Does The Internet Have A Phillip Schofield Filter?

Yesterday was a bad day for reasons I can't really go into. Things happened to somebody very close to me but they're not my grievances to air. All I can say is: kids, if you're watching, don't believe anybody who tells you that life is fair and that hard work is rewarded. It took me far too many years to learn this hard lesson. In fact, if I could rewind my life and give my young self some good advice, it would be this:

Be shrewd and calculating in everything you do. Play the system. Remember that it's not what you know, it's who you know. Be devious and deceitful if you can get away with it. The rest of the time simply keep your mouth shut. Never express an honest opinion. Opinions can come back to hurt you later. Never devote yourself to being good at your work. Push for promotion even if that means hurting the people around you. There are no friends in business. There are just competitors. Keep on the good side of the people above you and make sure that they owe you favours. People beneath you are simply beneath you. Treat them accordingly. Life rewards you if you're a cruel bastard. Knowledge is worth nothing unless you can use it to harm a competitor. Above all know that the only thing that is worth anything is power. Seek power and wield is ruthlessly. And should the people at the top ever realise that you're bad at your job, a cruel and bitter tyrant, make sure you have enough dirt on them that they can only get rid of you by paying you off generously.

Hmm... That sounds depressing cynical but it's genuinely how I see the world. I know I'm not the only one who sees it that way. All the talk in the newspapers about the state of the economy, our hospitals, schools, universities, prisons, police departments, legal system... All of it is meaningless waffle. The truth is that we have a system that widely promotes fools over people good at their job. The system rewards failures. It rewards people who are shrewd enough to play the system. The result is a system that fails us on every front.

I guess that's why I've worked hard to keep myself out of that environment. Despite my cynicism, I'm an idealist but I wouldn't last ten minutes. Mine would be flesh that simply snarls up the gears for a few moments before spitting me out. I don't know how other people do it. Everywhere I look, it seems that witless sycophants persevere. People of quality, depth or personality are made abject; the system shaming them into silence.

For example, I see this morning that the deeply cretinous Phillip Schofield has been mouthing off again. Is there any greater symbol of the national mediocrity than Schofield? Singularly without a talent other than his personability, he is a smiling shill of a human being. He's merely the bland filler between advertising opportunities. I'd consider it a shameful way to live a life; creating nothing other than opportunities for corporations to exert control over the masses. Take, for example, the way he's been defending 'This Morning' after viewers complained about the feature they did about S&M a few weeks ago.

“Obviously I’m not saying the bondage is going to save anyone’s life but what we did was reflect on what everyone else was doing or talking about at the time.

“Everyone went to see the movie and if you look at the stuff we had on there, it was very innocent stuff and also spectacularly when the item had finished the things we had were all sold out in moments.

“So behind those closed, outraged doors of middle England, what they were secretly doing was going to buy this stuff online.”

He's right, of course, except for a couple of very slight flaws in his argument.

1. Not everybody was doing or talking about it at the time. The way he talks about this is truly staggering. He's portraying it as though they were covering a sudden fad for a new type of biscuit. What he's talking about is sadomasochistic sex being heavily marketed by companies who cared about nothing other than making money. Just because a horrible film based on an equally horrible novel is made, doesn't not mean that everybody is our there sticking butt plugs up each other's arseholes. If you want to do that, then that's fine. Just don't be so hypocritical about it.


2. Not everyone went to see the movie. I never want to see the movie. If you want to watch porn, you should be more honest about it and watch something properly erotic. Not something that hints at something you're too uptight to genuinely look at.


3. Nipple clamps are innocent stuff only if the same is true of any other S&M sex toy.


4. Just because you advertised products on one of the nation's main TV channels, to an audience of millions, many of whom are illiterate dopes with more money than sense, it's obvious that whatever shit you're selling would be sold out in moments. It's not proof of your moral righteousness. It's simply the business of large numbers.


5. I'm not of middle England. I wasn't secretly buying this stuff online. I thought the show was vile.

Sigh. I give up. Sometimes it's not worth arguing. The world is beyond reason. One blog doesn't make any difference compared to the hundreds of millions spent in advertising stupidity to the world.

 

On Soup, Steadman and Skills

Monday and a post of a few odds and one barely functioning sod. It's noon and I fear that somebody spiked my coffee with a sedative. The caffeine has still not kicked in. I blame the weather. After a few days spent enjoying some early spring weather, the skies have turned an underpant grey. It's also cold which makes my blood run like soup.

