Allotment troubles.

I’ve only got a little bit of earth. End of last summer I planted impatiens for some end-of-the-year color, and had planned to use the space as an herb garden this spring.

But… Then the aloe plant took off, despite the winter and the sun AND the soil not being as sandy as it usually likes. So I seeded the oregano under a mini greenhouse, buried the garlic bulbs along the back, and put all the rest of the herbs on the windowsill inside until the weather cleared. I figured I was fine, despite the aloe taking a quarter of the box — herbs can choke themselves without too much harm.

But then one of the impatiens came back, because I forgot I can’t kill plants. So I stuck it in the corner of the box, and figured I’d still have half a bed, anyway.

But then someone left a pot with a dead plant under the box that turned out to a) not actually be dead, b) be a fucking strawberry, and c) not an ornamental as I first thought. It hasn’t got enough room, I know that, but it can hang over the side of the box if it comes to that.

And then ALL the oregano took. Thank god you can grow oregano in a thimble, because I’ve got no space to spread it out.

So… the lavender, marjoram, mint, sage, basil, and thyme are living on the window sill for good, which is a bit of a bitch because it’s fine that the marjoram’s already a foot high but the thyme’s a runner…

Yeah, those four spider-plants hiding from the sun were in the one pot in August.

And I kinda still want tomatoes.

IreneKaoru posted a photo:

After the great post-eating disaster of 2008, I've elected to experiment with offline composition tools until I get distracted by shiny objects or I find one that I really like. My two candidates are Ecto and MarsEdit. I actually used Ecto quite a lot until I upgraded to Leopard and it expressed its allegiance to Tiger by refusing to work. Luckily for me, the developers gave it a nice talking to and the most recent version appears to play nicely with 10.5.x. I suppose we'll really test that theory out when I hit publish, won't we?

So, rather than make this one of those "testing . . . testing . . . is this thing on?" entries we all make from time to time, I thought I'd take a moment to share some links:

I've begun playing pmog. I figure that if I'm on the goddamn internet all day, I may as well rack up meaningless badges and add an extra layer of fun to my whole experience. I'm a mighty level 3, and I'm not quite ready to reveal my player name.

Warren Ellis has been doing a free weekly online comic called Freakangels. It's been running for a couple of months now, and I absolutely love it. Unlike most of the serials I've read over the years (Green Mile, I'm looking in your direction), this one works in both short weekly installments and as a longer narrative arc when you read several episodes at once.

There's a new version of Propeller in the works. I've seen it, and I'm just blown away by what it can do. There's some official talk about it on Newsquake. Hear me now: Propeller is the future of social news, and the new Propeller is going to redefine the standard for a social news community. I can't remember the last time I was so excited about something like this. Disclosure for the seven people who don't know this: I work for Propeller as a scout.

Some dipshit at TBS thinks that it's a really great idea to interrupt a show -- by pausing the show in the middle of dialog -- to run annoying interstitial advertising. This has to be seen to fully appreciate the magnitude of idiocy on display here. I submitted the link to Propeller a few days ago, and posted the video in my Vox blog.

Yes, I have a blog at Vox -- mostly for pictures and videos -- because what I really need is another fucking blog.

Ecto is as easy and full-featured as I remember it. I especially like how it handles creating links. Just for grins, here's an Ecto-created Amazon link to Interzone by William S. Burroughs. There's a story in Interzone called The Junky's Christmas that is one of my favorite things he ever did. I was introduced to it when someone gave me the CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, where Burroughs performs some of his work. Unlike a lot of authors who really should stick to the writing, Burroughs, like Charlie Stross and Neal Stephenson, just make their work something -- well, the best I can come up with is more -- when they read it. In fact, I think the best way to experience Burroughs is to listen to him perform it.

I just found out this very moment, through the magic of the googles, that The Junky's Christmas was adapted into a weird and avant garde claymation movie in the early 90s. There's a short clip from it on YouTube.

