Well, let’s see.  I can’t remember how long ago it was that I first told the world that this book of linked stories existed – several years at least.  But even before that, it has been sitting there at the back of my brain for almost as long as I can remember.  At least 10 years.  And now, just today the proof copy of the book finally landed in my hands.  I will leave my reaction to that moment to your imagination.

It is scheduled for launch at FantasyCon 2011 alongside Nina Allan’s book The Silver Wind – also a linked collection.  The two titles make a great pair I think – both located in the quiet and haunting suburbs of slipstream.

Feather is a follow-on from my earlier book What the Giants were Saying, also from Eibonvale Press, though I am stunned just how much water we have all passed since those days (*ahem*).  Feather is a very different book in just about every way.  Where Giants was a lively and showy fable, these stories are much more emotionally-centred – which to me is more successful since that is what the act of writing should be about.  These are stories that have been with me through a lot of living – slowly developing over the years, not to make some cerebral point but to explore the bittersweet blend of pain and magic that is living life – encountering people, interacting with people, visiting new places, loneliness, love . . .  In Giants, Feather was a didact, wanting to show the world something that the world seems to have forgotten – but in Feather she is much more human and fragile.  Much more real.  During the course of writing this book, Feather the person developed from being a puppet I could use to enact a role to an expression of true human innocence, at least to me – someone who could stand for the essence of humanity, which I could then collide with the real world, hopefully revealing things about both.  So while Giants was an almost fun romp, Feather is an emotional journey – a deeply personal exploration that still hurts me, in spite of the levels of writers imagination that separates me from the stories.

It was with some appropriateness that Pete Tennant got in touch recently with an Interview for me and Eibonvale Press (read it here), among other things including the almost inevitable question on self-publishing.  That is not the first time I have discussed that matter, but this gave me a welcome chance to make my views known in the run up to releasing Feather and why I chose to let my own press handle the book.  Essentially the problem people have with self-publishing is the lack of a verification process, but I don’t believe for a second that that renders the act inevitably negative.  It all depends on the writer’s attitude, I think.  In the case of Feather, it was read, picked over, criticised and edited by three people involved with the press and several others as well – all of whom played a very valuable role in preparing the book for release and encouraging me to get my arse in gear and actually do this.  In essence, this means that Feather was ‘accepted’ three times – which probably makes it a more verified book than many published in the normal way.

With the book actually in my hands, I feel quite stunned.  Almost ready to cry for some reason.  I think that until this moment, you never quite believe that this thing is real – that you are creating a book as opposed to some weird thing inside your head.  And that’s another marvellous thing about being directly involved with the printing – the fact that you can see your creation all the way through to a physical object that you can hold.  Like a sculptor maybe.

But anyway – here it is at last.  Feather.  My own piece of bleeding heart nicely framed and nailed up on the wall for you all . . .

01 – Collector’s Instinct.

Yes yes – my collector’s instinct is VERY pronounced. I am not happy unless I have filled MORE than every inch of available space with things I love. I personally suspect that it is a result of not having a ‘life’ – but hey, a shelf full of books and thundereggs makes an ok substitute for a girlfriend . . . at least until I go home to Neptune and find one . . . *sigh*

Have I just revealed a few more weird things about me?

02 – Microsnail Collecting

Just that. I am a conchologist with a special interest in land dwelling species and a special special interest in the microsnails. These aint the sort that eat your lettuce or your hostas – so please, no cracks about your garden, ok? You might have some in your garden, but if these ate lettuce, they could eat for a year and you wouldn’t notice. These are only just big enough to be distinguished as snails with the naked eye – as opposed to, say, sand grains. Maybe that’s why I like them so much. These tiny things, with such delicacy in their structure – and most people would live their lives without ever knowing they exist. To them, snails are only those big cute round things that live behind their shed. Ach!!

How I find them . . . well, that’s another story!

03 – Rearing Giant Silkmoths

I used to do that, until they began to distress me. It was the adults that were the problem. The Caterpillars were great things to rear. They are simple creatures, who want nothing more out of life that to be surrounded by food. But when they hatch out into adult moths, they turn into something else. I had some Indian Moon Moths once. The caterpillars were huge – fat prickly green things – so large that you could quite clearly hear them eating in the night – munch munch munch. But the huge adult moths had something else on their mind. Sex. In fact – it was the only thing on their minds. They don’t eat and they only live for a week or so, so their entire adult lives are devoted to this one thing (sort of like a few people I know really). They attract their mates using smell. The only problem was that for some reason, all I got in my hatching were females. They spent their brief lives sitting on my curtains hopefully calling for a mate – and there was none. Their smell couldn’t quite reach to India, apparently. That seemed so sad . . . I never reared moths again. Or any pets, come to that. They’re better off among their own kind.

