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I got my sleek, pleasingly-textured and slightly oddly-smelling copy of the new Wired UK through the post yesterday. This made me happy, because… well, we’ve got our own Wired again. It’s a national pride thing, right? Now we can all collectively exorcise Danny O’Brien’s traumatic memories of the previous one. And, for the first time since Select magazine died along with Britpop and New Scientist went shit, there’s a magazine that feels like it’s actually sort-of targeted at me. Well, a more highly-paid version of me, at least.

Anyway, here are some quickly jotted down first impressions. I will probably change my mind about most of this over the next few days.

The design is certainly very pretty; the photography bold and colourful. Perhaps it’s a little over-designed – sometimes, the pretty-making interferes with the flow of information on the page; the text gets a little lost, your eyes aren’t quite sure where to look. But that could just be an early lack of familiarity with the magazine’s rhythm.

But certainly, I’d like to see it be more text-heavy. Currently, too often the copy gets relegated to a stray paragraph which is overwhelmed by the images – which doesn’t give me much confidence in reading something that seems like an afterthought. More text! A paragraph is not enough! But I think that might be me trying to hold back an unstoppable tide of contemporary magazine design, brandishing nothing more than an unread copy of the New York Review of Books. (Unread, of course, because it’s intimidatingly text-heavy.)
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As is now becoming tragically traditional, here’s my pigeonhole-breaking list of the best Things In General from the past 12 months. As is also traditional, it’s late. If you’re a regular reader, and remember the 2007 and 2005 lists, you’ll know the project by now: every year, the cruel hegemony of categorisation unfairly forces stuff into neat boxes. Iron Man was “a film”. Boing Boing Gadgets was “a blog”. The moment someone did something impressive in a sport was “a sporting moment”. This blog rejects such reductivist notions, and instead celebrates the innate thinginess of things, allowing – say – Will Wright’s Spore to go head-to-head with Billie Piper for the title of Best Budget Italian Restaurant.

So, without further ado, here are the 21 best things of 2008:

21. WALL-E
Made me cry, twice, on both legs of a flight to and from New York. I wasn’t the only one who cried, either: witness this awesome, awesome story from MetaFilter, which could have made this list all by itself. And will also make you cry.

20. Mars Phoenix
“Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!” was the most moving piece of writing of the year. What I said here pretty much covers it.
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So there’s been this internet brouhaha for the past few days, which isn’t of any real direct interest to you unless you have a reluctant but obsessive fondness for Blog Drama!!! (to which I plead guilty). But I think it does illuminate – or at least confuse in an interesting way – a lot of the problems that people are having adjusting to the still-newish world of mass online publishing, so I’m going to try teasing my thoughts out, as much to legitimise the many hours I wasted reading all the threads on this over the past couple of days as anything else. It’s a hugely overlong brain-dump, more about organising my own thoughts – obviously, I’d appreciate any comments you may have.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.
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Possibly of interest to people who care about such things: this blog post, in which Neil Gaiman is asked if he’ll be writing for Doctor Who under Steven Moffat’s glorious new showrunnerdom, and he really rather pointedly fails to say “no”, and instead talks about how nice the menu is at a Chinese restaurant in Soho.

‘Lo Neil,
As a great fan of Doctor Who, I’ve been dancing around the room after hearing that Steven Moffat is taking over as Chief Writer and Executive Producer of the series in 2009. [...]

Anyway- my real question is whether or not we’ll finally see a Neil Gaiman DW episode? We’re all quietly hoping the idea came up during your dinner back in March in Bar Shu… I know you’re a very busy person, but it would be the perfect combination for so many fans!
Rachel

I think it’s great news — what Russell Davies did over the last few years was remarkable: as a writer and as a show-runner he brought Doctor Who back, sure-footed and smart and with a heart. [...]

I’m really excited about Steven Moffat taking over — always assuming that it’s not just a publicity stunt on his part to try and get “Blink” a Hugo, as a countermeasure to Mr Cornell’s car-crash-to-get-the-sympathy-vote.

And it was a terrific dinner: they do fantastic dry-fried green beans at Bar Shu (it doesn’t sound like it would be fantastic from the menu, but it is).

Yeah, I know, it’s not much, but such fragile insinuations and half-percieved hints are what fandom thrives upon, no? And you must admit, it would be rather wonderful. I mean, he’s already getting his hand in at writing in the Doctor’s dialogue style:

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…. More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there…”

Now, if they could just ply Warren Ellis with enough Red Bull and cigarettes that he agrees to do their bidding as well…

UPDATE: The first hints of a rumour have now been upgraded to a full category five rumour swirling just off the coast of certainty land, as somebody who actually knows about such things says that sources within the BBC confirm the existence of the rumour, and more importantly he actually asks Neil Gaiman, who trumps his previous non-denial by going all Urquhart and saying “You may very well think that, but I could not possibly comment.”

In a continuation of my new resolution to do more with this little lump of internet, in a more Sore Eyesish quoty-blogging style, I was very fond of this from my favourite smart-writing-about-music blog, clapclap.org:

It’s unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to “good music” are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra’s image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud.

