Internet – Page 5 – Dirty Feed

Now He’s Gone

Published 2nd October 2020

Last year, I wrote about some odd little snippets of The Shangri-Las which had been uploaded to YouTube. They included an unreleased song, rehearsals for “Remember”, studio chatter, and an excerpt of a whole different version of “Leader of the Pack”. As I’m sure you’ll agree, this is one of the most exciting things which has ever happened in the entire history of recorded music.

Recently, I decided to go and listen to it again. And… hang on, what’s all this? Surely the video isn’t shorter? Am I imagining things?

Luckily, I had downloaded the original version of the video at the time. (My spidey-sense was tingling enough on my original listen that I thought that would be a sensible thing to do.) The version of the video I downloaded last year was 3:38 in duration. The version currently on YouTube is 2:35. Hang on, a whole minute missing? I can’t hide the tears, but I don’t care.

So, for those of you who want to hear that minute which mysteriously went missing from the upload, here you go. An alternate take of the start of “Leader of the Pack”, which according to the video description has Betty on lead vocals¹:

As for why that minute was silently removed… who knows. The account where this bootleg audio was uploaded is arcane to say the least. For instance, they also uploaded this amazing stereo version of the Shangs magnum opus “Out in the Streets”, which has never been officially released anywhere:

So, a minute of Shangri-Las history: we don’t know where it came from, and we don’t know why it disappeared. But hey, I said last year that the Shangs were “fuelled by myth and mystery”. Even in 2020, mysterious things keep happening. It’s all highly appropriate.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t grab an extra minute of fun if we can get it.

Health warning on this claim: a noted Shangri-Las expert who I’ve had the odd email exchange with doesn’t think it actually sounds like Betty. This is precisely the kind of stuff I’m terrible at figuring out, so at this I just throw my hands up and say “Whatever it actually is, it’s interesting, innit?” ↩

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the shangri-las

Strange Things Which Have Happened to Me on the Internet Part #23898372

Published 20th June 2020

Internet

Right now, I’m vaguely thinking of the next redesign of Dirty Feed. (I always get antsy after three years or so.) Don’t expect it until at least 2021; I’m the kind of arsehole who has to start from scratch, rather than using an existing theme. This kind of control freakery is very useful when directing television channels, and very not useful when trying to get anything else achieved.

But all this got me thinking of something very weird which happened to me, well over a decade now. None of this is still online; we have to rely on the Wayback Machine for this one.

Firstly, here’s Red Dwarf fansite Ganymede & Titan from 2007, which I designed:

Ganymede and Titan design from 2007

And here’s somebody’s personal website from 2007, which I had absolutely nothing to do with:

filecore.net design from 2007, looking pretty much identical

There’s just some kind of link here that I can’t quite put my finger on. And just in case you think this might just be some kind of bizarre coincidence, a quick poke around Kayak the Planet reveals a reference to http://www.filecore.net/css/gandt.css. Very good, well done.

So whatever, my site design was ripped off, by someone best described as a “forum acquaintance”. That’s far from unusual. I didn’t even really care that much; the design was good enough for what it was, but far from my finest work. It’s certainly not worth bleating about 13 years after the fact.

Except for one other thing.

Scroll down on Kayak the Planet, to the About Me section, and you get the following:

About me
The space for the megalomania to emerge.

Late-twenties. Geek. Grey eyes. Dark hair. Bad skin. No glasses. No fashion sense. But passionate about kayaking and the interweb. Speaks fluent English, passable Finnish and atrocious German.

Oh, recently married too. Can now be considered as owning flat and wife. No car. Excellent public transport except on the way home.

I recently decided to set up my own company to try and make my living as a full-time freelance proofreader and editor. At some point I might even achieve this goal. Until then, I’m mainly just sitting around wanking.

Now, let’s take a trip to ofla.info in 2007 – nothing to do with Ganymede & Titan, but my own personal site from the time:

About me

25. Geek. Brown eyes. Brown hair. Bad skin. Glasses. No fashion sense. But passionate about good telly and the interweb.

I recently left my job at makro in order to try and make my living as a full-time freelance web designer. At some point I might even achieve this goal. Until then, I’m mainly just sitting around wanking.