04 – No School

How’s this for weird – I never went to school. Well – ok, I did briefly, but I managed to escape after only a few years and before the worst damage was done. It left me to learn my way at home – which largely failed miserably and/but left me the strange hyper-creative social and worldly outcast that I am. The result is predictable: I am unable to fit in to anything – get on with anyone – and even less mesh with the world enough to have a real career of any kind. And, you know – I wouldn’t trade that for anything! I regard school as . . . well, ok, it aint the worst evil in the world. But it’s defiantly up there in the top dozen. It’s the great corruptor that takes innocent people and ruins them to fit into a ruined world. It’s the megaphone and control rod of a culture where free-thinking and non-conformity are still out on the fringes and where we all bow to the lowest common denominator. It’s a civilization-creating machine. And that alone makes it dangerous. I count myself lucky that I avoided it – even though the result has made my life very difficult and endlessly painful and brought me near to suicide on several occasions. It may be that the things that are really important to me will not do me many actual favours in life (aside from keeping me sane perhaps) – but I would rather that than be broken on the wheel of civilization . . .

Remember that next time a big issue seller calls to you plaintively.

05 – Down with Absolutes and Beliefs – Up with the Contrariwise

Question everything!

Why should I?

You tell me. I kind of like these twisted, self-contradicting philosophies. Never say never is another good one. They seem to sum up the tangled web of the reality of the human condition far better than any direct ideas, laws, creeds or defined behaviour patterns can. Humanity loves absolutes. Throughout history it has built its entire civilization, its ideas, its beliefs and its codes of law based on them.

It’s kind of a shame that they don’t exist, isn’t it . . .

I freely admit that I am a bloody minded and highly annoying person to discuss things with – since one belief I flirt with is that I don’t believe anything. No right and wrong, black and white. No absolutes. Accept nothing as direct truth. But of course – am I sure I believe that? Maybe I am not sure I believe it, meaning there are things I do believe in, in which case, how can I believe in nothing as I believe I should.

Believe me, this aint easy. It’s not lazy or somehow renegade. Not an excuse for behaving badly. But truely thinking for yourself – in some rarified world devoid of all preconceptions – must be so pure and fine and nice and etc. Outside of the protective cage of dictated moral codes and ideas, your brain would start fluttering like a bird suddenly released after years in a cage. It’s probably scary because suddenly you are away from those absolutes. Those blacks and whites. And you realise that you have to start making decisions and judgments yourself. And also discover that maybe sometimes, you just cant. Shouldnt. A glorious eden of thought. Do you believe that’s impossible? Sorry – impossible is an absolute, so impossible itself is impossible! The problem is, when you set out with the belief of thinking for yourself, all too often you end up trying to think for everyone.

One day I’ll figure all this out!

06 – Strange Food – Fantasy and Reality

I suppose I could have eaten those moths though . . .

People’s attitude to food bewilders me. There is so much out there that is edible, yet people eat so little – are even shocked by it, sadly enough. Whether it is eating guniepigs in Peru or Cats in china – poisonous puffer fish in Japan or honeypot ants in Australia . . . I dream of trying them all! And why not? Humans surround themselves with their strange morals but you don’t have to go far to find how hollow they are. Humans have this tendency to preach disgust at the ‘barbaric’ act of eating a cat while cheerfully tucking into a nice steak. Cringe in horror at the thought of chomping a spider while shovelling down a nice prawn salad. Nope – I don’t understand it either.

And think about this: A walk through a seafood market in china might make most British hair stand on end. But in all probability we catch all that stuff anyway – or whatever its equivalent is in our waters. The difference is that here it is all just slung back dead after they have picked out the handful of prawns that they can actually sell to us useless pathetic cretins. So who comes out tops then I wonder?

Bring ‘em on, say I! I want to experience them, before I die.

07 – I Respect Anime

Credo in animaris japonicus. Nyuuu?? What can one say about anime? Well ok – it aint THAT weird to like anime. Lots of people do – with varying degrees of embarrassment. It can be an alarmingly simple and formulaic art form sometimes – very much of the ‘establishment’. But the thing itself is weird to us western chumps and for one very simple reason. The Japanese seem to have very little concept of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The west can be hideously snobbish in its art. And somehow the art plays along with that. Dumb art is dumb art – beneath the attention of the serious-minded. And there is a huge distinction between the serious works and what is ‘just for fun’. Japanese anime just invites you in to a whole world where this snobbishness and distinction is just . . . not there. It all rubs together in one great equality-filled heap – the arty stuff not afraid to have fun and the silly stuff not afraid to take itself seriously in a strange way. And serious things can be said simply and daft stuff with unimaginable challenging complexity.

And all of it is very relaxed and accepting about what it is.

All this is more than can be said for ANY art form in the west. Trying to find an equivalent in western writing would be like having Samuel Becket writing mills and boon books while The Beano delves into Clive Barker style exploration of death and Hercule Poriot attends high-school and finds extraterrestrial romance. Oh and I must not forget The Lord of the Rings by Playboy!

Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, critic-san!

08 – I Dream of Flying Underwater but Refuse to Learn to Drive

I have a submarine, you know. I do. Really! A small one. It looks like a small, stubby winged plane, but this is a plane for flying underwater. You can just squeeze two people into it and you have to lie on your front to drive it. It cant go very deep – but so what? I have had fun with that submarine. Every night, I get in it and slide into the sea. I have helped Croatian girls illegally enter this country. I have attached limpet mines to Chinese warships. I have snuk into the Thames and spooked drunken Londoners. I have weathered storms in the north sea safe on the seabed and buzzed oil rigs . . . it’s great. Everyone should have a submarine. Better than cars any day!

Who would want to drive?

09 – Bare Feet in the Snow – In the Street

Sadly that is a thing of the past. My rebel outdoors days are fading. I no longer go out without shoes (well – I no longer go out much with shoes either). I have fond memories of tramping round college barefoot – I once got thrown out of the local restaurant for it (I never did work out why bare feet should be against some sort of resturant code . . . ).

I cannot survive in shoes for too long. Shoes are depressing things that we wear to protect ourselves from our own mess! When I was in Slovenia, the fight I had to go through to prevent polite people giving me slippers to wear indoors – they were horrified! To them it was the sort of pathetic state of affairs like being in bed but not having any covers. The sort of situation that should be remedied by a friendly gift, bless them . . . But I loved it. And I fought. And the good people of Slovenia gave me very odd looks.

More fond memories, of the snow this time – a foot deep and minus 23 degrees (this wasn’t England!). I kid you not. That is hardcore barefoot weather. Ok, it was only to the woodshed each evening – but it was enough to get me a reputation for some reason . . .

10 – I am Not Going to Become a Terrorist or Activist.

I consider this highly weird of me. It’s easy to explain why people become terrorists. And even easier why people become activists. It’s a fairly predictable reaction to a world that really does its level best to make people very angry indeed. It makes me angry too – and you note I certainly don’t include THAT among my weird traits. Like so many others, when I read the steady stream of news items detailing the next dumb thing that has happened – the next pointless law introduced – the next example of humanity’s closed minded and thoughtless, unempathetic attitudes – well, perhaps I DO yearn to do something about it. To jump up and down and shout till my face goes purple and my spittle starts flying across the room. To banish humanity to its proper place – a pest that needs to be exterminated like the stupid vermin that it is. Not for any political reason – simply because it is true. Simply because humanity urgently needs a kick up the backside.

Unfortunately I have argued myself rather beyond the point of believing i can do anything about it – even in some sort of fantasy world wher ei could actually do things (like my dear character Richard Jarvis). Terrorism has largely failed to realise that it is a pointless exercise and even activism only seems to work if you tell people what they want to hear. The world – well, the western world – has progressed beyond the stage when one can influence them in any way. The evils of the world are usually no longer concentrated in a few people tor entities hat could conceivably be removed/sacked/exiled/blown up/have their minds changed. Instead, we have a system – a decentralised network of culture and ideas – and the reason that decentralised networks are so popular online is because they are impossible to take out! The modern malaise is something far beyond leadership or the government or authority figures. Who can really blame authority? They don’t seem to have any power to change things, even if they wanted to. Perhaps this is a network that consists of the ideas and outlooks of every soul living here. We really have achieved a sort of democracy – a world governed by the supremacy of the most ordinary. Resistance is futile – resistance is futile –
And how can you talk to that? How can you influence that and attempt to make any changes for the better? Instead, this whole business has become a play of slow-moving fashions that rarely do anything revolutionary or radical. If you want to go against that fashion – if you happen to think there is more wrong with the world than the obvious things like the certain types of discrimination or mess it is fashionable to complain about and ignore, then you will quickly find out how unbending and set the world is. That’s how i see it anyway. It’s very gloomy.

Q: So what can you do?

A: I haven’t a friggin’ clue!!

However, that simple outlook overlooks one small and crucial point – one that the industry, the Government and everyone else concerned has never seems to pay much attention to: The movie industry itself is sick to the core! That’s why it would actually be highly embarrassing to live in the first country to clamp down on this, if they do it thoughtlessly and pay no acknowledgement to that fact. Instead of something that would help people, the move would then simply become another example of ‘the brainless nanny state banning things rather than thinking about them’. I would feel happier if I could believe that there would be some positive changes in the DVD world to match the changes in the file sharing world, especially if the DVD producers would at least acknowledge their part in causing the problem.

