My blogging service provider, Eblogger, gives me analytics such as how many people view my blog. The number doesn't shift much, it's mainly you occasionally looking at it every so often in a blue moon on a gap year whilst sewing wings on little oinklets whilst reciting the 37 proverbs of Wengal McSummary. The idea behind these blogs have been to create something completely of its own ilk. I want it to be that little bit of oregano floating in your otherwise tomatoey tasting italian dish which you learned from Jamie Oliver, but with swearing in it. The oregano is swear words. Arse piss.
Sainsburys are mates with Jamie Oliver. D'ya reckon he gives a shit about healthy food or just about having Jamie endorsed chain restaurants? I wonder if those restaurants use Sainsbury food coz Jamie likes Sainsbury's loads, or whether he doesn't care or know what goes in the food at all. Does he care about school dinners, or is he once again the face or the ambassador for another annoying campaign? Having been served food during the Jamie Oliver spear-headed school food initiatives, let me tell you it was fucking dire! As a genuine school goer whose one solace in an entire day of Victorian style school teaching was lunch time, to have something with sugar or calories taken from you and instead replaced by expensive cardboard tasting items, was depressing. This campaign was, (in corresponding terms of schoolboy propensity's), what Maggie Thatcher was to the Mining Industries. It felt shit. We knew the government didn't want us to eat Turkey Twizzlers, but that made this novelty meat all the more alluring, and made the government seem like dicks. If the government wanted future votes, all Tony Blair had to do was feed us a shit load of mechanically removed meats or sprinkled doughnuts and we would be feverishly voting for Labour and licking its would be sticky iced bun fingers. Instead David Cameron is lapping up all the milk which should be packaged in cartons and drunk by school kids. The conservative party won't serve kids milk because Maggie took the milk away in the first place, and the liberals will only suck the teet of the conservatives to get their milk coz they like the taste.
And apparently the dairy producers are losing money because supermarkets aren't paying them enough per pint... how long until milk is imported to the UK from foreign lands? I think i'm a bit lactose intolerant so i say fuck to all of it, im sick of weening from teets, im going to drink water coz its neutral. I might buy a bottle of water for whatever ridiculous price they now cost just so the bottle ruins the earths atmosphere and kills hummingbirds and bottle nose dolphins and eventually eradicates the human race... that way i wouldn't have problems drinking milk and being school tardy.
fuck off
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Monday, 24 September 2012
TV
The general consensus has always been that television is a form of escapism. It exists (as far as the consumer is concerned) to entertain and inform, and distract you from shit things. Like money troubles. The trouble with TV however, is money. Fair enough TV wouldn't exist without the stuff, but if you ever have the inconvenience of watching daytime TV then money is the both the subject and plot for the majority of TV programs. This isn't escapism, this is hyper-reality. I'm not sure where part one of Bargain Hunt ends and my Tesco shop begins. I've started taking a six pack of walkers cheese and onion crisps to auction houses in the hope of a small profit.
Homes Under The Hammer, Put Your Money where Your Mouth Is, Flog-it. All things that speculate how much something is worth with the intention to sell and make a profit. It's basically a very small scale model of how global financial market works and judging by how fucked up that is, it's not really a format i want to passively watch as narrative. Or maybe i do? Maybe investors in global markets do? Maybe they watch Flog-It and gamble our money on the basis of whether a 1930's brass shoe-horn reaches its estimate of £12-£15 or pull shares out of China's Steel industry on the strength of a 1979 Beano annual selling for more than expected?
As if the programs aren't enough bollocks about money, every 7 or 8 minutes I am met with a holocaust of adverts that keep asking me if i have been miss-sold PPI, or if I've had an injury in the workplace, and if so i could be entitled to $5695 or possibly even more if i fell off a ladder and/or have a crap fringe. Or how about adverts that think i'm old and want to give me a Free Parker Pen if i give them loads of money. Or the adverts that think i'm a cunt and would consider a £1000 loan with 1749% APR.
