I used to blog all the time. I used to have a serious writing work ethic. I’ve blogged in many formats under multiple names since 2004, or thereabouts, which makes me a bit of a youthful whippersnapper in terms of some of the internet. But it’s nearly a decade now, and that’s too much waffling on the internet to throw away just because I’m busy.
I’m out of practise. I’m rusty. I used to write for a living; now I’m more on the production side, and my writing is suffering for lack of daily use. This is not a muscle I should allow to atrophy.
Side projects are brilliant, and I like to have at least six on the go at the same time, because there is something wrong with me. My blog hasn’t been on that list for far too long.
Writing things through is a superb way to refine an argument, distill an insight or open a debate. Writing makes me better at thinking.
I used to yammer on about how important it was for a digitally-savvy journalist to have a blog and get themselves out there on the wide wide interwebs. Just because I’m happy with where I’m at, and pouring a great deal of energy and inspiration and activity into my day job, doesn’t mean that advice doesn’t still hold true.
I know a whole bunch of stuff about some extremely esoteric internet subjects now. Maybe some people might find some of that useful. I should share.
I have a whole bunch of opinions and knowledge about games and other culture, about storytelling more broadly, about politics and events. I have a lot of experience of making game things in liminal spaces. Maybe some people might find some of that interesting. It can all share space together with the media stuff here and cross-pollinate, the way it does in my brain.
One of the things making Detritus has viscerally re-taught me (more on that in a coming blog post!) is that what actually matters in my personal work is making things. If they’re well received and widely read, that’s absolutely brilliant. But what matters more is that they exist at all.
I didn’t want to do ten days of blogging every day on my own, so I sort of challenged Grant. He’s a far, far better and more entertaining writer than I am, and I really enjoy reading what he writes. I’m basically just doing this so that he writes more. It’s entirely selfish.
A couple of months ago, mid-move, I started a new project – a Twine game/interactive fiction thing called Detritus. I think it’s finished enough to share with the world.
It was meant to be quite a small experiment to see if I could teach myself the medium as well as using it to express something that’s almost impossible to express through non-interactive media. It got a bit more ambitious than that, I think mostly because I had no idea what I was doing or how tricky some of it was technically. At some point soon, when I’m a little bit less close to it and it’s had some air, I’ll blog about making it.
Any bug reports or feedback, please let me know. You can play it by clicking here: it should have sound running in some parts.
Here is a picture of the rather magnificent bird that crash-landed on our balcony yesterday evening. It’s a rainbow lorikeet.
It was stunned, so we put out a little water (which it ignored) and a little diced banana (which it ate in a hilariously messy fashion, getting banana mush all over its beak and then slowly licking it off and blinking).
Here it is being confused by my finger: After a short while it fell asleep with its head tucked under its wing, and an hour or so later awoke in much higher spirits. It shimmied up and down the window ledge a little, and started making squawking noises at me when I went out to check on it. When we went to bed it was asleep again, and when we woke today it had flown away.
I found out about rainbow lorikeets when I was in I guess second year of uni. I loved the way they looked in pictures but I thought I’d never get to see one in the wild, not really. They fly in groups of three and four through Hyde Park, making sounds like squeaking hinges, and they flock in berry-laden trees in the botanic gardens.
London’s doing its absolute best to make me happy to leave right now – it’s raining sideways. We’ve consolidated our lives into five suitcases (plus a lot of boxes in storage), and the taxi gets here in an hour and a half. This time tomorrow – well, for me it won’t be this time tomorrow, for one thing, and for another we’ll still be flying – but pretty soon after that we’ll be in Sydney.
There should be a new word – I bet there’s one in German – for this mixture of sadness, excitement, fear and joy that comes with this kind of move. I’m astonishingly lucky to be going to such an exciting job in such an exciting place. I’m astonishingly lucky to have so much to leave behind. I’m astonishingly lucky to be living in a time when I can still live in the internet, and keep track of where all my friends are and what’s happening in their worlds, while being as far away as it’s really possible to be without actually being in space.
We’ve come a long way. We’re off a bit further. We’ll be back soon.
In astrophysics, the growth of a massive object by gravitationally attracting more matter.
