Excuses and new beginnings

I feel guilt equivocal to that of a religious person. I know I haven’t updated in over a month which is just evil. However, rather than write short paragraphs about all my real and digital going ons, I’ve been posting them mainly via the twatverse and tumblroom.

‘isalive’ is going to take a newish direction. As I’m now working at an interesting agency and doing work I genuinely enjoy. So, every time something I work on launches I’ll post it up here, (with insider commentary) that way I’ll be more in line with other ‘industry’ bloggers (with a smattering of self promotion and smugitude).

I’ll also include the insights and rants about my new abode, Queen’s Park. After all, life will always be more interesting than advertising, if that changes we should default to Cthulhu.

Booty, as in treasure, not boo-tay

My significant udder and I have recently come into a mass of crockery, cutlery and furniture. No, no one had to die; this was a case of surplus. Like a farmer with a bountiful crop, my friend Craig, now happily married and head of tech at blah blah blah, found that his tenants back in good old LDN were moving on.

‘Oh, what’s this? There are cups everywhere. What’s this? Knives and spoons to spare!’

I should have been in musicals. Anyway, the excess loot is only the setting for our story. The real tale begins with our attempt to get it back to the flat.

For this mammoth task we hired the services of recent St.Martin’s graduate Reuben. Not since Han Solo or Sinbad have you ever met a more charming rogue. He was the captain of a van as battered and bodged at the Millennium Falcon, with another Van’s engine and modified doors to boot. Apart from the credits this artist from the emerald isle would be receiving for his trouble, we throw in a brand new washing machine, Romani style.

Reuben, a man of multiple talents as we would discover, managed to unhook the washing machine from a maze of tentacled pipes, with little effort, all the while talking of waster pipes and other things that someone as genteel as I am ignorant of. Next, we moved the fridge, again Reuben worked a new set of skills, this time disconnecting the live wires, cutting and taping them. Awesome.

The most entertaining part of our adventure came during the journey home. Reuben regaled us with tales of moving furniture and sculptures alike. The best story involved a trip to Hampshire where his van broke down three times. Each time the same A.A mechanic was called out, until, finally, the van gave up the ghost and Reuben had to be towed from Hampshire back to Ireland. A singing endorsement of the A.A if ever there was one.

All this man crush aside, it made me realise that in the here and now, the age, of geeks and metrosexuals, these ‘real world’ skills have been lost. Who can boast, fixing an engine, knowing how to wire a fridge and detach a washing machine without flooding? None of us. We have become like the kryptonians, hiding away behind our talk of social media and the digital age, skin with the consistency of porridge, chasing after the recognition of our contemporaries

And to give this post a nice bit of symmetry, we'll end on a musical:

Everybody's gotta grow up sometime, bum, bum, bum

I've moved in with my significant udder, got a permanent job and have governance, both physical and spiritual, over the cat. It's all competing for geek out time. I've even started to contemplate some sort of geek schedule.

Fitting in an hour of Battlestar every week shouldn't be too hard. And, lets Cylon it, once that's over I'll have already rounded up all the episodes of Deadwood and tapped every series of The Wire. Maybe I could buy the Cracker DVD box set? After all, I was only a wee one when the series originally aired. The only episode I can remember, with any clarity, starred Robert Carlyle as a Liverpool supporter who moonlighted as an anarchist bomber. I still duck and cover whenever I hear a scouse accent.

Graphic novels: a friend of mine works at Forbidden Planet, so there's a social excuse to fit that in. I've got some time before the next volumes of The Walking Dead, Fables and Ultimates get released. There's no rush to venture into the BO steeped caverns. They really need to give out deodorant to the more 'special' patrons.


Films: I watched Iron Man on das interweb recently. I also made the mistake of going to see the latest Indy film at the picture house. I thought this time, this time it'll be different. No idiots' mobiles going off in the back row, no middle class twits mindlessly twittering away (in the old fashioned sense) about the price of organic Soya beans. But every time, every bloody time. Cash and time I'll never get back. Still, the significant udder has a free pass to the Mezzanine. I'm gonna go all art house on your asses.


