Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing, and thanks to the medium of social networking, it is a much easier thing to achieve. Every time Facebook chisels away at the privacy settings of the least private private network in the world, or Google adds another prohibitively anti privacy line to its terms and conditions, I do the little shudder that will be familiar to most users of the internet, then I open my Gmail anyway and post a YouTube clip to Facebook. I might also grumpily link to an article on some well meaning blog bemoaning the gradual slide into the dystopian future we are all party to, or grumble on Twitter a bit. Maybe sign a petition. Down with this sort of thing.

But, having bemoaned my personal information going to places not of my choosing I them completely undercut my own indignation by taking all of my information and spitting it at the internet like an excitable toddler might a particularly tasty pudding. Not only do I have not one but two blogs dedicated to churning my every waking thought into something vaguely readable, and I’ve spent the last three years on Twitter, where I have posted a quite alarming 12,000 tweets, most of which were probably revealing of myself either in their tedium or otherwise. I joined Last.fm, which takes note of every single song I listen to and turns them into spiffy charts, which it then spews out onto Twitter, as though anyone has the remotest interest in what the three bands I most listened to were over a seven day period. () I’m not alone in doing this, and I actually love to look at other people’s charts and compare their ‘musical compatibility’ with my own, even though it often leaves me feeling oddly voyeuristic even though they too have blurted their own taste out to the world, just like me.

It doesn’t stop their either. About six months back I joined a service called Miso, which you can use to log every single thing you watch and leave a little comment. It also then asks you if you would like to post it just to your friends on Miso, or your Twitter feed, or Facebook, or all three. It then gives you points based on who you tell. I gave up using it for a while based on the fact that I found it a step too far, but then I decided it would be a good idea at the beginning of the year to see just how many films I watch in a year. Because, well, why not. It’s the sort of thing someone as geekily anal retentive as myself might want to know at the end of the year. ‘Oh look Ethel this year I have watched 174 films, wasting an average of 350 hours of my life, roughly meaning I could have spend an entire fortnight doing something more productive. Isn’t that interesting? Ethel?’

But then I instantly fell back into the trap of broadcasting my every episode of Sherlock, or Desperate Housewives, or Coppers, blurting to the world like some kind of broken foghorn, spluttering meaningless titles at the void and hoping people will look at my viewing habits and somehow decide that I am so utterly and comprehensively amazing that they should give me a research grant. Or a medal of some kind. Quite disappointingly, it turns out that in the whole of January so far, I’ve only watched 6 films as well. Gutted.

Then, yesterday, this happened:

I need more! More ways to rivet you all with my every move. Well actually, I thought it would also be interesting to see how many books I actually manage to read in a year, but nonetheless, this needs to stop! Well actually, more than one person pointed me in the direction of GoodReads.com, and having signed up and listed my first books of the year maybe I won’t stop, thank you very much. And I love my last.fm, it listens to me far more than most human beings do and has a lovely recommendations page that isn’t a ‘You like metal?’ Have you heard of Metallica?’ exercise in obviousness. Every month I take heed of its recommendations and find at least two or three new bands that turn out to be pretty good. Also, my charts are too in depth, too complex, too massive to abandon now.

So if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook and find my constant need to transmit objectionable then I apologise. But not all that much. Your choice. I’m not going to change. Next month I’ll probably find something that broadcasts my every idle thought and I’ll sign up for that too, and link it to my Facebook feed and my Tumblr, just for kicks. But the next time you see me crying over privacy settings on the internet, please do give me a virtual punch on the ear, and tell me to stop being an idiot. I’ve lost all right to do that.

Oh, and if you are a fellow obsessive, you can find me on Twitter, Last.fm, Miso, Goodreads and Tumblr.

There are times, and this is definitely one of them, where I really question what the hell I am doing with this blog, and all my other ‘projects’ and writing. It is a struggle for every writer, I imagine, trying to find hope that what you are doing, be it pouring out my head on here, or trying to write a novel, or reviewing music. This is not in any way a plea for validation, far from it, but since I know at my core that I am unlikely to ever find any kind of career at this, let alone find my name staring back at me in paperback form in the WH Smiths of my local train station, it is sometimes bloody hard to find the motivation to sit at this keyboard and type words.