So this guy not only ripped off my website design for G&T. He then went to my own, entirely separate personal site, and ripped off my “about me” section. My personal description of myself: cut, pasted, and lightly adapted. Wanking gag and all.

Brrrrrrrr.

Deviance.

Published 25th October 2019

Internet / TV Comedy

Currently, I’m going through a load of old Dirty Feed articles, for preparation for the site’s 10th anniversary in January.¹ And this particular piece about the now-dormant Dirty Feed Tumblr caught my eye.

There is no polite way of saying this. The most popular post I ever made on Tumblr was a collection of pulp book covers featuring women about to have sex with dogs.

Now, you may not be particularly keen on my bestiality material. You may prefer my in-depth articles about sitcom edits instead. But it was definitely the most popular post I ever made on Tumblr, by an order of magnitude. I mention over 200 likes/reblogs in that previous piece; it had over 400 before it was removed.

Removed? Ah, yes. Sadly, that post is no longer available, due to Tumblr’s porn ban in December 2018. As soon as that ban was announced, I stopped using the site. I never really clicked with Tumblr anyway; the porn ban was the final straw.

But the fact remains: by far the most thing I ever posted on the site was deleted by Tumblr. That’s a mildly annoying state of affairs, even if I’m not using the site any more, and even if the post did feature an illustration of an Alsatian with a particularly lascivious look on his face.

* * *

OK, fine. If you want an article on sitcom edits, let’s talk about some sitcom edits.²

Back in 2012, I wrote a series of articles on pre-watershed edits made to Red Dwarf on Dave. One recurring motif presented itself: time and time again, some of the funniest moments in an episode were cut.³ Kryten sticking up his finger and saying “Swivel on it, punk!”; “Rimmer Directive 271 states just as clearly: No chance you metal bastard”; “Santa Claus – what a bastard! He’s just a big fat git who sneaks down chimneys and steals all the kid’s favorite toys…”; “No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero gravity”; “Men! They’re all bastards!”; and by the funniest moment in Red Dwarf VIII:

CASSANDRA: I already told you: Rimmer dies of a heart attack, and then you and all the other Canaries die too; all except Lister, Kryten, Kochanski and the Cat. I’ve seen it.
RIMMER: That’s as well as maybe, but have you seen this?

RIMMER flips his middle finger to CASSANDRA, then turns and storms out.

CASSANDRA: Yes, I’m afraid I have.

My analysis of pre-watershed I’m Alan Partridge edits brought up similar points: “Don’t rub your fanny on me!” and “He means his cock!” were gone. And if I ever get round to writing something about pre-watershed Porridge edits on Gold, I’ll be sure to mention that the climax to the episode where Fletch sticks two fingers up to the camera is pixellated, destroying the joke entirely.

* * *

This isn’t really an anti-censorship screed, at least not per se. My point is simply this: when things are deleted from the internet, or cuts are made to programmes, it’s worth remembering that the effect of such things isn’t random. It’s not arbitrary chunks that disappear: it’s the outliers that go. The rudest joke in a sitcom episode; a blog post which takes a left turn into filth. And those outliers are often one of the most popular parts of a piece of work.

And slowly but surely, the corners of things get knocked off. Censorship is often talked about – sometimes correctly, sometimes not – in terms of how dangerous it can be. But often, the enemy is the sheer blandification of pop culture. It’s not that anybody dies. It’s not about suppressing important conversations. It’s about which bits of our culture survive in the popular memory, and which don’t. Which is both very important, and not important at all.

And that leads to one of the joys of owning your own little part of the internet. Away from social media giants changing their policies on a whim, and away from UKTV’s bizarre editing policies, you can quietly sit and document things. And documenting these things shifts the power dynamic back towards the integrity of the text, however slightly, rather than companies just doing things because it’s easier. I find it immensely rewarding.

Especially when – just occasionally – you get to stand up for an author’s original intention, when it never managed to make it to the screen properly in the first place.

Though that’s not as important as dog cock, obviously.