I must emphasise that I am not talking here about downloading the latest Bond movie or the latest horror flick from Hollywood. With the price of mainstream DVDs, there is little point to that and I would have no problem whatever with a ban on it. DVD prices online – especially second hand and on the Amazon Marketplace – are very approachable. Sometimes it takes a little time for the prices to drop – but it is worth waiting. I am talking here about things more on the fringes, which is where the DVD industry breaks down and reveals just how sick it actually is. I am talking about the times you desperately want to see some rare film – and no one has bothered to release it on disk. Or you desperately want to see ditto but it is only available on region 1 disks. Of course it is possible (and legal) to ‘crack’ and get round region coding – but that involves tampering with your system, installing software or firmware and possibly even permanently damaging it if it goes wrong. It is here that it suddenly seems that approaches to copyright have got it all wrong and some changes are essential for the sake of the whole industry.

Let me express the two main problems in two simple bullet points:

* It is unfair to make something available in one place only and then prevent people in other places from ever seeing it.
* It is unfair to make something copyright, then not release it at all.

I was talking with director Richard Stanley a while back and he was describing his frustration that, even after much struggling, he couldn’t even get to see his own film Hardware (quite a cult favourite, I believe). It wasn’t out on DVD (though a version has since been released) – in my entire career I had only seen one VHS copy (which could have been pirate, judging by the quality) – instead, the film was just sitting somewhere in a warehouse out of reach of anyone. I had no idea if the film is available anywhere to download and share – but I hope it was! Simply so that people who want to see it can see it. And anyone who wants to call that illegal is really stretching into definition of selfish. It would be kind of ironic if the film’s director is forced to download an illegal copy just to be able to see his own movie!

Region coding is also a highly suspect idea, and one with very little reason behind it. Its impact is less in the case of a film released across the world and in all regions (though even then you can run into versions cut in one region but not in others or better extras/better transfer available from one place but not others, which also makes the system frustrating). When this really becomes destructive though is when you encounter a film that is ONLY released in one region code. The concept of making disks that are playable in one part of the world and not another seems to me to be not that far away from some form of racism. The region coding system is like banning a touring art gallery show from visiting Africa or producing a book that needs a special pair of glasses in order to read it, which of course are only available in the US. Extreme examples possibly, but can you point out a single reason for region coding to exist that has anything to do with me? Anything to do with the people who make the films come to that? It is all based in the grey area that comes in between, which should never have the power to damage the system it is supposed to be facilitating.

I work in the book world, thank goodness, and books are what I collect and write. That’s a much more wholesome world. If I did create a film though, I would prefer that people could buy it from me rather than be forced by region coding to download a pirate copy. BUT, if I created something, I would rather people could download shared copies rather than not see it at all. Calling that illegal also seems to fit the definition of selfishness and unfairness. If they can’t release something properly, then they must expect people to take whatever paths they can to find it – including downloading it if it is there to download. After all – some people care about films a lot as an art form – and caring about films is more important to people than a pointless region code system and the laws it meshes with so unfairly. Therefore it is a legal setup that gets and deserves no respect whatsoever.

To put it bluntly, region coding is one of the forces that makes piracy inevitable and any attempt to stamp out piracy should also feature an effort to stamp out that. A) It’s the only way they could have a hope of succeeding and B) it’s an unfair system full stop.

I like to trot out the example of Australia, who, I believe, has warned that it could be a violation of the Trade Practices Act to sell DVD players that are fixed to one region code. Good for them. I really wonder why everywhere else in the world cannot see what an annoying, pointless and damaging system that is and act accordingly.

Let me express the results of my ranting in two more bullet points:

* It should indeed be illegal to copy something, provided that that something is actually available. If someone owns the copyright to something but can’t be bothered to release it then it should automatically be legal to copy and distribute the material without personal gain.

* Similarly, if a film is released only playable in one part of the world (region coded) then it should be legal to copy and distribute that material in other parts of the world without personal gain.

These two facts seem not only fair to me but obvious. If we could just see some attention given to these problems, in opposition to the unending media hype about piracy and the poor saintly producers that are supposedly losing millions to this evil corruption, then I would be a bit happier. But until that happens, I and many others have no sympathy at all for the industry and its complaining. And I really hope that any system implemented to make life hard for downloaders has the sense to operate in an appropriate way. It is worth remembering that not everything shared on file sharing networks is illegal. Far from it. I have shared my own stuff on there in my time. Distributed my music there for free sharing. And it was great. I loved it. There was something almost liberating about saying bye bye to it and casting it loose to places where I can have no more influence on it at all. If the proposed clamp-down can be suitably selective – targeting certain things that there is no excuse for downloading for instance – and concurrent with a warning (after the pattern of the Australians) against manufacturing region specific DVD players, then that would be acceptable. To simply strangle the whole thing and bring an entire and often valuable and exciting system crashing to the ground without any thought would be decidedly unacceptable. I just wonder which approach I can trust the UK to take. In the past, their record in the ‘ban it rather than think about it’ department has not been very good.