The New Yorker piece he’s spinning off from is also well worth a read. Alex Ross does seem to be widely acknowledged as basically the best thing ever, and I should probably set aside a significant portion of my life to read his book and his blog and everything. But I probably won’t get the time. Ah well.

Blogging this because it doesn’t quite fit into a del.icio.us link or a tweet, and because, hey, I’ve decided I should blog more often. The Hollywood Reporter brings us news that the studio MGM has picked up a script called Hot Tub Time Machine.

The money quote:

“We’re always looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the pack in today’s crowded marketplace, and what better way than to combine hot tub debauchery and the complications of time travel,” said MGM exec vp production Cale Boyter…

This is almost certainly excellent news for humanity.

Iraq just offers more of the same: death after death after death after death, until each death becomes nothing more than a dull pulse on a soundtrack; the throb of a neighbour’s washing machine we learned to filter out months ago; the invisible ticking of a household clock. We’ll notice if it stops, but not before…

…Particularly striking is the figure regarding the total number of Iraqi dead – striking because it’s so huge, and so vague. It lies somewhere between 150,000 and 1 million.

Between 150,000 and a million. That leaves 850,000 people who may be dead or alive. We simply don’t know. They currently exist, or do not exist, within a cavernous margin of error. Our minds can’t process this degree of horror. No wonder we change the channel. No wonder nothing feels real.

Charlie Brooker is also good when he’s not being funny.

Charlie Brooker on skiing:

The moment anyone tells me they’re going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I’ve constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy’s iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.

Did I mention that Charlie Brooker is right about everything?

I’m in a position where a frankly horrifying number of my friends seem to think that skiing is somehow a socially acceptable pastime, rather than an activity morally equivalent to grave robbing or fucking your nephew’s pet hamster to death (which is what it is).

What’s even worse than their belief that a week-long bout of organised falling down a mountain somehow elevates them above lesser mortals is the six months of cretinous babble that leads up to every skiing holiday. People who I know are normally funny, charming, erudite individuals will turn, at the slightest provocation, into witless bores, drivelling on about entirely imaginary differences in snow quality, as though they were Olympic champions desperate to shave off that extra hundredth of a second from their personal best. Mass emails get sent round analysing every possible option in such military detail that you’d think they were setting off to explore an uncharted region of the Amazon, rather than popping over to France to be pampered for a week along with a few hundred other middle-class Brits in a resort devoted solely to ensuring that nothing unexpected or interesting could ever possibly happen to them. And never in this whole period does it occur to them that taking six months to prepare for an activity in which gravity does most of the work – both in pouring people down the hill, and pouring alcohol down their throats – is something that renders them largely unfit to be members of the human race, rather than something to be smug about.

I am, of course, fully aware that any subject can come across as tedious and annoying when you’re the only person in a group who isn’t interested in it and everyone else is talking about it. Furthermore, I’m aware that this argument has, in fact, been made at length about football, something which I’ll happily talk about for hours on end, and which takes up an even larger amount of the year than skiing preparation does. But as a riposte, I’d like to point out that I’m right and other people are wrong.

So yeah. Skiing is shit, and I wish it would stop turning people I like into half-wits. Global warming, with all its glorious melting, can’t happen soon enough.

Journalist Paul Tolme recounts in Newsweek the unusual experience of discovering that an article he’d written about ferrets had been plagiarised – by a cheap, slightly erotic romance paperback.

Now, normally that would be a bad thing; plagiarism, after all, is a pernicious and dishonourable practice that needs to be stamped upon heartily. But the plagiarism, in this case, has given us some of the most giddily wonderful, utterly un-erotic dialogue ever squeezed between the warm, heaving covers of a soft-core potboiler.

The scene: a Native American called Shadow Bear has just boffed a young pioneer lady, Shiona Bramlett. Then, er, they see some ferrets:

“They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail,” Shiona said. “While alone in my father’s study one day, after seeing a family of ferrets from afar in the nearby woods, I took one of my father’s books from his library and read up on them. They were an interesting study. I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said that their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats. Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.” …

“What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females,” Shadow Bear said, watching as the last of the ferrets bounded off and disappeared amid the bushes away from where they had first been spotted. “Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows.” …

“I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight,” Shiona said, shivering at the thought, for to her one animal was as cute and precious as the next. It was a shame that any had to die to sustain the other.

It’s fantastic stuff. It’s Atlanta Nights meets Bulwer-Lytton meets David Attenborough. You should head over to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, who uncovered the plagiarism and who detail, in gleefully exhaustive fashion, every painful, jarring, sub-Dan Brown passage. Outstanding.

After a hiatus last year, when I forgot to do it, here’s the 2007 instalment of this blog’s ongoing project to fight the crude pigeon-holing tendencies shown by other end-of-year lists. No longer shall Neon Bible be relegated to the “best albums” parade, just because it was, in fact, an album. If Gordon Ramsay’s refurbished gastropub in Limehouse wants to compete for Best Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, rather than best restaurant, then it is free to do so. We not not bracket, compartmentalise, or divide. We celebrate unity through diversity.