Come on, like I’m going to be able to resist writing something appallingly self-important for it. ↩
“Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.” ↩
Bizarrely, not the rhythmic thrusting of Kryten and Lister in Polymorph. ↩

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edits

“The 100 Years War?”

Published 29th September 2019

Internet

I have to admit, Dirty Feed and podcasts is a bit of a sore point. I did three episodes in 2012… and the fourth one has yet to materialise. Yes, a wait of seven years and counting is taking the fucking piss. All I can say is that it will return one day. I’ve spent far too much on jingles for it not to.

I have been involved in another podcast these last few years, mind. Over on Ganymede & Titan, the Red Dwarf fansite which is unaccountably still running and updated in 2019, we just published our 100th episode of DwarfCasts. The reason we managed to get to 100 episodes is because all I have to do is turn up and speak loudly and annoyingly about Red Dwarf, rather than actually do any of the hard work of getting the show prepped, recorded, edited, and published. So when I say I’m proud of that 100th episode, it’s nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Ian Symes, who put that beautiful little documentary together.¹

Still, it got me thinking. Maybe 100 episodes of a podcast made over 13 years isn’t the most impressive thing in the world, even if that is 98 episodes more than most podcasts manage. But it strikes me that there’s something pleasant about devoting myself to the same thing for that length of time. Indeed, take a look at Ganymede & Titan as a whole – I’ve been writing for the site for 16 years and counting, and if you look back at the very first incarnation of the site, it’s been going for a full 20 years. And doing the same kind of thing for so long means that I’ve ended up writing and talking about areas that I never would have examined if I’d done what so many people did.

Because most sensible 90s Red Dwarf fans did the following: got a job, got a family, and stopped thinking that much about Red Dwarf. I managed the first two, but somehow never stopped doing the third. And sure, I’ve written about my frustration about that at times. I do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the show these days.

But if I’d done what normal fans do, and drifted away from doing anything in fandom, I’d never have written some of my favourite pieces on the show. On the development of Holly in the early days of the show, on the very earliest stirrings of Rob and Doug playing with the nature of reality, or about how the glimmerings of one of Red Dwarf‘s most famous episodes can be seen in Hancock’s Half Hour, to name three of many.

All this is on my mind as we come up to this January, and the 10th anniversary of Dirty Feed. In one sense, anniversaries are an arbitrary waste of time. But as an excuse to take stock of where we are, and what’s to come, I find them useful. Over the last ten years, I’ve published stuff on here I love, and stuff which I now think is a bit crap. But the fact that I’ve been publishing stuff in the same place for a full ten years feels meaningful, somehow. As with the DwarfCasts, I haven’t been as prolific on here as I would have liked to have been; other bits of life got in the way. But over the years, it adds together into a really nice archive of fun stuff.

There’s an advantage to plugging away at the same thing for years, without getting bored and flitting to the next thing. You don’t have to give it endless chunks of your time each week. Nor do you have to worry about any kind of long-term plan, or where exactly it is you’re going. And after a few years, you may just look back in surprise.

Without even realising it, you’ve made something you’re proud of.

Shhhhhh. Don’t tell him I was nice about him. ↩

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my other stuff, red dwarf

WordPress Not Currently Viable, Says WordPress

Published 30th November 2018

Internet

WordPress – the publishing software used as the backend for this very website – is undergoing a few growing pains at the moment. Either that, or – depending on who you believe – it’s blowing itself apart, much as Movable Type managed to do back in 2004.

Not that the outcry about WordPress is to do with pricing – it remains free. No, the outcry about the upcoming release of WordPress 5.0 is to do with Gutenberg – a brand new Editor, which entirely changes the way you write your posts. To say it has been controversial is putting it mildly. Just check the ratings on the current plugin version.

I’m not making any judgement on Gutenberg – at least, not yet. I’ll have a play with it when WordPress 5.0 is released, and see if I like it or not. If I do, great. If I don’t, I’ll go back to the classic Editor (available as a plugin), and think about my options. No, my issue is with how it’s being sold to us.

