links

yeah. so this is the text i wrote a year ago or so when the first bout of attempting to create Swallow #14 began. fuck it. it stands, or rather, leans. or something. herewith:

jesus h christ on a crutch.

this is actually a bit weird. i've just moved house, and the phone isn't on yet in the new place, but i've got the computer going and so on, and thought it was about bloody time i made a new issue of swallow, offline or not, so i can upload it as soon as i get online. it's been long enough etc...

which is all very well, but now that i come to the links page, i am suddenly having terribly strong urges not to write anything until i can be online and do what i have previously done with this page, which is to write about a bunch of random sites on the spur of the moment as i look at them.

i can't do that right now, obviously.

so why can't i write about the sites anyway? lord knows i've looked at enough of them. i've built enough of them and enough bits of them, i've written about them, all that. why can't i do it offline?

the reason, of course, is that to do so would be to stare certain parts of my more solitary obsessive going-online-to-escape-the-world tendencies just a bit too full in the face for comfort. instead of scanning a number of sites i've hopefully either never seen before or not seen for ages for flippant pisstakes, i have to confront an entirely different level.

are there then no sites that i feel i can or wish to write about while i am offline? what might it be about these sites that makes me reluctant to do so?

i could, of course, argue, that the reluctance comes from one of the functions that doing Swallow has fulfilled for me over the years, which is that it has forced me, even at moments of extreme jadedness with it all, to go off randomly searching for something, anything, that will provoke a reaction in me worth recording in some sense. such a subset of the Borges library as this must must and must always contain something new that you haven't found before which tickles you or makes you think or which jars you into some new and different level of consciousness to the previous one (feel free to add 'false' to consciousness there if you like), so by doing Swallow offline, i am failing to fulfil this function.

which may be true. but is still bollocks.

because Swallow has an editorial policy of no editorial policy, so there are no particular functions that any part of it need or need not play. and i would like to know what it is about these sites that i perhaps ought to be writing about that make me reluctant to do so.

or even which they are.

the news sites, the community news sites, the comics sites, the porn sites, the personal sites, the psychoceramic sites, the tech support sites. the tech sites.

o god the tech sites.

did i just say porn sites?

so these tech sites, right, they fall into two categories. either nothing is wrong or everything is wrong. one of the two. always and without exception. unless they're OpenGL-related sites, in which case they invariably manage both at once.

and the psychoceramic sites, they're also one of two ways. either it's a bunch of *really* weird shit expressing some genuinely unusual and particular world-view of some individual (or group), or it's actually a bunch of really *interesting* shit, depending on how far the skews in the world-view correspond to the skews in mine.

it's difficult to write about personal sites without either seeming to gush all the time or to be saying a bunch of things about such-and-such or so-and-so which perhaps wouldn't be otherwise said, or worth saying. or a good idea to say. personal sites are... personal. obviously. unless the comment is 'i really really like this', it's pretty redundant, and anyway i haven't really really liked anything for a while, not since i found the shrine to David Gonterman, but only because it managed to combine the telling of a somehow deeply moving story with some unbelievably sardonic humour in a way which both disturbed me greatly and made me laugh out load nonstop for several hours. it occurs to me now that you may perhaps react differently.

about the comics sites, there are a large number of good ones, of which there are hopefully many that i have not found yet. but why should i write about Sinfest, say, any more than i should write about Bristow, say, in the Evening Standard, which i also read and mostly enjoy.

the same goes for the news sites. actually i don't read any news sites as such. but some of them can be very funny, deliberately or otherwise. if you know which the right deliberately funny ones are, you don't need to scan the boring unfunny ones for the unintentionally funny ones. they do that for you.

it's not easy to write about the community news sites. the members of the Spawn of Slashdot cabal are all wonderful, but i haven't really felt... well... anything at all about anything much lately. in order to write about a community news site properly you need to have properly participated, and in order to have properly participated you need to have been less generally depressed and miserable than i've been for the last, ooh, three years or so, which is the only reasonable conclusion that the more astute reader may have already insinuated from the general passive aggressive approach i seem to be unnecessarily taking to my subject here.

ah. you still haven't forgotten about the porn sites. the thing about them is that you can't write about them. you might think you are, but you're actually writing about yourself when you write about porn sites, much more so than when writing about other sites. or rather, you are writing about your sexuality. which is fine, of course, and perfectly doable, but i don't really have anything to add to the article i wrote for Wired UK a few years ago that basically boiled down to 'bloody hell there's a lot of it', neatly avoiding the issue of my own personal response.

oh, did i forget to mention the net.art sites? 'when he does not know,' says the Talmud, 'the wise man says "I do not know it."' perhaps i should attempt to emulate the wise man.

and, ideally, cheer up a bit.

;)