(no subject)

[peterbirks]

Insomnia is still hitting me fairly badly. The depression about the bathroom must be worse than I thought. Oh well, they say that you can get used to everything, and maybe it won't seem such a disastrous idea when it's finished. But a nice bath was one of the few things that I used to look forward to in my generally sad and unfulfilled life. Now I don't even have that pleasure. The new bath is too narrow, the sides are too high, it's too 'plasticky' and the taps are in the wrong place. Oh, and it's the wrong way round and there's no way it can be replaced without ripping the whole bathroom apart and starting again, which I have neither the willpower nor the money to do straightaway. Bummer.

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I didn't play that well last night -- the first time I've felt this for a week or so. Lack of aggression was one problem (I'd been heading towards 'winner's tilt' and I think that I overcompensated the other way), plus the opposition was better than usual. One guy set-farmed me with remarkable efficiency for half my stack (and half his stack) when I flopped TPTK . Then again, if he's only going to get 10x his investment back, and then only when he flops a set and I flop TPTK, then, in the long run, I make money on the deal. Problem is, does he call my continuation bet with a rag flop? If so, the maths become more marginal.

And I did run into quads twice in five minutes..

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I was quite attracted by William Whyte's mention of LibraryThing.com — like him, by the cataloguing part of it rather than the social networking. William's listed the "unread" books (not sure how this works, but presumably it's the books that the network's users wish they have read but have not). A quick glance at this shows what kind of book club social network you are likely to be getting into (a significant preponderance of Jane Austen and George Eliot), and once again it's a case of not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me.

I was always baffled by the decision of my school to put Pride and Prejudice on the reading list, and I can only assume it was there because it was a book that our (female) English teacher adored. The book had no relevance to a boy's school in inner London; indeed, the book has little relevance to me today. The characters are little more than adolescent female stereotypes (kind of an early chick-lit counter-balance to the stereotypes found in poor science fiction) and the plot is little more than adolescent female wish-fulfilment. Darcy, of course, was the David Beckahm of his day - and a metrosexual to boot, before the word had been invented.

This stuff continues to be peddled as "literature" at its best, when in reality it just happens to touch an emotional chord with a certain type of reader. Nothing wrong with that (Phil Dick does the same for me, as does Graham Greene), but this does seem to lead to people putting the stuff on a higher plane than it merits from the quality of the writing.

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Woodhouse writes that it is "form" to only cover one subject in a single blog entry. Fuck that. Who invents these moronic rules of etiquette?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Wow! You have that materialism thing really bad.

It's just hot water and a bar of soap.

A few months ago I was living in a tent with just a solar shower. No bath, no bathroom. Just me, soap, a water-filled polythene bag with holes in it, my naked good looks and the sky. And any perverts with good taste, hiding in the bushes.

Maybe your depression is not rooted in décor but somewhere else. When I lived in The Big Bad I had to spend money on crap to make myself feel better too.

Now, I spend money on virtually nothing. Just a bit of food. I am selling most of my material possessions. When fully downsized I will have a mighty weight off my mind.

Don't replace former addictions with new and equally hollow addictions.

Love and kisses,

JayBee.

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

Fuck that.

There's a kind of logic to it, although not really in the personal journal-type sector. In the world of link/feedback/Adwords/blog-for-reward, blog entries should generally be more analogous to new stories or articles than to columns or editorials. That way they're more likely to pick up links, which in turn increase their chances of appearing on Digg or Techmeme or Technorati or one of the other such sites, which in turn offers the chance to acquire eyeballs.

If I ever get round to starting the technical blog over which I have been mulling for seemingly ages (actually ages, if I'm honest) then single-subject posts will be the order of the day.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I should point out that Mike was referring to his own flittation from subject to subject when he made this observation, not my own...

PJ

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

The unread books are simply books that have the tag "unread" -- you can apply an arbitrary number of free-text tags to each book in your catalogue, and you can also do database queries on tags, which is where nhw got the original list from. Since the text is freeform, people may choose to tag their unread books with "to read" or "not read", but "unread" seems to be the convention.

I think the reason why it's good to have one subject per post is to help other people to link to the specific item of interest rather than pointing to a huge post and saying "scroll down two screens". But I quite like your one-post-a-day-about-everything approach. It's like listening to a good magazine programme on Radio 4.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a sane man in possession of a web log, must be in want of laser-specific links from a wide variety of squinty eyed bozos whose web logs he has never read, and would find beneath contempt, and beyond the bounds of decent intellectual society, should he have done so."

