Internet – Page 13

Bad Journalism Part #8274982

Published 9th February 2014

I just read two articles. Two articles about two entirely different subjects. Oddly enough, however, they both managed to annoy me in exactly the same way. (Incidentally, congratulations – you’ve just managed to find the only site on the internet to tie together Mrs Brown’s Boys and Flappy Bird.)

Firstly, Rachel Cooke interviewing BBC director of television Danny Cohen:

“Would he explain to me the success of Mrs Brown’s Boys, watched by 9.4 million on Christmas Day? “Yes. There are huge numbers of people – and I’m one – who love studio-based sitcoms. The joy in the room!” Again, I peer at him, trying to work out if he’s being sincere. Oh, Lord. I think he is.”

Secondly, Patrick O’Rourke on Flappy Bird. He starts off with an interesting question:

“After about 10 minutes, I came to the realization Flappy Bird is an absolutely horrible video game and began to wonder why it’s so extremely popular.”

Somehow manages to contradict himself within two sentences:

“It’s Flappy Bird’s simplicity that makes it so addictive. What I don’t understand is how people genuinely seem to be enjoying playing Flappy Bird.”

And then just gives up:

“So do yourself a favour and stop playing Flappy Bird; it sucks.”

Now, what I think about the two topics is irrelevant. (For the record, I really like Flappy Bird, and haven’t seen enough Mrs Brown’s Boys to be able to judge.) What irritates me is the acknowledgement of how successful they both are… and a complete lack of engagement on behalf of the writer as to why.

In the case of Mrs Brown’s Boys, I genuinely don’t understand the interviewer’s response to Danny Cohen’s statement. Which bit is she disagreeing with? That people like studio-based sitcoms? That Cohen specifically likes studio sitcoms? The bit about the “joy in the room”? Or does she think he ducked the specific question and just spoke in generalities, and that’s what she’s perturbed by? It’s not clear at all. It’s just a dig from someone who doesn’t like the show, expecting the reader to happily go along with it without a single further thought.

The Flappy Bird article is even worse. It claims to be a piece where someone who hates the game genuinely tries to find out what people love about it… and yet the writer makes little effort to actually figure it out. The point of the article having now completely disappeared, instead he throws out an order from on-high to tell people to stop playing the game. I would hope that last part at least has some level of irony attached, but it’s still pointless. The entire article is ridiculous.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that just because something’s popular, you have to like it. You hate something popular, you should write articles in deep and penetrating detail saying exactly what you don’t like about it. (God knows I have.) What annoys me about these two articles is that both specifically bring up the fact that something they hate is popular… and then refuse to engage with any potential answers as to why. Instead, they prefer to sit back and sneer.

My suggestion: have a go. Listen. Engage. Think about why people might like something you don’t. You don’t have to suddenly agree that something is brilliant – but at least have the discussion. You’re more likely to come up with something that’s actually worth saying.

Noise to Signal: A Brief Retrospective

Published 4th August 2013

Internet

In September 2005, me and a group of friends set up a site called Noise to Signal. Its initial inspiration was pretty much “Ganymede & Titan, but talking about other media things other than Red Dwarf“. We had so many plans for it. It was going to “rock”, as I believe the kids all say.

In December 2009, it closed. And once it closed, I never got round to converting it to a static website, as I’m a lazy shit. Eventually the inevitable happened: a couple of months ago, I got a complaint from my hosting company that someone had hacked it and was using it to send spam emails, so I was forced to take it offline. Today – after some appropriate nudging – I finally got round to fixing it, and the site is now back online.

Of all the projects I’ve been involved in, Noise to Signal is the one which always makes me feel a little sad. The site never reached its true potential. There were some great writers, posting some brilliant articles – and after shaky start and an early revamp, the design of the site really worked well. (I’m especially proud of that final design, now preserved as the archive.) But the site never quite… flew.

The question is why, of course, and I can only speak for myself. I came to the conclusion that the problem with NTS was that the remit was just too wide, and the tone inconsistent. By trying to cover everything, we ended up covering nothing well – there was very little consistency in the output. This would have been mitigated somewhat if we’d had a large quantity of output, but apart from a few busy months, we never quite reached critical mass. (I take a large amount of responsibility for that, especially in the site’s later years – I just plain didn’t write enough, and often didn’t write what I promised.)

Ganymede & Titan always had a tone. NTS never quite found one.

To be brutally honest, despite my regrets about NTS, I’m far happier doing my own site now. Dirty Feed is far less ambitious than Noise to Signal ever was, and is never updated enough, but it certainly is more consistent in tone. And whilst I wouldn’t want to overstate the amount of drama behind-the-scenes on NTS – though there was a particularly thrilling midnight change of server and account block – there was inevitably some, and it could grow tiring. I like having to answer to nobody but myself.

Occasionally, one of us has the idea to do something with the site again – most recently, I brought up the idea of resurrecting the site as a group podcast. But every time, we realise we don’t have enough time to do the site justice. And the part of the spirit of the site lives on, as individual projects: here on Dirty Feed, on Seb and James’s Alternate Cover, on Tanya’s Gypsy Creams, on Phil’s Noiseless Chatter, and on Unlimited Rice Pudding.

I’m proud of the archive we left behind. It’s not all gold, but there’s some lovely stuff buried away in there. So if you get the time, have a peek through the site’s archives – and the final article, The Best of NTS, has links to some of the stuff we were happiest with.

Maybe it never worked quite the way we wanted it to. But I hope we left something behind that was worthwhile.