Game-shows have given up on any sort of imagination. Whether its completely guessing which boxes have more money in them than others in the case of 'Deal or No Deal', or simply not bothering to hide the fact that the game-show is crap by titling it 'Pointless'. You can only ever win money on game-shows now. I remember games such as Catch-Phrase where you could win a trip to the Bahamas for two, or an exotic cruise to any number of idyllic and seemingly utopian destinations. The little exerts of what these places looked like and what you could do and eat and smell seemed so appealing. Nowadays it seems like prizes have been replaced by cash and the game show presenter occasionally asking the contestants what they would spend the money on if they won.
"So Pam from East Croyden, what would you spend the money on if you won?"
"Dust.... and maybe some drugs so that the dust is more interesting. Yeh, that usually does the trick."
Homes Under The Hammer, Put Your Money where Your Mouth Is, Flog-it. All things that speculate how much something is worth with the intention to sell and make a profit. It's basically a very small scale model of how global financial market works and judging by how fucked up that is, it's not really a format i want to passively watch as narrative. Or maybe i do? Maybe investors in global markets do? Maybe they watch Flog-It and gamble our money on the basis of whether a 1930's brass shoe-horn reaches its estimate of £12-£15 or pull shares out of China's Steel industry on the strength of a 1979 Beano annual selling for more than expected?
As if the programs aren't enough bollocks about money, every 7 or 8 minutes I am met with a holocaust of adverts that keep asking me if i have been miss-sold PPI, or if I've had an injury in the workplace, and if so i could be entitled to $5695 or possibly even more if i fell off a ladder and/or have a crap fringe. Or how about adverts that think i'm old and want to give me a Free Parker Pen if i give them loads of money. Or the adverts that think i'm a cunt and would consider a £1000 loan with 1749% APR.
Game-shows have given up on any sort of imagination. Whether its completely guessing which boxes have more money in them than others in the case of 'Deal or No Deal', or simply not bothering to hide the fact that the game-show is crap by titling it 'Pointless'. You can only ever win money on game-shows now. I remember games such as Catch-Phrase where you could win a trip to the Bahamas for two, or an exotic cruise to any number of idyllic and seemingly utopian destinations. The little exerts of what these places looked like and what you could do and eat and smell seemed so appealing. Nowadays it seems like prizes have been replaced by cash and the game show presenter occasionally asking the contestants what they would spend the money on if they won.
"So Pam from East Croyden, what would you spend the money on if you won?"
"Dust.... and maybe some drugs so that the dust is more interesting. Yeh, that usually does the trick."
Friday, 30 March 2012
Why are we making photographs nostalgic before they have even had the time to become nostalgic?
Instagram and other similar applications are getting on my tits a bit now. A photograph by its very nature is something of the past. As soon as the photograph is taken it is a history, so what i don't understand is why so many people will add filters to photographs in an attempt to make them look like something from yester-year. The photograph will one day be nostalgic, give it time. The instagram filters are a way of trying to add a sense of spontaneity and element of chance to a photograph, much like 'hipsters' using shit lomo cameras to get 'cool' colours and fringing and terrible resolution. (It annoys me how that for the same money people pay for all this lomography stuff, people could be taking beautiful photographs with vintage film cameras with sharp optics and heavy duty build quality...but oh well.) Instagram basically imitates the characteristics of film. By adding a filter after taking the photograph to make it look like it was shot on film, therefore removing any spontaneity and chance factor involved - and even then, the filters are based on rigid mathematical code in software, not the true chaos of chemical reactions based on light and temperature that creates chance elements in film. To me the instagram photograph is generally typified by a photograph of a drink which is an appendage to a shit status about how yummy the drink is, followed by a "#yummydrinksareyummy". What the fuck is hash tagging facebook statuses all about? #pricks.
Hash tagging is a parallel to the instagram filter - an attempt to trend, and be noticed. They both aim to add a gloss to what is otherwise banal. People are attempting to transverge media: the hash tag of twitter becoming appropraited on facebook whilst the characteristics of film as a medium being appropriated in digital photogaraphs.