That leaves games. Its officially my job to keep up with what's going on in the gaming world, so maybe a new console isn't such an outlandish concept. I dunno, maybe I should wait till winter and then I can justify staying in with the sweet sounds of the console fan, as I shower fiery death on whatever.

A week of snobbery

Bloggers were recently participating in a week sans technology, for err, some sort of mental detox. I didn’t have the luxury of volunteering for this ‘unconnected week,’ thanks to my good friends Virgin Media.

That being said, and mainly to stick it to Virgin Media and all this detox rubbish, honestly, would you cut off your nose to see what a scentless world was like? I can tell you now, no Internet = absolute lameness in every sense. There, my thesis is complete.


Right, so, as part piss take and part, why not, I’ll be having a week of snobbery. It’ll go a little like this: One week of watching only BBC4, (More4 would have been included but they have some shockingly un-snobby shows) a week of listening to Radio 4 and the World Service (plays and shizz on Radio 7), visiting only TED ala the web and catching up with some dense philosophy (a bit of the New Statesman thrown it too).

What will become of me?

Retrospective, why not?

I was talking to Richard today and we both agreed, people don't spend enough time exploring blog archives. So, I've done it for you:

The Stars My Destination

City 17 vs London

Beowulf, Folklore and Fables

Paul Barnett vs the industry

Wild Gourmets aka idiots

Supreme geekdom

Digital life and times

It was my birthday recently and among the gifts, ranging from a 'Ghetto Stars' colouring book to a History of Street Art, my significant udder broke the mold and made a video collating our fives years together.


It's really good, if some what personal, but I might post it still. Anyway, it got me thinking about the history of 'me.' The recorded history of my parents, amounts to a few pictures, school essays and old passports. What became obvious from watching the Ben 5yr video was the intricate detail my life has been captured in, thus far.

If and when, I have spawn of my own, I can offer them a vast amount of imagery and exposition to try and sum up my life. Everything from this blog, tweets, tumbles, pictures, videos and work, will all combine to leave a Ben like imprint. I could offer them a back log of all my Friend Feed activity, but what's data without emotion.


At one point, we might only have drawn conclusions from diaries, historical accounts and raw data in the form of financial/medical records. Now we have a more personal and possibly, eternal, means of doing so.

A bank holiday weekend with no Internet

What I learned:

I can finish an RPG in two days vs the initial week and a half it took the first time around:



The Internet was developed with the sole purpose of satiating my need to know about any infinite spectrum of subjects whenever the mood takes me.

The longer you go without connectivity the choices of what sites/services you would have used had Virgin Media been less shit shrinks.

Reading a book is great but painful for your arms if its 1221 pages long.


Watching three generations of fish in a pond isn’t as lame as it sounds.

Coffee in Crouch End is silly expensive. There’s no world shortage of beans, its rice you’re thinking of.

Face to face interaction still trumps MyFace and Twit tweets.

Douglas Rushkoff for life

Thanks to Richard for the link. I remember reading Douglas Rushkoff when I was about twelve or so. A lot of it went over my head at the time but I do remember going around calling myself a 'child of chaos.' That didn't help my social standing much. Enjoy:

Digital Dynasty

Check out Richard's 'Change This' manifesto:

"It is a common theory that successful people live their lives like a project plan, so we struggle to shape our lives along a pre-determined path. Instead, Oliver asserts that that the majority of people, many of them very successful, make it up as they go along. This smart manifesto offers a convincing and well-researched argument encouraging us to do a little drifting."

We Think, therefore we am?

Search and ye shall plant

Hmm, take old plastic bags to be reused at Sainsbury's, check. Remember to turn off all appliances when leaving a room, check. Baths are made for two, check.

What other eco practices can I incorporate into my everyday? Well, I search. I search for the truth. I search for information. I search for stupid things to send to people so that they can LOL and therefore associate me with their laughing. But now this egomania can be offset with knowing I've done something selfless for no effort at all.



