Lost in Translation

In addition to this blog, I have a ‘forum‘ which I use as a blog for cycling topics, and another cycling forum, ‘acf’, which is long since defunct but still online as a repository of zombie threads and a useful source of killed time whenever I’m running low. There’s a story of it here, but briefly, it was fun until it wasn’t. Then it became fun again after it stopped being a forum.

Last night was a banner day in acf history. With the ancient software an increasing security risk, it was finally time to update it. Given the plethora of modifications I’d had done over the years – it’s amazing how much work is necessary to keep something simple – this always promised to be a headache. So I contacted my web guy.

He lives in the Pacific Northwest, which is a continent away from acf’s server in the American South, itself an ocean’s breadth from me. He’d be sitting down at his computer as I was due for bedtime. Naturally, I shifted my personal time zone to suit his working hours, which proved to be quite as elastic as mine.

We started with the colour. Fond as I was with what I had come to think of as acf blue, I now wanted something completely different from my other ‘forum’, itself a hue of the world’s favourite. The absence of all colour seemed the way to go, so I chose bitchin’ black. Far (for that is my web guy’s very appropriate name) then threw a totally unexpected squiggle at me; found art to which he’d matched a font. I didn’t get it the first time I saw it, but when the loveliness of the segue struck me, it was like manifest destiny. It’s also like a signature, in that it may not be immediately intelligible, but it’s unique.

Far had hit one out of the park.

Next came the detail work of throwing out the kitchen sink the Simple Machines Folk have built into their software, while keeping my modified version of it on a better footing for future upgrades. It pretty much took all night, with breaks zonked out on the couch counting sheep.

We didn’t wrap things up until late morning for me, middle of the night for Far. When I beheld the wonder he had wrought I nearly wept. With tiredness, it’s true. I know, it’s just a forum (which isn’t a forum). It’s also a canvas for painting when I’ve already got a few of those. It’s a social media construct whose only success has been my late night banter which straddled the globe. It’s a squiggle on the inky night.

Nobody cares
Now that’s out of the way…

I actually do have an account
It’s just not in my legal name. I registered to provide a window onto the landscape, and to keep track of family. Which is what they all say, I know.

It’s like a blog, but worse
Just what the world needed: a universal template, with an overlord.

Founder and policies
These are the main reasons. We have wildly different mission statements. His is to hoover up personal information and commodify it, packaged neatly for big brothers. Mine is to use my powers, such as they are, for good.

Though as The Register put it, State surveillance? We’ll do it ourselves, thanks. Image credit unknown.

It’s a “weirdly limited vehicle for human expression,”
as Ben Zimmer wrote in The Rise of the Zuckerverb. “The Timeline, Zuckerberg submits, is nothing less than The Story of Your Life… Stitching together simple declarative statements into an autobiographical timeline creates a pale simulacrum of personal story-telling, no matter how much Facebook presents it as a way to tell your story… This is what happens when language is optimized for social data-mining rather than natural communication.” I’m not wholly convinced by the arguments – you’ve got a keyboard, you can still use it to break out of the desired story arcs. I do feel that while Facebook facilitates communication, it is mostly a conduit for conformity.

Memes
Mark my words: the sharing of relentlessly uplifting platitudes will be the end of us all.

Like
FB may not have invented likes, but it took them to a new level of inanity if only because of its size. Everybody likes to be liked, but it doesn’t actually bring you closer to people, does it? Do we really need this stat in our lives?

I’ve got enough mouths to feed
With 3 blogs and a Twitter account which I sometimes use as a phone booth, trying to stuff as much into a tweet as is humanly possible (see some of my days in history), I risk attenuation.

*Status update: Feed me Seymour. Or whatever your name is.

I’ve had a love affair with newspapers ever since I could read Peanuts and Mike Royko. The affection hasn’t been mutual. Although the fourth estate has deigned to print me occasionally over the years, and I even managed to score an internship at one of America’s premier titles by walking in off the street with a book of college paper clips under my arm, mostly it’s been a hard sell; and mostly I haven’t bothered.

But every once in a while I get the itch. The last time this happened was last year, when I tried, and failed, to get any traction with this. The Guardian “didn’t like it” and nobody replied to my emails without follow-up bordering on stalking. It ended up in The Ride Journal, a freebie.

Last month, prompted by a rare boost in personal productivity, I sent a piece about iPod cycling (they say write what you know) out into the cold factories of pulp & pixels and waited while nothing happened. I had about given up when inspiration struck thanks to a random story link which invited further investigation into a market I simply hadn’t considered before. Why not try the Daily Telegraph, aka the Torygraph? It’s Boris Johnson territory: perfect. It would also be nice to place it in a venue not packed with a jury of one’s peers, like the Bike Blog.

I got an almost immediate response, which struck me dumb. That it underwent heavy editing (“It’s not our style”; the story of my life) didn’t bother me too much as it was so nice to get paid – also with a very pleasant fleetness, once they’d decided to finally run it – for what has always been a labour of love.

Although the Telegraph is due to print another small piece of me any day now, it’s doubtful I’ll be making regular appearances, thanks to a major handicap: a lack of topicality in my character. In the newspaper business, or at least the bit I’ve broken through, this seems to be a prerequisite for getting anywhere as a freelancer. Go figure.

Despite my early infatuation with newsprint it turns out I’m not a newsy kind of guy. As I said here what seems like a very long time ago, my preference is to write fiction, “another kind of fact which fortunately doesn’t have to be verified.”

I’ll take the cards instead

In history’s continuum, one day’s news doesn’t much distinguish itself from another, in my mind. Besides, blogs have thoroughly eclipsed old media as a source of informed, entertaining, and entertainingly ill-informed commentary.

It’s been years since I’ve bought an actual paper as anything other than a curious artefact, or souvenir. The medium is now too limited to be of much interest. Online incarnations promise and can deliver more, but Disqus fever has come along for the ride. If a comment isn’t liked, does it exist? While it’s great to be able to bypass sometimes very dull editors, such freedom comes with the modern-day price of the ever greater necessity for filtering.

The newspapers I used to spill cereal over at the breakfast table are so many long-dead trees; the ones I spy at in the supermarket or petrol station forecourt, yet another exercise in filtering. At some point Lucy snatched the ball away from Slats Grobnik, and that was all she wrote.

August 1: You must set a good example for the rest of the month. We both know what I’m talking about. Only your fresh start can help me stop visiting the cupboards and fridge out of boredom, to escape the keyboard, or for inspiration which will not be found hiding there.