However, trying to rouse myself: I have a new cartoon over at Tim Marshall's new blog, The What and the Why, and a new cartoon here today if I can shake life into myself and get it finished. Or perhaps not if I finish it and like it enough to include in today's magazine submissions. I've been spending a few days trying to collect together all the stray cartoons I've drawn. I have another batch ready to send out.

I was chuffed this morning to see that one of the rare Ralph Steadman newsletters had landed in my inbox. The master is finishing another book of 'boids', which I have to admit, isn't really my cup of tea. As much as I love simply everything that Steadman does, his 'boids' have never really floated my boat. I never bought the first book and I don't see myself buying the second. I think it's really the subject matter. I love Steadman's human figures, those wide eyed loons and tendril fingered deviants. Birds, to me, are just splashes of paint and a step too far into the world of the abstract. It's why I'm pinning my hopes on the news that he's working on a new book called 'The Book of Clever Bastards'. The title sounds promising. I just hope the clever bastards are human clever bastards and not a book about devious plants or ingenious insects.

I had a strange weekend. One of the unlooked-for advantages of honing my programming skills is that my new programming skills can be used for odd jobs. A close friend had a problem uploading data to a website because the data she had was in the wrong format. I said I might be able to help, thinking I could write a little bit of code to input the bad XML and output good XML. It took me about an hour but result worked and my friend was so happy the she had me quickly balloon the app with features. I now face a day when I'll be adding more. Did I say programming was an advantage? Not sure it is. It's the story of my life. All I ever want to do is draw and write and the only thing that life wants out of me is cold rational code.

Post Hobbit Thoughts

Stephen's comment this morning got me thinking about 'The Hobbit'. I recently saw the third part of the trilogy and, though I didn't think it the best of the three, I did think it a fitting end to both the adaptation and Peter Jackson's long sojourn in Middle Earth. I say that having not always been so positive in my thinking. When I first heard about a new big budget version of the 'Lord of the Rings', I felt a mild disappointment. I knew Tolkien would become bigger and even more popular, whereas previously, I knew very few people who'd read the books. I'd read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion at school and had given a small presentation about it to a class who clearly thought I'd gone mad trying to explain the attraction of hobbits and orcs. I'd loved the Radio 4 adaptation of the Rings and also quite enjoyed Ralph Bakshi's animated version, though he'd only made the first half of the trilogy with a hastily tacked on ending completing the story. My main disappointment with Jackson's films was that John Hurt didn't play Strider. Strider was my favourite character but made special because of Hurt's voice and the gnarly version of the Son of Arathorn in the Bakshi version. Despite so many obvious improvements in other respects, Jackson's Strider was never that good.

Yet given those doubts, I loved Jackson's Rings trilogy as I now love Jackson's Hobbit trilogy. In fact, perhaps I've enjoyed the Hobbit more since my expectations were lower and they've raised the source material and given it a more adult tone.

I know I'm one of a minority who think that way but I think it's hard to be balanced when there's been so much mildly warmed crap written about 'The Hobbit'. I accept I was as cynical as most when I heard that they were turning the relatively slim book into three movies, each the best part of three hours to enjoy. Yet it has worked really wonderfully. Somebody had perceptively recognised early on that the book breaks down quite evenly into three sections and that each section ends with a strong third act. The only reason the third film didn't feel so compelling as the first two was that 'The Battle of the Five Armies' was the only one that didn't end with the underdogs fleeing an overwhelming force (the Orcs of the Misty Mountains in part 1, the elves of Mirkwood and then more orcs in Part 2).

There were, of course, some horribly bad decisions along the way. Stephen Fry gave one of his better performances as the Master of Laketown but that didn't deflect from the problem that it was still Stephen bloody Fry in yet again in a big budget film. When will filmmakers realise that he's simply too big a personality to fit into any role? Thank Christ he's not (as yet) in the new Star Wars movies. I go cold at the thought of his mellow tones coming out from behind a Wookiee mask. The same was true (but to an even more galling degree) when the dwarf legions appeared on the hills of Erebor in Part 3. As the dwarves celebrate the arrival of the reinforcements, their leader rides forward. That was Dain Ironfoot or, as we prefer to call him, Billy Connolly. It completely broke my immersion in the film and I wasn't the only one. 'Oh bloody hell,' I heard at least one person mutter.