Stupid words. Sometimes it seems less a writing exercise and more a product of my own misplaced vanity, and I feel small and useless and trite, a deluded fool wasting his life chasing a dream that is too big for him. Tonight is one of those times.

Perhaps I need to step back from the blog for a week or so, get the creative juices going again, recharge my batteries again. Or maybe I should plough on through, hope that tomorrow is a better day. Right now I’m too bloody mind shattered to make that decision, but if I’m not here tomorrow then you’ll know why.

Today I managed to get embroiled in a small Twitter debate, which is rare for me. Usually I am all about the telling of bad jokes, musing on the music I listen to and boring people with links to this blog. I rarely say anything worth disagreeing with, because most of the time I am evidently talking shit anyway. But today, in the wake of the Oscar nominations I happened to muse that I thought it was a travesty that Christopher Nolan was not nominated for best Director for Inception, which was easily my favourite film of last year, and a terrific job by Nolan in particular, who shepherded every aspect of the film from conception to screen.

Suddenly I found myself engaging in a debate over whether Oscar nominations and plaudits deserve to go to large films, as well as a staunch defending of the film itself, and before I knew it found myself taking up a position that I only half agreed with. Within a few tweets we had both set up rather oppositional points of view, with me as the defender of big budget Hollywood and him the advocate of the smaller independent cinema. Which was very strange, and yet I felt like I didn’t want to back down from a position once I had taken it, even though it only partially covered my opinion.

Here, I think, is the real problem of Twitter and I suppose the rest of social media. If twitter is one huge swirling conversation, it also forces you to take sides on any number of things at once. Sometimes this is easy and without problem. It’s easy for us all to agree that the latest piece of Melanie Phillips’ private psychosis that spills out as a Daily Mail piece on gay maths is nothing but idiocy. You won’t have found many people defending the counter argument to this, or at least not without tongue firmly in cheek.

But people start staunchly taking up positions it doesn’t take long before you have to choose a side. For example during the Frankie Boyle saga I found far too many people wanting to fall down on one side or the other of the argument, but the truth was considerably more complex. And that’s what truth is, by and large. Complex and far too difficult to summarize in a 140 character twitter post. This then, is the shortcoming of Twitter, in that it is so polarizing.

Even in this very genteel conversation between myself and someone who was just having a small debate with myself, I couldn’t help but find myself making arguments that just weren’t me. When I start to find myself arguing against the worthiness of independent cinema, something is off. It all resolved itself in due course as we finally realised we didn’t hugely disagree about much other than whether Nolan deserved a nod, which is just a matter of taste. (My taste being obviously correct in this matter). But if it had gone on much longer I may have had to issue a Klingon Battle cry.

Now if you will excuse me I have to go and drink my beer and watch my football team be a bit shit. Well, quite a lot shit, if I’m honest. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the picture of my face at the top of the page. What can I say, it’s my face, and it’s my 365 post for today. If you’re on Flickr, why not stop by?

Walking through York City Centre is starting to become a slightly depressing thing to do. When I first came to York there were any number of shops that catered to my interest, but nowadays the only remaining shop of remote interest among the sea of fashion boutiques, cafes and other sundry places of zero interest are HMV and Waterstones, themselves hardly good for more than a ten minute browse. But the Waterstones is small and not particularly well stocked, and the HMV so utterly crammed with a mass of people into its small narrow confines that neither is much fun to be.

This isn’t a rant against the tyranny of the large chain either, my favourite of the now departed stores was the sumptuous Borders, with its huge three floor expanse, the perfect place to go and kill an hour if you had the need to do so, and a great place to discover new authors through a myriad of in depth displays. I loved that store, but like so many of its patrons, I spent very little money in there, taking their recommendations to Amazon.