I picked up pebbles when I was young. Entranced by tales of fossil hunters and gemstones discovered on beaches, I trekked back and forth amid the summer holiday shells in Cornwall and the rocky rubble on the north coast of France. I picked them over and came back each time with double handfuls of pointed mussel shells or curled snails showing iridescent patches, smooth stones worn by tides and marked with interesting lines and patterns. Always I had to pick just one or two to take home. Once I found a lump of quartz crystals as big as four fists. That one is with me still.
For a while, because I was a teenager, I collected pictures of the Manic Street Preachers on an early Geocities site. I printed them out and stuck them to my wall with tiny pieces of Blu-Tack. Later on, as I moved between homes in my late teens and early 20s, I took with me a mutating collage of words and phrases painstakingly clipped from magazines, newspapers, posters. It was a cut-up work-in-progress, the words clumping together to form new meanings by association every time I moved. They grew organically on doors and walls in tiny flats painted in scrupulously cheap neutral tones, until they took up more space than there were walls.
Collation
The act of collecting, comparing carefully, and often integrating or arranging in order.
My bookshelves, since I was old enough to own bookshelves, have always been overflowing. I used to buy one a week at charity shops, until I discovered student loans and bought dozens at a time and stayed up late in bed reading. Some I’ve read until they fell apart, and kept the husks. Some I’ve never read from cover to cover, but they have memories attached; they are physical, and come with inscriptions or associations or the fact that they have existed since 1786. Some I read and gave away, passed on, decided not to keep on shelves waiting for the right mood to strike.
Since 2006 I’ve collected oil-based perfumes from obscure perfume houses, pouring hours of time into swapping packages of tiny 1-dram vials internationally with people I know only by their forum names and avatars. I’ve tested perhaps six hundred, and still owned perhaps a third of of those, choosing to wear one a day on instinct or at random, until four weeks ago. Now the collection is full of small holes. Moth-eaten.
Decumulation
The disposal of something accumulated.
Three skirts in bubble-wrap mailers, to Yorkshire, Berkshire and Liverpool. A disco ball inexpertly wrapped, that rolled off the post office counter and luckily bounced. Books hand-delivered, posted, gifted, sold, taken box by box to charity shops. More than a dozen packages, each one themed, to friends in cities I will not visit before we leave. Fourteen parcels of perfume, each vial taped closed, accompanied by a couple of tea bags and perhaps a lollipop. My first car, bought in Norwich and delivered one snowy evening by three men, driven six weeks later to Ambleside for our honeymoon, driven away by a couple with a young son in the back. A camera. A pair of boots. Eventually, our bed.
Sorry. But yeah, it does. You know the ones I mean: where you actually tweet “RT @someone Stuff they said & maybe a funny link http://t.co/yadda” instead of using the native retweet button.
They didn’t always make you look like a dick. Back before Twitter got madly busy and everyone understood the protocols a bit better, it was actually fairly sensible to use old style. Folks, especially folks who fancied themselves as anchor journalists, preferred to have their own names & pictures next to the words they endorsed or passed on, whatever the source; they wanted to build trust with followers, and identity was part of that. People felt it was worthwhile to tweet separately because a new-style RT might get missed, if some followers had seen it before. (Which, well, what? No. Attention is finite and precious and why would you deliberately try to make me read something I’ve already read? That is wasting my time.)
There are still some situations where it’s legitimate to use old style. You have more control over the tweet – it won’t disappear if the original tweeter deletes it. (But people have started using old style RTs to put hilariously incongruous words in other people’s mouths, so actually you might just have a problem anyway if that happens.)
Arguably, you can make it clear you’re curating a source’s story (but native retweets make you look less like you’re trying to editorialise rather than report, and less like you’re trying to get credit for someone else’s original reporting). You can add a comment or frame your response. But if that comment is “This.” or “haha” or “BREAKING” or something else that serves no purpose other than to justify your old-style retweet then you still look like a bit of a dick, sorry. (Yeah, I’ve done this. I am not perfect. Sometimes I’m a bit of a dick.)