The overall sense of the films is one of gratitude. They've made me again fall in love with Middle Earth and, particularly, the Middle Earth I love: the only that lies just beyond the familiar stories and names. If it's at all possible, it's that Middle Earth that exists with a history as yet untold.

Clearing Out Old Cartoons

Another of my unfinished cartoons which are finished enough to post here but not finished enough to send out. There's much wrong with this: the hands need redrawing, the ground needs more shading and particles of dirt. The joke is okay but nothing special. Better to clear it from my folder and move on.

Boom Beach is eating my soul...

I'm not convinced that so called 'free to play' games should be legal, though I guess there's no rule in the world that stops bright folk playing us for saps.

I've been addicted to 'Boom Beach' since the day I bought my Samsung Note. It's supposedly a strategy game in which you build a small army which you can use to conquer islands overrun by computer generated force or forces controlled by other players. What's become obvious over the time I've been playing it is that there's actually very little strategy other than the psychological strategy of the creators who have a deep knowledge of what motivates human beings.



I've been playing it for months and I'm now at level 46, my HQ at level 16. That will mean nothing to you unless you play 'Boom Beach' but, to put that into context, the highest players in the world are around level 60+. What's more significant is that I've played it without spending a penny.

Money is a big element in the game. I read somewhere recently that 'Boom Beach' earns the makers hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every day. The money comes from players buying 'diamonds' which are the most powerful currency in the game. You'll notice that all these supposedly 'free-to-play' games require a virtual currency. In some games it's gems and in others it's coins. In 'Boom Beach' it's diamonds and diamonds allow you speed things up because without diamonds, everything takes an eternity to complete.

That delay is a powerful motivation. The psychology of delayed gratification is a strong one, as the best writers often prove. If you've ever read 'Lord of the Rings', you'll notice that Tolkien interleaves three narratives through the final half of the book. It's a brilliant technique which means that he can delay the gratification of giving you a vital piece of plot for the next but two chapters. He does this at the end of nearly every chapter, meaning you're always left on a hook.

The same is true of these games. As you level up, you feel more motivated to carry on and yet the goals become harder to achieve. Or, that is, harder to achieve without paying. In the course of a week, I can earn about 100 free diamonds by simply playing the game. However, I could buy diamonds which cost £3.99 for 500 or £79.99 for 14,000. I don't, of course, but lots of people do. 14,000 diamonds would allow me to level up my base (the game's single most important unit) at least three more times. As it currently stands, I'd probably have to play it for 140 weeks to get that far. That's nearly three years.

Without buying diamonds, you get stuck like I'm currently stuck. Every day, I try to get my resources (wood, stone, metal) to a level where I can upgrade my base. Every day, I'm raided by players and I lose all my resources. I often wonder how many of those players have paid the £79.99. It's been going on for months now and I'm at the point where I wonder why I keep going.

The reason I keep going, I suppose, is because I've already invested time into the game. Once somebody is locked in a pattern of behaviour, it's hard for them to break out of it. I'm locked into a pattern of behaviour. I need to quit now and spend that time reading a book or going for a walk because I should realise that at an elevated level, the mathematics of the game have already been carefully modelled by very bright people who also understand human psychology. The game, like so many others of the same type, is bright and cheerful and you feel like you're having fun playing it. Yet it's also unbeatable. There is no goal other than the goal of making me return to it and (had I cash) encouraging me to pay money for a completely virtual reward. More than that, it reveals how easy it is to manipulate people, break their free will and turn them into drones. Deep down, the whole culture of these games is very sinister. It reveals the mean truth of consumerism. The system tempts us, flatters us, sweetens us, courts us, romances us, but in the end, it only really wants to consume us entirely.

 

A Cartoon Not Fit For Anywhere Else

Going through my folder of the cartoons I've drawn in the last fortnight I'm removing all the chaff. This is chaff. I like the idea. I don't like the execution, though, in truth, I probably haven't even finished it. It was probably something I drew quickly thinking I'd go back and draw it properly. However, it's not worth throwing any time into it. It's the kind of cartoon I like drawing but no bugger would ever think to buy.

Milk, Ford, Cartoons.

Yesterday was one of those 'bad' days summed up by my going to Tesco to buy some milk, only to find myself standing outside five minutes with a woman tapping on my shoulder.

'Oh,' she said. 'It's you'.

'It is me,' I replied, thinking that finally somebody has recognised me my by witty turn of phrase or the way I famously wear my trousers baggy. I've been blogging and writing years so it would great if somebody finally recognised me.