So, here you go – here are the 19 best things of 2007:

19. The Arcade Fire at Glastonbury
Was it such a borderline epiphanic experience in spite of the drug-addled hippy with a poor sense of personal space who kept on trying to walk through my back during the entire set – or was it, in part at least, because of him? No. It was nothing to do with him. But thankyou anyway, kind sir.

18. Tony Blair fucked off
And for a precious, golden few days, it seemed like good sense, quiet competence and a dignified sense of principle might be restored to our government. Of course, not so much. But it was nice while it lasted. A clear winner of Vegetarian Restaurant of the Year.

17. The finger-tapping, eye-staring thing that The Rock does in Southland Tales to indicate that he’s going mad which is a bit like someone doing a Stan Laurel impersonation except they’ve never actually seen footage of Stan Laurel and have in fact just read about him on Wikipedia
Majestic.

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At a good friend’s birthday celebration recently, guests were asked to bring along something to entertain the other guests. All very nice. Naturally, I brought along a number of missing dog posters, which I thought I might as well share with the world at large. Please feel free to attach these to lampposts in your local area, for the distraction of passers-by.

Missing dogs (PDF)

1. Make lists. Getting complex thoughts out of your head and into list form can help to organise your workflow, prioritise tasks and remove time-wasting nuance and subtlety. Psychologists have found that the human brain responds to bullet points almost as dramatically as it responds to actual bullets; the time taken selecting exactly the right graphic to use at the head of each bullet point will always pay you back double in PRODUCTIVITY. You should aim to spend at least 25% of your day making lists of things to do.

2. Meeting expectations. Have you ever noticed how much time gets used up in meetings just getting everybody onto the same page? Rather than wasting ages talking at cross purposes or getting everybody up to speed, plan ahead: write up a clear agenda for the meeting in advance, laying out the topics for discussion, the goals being aimed for, the conclusions you will come to and what actions will be decided upon. If anybody tries to deviate from this agenda, don’t be afraid to ignore them, or to pretend you can’t understand what they’re saying.

3. Language is a tool. Use it wisely. Most words that people use in their professional and private lives are unnecessary. Linguists from the the University of Illinois at Chicago have identified adjectives as the most useless words, followed by adverbs and indefinite articles. Remove them from your speech. Verbs are powerful, activity words – try only using them. If you must use nouns as well, make a list of no more than fifty essential nouns you really need to talk about, and stick to it. Remember, while “productive” may look like an adjective, it is actually one of a recently discovered category of words called “superverbs”, which are even more powerful than ordinary verbs.

4. Don’t be a slave to email. Email should be an aid to productivity, not the killer of it. But studies have found that many workers spend upwards of 20% of their time responding to emails unnecessarily. Use an email client with a Bayesian spam filter to manage your inbox – simply marking anything with the phrases “Urgent”, “ASAP” or “by the close of play today” as spam will quickly teach it to hide away those intrusive emails along with the v14gr4 ads and Nigerian begging letters, allowing you to claim in all innocence that you never got it, and freeing you up to attend to other tasks.

5. Hell’s kitchen. Research from the University of Manchester has shown that the average man spends up to 12 minutes every day standing in the kitchen wondering what he went in there for. This is time that could be better spent being PRODUCTIVE, so fill your kitchen up with fast-setting concrete and wall it off to ensure this never happens again.

6. Waste of time. A voluntarily-attached colostomy bag is an excellent way to win back the 25 minutes or more that other people – lesser people – would quite literally be shitting away. While your competitors are in the head, you’re at your desk using your head. Also makes a useful weapon in tense business meetings.

7. Standing in the park on a spring day, soaking up the warm glow of the sun and listening to the happy cries of children as they frolic merrily, chasing butterflies and collecting flowers that give off a scent so pure and unsullied that it takes you back to more innocent times, where none of your worries and fears can find you. That’s five minutes you’re not getting back, loser.

8. Sekhmet. The Egyptian goddess of war and destruction, long thought vanished but in fact merely dormant and biding her hideous time, can be summoned by an act of bloodletting during the process of copulating with a lioness. Appease her with the flayed bodies of the weak – about 7 a day is considered appropriate – and she will grant you the strength of will and the infernal power to crush your enemies into the sand, grind their remains beneath your iron sandal, and feast upon the still-quivering flesh of their children. This should save you at least half an hour every day.

9. Hack hack. Use a service like Yahoo! Pipes or Feed Rinse to ensure that, as you read through del.icio.us popular or the Digg front page, anything with the word “hacks” in it is automatically deleted. Research shows that you’re a stupid fucking cunt who wastes most of their time reading shoddily compiled “productivity” self-help tracts online, when in fact you’d just be better off accepting that you’re a schlubby middle-achiever whose biggest barrier to success lies not in the fact you’re losing 42 minutes available time every day, but that you are simply a profoundly mediocre person destined for a life of moderate achievement and partial victories. Jesus Christ, just come to terms with this and you’ll be happy. You don’t have to be one of those hollow-eyed vampire people constantly striving to outdo the malevolent ghosts in their head… just be you. Look – Heroes is on TV soon. Just sit on your damn sofa and watch it.