Ecocho is a search engine that will plant two trees for every 1000 searches made. It uses 70% of its income for the tree planting! Search it up tree huggers.

Digital Nomad a go-go

Brands and the yoot

We the young people are incapable of thinking for ourselves, often times falling flat on our collective greasy faces at the first hurdle of peer pressure. We really do need to be told what to aspire to. Sometimes, if you throw enough buzz words and slang, that's getting a bit too ripe, you might just fool us into buying into whatever you've got to sell.

I’m constantly amazed by the ‘down with the yoot’ campaigns out there which are so convulsion inducing in their wrongness, to wit, lack of understanding of that audience, that I’m surprised no one has said, wait, that dude over there has no clothes on.

Something from a youth community (old but annoyingly gold):




Once the advertisers got to it:




If you want to know what the young people are thinking, ask one. Actually, ask one who can articulate why something works rather than simply fire off a series of slang and or grunts.

The sort of insight you’ll gleam by holding a focus group or asking someone in the office who has a young person at home will often lead to misinterpretation or just plain lies. I remember doing a piece for a channel 4 programme called Zeitgeist (really, like, err, cool name yeah, real cutting edge and that). I collected some of my primary school chums and we were interviewed individually and as part of a group. “What’s cool, what clothes are you wearing, why do you like them, is TV still cool?”



We wore the same clothes because we wanted to feel like we belonged, we played game x because we knew everyone else was. The change between these early years and not too long ago while I was still studying, was cross over.

Whereas before if you were a ‘road man’ no, not someone with a penchant for pneumatic drills but a lover of hip-hop, graffiti, grime, baggy clothes etc that’s all you could be. Now you can do what you like, why not like Grime and Abba too. Mix flash mobs with EMO isolation, why not?


In the same way you can have ‘creative generalists’ you can have mashed, evolving identities that change daily. Friends who are still at university see this as a way of life but we’ll see what happens when they finish their studies and have to engage in daily soul destroying tedium. As for me, I’m off to have a ‘street war’ lets hope my flash mob enabled ipod doesn’t get wet.

Anyway, Rachel (she’s real puurtey) Newsome talks about brands:

“To say that brands have somehow replaced religion, actually represents both a nostalgic view of the past and a feeling that life nowadays is somehow less meaningful and more superficial than it used to be. To claim that brands are a new religion is to express a fear of change…

…For example, 'Playstation gives you power', is a very powerful brand message. But its meaning only comes alive in a dialogue between the brand, the culture it was created in and the individual user. On its own it is impotent. It is only because young people in their twenties already feel disenfranchised and need a means of escape that they can relate to that idea. So, really the success of brands is about how they respond to values and aspirations rather than about how they shape them.”

Mad digital skillz

I really like the Tiny Gigantic guys. I'm a big fan of their PDF guides and their Replate project is in a similar vain to something I'm developing. Anyway, they're finding it hard to find young digital talent with more than one skill set. Yikes:

"So a few weeks ago, we participated in the CCA Career Expo. They gave us a booth alongside a shitload of other local creative shops and set the students loose on us. I never went to any of the job fairs when I was in school, but I assume that they’re kinda like this: students or recent grads come by, show their stuff, and talk to you about what you do and how they might fit into it, and you spend all day repeating your story. That’s where it got sticky."

The Million Word Project

I once had this idea to make a website for fictional stories like Flickr is to photos and YouTube is to videos. The main objective of the ‘Million-Word Project’ was to enable the creation of one thousand stories in one thousand words.

The stories themselves could be of any genre as long as they contained one thousand words exactly. I tried writing a couple stories just to see what the difficulty would be like. Hard, basically.


The rating system for the MWP would be known as ‘championing.’ A user would have the option to champion a story, which would then appear on their user page as a badge or symbol (like a dug on Digg or thumbs up on StumbleUpon).


The badge would be created/submitted by the author of each story (hopefully you’d build up a network of fans who might design one for you). If the author could obtain ten champions (start small) for their story, it would be submitted to the Library of Fame (this is all starting to sound a bit too RPG land).