'Yes,' she said. 'I've been following you around Tesco...'

'Ah,' I thought, 'a stalker too... Wonderful.'

'... around Tesco mopping up the milk you've been trailing.' She pointed to my feet. Sure enough, they were covered by the white stuff.

'Oh Christ,' I muttered and immediately inspected my rucksack which was also leaking milk. Milk was everywhere. Milk was down my coat, the back of my trousers, trailing down the path, through the automatic doors, and into the show where I could see the polished shine of the newly mopped floor.

That was the kind of day I had. Nothing went right for me from problems on the Mac, problems getting paid for the job I do (problems, believe it or not, with the Nigerian elections mean that, across the globe, I'm still waiting to be paid). There were problems galore, great and small. And then, later in the evening, I heard reports that Harrison Ford has been critically injured in a plane crash.

I don't believe there are any real film stars remaining in the world except for Harrison Ford. I'm a huge fan of Ford because he's not Hollywood. He seems to share my outlook on life and is realistically difficult to get on with. I also like him not because of Star Wars or Indiana Jones. I love the so called 'lesser' films. I love the Blade Runner, Air Force One, K19: The Windowmaker (great under-looked movie), The Mosquito Coast (truly great novel too), Witness, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, The Fugitive... I adore Frantic for reasons to long to go into. Even my favourite Indiana Jones movie is the one not cited as the best: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Movies just don't get better than the Ford/Connery combo. Just a day ago, I was cheering because Ford had agreed to start in the Blade Runner sequel.

Thankfully, it seems he's battered but okay. But that news came early in a new day. Yesterday was behind me.

Today: I'd like to post my piece about caricature, finish writing my app that automates the process of submitting cartoons to magazines. I've also got about 10 new cartoons to submit and I need to organise them properly and do some last minute cleaning up before I caption them. I'd also like to get The Gag Machine properly working for OSX. I also need to head out to Tesco again. Need more milk.

I Hate Hate Hate Hate Macs

It's take me two afternoons to remember why I absolutely bloody loathe Macs. I've been allowed access to one just to get my software running under OSX. The process is simple. I run this command:

mono thegagmachine.exe

Simple. Mono is the miracle software which turns my Windows program into something that runs under OSX (or, incidentally, Linux).

What's not so simple is getting that working from a simple command.

There's supposedly a simply way of embedding everything into an 'app'. An app on Mac OSX looks like an icon but is really a directory. If you right click on many 'apps', you can ask to see their package contents, which are a number of directories containing all the files, graphics and other resource files. There's also a 'simple' way of telling the Mac to run a script inside that directory structure when you double click on the icon.

So, in theory: I create the directory structure. I tell the package to run 'launch' when it's been opened. 'Launch' is just a script containing 'mono thegagmachine.exe'.

And that'it. And what's more amazing is that it worked. Wonderful!

However, I needed to update my bundle (that's what you call this .app directory structure) with a newer version of my Windows exe file. So I duplicate the gag.app (which, remember is just a directory). In the copy, I replaced my exe file. Should be simple. When I double click on the script inside the .app structure, everything runs. So I guess the script is correct.

Only, when I click on the main icon, I now get nothing. Just a momentary bouncing icon and nothing more.

Two afternoons it's taken me and I seem to be getting further from the solution.

I hate Macs. Beautiful machines but even doing the simplest thing takes hours of research and a damn lot of luck.

 

Bibi and Mitch

A Forced Blogpost

I'm finding it hard to muster the enthusiasm to blog, though the writing comes easy. Yesterday I wrote a longish essay about the politics of caricature which is so long that I haven't the time to polish it and get my words just right. Yet it's not just time I lack. I have two cartoons I've drawn but can't find the enthusiasm to frame, caption and post. It's incentive I'm missing. I sometimes feel like if I got hit by a bus, the blog would continue on for one month before my webhost would delete it. And it and I would pass into oblivion with barely anybody noticing. I see the traffic arrive for people wanting tips of pen cleaning or Unity programming or 'how to submit cartoons to Private Eye'. But they all pass by, my advice given but rarely a 'thank you' or 'have a nice day' left. It's the way of the world, they say, but it's not the way of my world.

Yep. Feeling a bit sorry for myself today. Feel like I need a bit of a boost. A little bit of luck. Some damn feedback for all my efforts.