These days, the vast majority of people on Twitter understand retweets. They don’t generally need to see your avatar right next to the tweet to understand you’re passing it on. They don’t need a LOL next to every amusing comment – people can generally work out from the context that you’re passing it on because it’s funny. It looks like you’re trying to get more credit as a discoverer than the originators are getting. It looks like you’re trying to build your own following at the expense of other people’s. And while that’s no crime, and not the end of anyone’s world, and it probably works well if that’s all you care about, it does mean you look like a bit of a dick.
You do, however, look like less of a dick than the folks who wholesale copy a tweet’s content without credit. So you’ve got that going for you. Well done.
When we heard that the Science Museum had put out a call for people interested in running live games about zombies, it seemed like a bit of a dream come true. We’ve been staging zombie games for years, and there’s little more exciting than the prospect of running around the actual Science Museum evading zombies and generally having a good time of things.
What we ended up running, though, was quite different to most of what we’ve done in the past. The Trial became a game with a very simple voting mechanic but an awful lot of deep narrative to explore. It became a peculiar kind of sociological experiment, an exploration of the ethics and morality that go along with having a zombie virus that can be cured.
Me, as Fiona, explaining how I didn’t remember any of it.
The frame of the game was fairly simple. Through text display, film and actors, we set up a story: a world where the WK-23 virus had infected significant numbers of people, causing them to exhibit zombie-like behaviour. Set in the later stages of the outbreak, as the virus was being brought under control, the Trial was ostensibly staged by the Community Jury Initiative, which brought two people accused of unpleasant acts in front of the public, and asked them to pass judgement. Fiona, a cured ex-zombie, was accused of killing a man while suffering from WK-23; Clare was accused of killing a zombie, who might one day have been cured had he survived.
At the exhibit, we had stacks of cards with statements printed on them – a total of 13 statements, deliberately stark and without nuance. Fiona is guilty of murder. Clare should be released without charge. Zombies should be killed. Every entrant into the exhibit received two of these cards, and was then asked to watch a short film showing the attack in which Clare kills a zombie, and Fiona is one of a group of zombies who kill her boyfriend. Inside the exhibit were witness statements, posters, factual information about consciousness, the mind and the law, and two actors playing Fiona and Clare (I was Fiona). At the end, we placed two ballot boxes, one marked “agree” and the other “disagree”, into which people placed their statement cards once they’d made up their minds. We counted the verdicts a couple of times each session, to keep the scoreboard online up to date.
Grant dealing with a small protest movement
From my vantage point as Fiona, the experience was fascinating. About a third of the visitors seemed to make their minds up fairly quickly, only perusing the information briefly, and not speaking to the actors at all. Many people read almost all the information we set out, and a few spent a very long time questioning us, poring over posters, and arguing over exactly what we thought about what we had done. One man spent more than half an hour questioning the two of us individually.
The group dynamics of the game worked best when we were fairly busy – which was a good thing, given that we had about 1,500 visitors in total between Wednesday late and the two weekend days. People are braver in groups; we often found people walking around in silence until someone got up the courage to ask an actor a question; as soon as one person engaged with us, a crowd formed and we would be fielding questions from all directions. I’m indebted to our excellent crew, who both encouraged people to get involved with us, and encouraged them to discuss their thoughts with each other.
Me as Fiona, explaining my misdeeds as a zombie
The fact we were seated on chairs while the visitors were standing genuinely affected the way people spoke to us, and the power they felt they had to question and to interrogate. Only once in the whole weekend did someone crouch down to get on the same level as me – but that ended up with me as Fiona explaining events to a group of ten or fifteen adults, sitting cross-legged on the floor around me.
The strength of emotion involved genuinely surprised me, as did the level of disagreement. Groups had heated arguments about which of us was guilty, if either. Some people flung insults at me as they walked past; others patted my shoulder and told me it was all going to be fine. Couples argued. Friends disagreed. One girl spent ten minutes trying to get me to agree that zombies were basically just like bears. A father encouraged his two sons to ask very serious questions, very carefully, before they decided together how to vote. And even though we deliberately put out no pens, a few people felt strongly enough about the ambiguity of the scenario that they found their own and wrote on the cards we gave them, so they could make their own responses.
