• Astronomers name ‘world of chaos’
  Sanity prevails: new dwarf planet and moon NOT to be named Xena and Gabrielle, but Eris and Dysnomia.
  (tags: space)
• The Wicked
  Because sometimes you just want a bit of choral-inflected cinematic crunching industrial metal from Helsinki.
  (tags: music)
• US Iran report branded dishonest
  The UN nuclear watchdog has protested to the US government over a report on Iran’s nuclear programme, calling it “erroneous” and “misleading”… a Western diplomat called it “deja vu of the pre-Iraq war period”.
  (tags: pol war)
• Black Daniel
  Lou Reed, Iggy and about another dozen indie touchstones mixed in here, shot through with some electroglam.
  (tags: music)
• Cancer Herald » Oral sex can cause cancer
  The same virus that is behind uteral cancer is now thought to be linked to tonsillary cancer: changed sexual habits and more oral sex are part of the problem. JUST TAKE AWAY ALL THE THINGS I LOVE, WORLD.
  (tags: med)
• Silicon-Based Lifeforms:
  Dr. Tom Gold, emeritus professor of astronomy at Cornell University, believes that organisms based on silicon may live far below the surface of the Earth.
  (tags: sci weird)

Claudio Pinto, 48 is making a living out of shows where he pops his eyes out… He reckons he can pop both eyes 95% out of their sockets. “It is a pretty easy way to make money.

“I can pop my eyes out four centimetres each, it is a gift from God, I feel blessed.”

Usually it’s a bad day when I get woken up three hours after I went to bed by the bloody postman leaning on the doorbell. But bless his medically-fascinating little head, he’d brought a box of music. I’ve been acquainted with Scott Booker, the manager of the Flaming Lips, for years (which is how I became an occasional judge for the Plug Awards). Haven’t heard from him in a while — making Western society a better place takes a lot of time from the likes of us, I’ll have you know. And then this box turns up, with a note inside saying, “Just realised I haven’t sent you any music in ages.”

And it’s a box stuffed with CDs. Some Flaming Lips stuff, including, my god, a seven-inch picture disc, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the 80s. What looked like a promotional pre-release of a Devendra Banhart thing. A bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of. And the remastering of MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS that was released the other month, which I hadn’t got around to buying for myself yet.

There’s a lot of shit things about this job, including but not limited to the constant deadline pressure. But you do get to meet some good and interesting people.

Am currently at pub. Things will probably be light here again today, as, in addition to finishing a couple of jobs, I need to set up the wireless fold-out keyboard I just bought for the new phone. Which in turn will mean I can set up the phone’s built-in RSS reader. The phone that I’m currently listening to mp3s on. I’m going to be living on this thing.

• Wasteland – One Hundred Years After The Big Wet
  The first issue of the fine new sf comics serial WASTELAND is now free to download.
  (tags: comics)
• Bill Sienkiewicz
  Groundbreaking comics artist starts blogging.
  (tags: comics)

I have been reminded that it’s September 13 today, which is, of course, the anniversary of the moon being blasted out of Earth’s orbit.

At LISTD.NET.

• Brian Bendis interviews Patton Oswalt
  (tags: people)
• Steve Irwin fans ‘in revenge attacks’ on stingrays
  Dead stingrays with their tails cut off have been found in Australia, sparking concern that fans of naturalist Steve Irwin may be avenging his death.
  (tags: crime mad retard+parade climb+on+top+of+a+stingray+and+it+will+kill+your+ass)
• Man starts fire by roasting bear
  The fire raged so strongly (bears are clearly a good fuel source) that it melted vinyl shutters and the siding of his neighbour’s property.
  (tags: weird)
• Photos of funeral ground stir anger
  When Dhun Baria learned her mother’s corpse would take at least a year to decompose, she slipped into the grounds — a place few Zoroastrians are allowed to enter — and took photographs and video footage that have shocked her community.
  (tags: death religion)
• She’s Her Own Twin
  In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at least two genetically distinct types of cells — or, in other words, someone meant to be a twin. But while in the mother’s womb, two fertilized eggs fuse, becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes — two separate strands of DNA.
  (tags: med weird)
• one shot tutorial – a photoset on Flickr
  How to make a zine out of a single sheet of paper
  (tags: comics)

Okay, so, we know what STUDIO 60′s pilot deals with. But what’s the show about? Someone in the pilot says, in fact, “let’s talk about what we’re talking about.” Good idea.