Personally, I believe social media is a document we reflect our ego onto. Upon daily reflection of this document which is always live and present, the photograph instantly becomes part of that document from the moment it was taken (the taker knowing full well that it will be uploaded onto facebook). Knowing then that the photograph will be part of this document and posted at a date and time recorded precisely by facebook, the photograph becomes information in a document, which can be viewed at a later date and therefore even at the moment of taking the photograph, the photograph is old. And what do old photographs look like? Grainy? Discoloured? Soft? Weathered? Bingo!...the instagram app can do all that. #Beingpostmodernisbeingahipster
Instagram and other similar applications are getting on my tits a bit now. A photograph by its very nature is something of the past. As soon as the photograph is taken it is a history, so what i don't understand is why so many people will add filters to photographs in an attempt to make them look like something from yester-year. The photograph will one day be nostalgic, give it time. The instagram filters are a way of trying to add a sense of spontaneity and element of chance to a photograph, much like 'hipsters' using shit lomo cameras to get 'cool' colours and fringing and terrible resolution. (It annoys me how that for the same money people pay for all this lomography stuff, people could be taking beautiful photographs with vintage film cameras with sharp optics and heavy duty build quality...but oh well.) Instagram basically imitates the characteristics of film. By adding a filter after taking the photograph to make it look like it was shot on film, therefore removing any spontaneity and chance factor involved - and even then, the filters are based on rigid mathematical code in software, not the true chaos of chemical reactions based on light and temperature that creates chance elements in film. To me the instagram photograph is generally typified by a photograph of a drink which is an appendage to a shit status about how yummy the drink is, followed by a "#yummydrinksareyummy". What the fuck is hash tagging facebook statuses all about? #pricks.
Hash tagging is a parallel to the instagram filter - an attempt to trend, and be noticed. They both aim to add a gloss to what is otherwise banal. People are attempting to transverge media: the hash tag of twitter becoming appropraited on facebook whilst the characteristics of film as a medium being appropriated in digital photogaraphs.
Personally, I believe social media is a document we reflect our ego onto. Upon daily reflection of this document which is always live and present, the photograph instantly becomes part of that document from the moment it was taken (the taker knowing full well that it will be uploaded onto facebook). Knowing then that the photograph will be part of this document and posted at a date and time recorded precisely by facebook, the photograph becomes information in a document, which can be viewed at a later date and therefore even at the moment of taking the photograph, the photograph is old. And what do old photographs look like? Grainy? Discoloured? Soft? Weathered? Bingo!...the instagram app can do all that. #Beingpostmodernisbeingahipster
Monday, 19 March 2012
Immersed in a nuance of tungsten we look out for nature and all its wonderment,
Packaged in squares of plastic transparency we weigh it, pay for it, breathe in deep so as not to waste it,
Then another square of a certain transparency speaks to us, flickers at us until a remote control controls remotely.
And as we breathe nature in further in a scatter of halogen, we notice that this disembodied vision is likely to happen all over again and we reach for a square of reflective packaging, and the halogen hits the surface and the contours are warping and scattering.
We graze on the reflective squares content, one square meal.
We gaze at the square pixels on a square area, it illuminates, speaks to us,
we touch screen.
Packaged in squares of plastic transparency we weigh it, pay for it, breathe in deep so as not to waste it,
Then another square of a certain transparency speaks to us, flickers at us until a remote control controls remotely.
And as we breathe nature in further in a scatter of halogen, we notice that this disembodied vision is likely to happen all over again and we reach for a square of reflective packaging, and the halogen hits the surface and the contours are warping and scattering.
We graze on the reflective squares content, one square meal.
We gaze at the square pixels on a square area, it illuminates, speaks to us,
we touch screen.
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Facebook mutation.
I've noticed some changes in Facebook. It has been drastically altered and tweaked but also the way many of us use it has changed. Originally, when many of us had a relatively lowly number of Facebook 'friends' i believe it used it more as a web tool to stay in touch with your immediate mates. Now it really has become a community, a social realm, and a living space. The process is catalysed by a growth in the number of friends we all have. Originally I might have denied friendship with people who I only knew as acquaintances because they technically weren't my friends, but somewhere along the lines this stopped and i would accept people i barely knew or occasionally didn't know at all. It is as if i have lost a personal level and became part of a virtual democracy where to deny someone a virtual friendship wouldn't be playing the game fairly. The more 'friends' we have, the more we feel obliged to mitigate our personal sense of friendship and instead replace it with the false utopianism of Facebook. With the utopian ideals of a virtual democracy, censorship is quite a telling attribute - by which i mean censorship of ones own thoughts, opinions, likes etc appearing as status updates or comments etc etc. I should think that it may sometimes cross your mind whether your post is appropriate or unfair or just plain rude, and with the more people watching the more we generally feel the necessity to censor the impression we make on the site. If i continue this presumption that we censor what we post on Facebook then it surely contradicts the utopian intent that we believe Facebook to be and aims to exude (obvious examples of utopianism include a connection with someone being called a 'friend, and simply the 'like' button.) As a neutral vehicle for expression it should be teeming with individuality but i feel as if we are reaching a point where it is a dumping ground for our failure to express ourselves at all. Yes the amount of information uploaded onto the site increases second by second but does this actually make Facebook a richer society? No, because its a website. Let us all remind ourselves that it's a fucking website.