My own betrayal of Borders of course reflects the same betrayal by thousand of other window shoppers who then took their money to the online retailers, and it is undoubtedly the reason that the only shops you see on the high streets any more are those where the online market cannot truly rival the physical. I’m sure there are lots of places selling clothing online (I wouldn’t really know, I stick with the same collection of faded black t shirts and baggy jeans that have been with me throughout my 20s and beyond) but with clothing I presume people will always prefer the tactile sense of seeing, feeling and holding what you are buying, and the ability to try things on. Likewise, coffee retailers are immune from the Internet wave because it is unlikely anyone wanting a Skinny Latte will then want it to arrive through the post three to five days after they ordered it.

But by moving to the cheaper world of the internet we have sacrificed the experience of the shopping trip, the weekend walk into town to browse and buy. If I want to buy a DVD these days my only option is HMV, but I remember back in the pre-parenting days when virtually all my disposable income went on building a wall of DVDs and I used to revel in going back and forth looking at the sales in HMV, Borders, Virgin and WH Smith (did you know they don’t do DVDs any more apparently, or at least York doesn’t), as well as the smaller alternative shops like the much missed Track Records or Hellraiser, debating on how to get the most film for the contents of my wallet. Nowadays I don’t even buy DVDs, surviving on deliveries from LoveFilm and the contents off the V+ box. Book purchases are rare, and will probably evaporate entirely once I inevitably cave to the Kindle. As for music, well, probably best not go there.

In the back of my mind I always thought I might end up in retail, but it’s only really a good place to be if you are selling something you actually care about, and all those dreams I had after reading High Fidelity or looking back to my favourite job ever (working in Blockbuster Video in college) are dashed now as those areas of the retail sector are thoroughly dead or slowly dying. How long will it be before those last two stores I can actually visit close down and HMV and Waterstones move online like Zavvi did? What reason will there be for me to go into town then?

And what of the promise that was made to all of the western world as its production and industries were farmed out to cheaper nations that the service industries would the the future for us all? Will the next wave of jobs be nothing more than distribution workers for massive internet behemoths who need only a web site and a warehouse?

For the most part I love this new internet age of ours, the way it has opened the world to all of us, but on days like today, when I realised just how bland and uninteresting my City Centre has become, I had forgotten that there was a cost.

For the most part I’ve been taking December as a ‘month off the Internet’, save for the occasional pop round the door of Twitter or Facebook to say hello, or tell crap jokes which then get ignored or scorned upon. It’s been refreshing, and I’m not really sure how much I’ve really missed it, but that has as much to do with still being burned out by Nanowrimo as it does with the Internet itself, I suspect. Nonetheless, given that it is the end of the year I feel somewhat compelled to come back and pester you with some half formed thoughts about the year that has gone by.

First of all, I’ve decided not to burden you all with the standard top ten lists malarkey this year. Unless you are really very good at them and your opinion carries some weight then let’s face it they are by and large a big heap of Gillian McKeith. Either you list a load of stuff that everyone’s already heard or seen and come off as being too mainstream and boring, in which case why bother. On the other hand if you try and go for more obscure things then you end up looking like a shallow scene wanker trying to point out how cool he is by listing a load of stuff you’re not cool enough to have heard. Over at Demon Pigeon Dan and the others lampooned this pretty effectively, so I’m just going to say there are a few albums this year which have blown me away, if you’ll spare me a moment’s indulgence I will tell you what they are.

Firstly the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, Option Paralysis, blew me away in March and has rarely been off my stereo since. It manages to be both the melodically adventurous and poppy metal album I’ve ever heard, and conversely the most brutal as well. There’s only one word for it, and that’s bewildering. Other metal albums I’ve really enjoyed this year have been the new Knut album, Wonder, and the excellently named Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza’s third album. I reviewed all three for Demon Pigeon so if you want more on them by all means click on them there links. I quite liked the new Misery Index album as well, even if it is a bit generic it’s a good laugh.

As for non-metal I’ve loved the Joanna Newsome triple album Have One On Me and the new Sufjan Stevens album Age of Adz. The latter especially is a lovely bold move by Stevens, incorporating digital effects and even auto-tune and vocoder without ever sounding generic or bland. These are by no means the only albums I have enjoyed, but they are the ones that stand out. As for gigs, well it’s been a bit sparse but the excellent Damnation Festival was a great day out, and Richard Herring’s Hitler Moustache was probably the best stand up I’ve ever seen.