Sorkin himself calls it “a valentine to television,” and talks about his love for the form: basically, his love for the idea that he can mount a play that several million people will watch (roughly) all at once. Which is of a piece with the late British TV writer Dennis Potter’s notion of television as “common culture.” The idea that television speaks to us all, and becomes part of the ongoing human conversation.

I’m cheating a little there. Potter was talking about the death of television as common culture when I heard him use the term. It came both from a deeply held conviction that art is part of public service broadcasting, and that public service broadcasting allowed writers to speak in art to the masses. His vision of vocation as television writer isn’t a million miles away from Umberto Eco’s view of the intellectual role in Italy: in both cases, it is that the engaged intellectual should be compelled to report to the people. Eco wrote in newspapers, and Potter wrote in television. What Potter was bemoaning — and by Christ that man could moan — was, in those pre-Web days, a common culture fractured by VHS, early timeshift tv, and the beginnings of satellite and cable service. Which was, of course, funded by advertising. And populist programming sells the most advertising. The small-s socialist, Reithian dream of, at the very least, middle-brow broadcasting discussed in offices and shops and schools the next day pretty much went away.

Potter said, in 1993, the year before he died: “Thirty years ago, under the personal pressures of whatever guilt, whatever shame and whatever remaining shard of idealism, I found or I made up what I may unwisely have termed a sense of Vocation. I have it still. It was born, of course, from the already aborted dream of a common culture, which has long since been zapped into glistening fragments by those who are now the real if not always recognised Occupying Powers of our culture.”

And who are those occupying powers? Judd Hirsch’s rant at the top of STUDIO 60 1.01:

“We’re all being lobotomized by the country’s most influential industry which has thrown in the towel on any endeavor that does not include the courting of 12-year-old boys. And not event the smart 12-year-olds, the stupid ones, the idiots, of which there are plenty thanks in no small part to this network.

“…there’s always been a struggle between art and commerce, but now I’m telling you art is getting its ass kicked, and it’s making us mean, and it’s making us bitchy, and it’s making us cheap punks and that’s not who we are. …We’re eating worms for money, ‘Who Wants to Screw My Sister’, guys are getting killed in a war that’s got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe…

“…and it’s not even good pornography. They’re just this side of snuff films, and friends, that’s what’s next ’cause that’s all that’s left. And the two things that make them scared gutless are the FCC and every psycho-religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott. These are the people they’re afraid of, this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouse of a network you’re watching. This thoroughly unpatriotic– ”

A valentine to television.

(And you can shove patriotism, pro or con, right up your arse there, son.)

Sorkin, being American, doesn’t even have the tarnished beacon of the BBC to look up to. PBS is an organisation to be protected and cherished, but it’s not remotely the same thing. He has to be talking about network TV. Now, I’m not American. Nielsen ratings are just gibberish to me. DOCTOR WHO averages out at something like 8 million viewers when it’s on, and it’s probably the closest thing we have to “common culture” in televisual terms now. I think WEST WING topped out around 16 million viewers, but I could very easily be wrong on that score. LAW AND ORDER got better ratings. And, of course, so did shows about eating worms, fucking your sister, and the like.

And that, I suspect, is what he’s talking about. If there’s a common culture in terms of American television, it’s Troy Aitken singing an Elton John monstrosity and then coming in your mouth. Or, pace Sorkin, the mouth of a dumb 12-year-old. There’s an image for you.

STUDIO 60 therefore becomes in large part the story of two people so gifted they were fired by said whorehouse network four years earlier, coming back to elevate a tired satire show to the point where it becomes common culture. Where it asks questions of many millions of people, and has them discussing those questions in their lives.

It is not my understanding that the American show SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was always as good as the sketch where Dan Ackroyd’s Nixon and John Belushi’s Kissinger. In fact, my understanding is that over the last five hundred years or so of its run it’s mostly been Chevy Chase falling over and Will Ferrell hitting a fucking cowbell. But, as I say, I’m not American. If it was ever as savagely impassioned as SPITTING IMAGE, well, no-one ever told me.

In fact… correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t most American network tv just shit? Or did you want to go out and take a bullet for THE GHOST WHISPERER? The BBC has the license fee to fund questioning work, and it receives the money regardless of whether anyone likes it or not. It doesn’t have to pander to advertisers. American network tv, however, is entirely driven by ads. If a show doesn’t get enough eyeballs in front of enough ads, it’s cancelled. There are many, many good reasons why American network tv is mostly… well, it’s not all WEST WING, is it?