* * *

Wikipedia article on Region Codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

A few helpful links on cracking open a region locked DVD drive:

A good general guide is here: http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/articles/region.html – though it doesn’t make much mention of alternatives to Firmware.

My drive was hardware-locked to region 2. Instead of troubling with firmware, I have had good results using a little free program called Remote Selector – http://www.remoteselector.com/

Of course, we all hate spam. I am a horror writer, and therefore usually a gentle and mild soul – but I also will cheerfully admit to the things I would do to spammers, if I found myself confronting one down a dark alley. Many other people feel the same. But would you want to beat up their families? Would you want to sanction the entire town a person lives in, just because of a dubious rumour that this person has sent a few spam emails? Those tactics are reminiscent of wars a thousand years ago and mercifully humans have progressed a bit since then – well, sort of. Sometimes. And yet, in a way these are equivalent to the tactics of the supposed fighters against spam, that are slung at us every day in cyberspace. Why we put up with it, I don’t know.

The problem is the so-called blacklists. They work by attempting to create a blacklist of spam sources, which can then be used to filter out the spam email. I use them myself in my mail software, which flags the messages that it thinks are spam so I can delete them quickly and easily – if I want to. It does NOT delete them automatically, and thank goodness for that because I have been noticing a worrying phenomenon. Simply that most of the legitimate addresses that I receive mail from – friends, newsletters from websites or small businesses that I am interested in etc – have ended up flagged as blacklisted at one point or another. Fortunately, it makes no difference to me since I am doing it by hand and can just ignore it. But even so – that makes me uneasy. There is no doubt that these so-called blacklists are doing a very good job of catching innocent messages. And the reasons for this can be quite disturbing. It appears that it is not just a simple matter of seeing an email address doing something naughty and blacklisting that email address. Innocent messages that have some element that trip the system are treated exactly like spam. Maybe you sent it to a few people at once. Or maybe it just ‘looks’ like an unwanted ad and trips the content and word filters. Either way, it is quickly removed. Worse still, it appears that they will quite happily blacklist entire servers because of suspected ‘spam’ activity, which can affect hundreds of ordinary web users. [1] There have also been cases of actual abuse of the system in the form of vindictive reporting of innocent victims to the blacklists. [2] More suspicious still, there have even been some so-called blacklists that allow you to pay to have your email address removed after they have got their grimy paws on it. Blackmail by any other name . . .

According to Margie Arbon of the Mail Abuse Prevention System, “Blacklists are a decision by the owner of the equipment. They are trying to defend their property.” [1] Unfortunately that appears to be largely nonsense. Of course, I am quite happy letting the blacklists interact with my software, provided I can see what they are doing. But in the confusing world of email and the vast flood of spam these days, it is easy to imagine people implementing these systems set to ‘delete’ without knowing the consequences to genuine email – and who can blame them? And another, far more serious problem is that these days, email is a whole nest of filters all the way down the line – “for our own good” of course. ISPs, email hosts and others all seem to have filters that the message has to go through to get to its destination, all trying to recognise spam in various ways and reduce this spam plague. One would hope that these filters are more sensible than the flawed blacklists – but it appears not always. But is that so surprising? This whole thing is an automated system that is basically trying to detect something as subtle as whether a person ‘wants’ to receive a thing or not – which sounds far too close to impossible for that system ever to be relied upon unsupervised. In my own and my friend’s experience, there are a suspicious number of messages that never seem to get through to the recipients, or even get overtly bounced back owing to ‘blacklisting’. It seems to be turning what could be a remarkably effective communication tool into a singularly unreliable one just as much as the spam itself is, which continues to arrive no matter what measures are taken.
A point to remember is that the spammers are clever. THEY know how to circumvent blacklist technology and aim their emails and all the blacklists in the world don’t seem to prevent the steady stream of spam flowing into our inboxes. Big companies are also clever – they can afford to employ advanced technology and to strike ‘bargains’ to get their messages (legitimate newsletters etc) through. Ordinary people are also not much affected by these no-brain strong-arm tactics – personal messages are largely below the anti-spam radar. It is the small business that really suffers from this.

Case study: A friend of mine has a small business selling thundereggs – polishing them and then selling them to collectors. Like anyone in such a position, he has a circle of people (me among them) who eagerly await his emails announcing that there are some more thundereggs available, so we pop over to the website and first come first served! And yet somehow, this system fell foul of the spamhaus blacklist, which caused chaos for a while. It was possibly due to a blacklisting of the entire host, which absolves my friend from any ‘blame’ (which of course he never had anyway) but only puts the matter into a worse and more stupid light. This is indeed analogous to stopping mail from an entire small town because you have a vague suspicion that someone there sent something naughty!