Take a look at this testimonial, on the official page on Gutenberg:

The editor is just the beginning
“This will make running your own blog a viable alternative again.”
— Adrian Zumbrunnen

Question: what do they think people have been doing with WordPress for years? Feeding the cat with it?

Gutenberg is a serious change to the very heart of the WordPress experience. This is a tricky proposition at the best of times: and it needs selling to people who already love using WordPress. WordPress’s answer to that? By quoting someone who says that using WordPress isn’t currently viable.

It’s literally one of the most tone-deaf pieces of advertising I have ever seen. People use WordPress because they love using WordPress. It’s one thing to tell someone what what they’re currently using is going to be improved. It’s quite another to tell your own users that what they’re currently using is shit, and not a viable choice.

Or, as one reply has it:

I'm pretty sure it's been viable for the last 15 years

— Simon Blackbourn (@lumpysimon) July 18, 2018

Quite.

Buried.

Published 26th November 2018

Internet / Meta

Dear Reader,

I try not to patronise you too much on here.¹ I write the literal opposite of clickbait. While it’s lovely when something I write gets a few clicks, chasing that leads to utter madness. Writing Dirty Feed is supposed to be fun.² However, I have to confess that sometimes an element of… calculation comes into the timing of what I publish. So it was with my collection of April Fools jokes played out in the pages of old BBC Micro magazines, published on the 1st April, because… of course that’s when you publish it. And I thought it was something that might gain some traction and find a little bit of an audience.

So I sent it out there, back in 2015. And it did… fine. Not spectacular numbers, even for this site – I thought it’d do more – but fine. I linked to it a few times on Twitter in subsequent years, updated it a little in 2017, and job done.

Until something interesting happened over this last weekend, that is. The piece got linked to in the latest b3ta newsletter. And just take a quick look at my stats for the April Fools article, especially the number for this month:

April Fool stats. April 2015: 255. November 2018: 559.

More people have just read (or at least clicked on) the piece than at any time previously. In fact, over twice as many people have read it this month than back in April 2015, when it was originally published. This was a piece designed to be linked to on April Fools Day to get a bit of interest. b3ta get hold of it just now, nowhere near April Fools and… bang.

You can never tell how stuff will end up being read. All my careful planning meant nothing.

And all this is exactly why I keep bleating on about keeping the archives of what you make online. If I’d yanked that piece offline after a year, for whatever reason, it would have lost the majority of people who ended up reading it. As it was, it was just sitting there… waiting to be discovered, and to have a little moment in the spotlight. Just a little moment – it’s not like it racked up thousands of hits. But that’s fine. I don’t need a piece to get thousands of hits.

Because I love people reading my old articles full stop. I think of Dirty Feed as an archive. What’s on the front page isn’t the most important thing about the site. It’s what’s buried in the archives which makes me happy.³ And my favourite thing is when someone tells me they’ve just spent ages in the archives, clicking around on things which looked interesting to them. I think of the site as a complete entity: the last ten posts are a tiny part of the whole.

There’s far too many things competing for people’s attention these days. Even if it’s a piece I’m really proud of, there’s no guarantee people will react to it straight away. But that doesn’t matter. It can just sit there… waiting. Some of them will be found eventually. And that’s enough.

If you found this piece and enjoyed it in 2028: hey there. I love you.

I just failed with that sentence. ↩
Although I often don’t find writing that much fun, which means I’m exactly as brilliant a writer as Douglas Adams. ↩
I should probably do a better job highlighting some of that older stuff; the best of link in the navigation is fine, but not enough. I should get round to finishing the random selected articles feature for the front page, really. ↩

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Support for Serial Comes From…

Published 11th November 2018

Internet

When Season 1 of Serial started near the end of 2014¹, it inspired many serious pieces of analysis. Whether it was taking on the subject matter itself and probing further, or discussions about whether the podcast was even a moral thing to produce in the first place, the world was not exactly short of Serial thinkpieces.

I’m not here to talk about any of that. What I want to talk to is altogether sillier, so by all means click away if you’re expecting anything about the main topic of the podcast itself, about which I can offer no insight. We’re nowhere near any of that territory.

What I want to talk about is: Mail…kimp?

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