In order to write his valentine, then, and make his case, he has to elevate the American televisual form into something it never was. (Unless you buy American cable, in which case you have access to some of the finest literary television ever made.) If he’s going to imagine an American show that says something worth listening to using social satire and thereby clawing back the high ground of public broadcasting, then we really do have the same themes as WEST WING back in play: a paean to public service that can only be told by idealising the work and workers of government.

Which he wrung some terrific stories out of. Which is all that matters in the end. What interests me is that Sorkin’s working in a country that takes its television a hell of a lot more seriously than it takes its government. He could catch a lot of flak if he really goes after his theme. And plopping in Harriet Hayes, the WEST WING/Ainsley Hayes (hey!) character there to remind us that middle America is full of good honest downhome sensible conservatives and non-insane people of faith (“Invisible Space Daddy says I should hug you, infidel”), as a shield against knee-jerk rightist criticism just isn’t going to soak it all up.

I’ll be watching STUDIO 60 because Sorkin can write very well, even though the eventual produced pilot is a little slicker than I’d like. The thing that’ll keep me watching is whether or not Sorkin strips the thorns off the rose before he proffers it as his Valentine gift to television.
This literally just in from a breaking media news service I subscribe to: “A Universal McCann online survey polling both regular and non-regular viewers of the CBS reality series Survivor shows that despite all the controversy surrounding this season’s format of dividing teams by race, only 17 percent of the show’s regular viewers say they were “personally offended” by the series’ new twist.”

For the foreseeable future.

Because I like to give encouragement and publicity to new young comicsmakers, I thought I’d mention here that Joss Whedon is taking over the writing of breakout Marvel title RUNAWAYS, originally conceived and written by ageing veteran and Hollywood monkey Brian K Vaughan. Best of luck, lad.

• Woman found with one arm severed
  A woman was found wandering along a stretch of the M8 near Glasgow with one arm severed. She is said to have told that she had been to a nightclub and had been chased by a man after leaving…
  (tags: crime)
• rebelbiologista: Espimir is Spanish for ¨To Spit¨…
  Lenya’s been meeting Ecuadorian curanderas: female shamans. “At least no evil spirits were invading my headmeats.”
  (tags: people magic)

I recently saw some episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s SPORTSNIGHT for the first time.  It’s a behind-the-scenes look at a sports tv show, as THE WEST WING is behind-the-scenes at the White House.  It never got primetime air here in Britain, but I found by accident the other week that it’s being shown sporadically on some tiny cable channel no-one ever watches at some dismal time in the early morning.

SPORTSNIGHT was Sorkin’s first tv show, before THE WEST WING, and only lasted one season.  It’s not hard to see why.  For one thing, it has the most bizarre laugh track I’ve ever heard.  Most of the time it’s silent — just catching one act of an episode, you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t have a laugh track at all.  And that’s fine.  I hate laugh tracks.  But every now and then, you hear a weak sprinkle of half-hearted laughter, a chuckle here and there.  And you realise that the tape’s being shown to an audience, and their reaction is unsweetened.  That people are reacting to a comedy show and they don’t think it’s funny.  (Also, the cast is grating as all hell.)

Which brings us to STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP, NBC’s great white hope from Sorkin and director/producer Tommy Schlamme, the SPORTSNIGHT/WEST WING team.  About, strangely enough, a behind-the-scenes look at a comedy show that isn’t funny, and the two guys strongarmed into saving it.

From an ungenerous perspective, the two guys are in fact Aaron Sorkin — the flaky writer, and the drug-challenged showrunner. 

Sorkin was supposed to be directing a historical film, a year or two back.  That kind of faded away.  (Now, apparently, to be a stage play produced by Steven Spielberg.)  The drug-challenged showrunner is also a director, who had to give up his historical film due to failing a drugs test.  Sorkin’s liking for the smoke and the crack is well known, the poor bastard.  The flaky writer is recovering from back surgery, a procedure Sorkin’s had, and can’t hold the best relationship in his life together.  Thankfully, we don’t know the details of Sorkin’s own divorce.

The apparent two halves of Sorkin are the best two casting decisions — the underrated, unstretched Matthew Perry and the fine Brad Whitford.  That’s the best of it.