I myself have fallen foul of Spamhause with Eibonvale press in the same way – and had reason to curse their name in the same way. I thought at first that it was due to the incredibly shocking activity of actually telling people I released a book, but it appears to also be because my entire server got blacklisted. The result of that was that I had no idea who received my messages and who didn’t and had to run the risk of sending out duplicates. And I am not talking newsletters or anything – I don’t HAVE a newsletter. I am talking ordinary business communication to shops who stock Eibonvale books etc.

I went to the spamhause website, only to be confronted by some of the most incomprehensible computer lingo I have ever had to deal with and no obvious way to fix the problem. Along with a general attitude of “well you should know better than to ********” – well, no I bloody shouldn’t! I am a publisher, not a computer technician. I consider myself relatively computer literate – I have built my own PC and run my own clutch of websites. But I am a busy man – I haven’t TIME to take a degree in email server technology and filtering systems so I can make sure I have designed my email in the precise and only way that will get them through the email filters ok.

In case people have forgotten, email is about talking to people. In case people have forgotten, a small business is about selling things to people in a small way. In case people have forgotten, selling things to people means TELLING people about those things sometimes – without spending over £100 a year on sophisticated 3rd party newsletter companies who know the ropes.

The fact that so many ordinary people are being inconvenienced by these email filtering technologies says that there is something wrong with them. But people still blindly rely on the blacklists – or are forced to rely on them. To let automated systems they cannot even control decide what they see and what they don’t. Of course, genuine spammers should be publicly birched on prime-time TV – but even so, where do you draw the line in this fight? Is it ok to mess around ordinary businesses – like thunderegg hobbyists – in order to give the true spammers just one more thing to find a way around? Fortunately people just seem to be waking up to the fact that spam filtering is far from a failsafe solution. Indeed, there are even thoughts that it might represent “irresponsible censorship” and an illegal interference in business practices. [1]

Why does spam exist? Presumably because if, out of a million spam messages sent, just one person, somewhere, is dumb enough to click on it and buy ‘Viagra’ or a suspicious college degree, then it has succeeded. And is that going to be a constant, I wonder? Since spam seems to be thriving and flooding into my inbox as strongly as ever in spite of all the anti-spam rage and publicity that floods the world (and in spite of all the blacklists and filters), then I can only conclude that it is. So no one is saying ‘give up the fight on spam’. Simply that it needs to be done responsibly and without causing harm – neither of which is the case at the moment. That blacklists cannot be allowed to operate in secretive, unaccountable and confusing ways. Blacklists can be useful – but only when used and run responsibly. Not blindly deleting all your hobby emails. And not imposed on us by the powers that be.

Sources:
[1] – http://management.silicon.com/government/0,39024677,10003993,00.htm?r=2
[2] – http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y202/m12/abu0085/s04

Esterel Thunderegg

Buchanan Thunderegg

Gawd i love thundereggs!  Are these things amazing or are these things amazing??

More over at the thundereggs blog: http://thundereggs.wordpress.com/

Also, wherever you are in this flat landscape, you are constantly in the shadow of the huge Dungeness nuclear power station.

You get there by riding – of all things – a long miniature railway line, complete with small working steam engines. The famous Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. That railway provides the last surreal touch as it strikes out from the familiar south Kent marshes and enters the great shingle sea. What else WOULD you expect to see crossing this lonely wasteland, bristling with pylons?

In spite of the railway, the shingle itself is filled with the feeling of ruin and decay. The houses look rickety. The church (if that is what it is) is the eeriest i have ever seen and in ways i cant quite put my finger on. Old forgotten structures sit crumbling in the wilderness. Mysterious posts sticking up out of the gravel with no current purpose . . . Even the plants are strange. Small and stunted – and sometimes suffering strange deformations.

It looks like a glimpse of the future.

I mean literally.  Suppose we all had a cute little red heart somewhere – floating overhead like something in a cartoon – that increased or decreased in size depending on how you felt about the people with you at the time.  A precise visual indicator.

No hiding then!

No more love-lorn timids unable to tell anyone how they feel.  Everyone would know – and everyone would just have to get used to it.

No more lying relationships based on artificial guilt or fear of the alternative.  You could never again pretend that you loved someone just to keep a dead flame alive.

No more paranoid people afraid everyone around them wants to get into their pants – they also would have to get used to it.

No hiding any more . . .

You could nurture the other’s heart like a pot-plant and see it flourish!  Not like a ghost and see it hide.  Not like a riddle that has to be solved.

It would be the end of civilization as we know it.

And wouldn’t that be just great?

