oxfordhacker

It's only with the benefit of hindsight that I realise how up-fucking many of the things lying around the family house were, especially the reading material that my dad left in the loo. I vividly remember the true crime books with their grisly descriptions and appallingly suggestive black-and-white photos, and the Chick Tracts which Dad collected for their kitsch value and left lying around apparently unaware of or unconcerned about the effect that they might have on a young mind intent on devouring all the reading material it could lay its hands on. I've ended up collecting these tracts myself, and while I can't deny that I share some of Dad's ironic/appalled fascination with them, I'm also looking to exorcise myself. They're designed to be vivid, and it takes a sober adult rereading to contextualise those images as the crude propaganda that they are. I should count myself lucky, I suppose, that they always seemed too alien to be entirely convincing, though I do recall contemplating the sinners' prayer at the back of each and understanding that I was risking Hell by not saying it. I dread to think what effect these toilet-based existential crises have had on me.

However, I had intended to write about another, less damaging publication that I read under similar circumstances: The Fortean Times, named for Charles Fort. This was, and remains, a long-running collection of oddities of all sorts - cryptozoology, psychic powers, alternate history and pseudo-science - all presented in a tone somewhere between dryly ironic scepticism and open-minded acceptance. It was pleasingly mind-broadening, expecting and encouraging the reader to make their own assessment of the merits of each article. For many years I requested a subscription for my birthday, and sought out books covering the subjects that I found most interesting. Going further, in the early 90s I attended a couple of the Unconventions. They were the first conventions that I'd ever been to, indeed the first that I'd ever heard of, and they were an experience that I doubt I could ever recapture. The programme, like the magazine, was wide-ranging: intense people lecturing in painstaking detail about their particular obsession (UFO propulsion mechanisms, perhaps, or the true history of the colonisation of America), interspersed with fringe scientists, pop psychologists and performance artists with little indication of which to expect in any given talk.

However, the most fascinating area was the merchandising hall. It's probably just as well that I didn't have enough money to buy the lucid dreaming machines or the bizarre sculptures, though I did covet them. Instead I gravitated towards the tables awash with zines, read as many as possible, and bought the few that I wanted to read again. Some still resurface from time to time, in a box of paperwork or tucked into in a sheaf of comics, and I normally still endorse the tastes of my past self. These were the days before in the internet (as far as I was concerned, anyway) but they exemplified the things I still seek out today: quirky subjects, good writing, and/or unsettling art. Three very different ones stick in my mind, and I have since managed to track down websites for each. I doubt I could really convey (nor really understand) how they affected me at the time, so I will present them little further introduction:

Schwa - an unsettling comic parody of conspiracy theory and normality, unexpectedly resurfacing on Facebook after many years dormant.

The Journal Of Inconspicuous Design - a zine dedicated to overthinking overlooked aspects of commercial design.

Shark Fear, Shark Awareness - apparently taking the attitude that the only way out of a phobia is through.

This may explain a lot...

I have another comics recommendation today: Subnormality. This one's hard to describe: it's normally funny but it isn't a gag strip, it's packed with detail and references, and it's not afraid to experiment. I want to describe the typical subject matter as 'social commentary in the medium of urban ennui with light surrealism', but fear that makes it sound pretty awful, so maybe I should just offer this strip as an example, in which a chick discusses the nature of fashion with her friend, The Sphynx. The artist also likes making the most of the internet's infinite canvas to do some really cool stuff.

Rather than rambling any more I'll link you to a few favourites:
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
The Atheist Apocalypse
If The News Media Was A Person

( And here's a particularly neat one, under the cut to spare your friend's page )

Oh, and I should warn you that they all have alt-text comments if you hover over them.

I'm going out tonight, and am thus forced to write this at (and in) a reasonable time. I will therefore recommend two essays about the internet:

The first is Whatever made you think it was your data anyway? by Steven Poole. I've been reading his work for ages, and love his dry, cynical and insightful style. The stand out line from this piece is “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”, which is characteristically brutally accurate. If you too enjoy his style, I also heartily recommend his book Unspeak, which looks at the tactical use of euphemism in politics and the media, and is fantastic. I have a copy that I'll happily lend to interested Oxford people.