The Perry character’s ex, a lead on said comedy show, is Sarah Paulson.  As Miss Isringhausen on DEADWOOD, it was okay that she radiated The Crazy.  On STUDIO 60, she also radiates The Crazy, brittle and loopy.  There’s supposed to be a bit of an ethical ballet here — her character, Harriet Hayes, does something that the Perry character finds indefensible.  She can mount what many people will consider a perfectly good defense for it.  But she radiates The Crazy, so I don’t care if she told him little girls would be clubbed like seals if she didn’t do what she did.  She’s fucking crazy.

Also, Wikipedia passes on the slightly creepy tag: “Hayes is reportedly based on West Wing alumna Kristin Chenoweth, whom Sorkin once dated.”

Amanda Peet, as new network head Jordan McDeere, is just from fucking Mars.  All of her acting choices are just downright weird; she seems like she’s coming in from a completely different angle than anyone else, stiff and mannered and wide-eyed and strangely slowed-down and nowhere near the actress she actually is.  I have no idea what’s going on there, and the writers, producers and directors I know who’ve seen STUDIO 60 all agree she’s a really jarring, odd presence in the show.  Steven Weber’s turn as Evil Superior is just missing a moustache for him to twirl.   He seems to be enjoying himself immensely, and that’s fine in the few moments he’s jousting with the expansive Perry, but the caricature looks too broad compared to most everyone else on screen.  He and Peet, particularly, seem to be in two different shows.

There’s a couple of cameos of note.  Judd Hirsch, of course, blows everyone away as the producer of the show who torches his career making a rant about mediocrity straight to live camera, and Ed Asner turns in one of his enjoyably toadlike performances in his favourite style of small role — he’s spoken of seeing a tradition in “liberal” actors playing evil capitalist bastards, and he’s very good at it. 

The pilot differs from the scripts I saw only insofar as scenes and bits are chopped out of it.  Sorkin notoriously overwrites — I’ve spoken before of the stories of WEST WING actors having to speak faster to get all the pages in — but here he’s had to take elbows and knees off the beast to get inside the runtime.  DL Hughley and the uniquely punchable-looking Nate Corddry get most of their lines left in the editing room, and Evan Handler and Carlos Jacott as the unfireable hack co-producers get reduced to two three-second glimpses.  Some of the severed lumps were kind of useful to the show, and it’s a shame to see them go.  But what’s left is sleek liquid machinery.  It’s just a perfectly weighted piece of writing.

As it ought to be, since the front half is an acknowledged riff on Paddy Chayefsky’s NETWORK, which remains one of the most stunning pieces of writing ever dropped on Hollywood.  The Judd Hirsch rant that kicks off the show isn’t Peter Finch’s rant — it was the one trapped inside William Holden, who saw his friend turned into a lunatic and his lover turned into a robot by the sheer ruthless fucking mediocrity of American network television.

Not that NETWORK was half as slick a piece of work as this.  STUDIO 60 has been panel-beaten until it’s all gentle shiny curves, easing you past the NETWORK debt by not only explicitly referencing it a dozen times but cracking off a gag about the multiple references.
To be continued.  Have to go to dinner.

• Mississippi Witch
  Raw stamping blues noise. Good for the blood.
  (tags: music)
• Modern humans, not Neandertals, may be evolution’s ‘odd man out’
  Could it be that in the great evolutionary “family tree,” it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out?
  (tags: sci evolution x)
• Ruby Throat
  A new project by Katiejane Garside
  (tags: music)

I’m appearing at the Helsinki Comics Festival on September 23-24.

http://www.kupla.net/fest2006/

Right now, it appears that my manifestations at said event involve a Q&A at 3.30pm on the Saturday followed by a signing and then probably heavy drinking at a club called DUBROVNIK (?).  And then a talk of some kind at 5pm on the Sunday followed by heavy drinking at a place apparently called MBAR.

You can, of course, imagine how gruelling, harsh and heartbreaking this schedule is.  But, for my children, I will tough it out.

Obviously, I expect to see none of you there.  But if you are going to be in the area, leave a comment.

“She’s Gone” – The Hidden Cameras

“Telefon Ear” – The North Valley Subconscious Orchestra

(All mp3s are provided for review purposes only and will be deleted in seven days. Contact the writer if you need them removed.)

• DRIFT006 – Set In Sand – Mini Splintered Things
  (tags: mp3)

“White” by Andrew Drilon – a retelling of a Filipino ghost story.

NEWUNIVERSAL Previews at marvel.com: series commences December.

• Human heads dumped in Mexico bar
  Armed, masked men have burst into a bar in Mexico and flung five human heads onto a crowded dance floor, in an apparent warning to a rival drug gang.
  (tags: crime)

This post is about my friend Melinda.  Say hello, Melinda.