People can get in trouble for a lot of things – and some are quite destructive.  You kill someone – you get arrested and jailed.  I suppose people occasionally deserve that.  You assault or rape someone with violence – you also get arrested.  Yes yes – though I would prefer a clause in the legal system that permits the victim to retaliate with appropriate cathartic violence, if desired.  But when you can be arrested, fined or jailed for just being what we are – people, homo sapiens, the most confused animal on the planet – then something must be very wrong.  At the end of the day, that’s what prudery, censorship and the so called ‘decency’ laws are attacking.  There’s no two ways about that.  People can argue until they are blue in the face, but when you follow the arguments to their conclusion, you are left with nothing at all.  Blank.  A great big echoing empty space.  Instead this is all about humanity’s self-consciousness and its tendency to want to hide what we actually are – including those things called our bodies.  Yes – we do have them.  You do to – somewhere under those clothes and that makeup you have something that is original and very real.  But that reality is always the last thing you show – as though that reality is somehow the guilty secret and everything you have piled on top is somehow the truth.

Which is strange, because reality seems to me to be worth far more than any number of illusions.

Ok – it ain’t a glamorous thing to protest about.  It ain’t a big and grand activist’s stamping ground.  It ain’t like torture, oppression or absence of free speech, cruelty to animals, saving the planet or banning big brother – things that create a big glow and glitter inside you accompanied by mild feelings of turn-on and self-righteousness.  In comparison to the big, howled about wrongs of the world, it is almost ignored.  People who say “hey, surely all people should be treated the same regardless of which part of this chaotic planet they come from” – they are applauded.  Of course they should be.  But people who insist that all parts of the body should be treated equally and that people should shrug off the immature self-spun pointless chains of prudery, censorship, self-consciousness etc. are just shrugged off as crackpots – as no doubt I already have been.  Long ago.  Perhaps that is because this particular oppression doesn’t lead to mangled corpses and genocide.  Because it doesn’t . . . hurt people.  Insult people . . . Because it . . . doesn’t really harm people . . . err . . . because it is not really important . . .

Errrr – yes?  The fact that all of the above are wrong seems to have been overlooked.

There are two manifestations of this.  Both unhealthy – both causing misery, insulting everybody, sometimes causing persecution and, together, are almost universal.

Firstly, there is the self-consciousness bourn though your lack of self-worth.  The feeling that your body is too inferior to be displayed.  These days, it may be that we are being taught to be more afraid of ourselves than ever before in this way.  In this day when we are surrounded by impossible ideals in our imagery and also by an ever more hyper-precise health-consciousness regime which hammers it home continually that if you are not quite the willowy, glittery example of that same impossible ideal then you are defective and basically worthless.  You may hate yourself for not being it.  You also want the people you interact with to be it.  You develop impossible ideals for people you want to meet/screw/work with.  Ordinary people are suddenly not quite good enough any more.  Then you think to yourself “well – if I was perhaps a few pounds lighter, then I would be able to feel confident about my body.  Or, if I can just get rid of that floppy bit there then fine, THEN I could put on a swimsuit or try a bit of nude sunbathing.

The other is even more distressing and, frankly, more irrational.  The other side is the people who may well be nicely self-confident.  Who don’t mind baring most in a swimsuit (eg.) – are reasonably comfortable with their bodies, but then stumble over the problem that there are still CERTAIN BITS that they cant expose.  This one drives me nuts!  The notion that some parts of the body are somehow different than others – that they are ‘bad’ – that we basically wish we didn’t have them – seems so self-evidently ludicrous that I shouldn’t even have to say it here.  Just as no one should really have to say that hey, people from [insert location of choice] are not actually fundamentally inferior to people from [insert second location of choice].  And yet it is one of the most universal things there is.  Probably more universal than the racism I am using as a comparison.  It is a self-perpetuating myth as well because the more people think it exists, the more it actually exists and therefore the more you will upset people if you go against it, the more attention you will draw, and the more guts you will need to face down that attention.

In reality of course, the two usually co-exist to varying degrees.

The arguments against all this prudery and shame are classic and have been around for a long time.  We are all just the same under our clothes – we are what we are.  Even the Americans can’t alter that.  So why must that be hidden?  Why the hell do these silly things called clothes make such a difference to us poor souls – and, far worse, why do some people feel the need to inflict this on everyone else and the world in general?  Just what is WRONG with what we are underneath?  It makes no sense.  We all seem to know it makes no sense.  I imagine a fairly high majority of people reading this – younger people especially – will have at least agreed with this point.  But even so, somehow the general mass of humanity with all its momentum pays no attention.  Our intelligence is still insulted by stories of people arrested for going naked in their garden (sued by a neighbour I think) – arrested for organising naked art stunts (dear old Spencer Tunik) or for just playing around and having fun (the nude hiker).  All of which just serve to make a mockery of the justice system and insult people who are victims of real trouble.

(Id LOVE to have been the judge in that naked neighbor case!  I would award the plaintiff psychological help and the defendant a weekend holiday on the Adriatic!)