I’ve only been to the cinema a handful of times so I feel ill-qualified to talk much about this year’s film crop, but rather predictably I loved Inception and HP7a. I’m sure Social Network would have made me very happy with its mix of being geeky/being written by my favourite writer/being directed by David Fincher, but I never got to see it, so I am now left to wait impatiently for the DVD release. Not being able to see many new films has not stopped me from getting addicted to the Kermode and Mayo podcast however, and hello to Jason Isaacs if you are readong. Which of course you aren’t. I’ve been watching far more television this year, and it’s been a bumper bonanza of goodness in that regard. I was mentioning to Ellen the other night how it’s felt that this year British Sci Fi has taken over again from its glossier American counterparts. Consider the quality of the second series of Being Human or Misfits, or most strikingly the new Stephen Moffatt helmed Doctor Who and contrast that with the rather stale reimagining of V, or flashforward, or any of the other Heroes clones wheeled out to fill the void left by Lost and Battlestar. Long may it continue, although the news that the new American based Torchwood is being mainly done by ex Buffy writers may mean American Sci Fi goodness returns next year. In non sci fi I think Any Human Heart was about as perfect as TV drama gets, just a sumptuous feast of excellence.

At the end of the most turrbulent year in politics that I have experienced in my adult life, I now strangely feel I have nothing to add. This may be because i think everyone is now so much more engaged with what is going on around them that I have nothing to add to the reams of available information or commentary, or it could just be because I couldn’t possibly put anything better than my favourite blog of the year Enemies of Reason, which has grown month by month into the most authoriative and correct voice in my feed reader. If you don’t already read every single word that Anton Vowl puts out, then I highly recommend you do so. But please don’t judge me for having the same wordpress theme as him. All I will say is that having supported the Liberal Democrats for all of my adult life on the grounds that they were a little less interested in power and more interested in their values it’s quite staggering the extent to which they have sold those values out for a modicum of power. 

On a personal level, I think I can call 2010 a good year overall, although financially it’s been an absolute nightmare. But Ellen and Rosie and I moved into a proper family house in May, I am close to passing my driving test, I launched Demon Pigeon which has turned out to be reasonably popular, although I am not under any illusions as to my own responsibility for this success given the excellent assembly of writers that are now doing the words. On top of DP I wrote a lot for Blood on the Motorway (still hope to launch soon) and wrote the first draft of another novel. On the flip side after a very successful first six months the Year of Health experiment turned out to be a pretty catastrophic failure and I am back up to the weight I was at the beginning of the year, and that’s before even the indulgence of the next few weeks to go on top of that. I have managed to give up smoking however, so that one goes firmly in the win column. As for the weight I am going to try again in January, but one suspects this will be a battle I will be having with myself for most of the rest of my life. I say most, because I plan on not caring when I get to pensioner age. I have taken the YOH site down now since it was being spammed to a ridiculous level, but all the posts are now floating around in here, so if you missed any of it feel free to try and work out where they are.

As for next year, well I have other news that I cannot share at the moment but I think it’s fair to say that 2011 is going to be a brilliant one. I will share more when I can, but that might be a few months away yet. As for you lovely readers, if you’ve managed to make it through this most sparse of years, where my average post count has never crept above one a week then I must say a hearty thank you, and I wish you all a lovely Xmas and a Happy New Year. I leave you with a video from my favourite album of the year, because nothing says Christmas like a buff man shouting over tech metal.

Merry Xmas you beautiful bastards.

To which they responded:

So now I learn that rather than the two days to resolve things that I was promised on the phone, it could now be as long as 28 days, which would conveniently take me out of my standard 28 period to cancel. And so I sent back:

To which they responded…. Well, they didn’t in point of fact.