I spent yesterday converting my Gag Machine for Mac OSX. I expected the conversion process to be hell but was pleasantly surprised at how easy that was. I was also surprised how much of it I could do on my PC before I had to take it to the Mac given that I've only got very limited access to one of those Supreme Beings.

It's all done via the beauty of Mono, which if you're technically minded is a development framework which mimics the operation of Microsoft's .Net framework but under the Mac operating system. If you're not technically minded, it's just powerful mojo that makes magic happen. The result is a programme that looks fairly close to the Windows version and has all the same functionality. I might put it live today. I might not. I don't suppose it really matters.

The Weasel and the Woodpecker

So far this week, I've drawn about three cartoons and written a Windows program to record all my cartoon submissions. Not that I've submitted many this week -- four or five went to The Spectator yesterday -- but the program is central to my vow to take my cartooning more seriously. My problem is that I've never been much of a 'submitter' and, as they say, you have to play the game to stand a chance of winning a prize.

When the program is completely finished, I might upload it here for free for anybody who might want to use it but even as I type that I have my monetary angel is banging his head against my right shoulder as if to tell me to stop being so damn generous. But, frankly, I don't think there are enough cartoonists or writers in the world who would want to buy it or even would find a need for it. The main reason I've written it is to also help archive my cartoons. I lose too many to computer glitches that I'm trying to make more use of online storage. So, every time I finish a cartoon, I add it to the database which archives a copy to Dropbox. With all my cartoons listed, I can (for the moment 'in theory') simply click a button and generate an email based on the publisher details I've already entered and with the cartoons embedded into the email.

When it's finished, I might give it away, might keep it for myself or I'll ask a few dollars for a copy and stick it over on The Digital Nib. Unlike my previous program, The Gag Machine, this isn't a long term project. It's more of a useful tool I needed and realised I could program in a day. And I did program its basic functionality inside a day. I was writing it when my laptop died on Sunday.

The loss of the laptop has be surprisingly hard. The faded/yellowed/'cooked' label on the back would say I've had the laptop about four years but for about three of those years, I've not switched it on for fear that it would burn out. However, since my writing my 'review' and claiming that I'd never use it again, I'd started to use a thermal cooler beneath the laptop. It didn't do a great deal but it did make it usable for short periods. With a slightly cooler lap, I'd started to use the laptop at least once a day and I'd got it just how I wanted it. I was programming more. Writing more. And then, within about two weeks, it has died with an inevitable smell of burnt solder. It died exactly how it died the first time it blew its video card. I now hate Dell with a passion. That laptop cost me so much to buy, thinking that buying from the XPS range would make it a long term laptop, only to have it now burn out twice. Only this time I've not asked for a repair. I'm not investing another penny into that machine or that company. The XPS 1340 was a horrible machine that should never have gone to market.

I should really get a new (non-Dell) laptop but they're so damn pricey and my attempts to monetise the blog have come to naught. I started my new drive to earn from blogging on the 4th February. It's now the 3rd of March and in one month I've managed to raise a whopping £1.06. That's £1.06 reward for 12 cartoons, 2 Photoshops and 21,000 words. Okay, that's not one of my most productive months but it's surely worth more than £1.06.

I'm not pleading poverty here (though, perhaps, I guess I am) but this is a example of the new internet economy in which the big guys make millions while the rest of us scramble around to earn pennies. The reality is probably that I should really blog less and devote my time to selling my cartoons or my software. It's galling that I think that but even more galling that my past efforts have come to naught. Take this morning's cartoon as an example. If I type 'George Galloway cartoon' into Google, one of mine appears at the top of the search results. That's even before you go into Google image search.

That's really weird and yet deeply satisfying.

The three other cartoons are by heroes of mine: Peter Brookes and Martin Rowson. My cartoon (below top) was drawn years ago when I was first starting out. I don't think it's anywhere as good as today's (below bottom) Galloway cartoon which, I hope, is not as good as the next one I draw.

Yet the cartoon is there. Multiply all those years of effort and count up the many hundreds of cartoons I've drawn, hundreds of thousands of words (I once calculated millions for all the blogs I've written), all of which is still online: and all I have to show for that this month is £1.06.

Forgive me if I sound cynical about the internet. The truth, for me at least, is that I draw a cartoon which hardly anybody looks at whilst Twitter is today dominated by a picture of a woodpecker carrying a weasel on its back. And if a woodpecker carrying a weasel isn't a metaphor for the great democratization of media production then I don't know what is.