I think it's fair to say that Facebook has become a huge portion of many of our lives, so much so that i get the sense that maybe we are starting to live our lives only to document it on Facebook, to advertise ourselves, give ourselves a certain gloss or sheen? If Karl Marx was to take a look at Facebook he would probably see it as an extension of his theory of 'Alienation', bound tightly to a rejection of capitalism. Part of his theory states that, in manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes a mere living appendage. This i feel is poignant because i feel it is as if many of us may be becoming lifeless appendages to our own Facebook page? On the other hand Marx might have really liked this whole social networking thing because it appeals to communist ideals of a classless, moneyless and stateless establishment.
Do we create a Facebook page for other peoples consumption or for ourselves to consume? If we go out for a day and dont take any photographs, don't post a location update or status update and so on, did we ever go on a day out?... or to put it another way if a tree falls down in a forest, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? But are we now the trees and is Facebook the forest? Are we now beginning to bypass the part of this philosophical thought experiment where it matters if there is any human perception? I'm getting the impression that we are all getting a bit confused about reality because of our obsession with social networking, but what's worse is that I am also getting the impression that many of us aren't realising that there might be a confusion in reality at all.
We are extremely social animals and im not sure whether virtual friendships appeal to anything more than our virtual selves. Comporting social aspects in a cyber space makes me wonder at root whether any of the information on Facebook is a social document of us or whether it is actually a document of Facebook's social effect on us.
As Ernst Fischer wrote, 'We have become so accustomed to living in a world of commodities, where nature is perhaps only a poster for a holiday resort and man only an advertisement for a new product, we exist in such a turmoil of alienated objects offered cheaply for sale, that we hardly ask ourselves any longer what it is that magically transforms objects of necessity (or fashion) into commodities, and what is the true nature of the witches' Sabbath, ablaze with neon moons and synthetic constellations, that has become our day to day reality'.
Monday, 19 December 2011
Jesus Christ!
It's christmas time. Christmas time is different to real time. Real time implies a reality whereas Christmas time is the opposite, based upon the birth of God's little whipper-snapper. It's a celebration of the warping of time. Warped in the sense that we measure our calendar from the birth of jesus and therefore we are constantly celebrating christmas whether we like it or not. Isn't it bizarre how we began measuring time from the birth of someone? I'd love it if i was jesus and someone asked me what the date was, i'd be like: 'I was born 25th December 20 years ago so work it out you mortal scum...oh yeh, and love thy fucking neighbour would ya?'.
I'd much rather the calendar start with the creation of earth rather than a baby. So it's the year 4,540,000,000...ish. Christmas time is also warped by the fact that Christmas goes on for fucking ever. They must have measured Christmas from when Jesus first started crowning, and since he was known for his thorny crown i reckon Mary must have been in labour longer than Tony Blair. But what better way to celebrate the birth of God's son than advertise piles of shit that i don't want or need? There's a constant plethora of perfume adverts at the moment - each as wanky as the other. Dog Shit - By Calvin Klein, Windy-pops - By Jean-Paul-Gaultier, Complete and Utter Rancid Gooch - By Gucci. It makes me want to go back in time and kill baby jesus... that King Herod was onto something there... Maybe i was King Herod in a previous life? Well God, if you have another spawn of your seed on this earth, im going to make sure my next incarnation checks amongst the reeds. I spose it was those three kings fault for all this obsession with pointless presents. Here's my idea of how their presents went down:
Three Kings: "Awww look at that beautiful little fragile newly born baby! 'Ere you go, we got together and bought you some Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh, good aint it!?"