The second essay is also rather marvellously named: The Social Graph is Neither by Maciej Ceglowski. It's addressing a similar problem from a different perspective: asking what it means to make your relationships public, and what makes for a good social network. I wasn't aware of this guy until someone linked me to him today, but (amongst the technical stuff about his site) he's also written some other interesting stuff about social networking: the influence of fandom in this case, for example.

I read a lot of webcomics. They're ideal for leavening the day, like having sweets in your desk only healthier. I'm assuming that everyone has at least encountered XCKD and Daily Dinosaur Comics, (if you haven't, you should), but there's one more which I enjoy as much but doesn't seem to be quite as ubiquitous: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It's along similar lines as the aforementioned, in that it deals with a wide range of geeky topics and is great. However, this one actually includes proper drawings (sometime a lot of proper drawings), and yet is pretty much daily and consistently really funny. Here are two favourites, which demonstrates a characteristic approach which you might call 'high-concept puerility':



And:



And here are a few others that I've bookmarked, with suggested targets:

• Recommended for tinyjo
• Recommended for sea_bright
• Recommended for bluedevi
• Recommended for timscience
• Recommended for archie
• Recommended for mr_snips

If you like it, there's an LJ feed here: smbc_comic.

Oh, and you know that feeling when you're ploughing happily through the archives of a newly-discovered comic and then suddenly realise that you've been missing a whole other extra joke in (for example) the mouse-over text? If so, you'll thank me for mentioning that there's always a bonus panel if you hover over the red dot at the bottom left of each comic (and note that this doesn't appear on the feed).

Well, congratulations to fiddlingfrog! I'd set up yesterday's recommendation with an eye to following it up today by comparing and contrasting another epic deconstruction that I've been enjoying. Obviously I had done so extremely well, because in the comments fiddlingfrog recommended the very site I had in mind: Reasoning with Vampires. This is a similarly entertaining and obsessive deconstruction of an awful series of books, in this case The Twilight Saga, but stylistically it is very different. Though Dana certainly doesn't shy away from addressing the many problematic themes, she more frequently focusses in on the (also problematic) grammar and language use, and it's all presented in a simple, elegant, and frequently rather gorgeous cut-and-paste style:

Tagged: If it's the Underground sort, it can. rough, angry, honey velvet a new fabric that'll bring you to your knees, rough velvet if you please Velvet short answer: no

Her commentary (and especially her tags) are hilarious and unashamedly reference-dense, and the intersection of grammar pedantry (underpinned by an obvious love of English) and feminism gives me great pleasure.

In other news, in an attempt to snap myself out of my current mental slump I have resorted to extreme measures: shooting myself in the face with electromagnetic radiation specifically designed to emulate the output of a massive fusion reactor from space. (i.e. I bought an SAD lamp.) I have no idea whether it's going to be of any use, but I did feel slightly less sluggish today, so I can but hope... Also, I've just realised that these two paragraphs are tied neatly together with a theme of sunlight, though I'm afraid my lamp causes me neither to sparkle nor catch fire.

My taste in entertainment is quite predictable: I like surprises. As a result, I'm far fonder of, say, The Mighty Boosh (where each episode lurches between shit, baffling and hilarious) than of things that are more consistently good but also more predictable. In fact, I'd sooner watch 'Star Trek: Voyager' on the off-chance that it's going to be one of the entertainingly awful episodes than 'Next Generation' being reliably bland. With this declaration/warning in mind, you may wish to consider listening to Warhorses of Letters

It's the sort of program that you might dream, or that Charlie Brooker might invent: Napoleon's horse and Wellington's horses exchange love letters. It stars Steven Fry, and hot gay horse-on-horse action, and I really can't decide whether it's any good or not. But I am glad that it exists. I like surprises.