Gypsy Creams

Published 7th July 2013

Internet

If you’ve been wondering why Dirty Feed has been updating even less than usual recently, that’s because I’ve been busy redesigning Gypsy Creams, my darling girlfriend’s site based around 1960s magazines. There’s all sorts of amazing stuff there – and posted as part of the relaunch is this great interview with Simon Dee from 1969 – but one of my favourites is still the very first thing ever posted on the site.

(Sadly, it’s not currently very mobile-friendly. Yeah, I know, I know. It SHALL BE FIXED. Apart from that, if you have any suggestions regarding the site design, let me know below.)

Right, back to getting this place updated. I’ve been building up plenty of things to be annoyed about, don’t you worry your pretty little heads.

See ya, YouTube

Published 6th March 2013

Internet

I’ve been uploading things to YouTube for a few years now. Hardly a heavy user, mind you, and I was never eagerly chasing views: it was mainly just a place to store small bits of video easily that I didn’t especially want to pay the hosting costs for.

This was was the case tonight, where I had recorded a fun bit of video I wanted to share with the world. So I go to the YouTube upload page, and was greeted with this. Pay special attention to the right-hand column:

YouTube account creation with Google+ profile screenshot

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.faxmachine

Published 15th February 2013

Internet

Yesterday, I bought the domain name for my upcoming internet radio show: 80track.fm. There’s only a holding page there at the moment, though TV pres geeks should recognise the font used for the logo. (For more, check out this post by Dave Jeffery.) There will be plenty of time for more about the actual show, however – let’s talk about simply buying the actual domain itself.

As it’s a radio show, I decided to go for a .fm domain; domain hacks make me feel a bit dirty, but I just couldn’t resist it. My usual domain registrar doesn’t deal with .fm domains, so I decided to go with the official domain registrar. OK, so the website looks like it was designed in 1485, but no matter. So I got to work filling in all my details, and was told my fax number was required. I got a vaguely amusing Tumblr post out of this, typed in “none” in the Fax field, filled in the rest, and awaited a confirmation email. Ah look, there we go…

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“Stupidly, I very nearly cried…”

Published 13th December 2012

Internet / Life

I take great – if possibly misguided – pride in being pretty much the same person now as I always was. Me when I was nine and when I’m 31 are rather too close to being the same person. When people tell me they used to love certain TV shows and then grew out of them, it always puzzles me – with the odd exception, if I loved a show when I was younger, I still love it now. Sure, my tastes have widened since I was younger – I used to dislike Press Gang for fuck’s sake – but very, very rarely have they shrunk. I’m the same person – why would I suddenly decide I disliked something?

Yet, there is one exception to recognising myself as the same person, one piece of history which I look back on with absolute horror: my old blog, which I ran around 2004-2005. It makes bizarre reading now in one sense, in that a lot of what I say is ideally suited these days to Twitter but feels a bit batshit insane on a blog – but hey, it’s still recognisably the same person.

Then, occasionally, there are posts like this one. Yes, that would be me giving personal details about exactly how badly my job was going on the internet, to anyone who cared to drop by, almost LIVE AS IT HAPPENED. There are a few more if you root round for long enough.

Now, I happen to utterly love my current job – and I’m far enough removed from my life working at makro not to worry about linking to that piece now. But even if I didn’t love my job, I wouldn’t even vaguely contemplate complaining about it on the internet these days. What the hell was I thinking? Why, in the name of holy fuck did I think that that was a good idea in any way whatsoever? Did I think the internet was my own little private place where nobody but me and a few close friends hung out?

Reading this stuff makes me feel completely distanced to myself. I just don’t recognise the mindset that made me put that kind of thing online. For someone who still makes the same excited noises as they did when they were nine, it’s an incredibly odd feeling.

Lost.

Published 28th September 2012

Internet / Life

I am not an internet celebrity.

Still, type my name into Google, and – if you can get past cameramen and trumpet players – you can find a fair few traces of me online. There’s this site, where I bang on about nonsense. There’s Noise To Signal, where I used to bang on about nonsense. There’s Ganymede & Titan, where I bang on about Red Dwarf-related nonsense. And so on.

Now, I used to go to school with someone who was pretty similar to me. Not identical – he stuck his finger in places where I could only hope to stick it at that point – but we liked a lot of the same things. He was cooler, though. He had his own shed. He was a far better programmer than me (as in, he wrote things that could do more than play a CD roughly half the time you pressed the play button). Sure, I once beat him at a calculus question, but that was about it.

I lost touch with him years ago, but I sometimes wonder what happened to him. So occasionally, I type his name into Google. And what do I find? Precisely nothing.

This is something I come across time and time again. All the people I used to know – the nerds, who you’d think would have a fairly widespread net presence – I can find nothing. There are people I would expect to have reams and reams of blog posts attached to their name, or writing for some website or another, or even just have a page which listed a few electronics projects they were working on… but I can find absolutely sod all. And from conversations I’ve had with other people online, it seems I’m far from alone on this – a lot of old friends they would have expected to have a presence online have just disappeared into the ether.

What happened to them?

Regarding Brand New’s “Why I hate Helvetica”

Published 12th July 2012

Internet

I love Brand New. Describing its purpose as to “chronicle and provide opinions on corporate and brand identity work”, a huge part of the site simply presents logos before a redesign and after, and invites comparisons. You could get lost in those archives for hours.

However, I have to – admittedly belatedly – take issue with the following post – New University of the Arts London Logo, or Why I Hate Helvetica. Click the link, read the article, especially the rant at the bottom – I’ll wait.

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