I don’t really think that I’m stretching it too much to say that you are hardly reaching your service level promise of a response within 48 hours if you send a generic automated response within seconds of receiving a complaint form.  If that were the case then where I work I would just stick my out of office response on saying ‘Hi, I’ve not read your mail, but I’ll get round to it eventually’ and I’d never get in trouble for not doing my work. Of course I wouldn’t do this, because I’m not a bastard, which is more than I can say for some media companies.

They have until the time I get home tomorrow to respond.  Oh, and thanks to everyone who left helpful suggestions on the previous post, rest assured they have been studied and will be held in reserve in case of emergency.

Other than that, the good news is the writers block is gone, thanks in no small part to the Virgin letter.  Since then I’ve put two posts up at Demon Pigeon, one of which went down so badly with my fellow members of staff that I have a nasty feeling I may get a visit in the night and the swift removal of my testes. To be fair though, it’s a terrible review of an awful album, but one which I inexplicably love anyway.  Oh, and I’ve lined up an interview with one of the most influential bands of the last 30 years too, so that’s nice.

As I mentioned before, I am really suffering with writers block at the moment. I have managed to write one thing though, a bit of a missive to Virgin Media for the terminally awful piece of shit they call ‘service.’ I thought I might post it here, just on the off-chance that I can later try and persude them that you dear readers are numbered in the tens of thousands, and that I am what they call in marketing terms ‘an arbiter of taste.’ This also means I don’t have to try and go through it all again, as typing anything seems to fill me with a certain amount of unspecified dread, roughly akin to when you have a hangover and have that guilty feeling that you just can’t shake all day. But anyway, what follows is my letter to Virgin. It’s not one of the comedy letters you see so often and that can be rather wonderful, mainly because they are easily dismissable, and I want a resolution.

“I am writing to complain about being mis-sold a package on Virgin by one of your sales staff. I initially was looking at a range of options for my new home, amongst which was Virgin. Having entered a few details onto your website I got a follow up call from one of your agents, and discussed the matter further. I had looked at getting the bundle which included Broadband L (which included the wireless router), TV M+, and phone M, as well as the V+ box with associated costs. I ran through the details with him over the phone, and he said that if I could call him back he would be able to get a better deal for me. I looked into it further and decided to call him back.

At this stage he offered me various discounts, including dropping the one off charge for the V+ box. We discussed this in specifics as I explained to him that I was not all that bothered about the HD aspect, as I don’t have a HD TV, but I really wanted the V+ aspect. He informed me that the HD box was the V+ box, and so I agreed.

We moved into the house and managed to get everything set up, although was a bit annoyed to find that my router had been downgraded to a non-wireless kind, this was never mentioned. But when I came to try the V+ box I was very upset to find that it actually was just an HD box, without the V+. I immediately phoned your customer services centre and spoke to someone called *******, who was extremely rude, told me there was nothing he could do and that he also couldn’t get me a manager to speak to, but that he would get one to call me back within an hour.

That call never came, so I phoned back, and this time spoke to someone whose name I didn’t catch, but they told me that there was no problem, and that you could send me out the V+ box, but not until my account had finished setting up on the system, and that I should phone back the next day.

I called back the next day, and was told that it still wasn’t set up, but that I would get a call the next day to confirm sending out my V+box.

Two days later I still had not received a call back, so again I called your centre, only to be told I could not get the V+ box that was promised to me, as I had not paid for it. Eventually I was told that I could purchase one for £100, or by upgrading to the XL TV package.

In summary, I am very disappointed by this service. The box that I do have is completely useless to me (it also has a nice habit of crashing just as I am in the middle of watching something, if only I had V+!) and the V+ box was one of the main reasons I took your service, and was explicitly promised to me as being within the package I was signing up for. I would like you to look back over my account and listen to the various calls to me and from me on ******** , and once you have confirmed this, I would like to be sent both the V+ box, and a wireless router.