You can’t tell, but Melinda is a deeply warped individual. 

Melinda is out on the streets with a friend.

Having apparently failed to put her friend’s eye out with her nipple, it seems that Melinda went shopping after having the above picture taken..

I’ve got to tell you, my life is no better this morning for knowing that ANAL RING TOSS exists.

• (( LiteFeeds )) RSS for your mobile phone
  May be useful for the new phone or for the Treo.
  (tags: rss web phone mobile N73)
• Ahmadinejad calls for university purge
  Iran’s president urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country… echoing the rhetoric of the 1979 Islamic revolution
  (tags: pol religion)
• Private Sets Sights on Mainstream Movies
  “The whole world is talking about how porn is going mainstream…It’s time for real-sex to be a real box office hit.” Private has contacted the offices of John Malkovich, Lars Von Trier, Julio Medem and Pedro Almodovar…
  (tags: sex culture movies endless+comedy+in+link)
• Defense Tech: Robotic Frisbees of Death
  “Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition,” by God: “the drones will use a series of armor-piercing explosives, shooting jets of molten metal, to eliminate their targets”
  (tags: weapons war tech)
• Phone telepathy: You knew it was true – Sep 5, 2006
  Rupert Sheldrake, still crazy after all these years.
  (tags: sci neuro mad)
• Is this Bush’s secret bunker?
  Mount Weather is a top-security underground installation an hour’s drive from Washington DC. It has its own leaders, police, fire department – and laws. A cold war relic given a new lease of life since 9/11. And no one who’s been inside has ever talked.
  (tags: pol)
• My So Called Second Life
  Vox Nouvelle blogs the reconstruction of Integral Castle
  (tags: 2l)
• Transit Kings Podcast 1
  Live performance (I think) post-ambient house electricky space fucking.
  (tags: music)
• Are you Komfortable?
  The Orb – podcast 1
  (tags: music podcast)

So, as I said the other day, my friend Ariana hit the website with a big shitty stick until the moblogging system started working.  To a code-illiterate like me, this was not a small thing.  So I got her to write down how she did it.  Ariana’s explanation follows:

*   *   *   *   *

Note: This is only one way to enable mobile blogging with WordPress. There are other plugins out there that may work just as well, or better, depending on your set up, version, and preferences. This is just the way I set things up for Warren when nothing else seemed to be working.

What you’ll need:
1. A current build of WordPress.
2. A phone capable of sending email, photos, etc.
3. An email account that you will use exclusively for posting.
4. Posties
5. WP-Cron

What to do:

1. Download and unzip Posties, then upload the postie folder (using FTP or your cpanel) to wherever you have WordPress. All the files for Posties need to be in their own folder, so your directory layout should look like this:
wordpress>wp-content>plugins>postie>all the posties files

2. Next, download WP-Cron, unzip the folder, and upload it to the plugins directory as well. The directory layout for wp-cron should be:
wordpress>wp-content>plugins>wp-cron

3. While you’re in the admin panel or FTP application, back out to your MAIN wordpress directory (the one where the folders “wp-admin” and “wp-content” are). You’ll need to create two new directories:
wp-filez
wp-photos

These two directories need to be set to CHMOD 766. If you’re doing this from an FTP client, you’ll create two new folders, name them wp-filez and wp-photos, and then right-click to select properties, permissions, or chmod (depending on your program it could be any of those three). By default, folders are set to 0, so just change that number to 766. If you’re working through a web-based control panel, there should be a similar option either next to the folder icon, or at the top or bottom of the screen. If you’re doing this all via telnet or SSH, you should damned well know how to chmod files. If you don’t, close your terminal before you break something, and get an FTP client.

4. You can close FTP, or leave the cpanel now. Log into your WordPress account as Admin, and activate the following new plugins:
Cronless Postie
Postie
WP-Cron

Ignore all of the other WP-Cron plugins (Dashboard, Reminder, etc.) for now. You’re more than welcome to go back and look at them later, but they aren’t necessary for posting-by-phone. There’s relatively good documentation over at the WP-Cron page about all of the plugins, but the truth is that we’re just using WP-Cron because that’s what the Posties plugin needs.

5. If everything activated with no errors, you’re ready to configure Postie. From the WordPress Dashboard, choose Options>Configure Postie. You will need to set the following:

• Authorized Addresses – These are the addresses you will be SENDING mail from. If you’re not sure what the email address of your phone is, send yourself a message.
• Mailserver Settings – This is the email address that Posties will check for entries. Choose your mail protocol, the mail server, your userid, and your password.
• All the other settings are options that you can explore once you’ve got Posties working.