A George Galloway Cartoon

The Same Old

I leapt out of bed this morning. New day. New week. A new month. New resolutions and a new determination to 'do something'. That 'something' was to submit some cartoons I've been drawing over the last week or so. I had a 'good lead' in the form of an email address. So, I'd specifically drawn cartoons that would appeal to my lead. What can I say? It was the right market for these cartoons and I've been focused on doing the best I could.

So, this morning: final clean up on the cartoons. Nicely captioned. Then packed into a PDF. Email written. Just about to paste the email address into the bar and I thought... Better just check that the email is still current. So I did a quick check.

The person no longer works for the publication.

Damn.

So, I began to search for their successor. After about half an hour, I made the breakthrough and I had their name. A new name for the old job of cartoon editor. However, despite another hour long search, I could not find a single email address. So, as it stands, I have five really nice cartoons into which I've poured my body and soul, yet I don't have a place to send them.

All that talk about 'newness' suddenly feels so dumb. I'm stuck back in the old rut where my enthusiasms quickly run dry.

On a more positive note: I mean to blog more this week but, today, I'll be running around doing about a dozen jobs.

Laptop

Well it died. That's why I'm posting this from my tablet and hating every moment of typing with predictive tits.

NEWSREADER BUY DELL. I mean that to say 'never' but damp predictive tits changes everything I write. Anyway, the  laptop was running hot as I tried to use it for a little coding. Written a nice little programme or was doing until something began to smell of bumming. BUMMING? I hate predictive text. Burning. Bud I get.  Burning.  Burns v.  Burton I get. Can never type the same world twice. It smelt of bur ING

Dawn.  I tried to type "damn".

Dan. 

Dan.

Just ridiculous.  What would my blog be if I wrote in on here?

My Cartoon About Mosul Museum

Done and Done

A brief update since I'm exhausted. After about 36 hours of frantic work and not enough sleep, I've got all my websites up and running. The Digital Nib is also back, which is a small relief. Hopefully, I'm now at the stage where I only have small housekeeping tasks to finish before I can consider that I've fully recovered from my own stupidity.

I took a break last night to draw a cartoon which I've donated to The What and the Why. I have to say that I think it's one of my favourite cartoons and written with the aid of my invaluable Gag Machine. It's a bit tiny in the sidebar and I might have posted a copy here to congratulate me for the quality crosshatching. However, my upload still isn't working. It's next on my list of problems to fix.

 

Taking a break from Linux hell

First of all: if you've written to me in the past few months and I've not replied, then I'm really sorry. I discovered yesterday that my email server was plain not working. It was a lottery if emails were getting through.

Things should now be better or they will be better if I can conquer Linux (again).

It's not that I hate Linux. If I had the time, I'd probably love learning its intricacies. However, I don't have the time and my method of working is often to search the internet for solutions and then try them out. I guess it's my approach to most things. I think it's the best way of learning. Work in small steps. Things sink in but in a way that's organic and natural. It's not like reading a 1000 page manual and thinking you understand it. Figure things out from the inside. Best way to learn.

Anyway, so far I have this blog back, but with a few things 'under the hood' to fix. The archive will be next (i.e. the old Spine website) and then I'll work on the other websites I've hosted here in the past. The FTP server is proving a pain to configure but, hopefully, once that's done, then the rest should be less 'brain work' and simple typing, clicking and dragging.

This new server is a bit different to the last. Firstly, I've upgraded it, doubling the memory since it's now doing more. I realised yesterday that things hadn't been working right for weeks. I was using a simple email service which forwarded all emails to various addresses to a single account. However, this meant that Yahoo and Google thought it was a server spamming their email servers. They have a *very* low tolerance, it seems, for small servers running email. I needed a proper email server installed on the machine, so that's what I've done along with a few other things including, for the first time, a proper control panel. I've also enabled backups just in case all of this goes horribly wrong again in the future.

My Mistake

You might have noticed that the site disappeared for a few hours. I did something really really stupid. It meant that my Linux server was completely messed up and I've had to start again. If you're reading this, I've made a start. Please bear with me.

Lessons learnt:

1. Never take the cheap option when buying server space. Don't opt out of regular backups just to save a pound a month. I'm an idiot.

2. Don't play around with Linux commands that you don't really understand.

 

A Brief Descent Into Semi-Colon Hell

A visit from news royalty this morning: a comment from the sorely missed Tim Marshall. My sister (a real news junkie) gasped when I told her, however, his visit also puts a slight shot across my bow given what I'd already written for today.