“The only cure is death” – statement cards, defaced
I was very proud of the event. I owe a big thank you to Chris Farnell, who wrote an enormous amount of material for the game, Alina Sandu, who made it look gorgeous, Ellen Clegg, who played Clare and became increasingly Daily Mail as the weekend progressed, Grant Howitt, who was front of house and wrote background and script, and George Seed and Matt Barnes, who crewed the event and gave me the most appropriate and necessary coffee of my life thus far.
We got people talking – we made something serious, something big and difficult, and in the middle of a massively fun and light-hearted event we asked people to think about a complex, tricky issue. They responded wonderfully well, with nuanced thinking, complicated questioning, role-play, interest, and intelligence. And in the end, it transpired – terrifyingly – 67% of people who were asked said they’d kill another human being, if that human was a zombie at the time. I think that’s valuable to know.
I’m moving: not away from the Guardian, but with it. I’m going to be moving to Sydney for a secondment with the Guardian’s new Australian team. My role is editorial audience development, and will encompass SEO, analytics, community coordination, social media, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t know about yet. It’s a small, brilliant team full of interesting folks, with lots of exciting opportunities ahead; I can’t wait to get started.
It’s also literally half a world away. I’m lucky – we’re lucky – to be in a position where Grant can come with me, and can hopefully work and live alongside me, rather than having to be apart for what’s likely to be at least 9 months. We’re at a time in both our lives where upping sticks to somewhere with wombats and wallabies is not just possible but sounds like it could be bloody good fun. It will be hugely sad to be so far away from friends and families, but it will also be a very big adventure.
It turns out I own an awful lot of things I don’t need. And an astounding number of Nerf guns, which I clearly need to keep somewhere till we get back, along with the fire axes and the smoke machine and all of the books. If I owe you a coffee, a beer, an email or a chat, now’s a very good time to cash it in, while I’m still hunting for paperwork and trying to get our lives stowed away before we leave. Also if you’ve seen my birth certificate, I need that back.
And, in unrelated news, I’m hosting The Story conference next Friday. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.
But if you’re working in media now you shouldn’t be worried about getting your website to hit 20 or 30 million uniques — if ad rates continue to fall, even websites of that size may not be economically viable. Instead, media companies should be doing everything they can can to improve the economic value of their work (which may not mean more pageviews).
For those of us actually working in web journalism, this adds yet on another layer of existential angst. Journalists certainly shouldn’t spend their time worrying about how to make their articles more attractive to advertisers.
Whole article is worth a read, but I don’t think its conclusions quite hold true. For one thing, there are more ways of selling ads than simple CPM, from more careful targeting to real time bidding to TV-style channel takeovers at busy periods. Some of those have the same problems as CPM with oversupply when it comes to pure growth, but for others size of market is vastly important when combined with good user data.
Secondly, maybe journalists should think about the value of their articles, as well as their other attributes. Or if not the journalist themselves, at least someone on the editorial side. The nature of journalism online is a fascinating crossover of popularity, importance, usefulness and financial value, and every news organisation builds its editorial criteria differently from those sets. But if you build your business only on the first three, and ignore the last one, then eventually you don’t have a business at all.
Three years ago today I got married. We had a secular ceremony at the registry office in Norwich, and each wrote words for the moment when we exchanged rings. Both being writer types, it all got a bit competitive. This is what I ended up with.
Grant,
I love you. Those three words have my whole life in them.
My eyes see through those words, and the world is changed and made wider and more beautiful, more precious, because everything is touched with that love.
My arms are full of those words and waiting to give them to you every morning, every evening, every day that I am lucky enough hold you, for ever.
My heart sings those words every morning as it thumps in my chest, a triple beat greeting the morning with joy because you are in it.
My legs run home every night to those words. My feet pound the streets to those words.
Those three small words are a shield for my back and a shelter from the rain in hard times.
Those three small words are the snow falling on my upturned joyous face and the sun shining to wake my sleeping skin.
My tongue tastes those words, shapes my speech through those words. Every word I speak to you has those three words in it too.
My hands are shaped around those words. There is no gift greater than those words that I can give to you.
So I give you this ring which is not a circle but those three words made solid, those three words with my whole life in them.