I have tried to isolate some of the basic laws that operate in this area. This is what I came up with –

1 – It is the act of hiding something that most draws attention and interest to that something.  To spell out:  You try to hide or crush your sexuality/ what you are – instantly you just attract attention to it.  Which is probably unwelcome as you were trying to squash it in the first place.  *warning* *warning* Vicious cycle ahead and I have met enough of the paranoid, bitter man/woman-hating people this produces to last me a lifetime, thankyou and get out!

3 – Ergo: There are no absolutes that stand up to investigation.  None.  Zero.  All reasons for the existence of prudery turn out to be purely constructed illusions with no real foundation – and no positive advantages either.  A self-replicating pointlessness.  Isn’t it marvellous.

It seems to me to be a major psychological flaw of modern life (hell, life from any period, probably) how terrified people are of themselves and what they are – and, secondarily, what the people around them are.  To my mind, this whole area contributes to the vast culture of hiding from the truth and from reality, hiding behind labels and wrappings and the ‘personal fortress’ syndrome – all of which are basically nasty and disabling and reducing phenomena.  Leading directly to the ‘devilment’ of the body, leaving vast numbers of people terrified of themselves and of other people – of people’s hidden and mysterious sexuality – of what they stand for beneath their clothes.  I am also sure it contributes to the negative aspects of our lecherous and flesh-crazed society.  Obsession anyone?  Sex obsession?  The grand old annoyance of lechery?  Small-minded cock/cunt-centred dopes who just want to get inside a man’s/woman’s pants to find out what is there!!  Maybe if the body wasn’t such a stifled thing then people would take it all for grated more and look for other things beyond glimpses and teases and lecherous obsessions.  Then we would treat each other with more respect and sheer good sense and pretty little bluebirds would flutter round our heads singing ‘tweet’, filled with the joy of life.

[Insert angelic-sounding violin music here] Wouldn’t it be rather nice to live in a world where we aren’t forced to be ashamed of what we are?  Where a vast culture of hiding isn’t flung in our faces, ruining our relationships?  Our interactions with people?  Our own personalities?  Wouldn’t it be nice to be free?

I am not suggesting it is the complete cause of all the worlds problems.  It is just one small contributing part to the general psychological degeneration of humanity.  It might not even be a cause exactly – it might be more of a symptom for all i know.  But that does not vindicate it!  Does not make it any less worth getting cross about.  Likewise, I am not suggesting a ban on clothes.  I am not suggesting that we all get naked and fill the streets in a massive ‘happening’ (well ok, I would LOVE it if we all got naked and filled the streets in a massive happening – wouldn’t that be great and healthy and uplifting and blah blah?  But no one would pay any attention if I said that!  I have to keep my arguments moderate and not follow them through to their conclusion in order to get them through your thick skulls!!) – but I am suggesting that the people who enforce these ridiculous notions, who would go nuts if someone walked through Camden Town market naked or persecute neighbours who like to sunbathe should be locked naked in a small room, filled with icy water spray and then barraged with peashooters until they cant walk.  Then, most importantly of all, be fucking IGNORED for the dumb brain-dead primitive morons they are!!!  *pant* pant* *simmer*

*ahem*  Humanity has accomplished a lot in a way – but it is all rather let down by stupid failings like this.

Remember that ridiculous ‘wardrobe malfunction’ incident in the US?  (Where else?)  That was blown up until it shared media ranking with small wars and foreign earthquakes.  I mean – correct me if I am missing something here but – well – was that incident not just about the stupidest thing to have come along in what someone for a joke has called the civilised world for a very long time?  But I can see it now.  All across America, thousands of men, women and children sitting up in unison and crying in shock “Oh my god – what IS that thing?”  Then, when the men have finished consulting the encyclopaedia and the women have come out of the cupboard and been calmed down with a drink – that’s when the phone lines are jammed . . .

That’s not what happened . . . but you can bet your rosy pink arse that that is what the collective US consciousness WISHED had happened.  Thought SHOULD have happened.

[Insert strident protest song music here] So yes – stand up, people.  Stand up ya’ lazy buggers and cast off this oppression and this dark and smothering sin that we are all rooted in.  Throw off the chains and stride forward to something new and clean – and your bodies shall be washed in sunlight and sprinkled by dew.  You shall feel the world again as it is supposed to be felt and you will be at one with nature.  You will learn respect and dignity.  This pulpit-thumping tone is of course, pure satire and an attempt to hide from general view that I myself am just as incapable of following these ideas as you are.  I too am a hopeless shrinking coward, lost in a mess of ruined self-worth and embarrassment.  So why the hell am I bothering.  The doom is total and eternal.  But anyway, yes.  Throw off the chains, people.  Rise up and overthrow.  Truth always has a power if people care to wield it and together we can see falsehood trampled and bleeding in the dust where it should be.  And then all hail a new era of simplicity and truth . . .

Or not . . .

Who’s the hell’s going to listen to this ranting?

I’m going to bed.