I was going to point you in the direction of a couple of interesting reads over at his new website, The What and The Why, but I was also going to drop a warning about the second piece by a guest writer talking about Saudi Arabia. I was going to warn you to push on past the opening paragraph. It's a fascinating article but begins in semi-colon hell:

While pressure was building around the situation with Putin and Ukraine; the possibility of Grexit was on the cards – creating a possible pincer on Turkey between IS and Russian influence; world leaders and country representatives headed to Riyadh to pay their respects to the new King Salman bin Abdul Aziz.

The reason I noted this was last night I was asked to proof-read a letter a friend had written for a job promotion. They'd used a semi-colon where they should have used a colon. I pointed this out and they questioned if I was right. I was naturally a bit affronted. A published writer, blogging for ten years, millions of words under my belt and with a PhD in English Literature and I was being asked if I knew how to use a colon! What was worse: I immediately started to panic. Did I really know how to use a colon? I had to go on the internet to check.

As it happened, I did know how to use a colon but the whole drama reaffirmed my own writing paranoia, which was brought into focus when I started to read the Saudi Arabia article last night. I just couldn't get past that opening.

Now, despite how this sounds, I'm not a pedant about the rules of writing. I don't really know the rules that well. I've always been more of a gut instinct writer. I've always encourage people to write from their gut and to ignore the rules they were taught at school. Our schooldays make bad writers of us all. They introduce things we never need such as the semi-colon. My mantra is: write how you speak but then edit how you read.

I have a love-hate relationship with the semi-colon and realise that admitting this is an odd thing to confess. Whatever next? A slight entanglement with an asterisk? A romantic weekend with flirty ampersand? The fact is: I adore a well-placed semi-colon but I tend not to use them myself. They're the harbinger of worse things. They're a form of gateway punctuation. You begin by occasionally dropping a semi-colon at a middle-class dinner party but then you find yourself using them every weekend just to cheer yourself up. Before you know it, you're a punctuation junkie scoring apostrophes and em dashes from dealers in some rat infested hovel in the backstreets of Manchester.

Semi-colons are the most pretentious form of punctuation. They're the most elegant when used correctly but abject expressions of self-importance when flaunted where they don't belong. You'd rarely (if ever) find a writer such as Hemingway use a semi-colon. They are not the stuff of his brusque prose. In fact, I'd offer a my hunch that 'better' writers rarely use them at all or those that do have a style which is distinguished by its sheer refinement. Whenever I've taught English to students, my first advice was always to learn to use the comma correctly. Commas can rarely be overused (though, of course, there are, exceptions). It can take years to learn to correctly use the comma and, even then, there's rarely a need to go further and adopt the semi-colon. Writers with a real ear for the flow of language can sense where pauses naturally occur in a line. The comma is really all they need and even then used sparingly. A master of writing, Kurt Vonnegut, once gave this wise piece of advice:

'Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.'

Not using the semi-colon is really the best advice since it is often misused simply because people don't quite know how to use it. There are pedants who will give you the strict definition of when and how to use one, though I don't take the pedant's line. The way I think about semi-colons is that they simply introduce a pause to your flow; a break in the narrative slightly longer than a comma but not as absolute as a full stop. Perhaps I've just misused one there and this too would reveal something significant about my character. I don't consciously use semi-colons myself and when I do I always get into a knot of self-loathing.

But back to the offending paragraph. It wasn't written by Tim Marshall but by a reader who also happens to be a solicitor. I began to wonder if that's significant. Solicitors live in a world of language yet they're not trained in language. Solicitors are often the abusers of language. They treat words like station masters racking up train carriages in a yard; locking clauses together with the iron link of the semi-colon. The offending prose is overwritten, destroyed by the misuse of the semi-colon. It's not a trivial misuse. What the writer only really needed was the simple comma. So why didn't he do that? Because semi-colons convey a message. It's like wearing an old school tie or a pin stripe suit. The semi-colon is saying much more than simply 'take a breath'. You can read a lot about a person's character by their use of the semi-colon. It's telling us that the writer is educated and believes in their education. They believes in their status. It is all posture. Horrible. Brutal. Plain bad writing. It's also a real shame. The article is an interesting insight into something you rarely read about. Just skip the opening paragraph and bite you lip whenever you see a semi-colon.

An Extremely Erotic Cartoon