If this is not resolved, I will be cancelling my contract immediately and going to one of your competitors.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Paul”

Interestingly, I was promised over the phone that if I sent a letter of complaint I would get a definite response within 48 hours. It turns out that what I would get is an immediate automated response which say’s, and I quote:

“Hi Paul,

Thanks for the email you sent to us on *********. We’re on the case and a member of our team will get back to you as quickly as possible, usually within 5 days. Don’t forget – if there’s anything else you’d like to know, just log on to our website. It’s at www.virginmedia.com”

How utterly helpful. What’s the betting that I don’t get a response within 5 days?*

So there you go. The world’s most blatant attempt to circumvent writers block. Hopefully it will have worked, and I can write something somebody may actually want to read.

*I actually wrote this two days ago now, so by reckoning, Virgin will get back in contact with in exactly ‘when hell freezes over’ days time.

If you are looking for something to read, you should really go and look at the NME’s list of the top 50 albums of the last decade, especially if you are looking for something to fill your belly with incandescent rage and bile.  It worked for me.

So that was interesting.  The whole 7 days experiment was, I think it’s safe to say, pretty successful, although I will admit defeat on the timescale. I forgot how little I am on the computer over the weekend, and the fact that I had an OU assignment due in at the same time. But overall it’s been lovely to get the feedback that I have, and nice to see the rise in visitors too, but most of all it’s been good to do some writing that has stretched me a little bit.  Some of the topics were quite hard to wrap my head around, so thanks to everyone who left a suggestion, and I hope that you all liked it.

One thing this week has shown me is the potential of this blog, so over the next few weeks I’m going to try some other interesting things. I already have something in the pipeline for a collaboration with a fellow twitterer, which should be up and running in the next week.  In the meantime, as ever, any thoughts on stuff you’d like me to write about are always welcome.  The first issue of Blood On The Motorway is done, second issue is being written, so it wont be long before that starts.

Other than that, the big news for me is that I’m about to say goodbye to Microsoft completely at home. Unfortunately work is another matter, but tonight (or over the weekend) I will be installing Ubuntu on my PC at home, and saying goodbye to the steaming pile of excrement that is Vista.

It’s been a long and slow decline in my relationship with Microsoft.  Like most people like me, who aren’t particularly techie, Windows and its products were always just easier. As the default setting on every PC I’ve ever used (I used a Mac once. Didn’t like it) I learnt the Internet through Explorer, used Media Player to play music, even had a hotmail account, and ‘made do’ with the tools at hand.

It wasn’t until I met Jonic that I realised that there was more out there. I mean I had always known that there were alternatives, but I figured they would be so impossible to use that there wasn’t any point. This is the mythology that Microsoft have perpetuated throughout their history.  But then Jonic showed me Firefox.  It was a joy. Even in its infancy it was smoother and easier to use, and came with an added sense of freedom.

Next up was Gmail, and again a whole new world of usability. I still love Gmail, and am now a bit of a slave to the Google machine. I don’t know what I would do without iGoogle. (Clue: I may get more work done.) But now I’ve decided to take the next step away from the hideous chud of an operating system that is Vista.  I’m sure I don’t need to list its faults here, you will all have heard or seen for yourself.

For someone moving very slowly into the world of tech geekery, the move to a Linux based OS is quite a large step, but I’m determined to do it, and do it on my own.  Wish me luck.

I must admit that while I do have a facebook account, it’s not something that occupies a huge amount of my time. There are too many irritating things about it. I for one am constantly bombarded with requests to do this or that, or bite another zombie, or take a movie taste challenge. To be honest I have neither the time nor the inclination. A lot of the people who send these are good friends of mine, and I always feel really bad when I ignore the request of my girlfriend, or a close friend, but I have decided on principle not to do them.

But yesterday, having signed on, I found a new crack-like way to pass the time, and that was the ‘recommended friend’ feature. And there was a whole evening gone. Now I have another rule when it comes to social networking sites, which is to only accept the friendship of people who I have actually met, or at least spoken to enough to genuinely call them a friend. But nevertheless, so many old acquaintances made my head dizzy. Now to sit back and see if any of them remember me.

This weekend I am spending a rather pleasant weekend with my ladies, but it is being somewhat undercut by the constant wave of nausea that hits me when I remember that I will, in the next few days, be finding out if I have a tremendously exciting new job. So to distract myself from this question, I present you with a picture of my little Rosie. Isn’t she cute?