The author could then see which users had championed their story and read their comments and feedback (a bit like your Digg or StumbleUpon page), while users who had championed a story would be able to interact with other fans and the author too (duh). I didn’t know about things like Twitter back then but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a ‘writers process’ feed or something.


Partnerships with the BBC, British Library, NESTA, the Arts Council and other organizations would have been a good source of initial financing and medium to communicate to an already established audience(s). You could throw in regular workshops both physical and online to help establish an understanding and enjoyment for writing fiction too. Oh well, it never happened.

Spore studio story

Maxis sounds like a interesting place to work:

Homemade Jelly

For the last few months I’ve been freelancing and whilst this does have some benefits: not getting on the evil tube crush, being able to work in a dressing gown, popping out to see friends for tea etc there are some serious drawbacks. The lack of (during the day) social contact comes top.


I’m lucky to have the opportunity to meet friends for lunch, as they live near by, but if they didn’t, I’d see no one…for days.

I have no illusions that I will become Jack Nicholson in The Shinning after a day or two, but other ‘workomers’ and their psyches might yet be saved via Jelly:

For the love of Skype

Love and relationships can be tricky at the best of times but with the advent of SMS, Skype, social networking etc completely new levels of love ratdom can be achieved. Below is a pod from Current TV:

Digital protesting vs physical protesting

It’s the fifth anniversary since the start of the Iraq war, or at least it will be on Thursday. No doubt you will have caught one program in the plethora of Iraq, ‘where are we now, that’s right, just showing you this so you can keep tabs,’ season.

I went on a, what should have been called ‘Leave the Middle East alone, they all cool’ rally but was in fact called, the less catchy, 'Troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, don’t attack Iran and stop the oppression of the Palestinian people’ rally. Phew. I think my name is better. Anyway, it was a miserable day, raining and freezing but there was still a pretty good turn out.


Speeches were made, some better than others. I took particular offence at a speech given by ‘the girl that organized all dem walk outs at schools before the invasion and ting.’ She sounded as if she’d just been pushed out on stage rambling on about, ‘nukes were bad and so was America, yeah, that’s right, cos, eeer, um, they’ve got like a military industrial complex init.’

That evening I had a discussion about the effectiveness of public protests. I went on the million people march before the war and here we are reflecting on the five-year anniversary. Since that time, Green Peace, Amnesty and others have petitioned me via the interweb.


Click here to add your name to a petition to stop such and such. And lo, a few weeks later I’d receive an email explaining that the petition was a big success and bill x was passed in the House of Commons. Wow, direct, digital protest and it works.

Despite the meagre coverage the protest on Saturday got, having pictures of Parliament Square packed with protesters still makes the hairs on my hunch back stand up on end. The moment it looks like people don't care enough to take to the streets will be the day that those who have the power to change something will have nothing to convince them to do so. The only difference now is there are two mediums to get your protest across, each feeding the other. Protesting in the flesh is still more fun...for now

If you Stumble, you might Tumblr

I’m finding I like Tumblr more and more. It’s like giving someone the ability to unscrew my bulbous scalp and stare directly at the pulsating, grey goo encased within. Through the useful ‘share on Tumblr’ button, everything I come across is posted directly on to my personal Tumblr page.


How’s this different from submitting stuff to your Facebook account you say? Or maybe you don’t but lets go with it anyway. Whereas submitting stuff to Facebook is somewhat lame due to the space it takes up in your mini feed, Tumblr allows you to connect several RSS feeds directly, turning a Tumblr page into a sort of, cyber, stream of consciousness. I get all my Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr etc updates put on there, plus, any interesting stuff I find randomly through StumbleUpon.


My Tumblr page is comprised of a nonsensical collection of random oddities. A bit like my mind, no, very much like my mind. Where Twitter allows you to post thoughts and actions this allows images, videos and links to be posted directly, thus making it one seamless cerebral experience. Like I said before, it’s as if someone is taking a gander at my grey matter…and I kind of like it.