6. Now, first test. Send an email from one of the “Authorized Addresses” to the account you specified in “Mailserver Settings.” Wait a minute, then click the Run Postie button at the top of the Postie Options screen. If you did everything correctly, a new entry should appear on WordPress. If not, back up and see if you missed any steps.

7. Cronless Postie + WP-Cron. Once you’ve got Posties working, you need to set up WordPress to automatically check for new emails. Otherwise, the only way you’ll be able to post is by logging in and clicking that little button. WP-Cron basically uses RSS feeds, webcrawlers, and other automated systems to trigger automated tasks. If your blog has a LiveJournal feed, for instance, WP-Cron will automatically run a list of commands every time it is accessed by the LJFeed aggregator. Cronless Postie is one of the commands that WP-Cron can run. Both need to be enabled for Postie to auto-update, and tiny bit of code needs to be inserted into your wp-rss.php file:

do_action(’check_postie’);

Cut and paste the above line of code into wp-rss.php. It goes by itself, on the line below the first } and above the word header.

8. Cronless Postie+WP-Cron may not work immediately. Remember, this is a workaround is based on RSS feeds and webcrawlers. If the only RSS feed currently subscribed to your journal is LiveJournal, you’ll have about an hour delay between fetch times,which means you could be waiting for up to an hour before an email post goes live. If that does not suit your needs, then you’ll need to subscribe to something that updates a little more often (try bloglines, or gmail rss). There are also known issues with the Cronless Postie app — in other words, if you just can’t get it to work, it’s probably not your fault. If your directory is anything other than normal (if you’ve got wordpress in a different folder than your main page) or if you have some arcane plugins that don’t want to play nice with WP-Cron, there’s not a whole lot you can do except Step 9 below.

9. Alternately, you can set up a webmonitoring service (like Easy Monitor) to check:
http://yourserver.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php.

Unfortunately, free Web Monitoring services are notorious for down times and error messages, so if you can get wp-cron working, it’s far more dependable. If your hosting provider comes with a Web Monitoring service, this is definately your best bet, because if their servers are down, there’s a good chance your site will be, too.

10. And that’s it. If you got it working, congratulations! Go get yourself a drink. You’ve earned it. If not, go get yourself a drink, anyway. You’ probably need it.

*   *   *   *   *

NOTES: if you’re going to use Gmail as your secret-address mailserver, remember to select POP3-SSL from the dropdown. 

ISSUES: Posting-to-blog via Flickr is currently not working.  I have not yet discovered whether the problem lies with the moblog solution or with my new phone.  If it turns out to be a conflict between the above solution and Flickr — well, since this solution allows you to post photos straight to your blog off the phone too, it’s not that much of an issue, is it?

My thanks to Ariana both for making the thing work, and for taking the time to write her steps down.

[TAGS]wordpress, moblog, post+by+mail, mobile, cron, postie, cronless, wp-cron, annoying+the+fuck+out+of+you+by+phone[/TAGS]

• WidSets Beta
  Widgets for using web services on mobile phones.
  (tags: phone)
• futurepunk
  “A new wave of high tech punk is sweeping the UK punk-goth-industrial scenes, promoted by labels like Wasp Factory Recordings and Oktober Productions. Soldering irons, laptops, big digital noise and politics driven by DIY attitude.”
  (tags: radio)
• AVN :: Articles – Jon Dough Passes Away
  Veteran porn performer commits suicide
  (tags: sex culture)
• riotclitshave: “While You Are Reading This…”
  photo of the day, from the excellent RIOTCLITSHAVE photoblog
  (tags: photography weird)
• jwz – dnalounge radio
  DNA Lounge, an excellent club in San Francisco where I once spent one of the best Hallowe’ens of my life, is now offering a streaming radio station. Haven’t checked it yet.
  (tags: radio)

For those who regularly visit my spot on Second Life, Integral Castle at Rogla (174, 120, 124) : well, you might want to go and take a look today.  Because I just told a builder by the SL name of Vox Nouvelle that she can start rebuilding and pulling the place apart.  She’s the one who constructed the floating/spinning conference space hanging over the castle right now, which I intend to use sometime in the next few weeks.

So take a look at the area now, because it may not look the same by the weekend.  And, thank god, it also won’t look the way it did the morning I found a welcoming sculpture in front of the place: