You wait, time passes

Crikey, its been ages since I last did a quality blog post. Its the time, I just don't have it, you know, to really sit down in front of the old keyboard and find something new and interesting to write about. I can't just squirt out any old crap.

The other day, via Astrid off of Facebook, I discovered the joy at is Hyperbole and a Half. Its this blog where the author write memoirs, stories of things that happened to her, illustrated using MS Paint.

Its hilarious and almost had me weeing myself. Its her brutal honesty that wins through and also how she shamelessly wants to win at the internet.

I fear if I tried such a thing, friends and loved one's would advise me against it in a matter of seconds.

Anyhoo, There was an interview with the author elsewhere on the web where she says it can take 16 hours to do a blogpost. I understand, I wish I could do that, but I'm inevitably dragged away to do something else, washing up, work, get off the sodding internet, etc. She writes around two blogposts a month and cos its pure internet comedy gold, she has the 1240th most popular blog of the internet, with a technorati authority of 526, by way of comparison, my old Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes barely made the top 100,000 blogs and only had an authority of 126, back in the day when Technorati authority meant something.

Anyhoo, so right now I have a wee bit of time to myself, and instead of practising away at my guitar and videoing poor cover versions of The Just Joans and Moustache of Insanity songs, I'm going to revisit a subject I covered a few weeks back on this here blog, and that is the website All Our Ideas.

For those who haven't been paying attention, AllOurIdeas.org is

...a platform that enables groups to collect and prioritize ideas in a transparent, democratic, and bottom-up way. It’s a suggestion box for the digital age.

You can post a question, provide some possible answers for people to chose and then if people suggest other answers they become part of it too.

I set up a wee half-arsed thing about civil liberties here, its had fifty one votes so far, undoubtedly a large proportion of them came from the same person. See, whilst the site is a great idea, it doesn't quite provide a hosepipe of traffic, that's up to me, the user, putting links on twitter and facebook and here, and I can only muster 51 votes.

Or in the case of deciding whether to play guitar or learn java or some other life-enriching activity, I mustered 54 votes.

And here follows the wee quality bit of this blog post, wondering how popular AllOurIdeas is for other people, here's a wee table of polls that I've found and how many respondents they've had.

Link	Respondents	What
chrislifeenrich	54	Chris's life enriching project
ukcivlib	51	Most pressing civil liberties issue in the UK
nameksp	865	Craigslist Knowledge share project name
funniestword	437	What's the funniest word
sipprellepoll1	3722	What should be Scott's most important focus as your new Congressman?
drogasmexico	21	¿Cómo solucionar los problemas relacionados con el tráfico ilegal de drogas en México?
ilsp	18	What should be the topic of the International Legislator Survey Project in 2011?
studentgovernment	5564	Which do you want more from the student government?
improve_allourideas	494	Which do you want more from allourideas?
innovation	5246	What future innovation does society most need?

That's all I can find right now, there's probably loads more people using the site, but I can't find them, what I can find however its lots of people talking about the site, lots of social media news write-ups.

If more people are to use the site, which would be a neat thing, then surely some kind of easily accessible index would be good. Sure, some people will want their surveys kept quiet, if its just a wee local thing or a corporate employee only survey, you don't want folk for all over Asia voting, but if it something where you want as many people as possible to vote to get the broadest range of opinions, then maybe, instead of an index, some kind of hosepipe site would be neat where you just click through voting on lots of different polls and surveys.

I dunno.

Anyhoo, if you're reading this, having somehow found this page via google, and you know of any other allourideas pages that I don't have on my wee list, then let me know in the comments. Aye.

Relevance in XKCD

I think I had a very similar conversation last night.

Graphs on XKCD

A truly great strip today on the internet's finest webcomic XKCD

But his numbers are wrong on some of the graphs.

Dilbert strips for my life (part 1)

I felt a strange urge to track down this Dilbert strip today

Extra-terrestrial TV watching

This is rather neat, how far out our TV transmissions are propagating in the universe.

How long they'll take to get here once they realise we're a threat is another matter.

Unless, of course, they're already here.

UK Web & Mini Comix Thing 2009

IMG_6621
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Hi, my name is Chris Gilmour, the artist formerly behind the spectacularly successful art website 'Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes', earlier today after a morning's protest marching, I took myself along to the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing at Queen Mary University in Mile End as a wanderabouterer.

There were lots of people there and I was feeling pretty quiet, but oh there were sights to be seen.

I was accosted by a chap offering sweets and trying to sell a comic called My Name Is Chipmunk, it seemed quite cool, some young and nubil superheroine fighting crime in a latex costume, and then having a shower by page 17. Not much in the way of a website to link to though.

There was a stage at one side of the great hall and some kind of question and answeer session going on, but with broken microphones so no one in the audience could hear anything. Or maybe it was just me going deaf.

So many tables set up selling comics and things and stuff, I tried to find something familiar to hold on to and stumbled upon OddFish, its this hilarious webcomic full of truly dreadful puns told between the two main characters of Lovecraft the octopus and Howard the pufferfish. Its drawn in a rather warn pencilyshady kind of way.

I could have sworn I saw Saz of t'internet, but kooky comic people all look the same. The whole homemade vibe going down was breath taking.

Last week I tried to brief myself of which comicy folk would be there and what their work was like. My Cardboard Life looked cool online, but then to see the actual comics were really card glued on paper, that was beautiful.

I think I saw whoever draws Bunny, but I didn't linger for too long in case some kind of conversation started.

On the stage were tables set out with paper and felt tips, so I drew a few naked chick drawing from memory, but I got scared that people might see them so I hid them under piles of comics, and tried stalking people.

According to the program websitey thing, John Allison from Scary Go Round was there, but I could place his table. Then I overheard the chap who previously drew the Beaver and Steve webcomic mention that RStevens who does Diesel Sweeties was there, so I did a few more passes of the tables until I'd located him.

Very shocked to discover that Clango has feet, but we chatted briefly and I bought socks.

Slightly better write-up by other people
here
here
here
and here

Usually when I point out these things, I never see the other half again.

Maybe they read this blog more than they read other people's?

Once again, I feel kinship with the mighty Dilbert.

ill theatre returns

theatre159
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Have done a special trilogy of Ill Theatre drawings over on my personal blog as webcomic site. here here and here

Read through them all starting here

Who would?

Its a little flattering and at the same time scary, people searching google for Chris Gilmour's diary and then finding it. Wouldn't be so worrying if people left comments saying things like "Hey its's Shiva/Lisa/Arlene/etc, was wondering what happened to you, we should go for coffee, email me at shiva/lisa/arlene/etc@hotmail/google/yahoomail.com/co.uk" or whatever. Or add yersel to my Twitter feed. But nope. Just this feeling of a goldfish bowl like existance, living in the matrix, doing party tricks to keep folk entertained.

So.. here goes

One of the most important lessons learnt from ex-girlfriends was from the ex-wife, I think her phrase was "I don't care what the fucking spreadsheet says, we're not going to start going out again."

Which is a shame cos I did the coolest spreadsheet ever this morning.

Other cool spreadsheets and graphs include the one I sprung today when a coworker said "All you ever talk about is...".

Actually no, I talk obsessively about several things and if you look carefully at this pie chart, there are things I talk about far more. Messageboards for instance, I'll accept that at 25% of the time I'm 'always' talking about messageboards.

The one thats shameless, shameless

Went to London Bloggers Meetup.

Arrived on my own without usual meetup companion Aref-Adib and as a result sat on my own in a corner for the first half hour or so, scribbling notes about the sponsored goodie bag.

Berocca make vitamin drinks and engery tablets, the goodie bag contain a fine branded glass (about 400ml), one branded biro, a tube of the Berocca effervescent tablets (orange flavour) and a pad of branded post-it notes.

I'm sceptical about the effervescent tablets, one side of the pack says "Taking more than your recommended daily intake may be harmful", the other side of the pack says each tablet contains 860% of your recommended daily allowance of some of the vitamins.

It is a fine branded glass they provide and the branded post-it notes make my mind boggle at the possibilities. But the warnings and information on the packaging are a bit ambiguous. Its like if a pack of razor blades says how sharp the blades are and then warns you against cutting yourself.

Anyhoo, Jaz and Lisa both recommended taking the stuff, so I have done. The fizzy bubbly goodness has burnt my lip, but I think the goodness will do as a surrogate breakfast for me tomorrow morning. It is orange flavour so I think it counts as one of my five daily portions (along with two cups of coffee, bacon roll and microwave meal).

I am well healthy me.

Met the following bloggers:-

Andy from the marketing blagger
Chris from qwghlm
Andy from Distributed Research
Jure from Zemanta
Lisa from u-handbag
Krista from Londelicious
Julius he's an event manager
Jaz from ShinyRed
Tom the Flashboy from The Metro

Also I think I glanced at:-

Carmen from Green is Not a Colour
Annie from the Going Underground
Peter Marshall from My London Diary

I can has world donimation?

Ill Theatre strip from several months back


Today's XKCD


What do I win? C'm'ere girl, we got drinkin' and DVDin' to do.

ill theatre narative

It was a nice run of strips, two week's worth before I lost my nerve.

To be honest when the storyline started I didn't really have much of a clue, just needed to get out of reality, and into some other world where things happen.

Of course, ever since last year I had this image in my head of leading an army of giant spiders to castle Bowlie whilst it burned, but I wasn't sure how to get there, just random exploring of the internet and chatting to Robster on MSN.

Damned MSN, there's something up with my internet at home, still can't get on MSN or check my email, well, I can use a webmessenger sometimes and I can pick up the email on my fancy new phone, but its not quite the same.

So when the call to return to Bowlie came through, it was a bit of a windfall for the webcomic storyline, seeing old chums again, talking to folk for the first time in years. Like the time travel webcomic from last month, there were tears in mine eyes.

Alas the internet is very different from real life. Some bits looks familiar and with the online presense some bits of real life feel more familiar. It was a weird evening when I wandered back into The Buffalo Bar, the place has the same colourscheme as the messageboard, same folk too, kind of.

Soon the crushing loneliness set in again, its still me under this mask, with the same fears and anxieties, and the same crazinesses.

God knows where the storyline was going, getting up to the blogger balloons to find them empty or something, crazy adventures floating around. I had this idea of visiting the secret garbage continent in the Pacific, welding together a load of lumps of plastic and starting a new civilisation.

Alas, I lost it. As an avatar of the matrix between real life and bowlie, I lost it, thought too hard and couldn't face going on.

It was only after I posted the thing with the balloons, that I realised I was back to the falling motif that I've used a couple of times before on ill theatre. Its like a default state.

So from the artist's side of things, it was a warm and rich world of castles, giant spiders, dinosaurs and balloons, familiar faces and unexplained stuff. But god knows what it looked like to a casual observer or even folk with some depth of perception, was there enough hinted at to flesh it all out. Whilst possibly only folk who were party to an obscure bowlie thread months ago would have got the spiders thing, what would anyone else make of it, just surreal adventure?

Where now?

Back in the office / factory / car, looking down at my coffee and trudging along until the next spark of inspiration carries me away.

Thanks for coming anyway, and thanks.

Sometimes comic strips

I have vague memories of being Shelley Winters here


And I think this XKCD was one of my posts back when I was doing the illegal and almost got me fired Linn Products blog


In other news...

I'm getting rather psyched about this weekend. I'm going to get really drunk, make a fool of myself, lose lots of friends, sleep on a street corner, drink coffee in the 13th Note and spend lots of money.
Yay.

Vague memories last night, trying to get to sleep, of being at IndieTracks and getting a train ride in the middle of the night with someone, but I can't remember who. I worked through in my ead about thirty people from that scene, before coming to the conclusion that it might have been Robbie, but probably wasn't, was it a girl?

Jack

Its getting like this

I am... Pron-Ninja

Once again, webcomics depict my way of life



Alas, even as I write here, my post it note pron site is getting more and more plaudits from across the blogsphere. One day someone interesting from real life will reach out cos of it, one day. I'm in the top 500,000 most popular blogs in the world now, only 499,999 to go. Boing Boing must be quaking in their boots.

mini-post #01

Its not only me pursuing the indiepop genocide, Cat and Girl too, I would be cat.