Sunday morning, 28th December 2014, and something unpleasant is going down on Comedy Central UK.
Comedy Central keeps repeating the first half of each Friends episode..
— brianhawkes (@Cafe_P_Loyal) December 28, 2014
Well Comedy Central is fucking up… Still haven't seen a full episode of friends yet
— Ell (@ellgriff98) December 28, 2014
Why is Comedy Central repeating the first half of every friends episode?!
— edie (@edi3murray) December 28, 2014
I don’t tend to talk much about my Tumblr blog on this site. I use it for posting little pictures, thoughts, or snatches of audio, some of which develop into something more substantial over here. But I do feel I have to acknowledge by far my post popular post over there. It’s just hit over 200 likes/reblogs.
Extraordinarily unsafe for work.
Maybe I should stop talking about old radio airchecks or obscure sitcom edits on here, and just concentrate on women enjoying dog cock.
This is the tale of one of the more ridiculous things that happened to me when I worked in Channel 5 TX.
Saturday, 14th December, 2013. I’m sitting at home, preparing for my first day back in work after a short illness. It’s live BAMMA coverage that evening – mixed martial arts, which usually involves the floor being entirely smeared with blood by the end of the night – and I decide to have a look at BAMMA’s Twitter feed to see what’s going on.1
So, I scroll down their feed… and something catches my eye. Something horrible. I reproduce it below – but I’ve had to blur out the relevant bits, I’m afraid. I’m sure you’ll understand when I tell you what they are.
All TX ops should do a little research on the show they’re going to be working on. Not all do. To be fair, I did once find myself in the middle of a live sporting event and suddenly realised I didn’t know the scoring system. Never. Again. ↩
Emotional Public Domain Software.
That’s what the opening title of the program reads. This is BBC Micro public domain disc BBC PD #171, “Something About Me”. The catalogue description reads: “…by Oliver Debus. A personal anthology of graphics, digitised images and scanned pictures.”
And that’s what we get. Dated 1989 in one of the program files, you can download the disc image file from 8BS – but I’ve captured a video of it below, to save you the trouble of emulating. (Contains brief, low resolution nudity.)
At first pixellated glance, at a slideshow of 320 x 256 black and white photos, this might seem far removed from anything teenagers are doing now. But come on – pictures of yourself, of famous people you like, of things you’re interested in, of silly cartoons, all with captions – sent out into the world for other people to see?
This is just a 1989 version of Tumblr. How fabulous.
Technically, in fact, this disc only runs on a BBC Master. Disc #75 however, dated 1991, contains an amended version by Duncan Lilly, which changes the visual transitions to work on a normal BBC Micro. ↩
Two images of the Golden Gate Bridge. On the left, a fake picture posted by the Twitter account @HistoricalPics. On the right, the real picture which it took me all of two minutes to find.1
Unsurprisingly the account failed to post a correction, even with numerous people – myself included – pointing out that the image was fake. I say “unsurprisingly”, because the account smacks of the kind of thing that doesn’t care what it posts, as long as it continues to gain followers. The Twitter bio of the person who owns the account does nothing to dissuade that impression.
Let me be perfectly clear. If you post any kind of content to the internet – professional or amateur, paid or unpaid – and aren’t willing to post corrections when someone points out when you are wrong: you stink. Not only are you spreading misinformation rather than truth – the very opposite thing an account called “Historical Pics” should be doing – but you also come across as someone who is massively, massively insecure. You really think so little of yourself that posting the odd correction is just too much to bear?
That’s just… embarrassing.
As was pointed out to me, why the hell was this ever photoshopped in the first place, when the original looks so much more impressive? ↩
Robert’s Web. Safely one of the worst television programmes I have ever seen. Not that that’s my main point here, but I’ll take any chance I can get to slag off that wretched show. No, my point here is to do with the show’s Twitter account.
Let’s ignore the fact that the last tweet there is advertising the third show of the series, despite there being four episodes – a sure sign the team had given up by the last one. More importantly: there’s no goodbye message. No “thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it”. Nowt. Zilch. Abandoned. Production office wound up, nobody there to even tweet a farewell.
Which altogether gives the impression that the account meant nothing to the makers of the show than what they could get out of it. Nobody could spare a minute to even pretend they gave a fuck, and post a goodbye. There is little more transparent than an account just abandoned like that. They never really engaged; it was all a front to try and whip up interest, then abandoned when the show failed.
In comparison, when the online game Glitch had to wind up, their Twitter feed was full of updates, proper goodbyes and fun stuff. The absolute right way to go about ending a project. Engaging with your audience to the last, not running away with your tail between your legs. It was obvious that the people running that site cared about their audience.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, obviously. I’ve seen excellent Twitter accounts run by TV people, and I’ve seen awful ones run by web companies. But it happens enough to spot a pattern, and it’s not a pleasant one when it comes to television shows.
Which makes me sad. Telly can benefit hugely from social media, done right. Done wrong, it exposes some rather uncomfortable truths.
It’s no secret that this site isn’t the most updated place in the world. This is partly due to me wanting to – vaguely – think about the stuff I post on here. And I find thinking hard.
If then, you would like your fix of Dirty Feed without the benefit of a coherent thought process, I’ve just started a companion Dirty Feed Tumblr. Hopefully some of the stuff I post over there will develop into bigger articles over here; others will just be me posting a DVD grab because someone pulled a funny face. The latter will be the better posts, I would wager.
Last year, a Ruby programmer called why the lucky stiff disappeared. Not being part of the Ruby community, the whole story still fascinated me; see the posts Eulogy to _why and The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff for two opposing views on the subject.
The other day, I decided to see whether there had been any sign of him. Short answer: no. Long answer: no, there hasn’t. But in my travels, I noticed this tweet from him, which a lot of people seem to like:
“when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”
It’s such a deliciously seductive idea. And yet it’s so fundamentally wrong.
I have no idea, but this must come close.
Recently I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. Not because of worries over privacy – although maybe I should be more worried about that – but due to the weird joint problem of using it too much, and not enough. Too much, as in spending every waking hour when I should be working playing Scrabble… and not enough, in that I did precisely nothing else with it.
So, I decide to deactivate my account. (You should, of course, be able to directly delete it without waiting, but that’s a rant for another day – and I probably would have chosen a simple deactivation this time round anyway.) And what greets me?