No it bleedin' isn't, William.

I never liked the concept of the Web (a universal Hypercard) in the first place. I am particularly nauseated by the various manifestations of Web 2.0. And the whole concept of a semantic Web fuelled by self-knowledgeable links is such an outrageous attempt to fly in the face of P-NP computational science, not to mention common sense, not to mention philosophical musings on epistemiology, that I would have thought that it would have been laughed out of court by now. Oh no, I forgot: there's money in them thar semantic hills...

If someone wants to link to your comments, then that's fine. If they think their poor lambs of readers will be (a) confused by extraneous detail or (b) likely to jump ship and read a different blog that is not solely obsessed by the state of toilet paper supply in Botswana, then there is a time-honoured, simple, and honourable way to achieve the same effect:

Cut and paste the relevant information, and add an attribution. No more and no less is necessary.

The whole concept of a hyperlink has always puzzled me. As one can note from average usage of the WWW, information is either static (in which case, why not present it in situ) or dynamic (in which case, it will probably become unavailable just when you most need it). Damn the torpedoes and plough straight ahead with what you were going to do in any case, that's what I say. "Netiquette" indeed.

Personally, I find "Pride and Prejudice" a rattling good read, but then I never had the constraining handicap of an education in London. It's occasionally very funny -- not something you can say about most 18th century novels -- and gives a well-observed and intentionally frightening view of the life of the genteel poor in the Home Counties at the time.

Whether or not it is/was/will ever be "relevant" is a question I will leave to the likes of O'Brien:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power."

Substitute "relevance" for "power" and there you have it.

The worst thing about Jane Austen was that the rest of her books had nowhere else to go but down-hill. "Sense and Sensibility" was a decent read, but after that it got much, much worse.

I was, however, treated to The Best of Jane Austen last year when I stayed at my old Cambridge college, Kings, in a three room suite by the offices of the Provost. For £40, I got spectacular views across the college and a hippo-wallow of a bath, the likes of which Birks can now only dream of. I wondered why it was so cheap. Could it be the wall-to-wall Jane Austen? The damn woman only wrote six books, after all. They were all there. In every possible language. With every possible scholarly annotation. Over and over and over again. Sometimes even in paperback.

I now know what the Flemish for "Pride and Prejudice" is. I also know what a strange mental illness the pursuit of the intellect is, when taken to its logical extreme.

BTW: My school's reading list included an unfeasible amount of Charles Dickens, no doubt more relevant to the young Birks growing up in a sink-hole of squalid London poverty. Didn't do too much for me, though: far too many characters, not to mention pages. We were instructed solemnly to read fifty books off the list during the year. I worked out that, after subtracting Dickens, there were only forty-five left.

I flunked.

P.S. My mum thought you were great on "15 to 1."

Re: What The Dickens

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started on Dickens.

Story line:

High-born child, through various misfortunes, encounters the poor of London (or elsewhere). After various adventures, high-born child is reinstated in position of wealth that he deserves. Passim, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby.

Meanwhile, the poor low-born carry on with their lives, basically happy with this, because they know no better. See The Artful Dodger.

Then again, give Dickens his Eastenders-like due -- he knew how to spin a yarn and he was top-notch at creating stereotypes. If he were alive today, he would be a leading scriptwriter on at least one soap, possibly two or three. And he'd probably be acting in one of them as well, given his brilliant stage performances. I don't think people appreciate how Dickens' performances "on tour" worked to generate sales of his episodic masterpieces.

For some reason, my school was not only a fan of Austen, but also of Trollope and George Eliot. Trollope was almost of less relevance than Austen, and had the further downside of being even worse-written. For the "genteel poor", I think Orwell's account of his youth is just about as good as you can get -- the "lower-upper-middle class", I believe. Marvellous. Merits rereading. Must get the books down from shelf.

And, yes, I'm puzzled and irritated by the posting of links and nothing else. Far better to cut and paste and to put a link at the end. Better still to add your own comments - which, to give William his credit, he does.

Oh, and I had read about 25 of William's quoted list (WW had read about 34, I think), but then again I'm not a metrosexual ex-inhabitant of the US. No Phil Dick? A travesty. I assume (ok, I hope) that's because they've actually been read.

But I like the LibraryThing idea. When I have a spare few hours, I could have a lot of fun with it -- so long as I stayed away from the networking.

PJ