't even a tenth. Things like, Simon Cowell is just a person, not evil and not stupid, capable of evil like the rest of us, but just a guy. Get over it. Not only that but he's undeniably clever enough to have more money than I'll probably ever see and if that's how we're living our lives then I guess I have to pay that the respect it's due.

On which final topic, if I am happy tonight, as I am, to go home on the bus, eat some Chicken Fajitas, watch a movie or two, go to  bed, get up tomorrow and do it all again - if I am even able to do that using the tools society has provided to help me live my life - then I implicitly accept that this is the way we are doing things for now.

But that doesn't mean that I am necessarily robbed of my own free will. Maybe I do these things because I have entertained the ideas of those calling for revolution and decided that they're not for me. I am broadly satisfied with much of the way things are done and if I am not I don't like the proposed alternatives any more and am not sufficiently outraged to suggest my own.

I chose not to get involved in the Rage vs. Robojoe fight because I saw worth in both sides and just wanted to know who would win. But I don't reject either Facebookers or X Factor fans because there's room for us all under the sun and all the miserable whiny curmudgeons who want to tell me I've been brainwashed can stick it up their tinfoil hat wearing arses.

Tweeting The Second Time Around

I have to ask myself the question: Am I just not getting it or is Twitter, in fact, rubbish?

The first time round I didn't give the world of Tweeting a chance; so I'm back on with a Twitter feed that is on the public timeline and trying to get my head round all this "Trending Topics" nonsense. I even looked on here for a widget to put in the sidebar which would allow people to see my Tweets but there doesn't appear to be an "official" one so that quest came to a hasty end, in the first instance.

Still, I am determined not to be one of these people who showers scorn on something just because he doesn't really get it. I want to get it before I shower scorn on it because for the life of me I don't know why all these celebrities and whatnot think it's so amazing. I had a quick look at Charlie Brooker's feed and the massively tiled background photo, preponderance of profanity and surreal disconnection of an unnetworked feed sent me away underwhelemed.

Perhaps I will warm to it...

I think I'm "searchable" so why not look for me. After all that's the idea of this stuff, surely.

In other news: they're making a film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies cue mind-boggling at the intertextuality.

An underwhelming set of duets is planned for the X Factor Final. In the office the prevailing attitude is that nobody should win because they're all rubbish. As long as Robojoe fails to win I really don't mind. I think it may well be Olly, if it's not Robojoe. If it is Robojoe I predict a christmas number one and then almost certain obscurity as people fail to care. An unfortunate wastage of the X Factor prize fund. Who knows if he wins I may try to push "Killing In The Name Of" to number one for Christmas as the Facebook group wishes.

The only thing that's news-y about the revelation that most people won't pay extra for TV in HD is that the BBC thinks this is news. I remember watching  the clarity and beauty of the clear digital image slack jawed when DVD was released. But HD only improves on DVD a tiny little bit, and is monstrously more pricey. Whoever thought people would pay premium for that is stupid and greedy. Like I said, big news, not.

It appears that now people can see how whichever government is in power at the time is apparently squandering taxpayer money at Where Does My Money Go dot org. 53bn on General Public Services, eh? That'll buy a lot of second homes and duck houses... Pardon my cynicism. How long before someone registers wheredoesmymoneyreallygo.org? I can picture a wonderful parody with coloured circles representing "Down the back of the sofa", "Government 'Sharp Exit In Case Of Coup' Fund" and so on and so forth. It's all very well being able to see how the government our wasting the sweat of our collective brows but if we don't like the size or number of coloured circles in a particular category what, exactly, are we supposed to do? Ask for a refund?

Meanwhile, the taxman is complaining that his old computers are stopping him pwning us for all the money we might possibly owe. So let's get this straight, shall we? The government wants to plunge us back into misery and gloom in 2010 by charging us more tax for everything and the taxman is moaning because he can't screw us for an even greater amount... It seems as if we never needed a website to answer the question about where our money went. The answer is quite obvious.

Well, as always it's up to the personal world to rescue me from such gloomy thoughts. There's bacon, sausage, Dreamtime Stories and a generally sociable weekend in my immediate future. It seems all my money goes on buying cuts of dead pig... yum.

Quiet Day Posting

Not much to say today except I've been following with some amusement the fracas surrounding social networking behemoth facebook's updated privacy policy.

I find the best way not to accidentally share personal information you don't want to be seen by the world is not to publish it in a thinly veiled marketing database that spans the entire Western World. Today's top tip...