Mary: " That's lovely.... we could really do with feeding Jesus though, we have no food and he is weak... im also really scared that he will get an infection as we are in a dirty stable and the hay we are using as bedding is covered in horse shit"
Three Kings: "What you trying to say like?! That you are not interested in material items and only in necessities?"
Mary: "Well yeh, those are the Christian values i follow"
Three Kings: "Whats that mean? What does Christian mean?"
Mary: "Well it hasn't been invented yet but yeh, this whole Christian thing is going to be fucking huge!...and oh yeh, the date is no longer December 25th 4,540,000,000...ish but December 25th 0."
Three Kings: "Well this all sounds mental!? I'll tell you what, we won't bother with actually believing this Christianity thing you just made up but we will continue to celebrate it as a tradition where we give useless random bollocks to each other... things like socks, tie racks and a multitude of things from gadget shops and Hawkins Bazaar".
There are two more ways in which Christams warps time, and they go hand in hand. Boredom and Drinking. Sometimes in the Christmas holiday i genuinely feel like I am a character created by a twisted and balding teenage sci-fi nerd. The plot of his sci-fi novel revolves around a character trapped in a vortex of time which can only be battled by heinous quantities of beer and spirits accompanied by handfuls of mini-cheddars and other cheese orientated savories. It's a character that you would think is fun to be, apart from the bloke that invented the character decides that the character suffers from heartburn and weird poos.
Merry Xmas to the small number of people who read this, and to the large number of people who haven't read this but could also potentially offend.
I'd much rather the calendar start with the creation of earth rather than a baby. So it's the year 4,540,000,000...ish. Christmas time is also warped by the fact that Christmas goes on for fucking ever. They must have measured Christmas from when Jesus first started crowning, and since he was known for his thorny crown i reckon Mary must have been in labour longer than Tony Blair. But what better way to celebrate the birth of God's son than advertise piles of shit that i don't want or need? There's a constant plethora of perfume adverts at the moment - each as wanky as the other. Dog Shit - By Calvin Klein, Windy-pops - By Jean-Paul-Gaultier, Complete and Utter Rancid Gooch - By Gucci. It makes me want to go back in time and kill baby jesus... that King Herod was onto something there... Maybe i was King Herod in a previous life? Well God, if you have another spawn of your seed on this earth, im going to make sure my next incarnation checks amongst the reeds. I spose it was those three kings fault for all this obsession with pointless presents. Here's my idea of how their presents went down:
Three Kings: "Awww look at that beautiful little fragile newly born baby! 'Ere you go, we got together and bought you some Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh, good aint it!?"
Mary: " That's lovely.... we could really do with feeding Jesus though, we have no food and he is weak... im also really scared that he will get an infection as we are in a dirty stable and the hay we are using as bedding is covered in horse shit"
Three Kings: "What you trying to say like?! That you are not interested in material items and only in necessities?"
Mary: "Well yeh, those are the Christian values i follow"
Three Kings: "Whats that mean? What does Christian mean?"
Mary: "Well it hasn't been invented yet but yeh, this whole Christian thing is going to be fucking huge!...and oh yeh, the date is no longer December 25th 4,540,000,000...ish but December 25th 0."
Three Kings: "Well this all sounds mental!? I'll tell you what, we won't bother with actually believing this Christianity thing you just made up but we will continue to celebrate it as a tradition where we give useless random bollocks to each other... things like socks, tie racks and a multitude of things from gadget shops and Hawkins Bazaar".
There are two more ways in which Christams warps time, and they go hand in hand. Boredom and Drinking. Sometimes in the Christmas holiday i genuinely feel like I am a character created by a twisted and balding teenage sci-fi nerd. The plot of his sci-fi novel revolves around a character trapped in a vortex of time which can only be battled by heinous quantities of beer and spirits accompanied by handfuls of mini-cheddars and other cheese orientated savories. It's a character that you would think is fun to be, apart from the bloke that invented the character decides that the character suffers from heartburn and weird poos.
Merry Xmas to the small number of people who read this, and to the large number of people who haven't read this but could also potentially offend.
Monday, 5 December 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)