Have I mentioned before that Burroughs is one of my primary influences? It's a little strange, because I don't write anything like he did, but something about reading and listening to him accelerated my desire to write more than just a series of journal entries when I was in my early twenties. My first short story, called Scene Missing was heavily inspired by stories in Naked Lunch.

Okay, I am not making this up: in the middle of the last paragraph, my machine's screen saver turned on, and it refused to wake the screen up. This is the second time it's happened to me this week, and I had . . . an episode . . . while I shut down the motherfucker and restarted it. I thought it was the second time in two days that I'd worked on a blog entry and lost it to the land of wind and ghosts.

But! It turns out that Ecto has an auto-save feature which meant I only lost half a paragraph instead of an entire entry. For that reason alone, Ecto is a HUGE SUCCESS.

I'm off to lunch with a friend of mine who just got laid off from TokyoPop. I think we're going to plan global domination together.

. . . I am now hitting publish, and hoping for the best.

Marc Johns posted a photo:

ink & watercolour, 5x7 inches (Available at shop.marcjohns.com)

Marc Johns posted a photo:

ink & watercolour, 5x7 inches (Available at shop.marcjohns.com)

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

1. Oslo, 2. Fresh dye, 3. street fatigued, 4. Red light for Lisbon Treaty at Ballybough, Dublin, Ireland, 5. anna, 6. indexbook

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

well it ain't no dream now.

food and water not on the agenda today.

It’s Friday, it’s gone noon UK time, so the new FREAKANGELS episode is up for your cost-free enjoyment (as are all previous episodes): http://www.freakangels.com/?p=40

The things the internet have done to music continue to fascinate me.

In times past, people recorded for radio — that is, they recorded in a way that would sound good on medium-wave broadcasting, because BBC Radio 1, the nation’s way of discovering music, broadcast on 275 and 285 on the medium wave. FM was, for a long time, reserved for the Chart Show on Sundays, where Radio 1 took Radio 2’s FM slot for two hours. (Or was it an hour and a half?) This is one reason why there wasn’t any bass in British pop music for years and years. It didn’t broadcast all that well. Pop music was incredibly toppy for a long time; you only got real bass in clubs and at gigs.

Today, it’s the middle stretch that goes missing. Mp3 preserves the top and the bottom, but the centre loses nuance in the compression. And now I’m hearing people record for mp3. People are starting to complain about it — click around and you’ll find ”audiophiles” wishing for FLAC and Ogg that preserves more of the music. It’s just another cycle. Sooner or later, we’ll have another moment as in ‘87/’88 when people discovered bass again, and everything else sounded kind of insipid in comparison.

Not that it’ll happen in a big wave next time. The other interesting thing is the immediacy and fractioning of musical movements. In (say) 1988, you could feel it coming. (In actual fact, there were two things coming — in addition to acid, there was a reinvention of guitar music). Genesis P-Orridge has talked about this a little bit, the weird surge in the air that took him to Jack The Tab. In those days, big cultural shifts were a slow wave passing over the planet, moving at the speed of postage and club nights and the occasional phone call. And they came, at best, one or two at a time. And they caught up everybody.

What’s changed is the speed of communication and the speed at which new music can be experienced. So today we no longer wait for the breakers to hit every 11 years (roughly: rock, 55. Psychedelia, 66. Punk, 77. Acid, 1988). Instead, micro-movements pop up every month. Some new eddy in the hardcore continuum, MySpacey chavpop, The Fonal Sound, British ”dark folk,” the spooktronics crowd being drawn to the Miasmah label (and too many more to mention)… far more plentiful than “scenes” in the past, geographically scattered and inspiring the sort of mad group inspiration and evolution that you used to only find at the top of big New Sound cultural events.

Everything is happening, all the time, very fast. I like that.

All I remember is Dave Baldwin telling me about the Carnegie Club, being intrigued, and drinking way


WAY

too much vodka.

IreneKaoru posted a photo:

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

trixiebedlam posted a photo: