Pete Ashton’s Blog

Photo down on the sidebar is from New Years taken by my sister. I was very drunk.

Who you calling boring, punk? If you think the web’s gotten boring, you’re just not looking very hard.

S’almost funny. The last time I was plunging headlong into what looked to be clinical depression and seriously considering going on pills a woman I’d never met and never really cared for died in a car crash in Paris and the world went stupid for a bit. And now a much older woman, though still one I’ve never met and never really cared for, has died and the radio at least has gone stupid for a bit.

Coincidence? Synchronicity? An omen? Who can tell.

Now, what’s the doctor’s phone number…

Stats news

March is looking interesting. BugPowder seems to have stabilised at 1500-1700 unique visitors a month and appears to be on something of a decline, which is strange as the weblog is going great guns at the moment. Looking at the search engine referrer logs I have a feeling the Gorillaz effect had a lot to do with this peak last year so we’re hopefully reaching a level or normality. Which is good. The daily stats are all over the place currently. Some days as low as 30, some days as high as 80. Not sure why this is. End of the day I’m happy with it.

The Pete Blog, being this one, has been slowly but surely increasing. While it has it’s fair share of weird-assed referrers it’s never been hit by something like the Gorillaz wave, probably because I rarely mention popular icons on it. Then, suddenly, this month it’s gone crazy - getting close to 1000 unique visitors. Okay, that’s not that crazy, but it’s quite a leap. I don’t think it’s been mentioned anywhere fancy or been hyped particularly - it’s just my little blog - but here’s the proof:

While we’re in an appropriating mood… keaggy.com - file for future reference, along with the haughey spring design.

Credit where credit is due. So taken was I with Matt Biddulph’s manner of displaying l’espion photos that I have ripped it off wholesale because it’s so perfect. Although I did write the HMTL from scratch if that makes any odds.

Here, then, be Grid 001 in a series, comprising the best, or most intersting, photos taken with the wee thingy over the last few weeks. More to follow.

Side note: When Matt was over today I was telling him how easy it was to do HTML with NotePad and a browser, and I realised I haven’t done a page like this for ages, having become somewhat dependent on GoLive and the old click and drag technique. So I figured I’d do this in SimpleText (that’s NotePad to PC-types) and check I could still do it. Interesting results. Firstly, I noticed I’d forgotten basic tags like colspan, which was worrying. I had to refer to a book for the first time in over a year. Secondly, I’m forced to keep my code simple so I can scan through it. Thirdly my eyes got much tireder quicker because I was concentrating more. I think the results came quicker because I wasn’t messing around, plus I feel like I’ve actually achieved something. I can see why proper programmers like the command line so much. Think I might go back to basics more often, especially as GoLive uses 48meg of memory while SimpleText requires a mere 512k. (See older rant on this subject)

Okay, this is just too clever. I may well rip it off.

Had The Cartoonist Matt Abbiss over tonight, ostensibly to scan his sketchbook in preparation for a new subsite on BugPowder, so lots of tea and pesto was consumed. While Matt was verbose, urbane and a pleasure to have around, I do get the feeling when people visit us, especially those of a comics persuasion, that they’d love to be locked away with the bookshelves for a few hours. I have a dream that one day I’ll have an actual reading library where people can come and sit and read for hours on end. That’d be so cool…

Really like this picture diary idea. Thinks I mights starts one.

More corporate anthems. No comment necessary I feel. (from mefi)

Nan Goldin was as good as the last time I went. Last time I just caught the smaller slide show on the ground floor which actually has the better “sequence” (for want of a better term) All By Myself. This time I went straight for the 1st floor show and managed to catch it right from the beginning - no mean feat when it’s 45 minutes long. No seats left so I sat on the floor, then lay on the floor soaking it all up. Quite stunning indeed.

Met up with Mo in the gallery who had popped in after work to catch some of it. It was good walking round with someone this time, a bit odd because of the explicit nature of some (most!) of the shots, but good to compare reactions, etc.

Mo works in my normal shop in the City and was the person who read this entire weblog in on 6 hour sitting a few weeks back. Since I’m currently on secondment at CXR I hadn’t seen him properly since then (save at the weekend) and he wanted to ask about it all. He used to keep a weblog-type thing a few years back but went on a date with a friend of a friend who had read it and was rather freaked out by this, so he took it all down. So he was intrigued at what I write on here and why.

I remember addressing this when I started this venture two years ago (before Blogger) and my friends thought I was mad. As you can probably tell, I’m about to go through it again.

A quick brainstorm…

This isn’t the whole me. There’s a lot I don’t write about.

My relationship with Kate is way off the agenda as are my thoughts about other people, positive or negative. Same goes for family.

It’s cathartic. There’s something about putting things down on ‘paper’ that neutralises them. If something’s pissing me off, rambling about it in a public forum makes it seem much less important to me and I can move on.

If you sat in a pub with me and we got on, chances are I’d be as revealing as I am here, probably more so.

I refuse to get embarrassed about myself. I used to get embarrassed about myself when I was younger but I’ve gotten over that, and it’s much better this way. At the end of the day, this is me. What do I have to be worried about? I know this is a public forum accessible to anyone with a computer who puts my name in Google.

I have a bad memory. Going though my weblog reminds me what I did.

I’m terrible at keeping in touch with people, really terrible. This can function as a circular letter to people who want to know what I’m up to, although I don’t write it for that reason.

There’s something bigger that I’m trying to put my finger on, but it’s not coming through… I suppose it’s that writing this weblog is important to me, not as therapy necessarily or as performance, but because it allows a kind of creative release. Through BugPowder I have a lot of contact with some very creative people many of whom use their ability to create Art, in the sense that they communicate something close to the universal by creating. This is why I like Nan Goldin’s work so much. At the most basic they are snapshots of her friends, but there’s something about them that you can identify with even if you’ve never hung out with transvestites in New York in the 70s. Which is the point. That is what “good art” is. Taking your life experiences and communicating them to others in a way that enriches their own experience of life.

I’m not claiming to be enriching anyone’s life with this weblog, but I have created something here. And I do feel the need to create something. This is important to me. I could probably live without it, but my life would be poorer for it I think.

So why not just save it on the hard drive and keep it completely personal? Wouldn’t that allow me to be more honest and true? 1) I wouldn’t do it. I tried it before. No reason to. 2) The audience, or the potential of the audience, is what makes the weblog what it is. I’m telling a story. What is a story without an audience?

At the end of the day, I wrote this post for me. It was on my mind this evening and I wanted to figure it out. But I wrote it in a way that someone else reading it will understand it.

Anyone up NOW and likely to be so for the next hour or two, tune your radio to Radio 1 for The Lock Up. Very good indeed.

Pete Ashton Dot Com now has a search engine. See under the archives.

And so the black cloud passes. And everything is okay again.

Funny that.

Thanks to the people who mailed - it’s appreciated.

Off to the Nan Goldin show now.

Big Black Cloud again. Bugger.

This always seems to happen whenever I start a holiday and I still don’t know why. The lack of direction? The huge possibilities? The need for self discipline?

Getting by doesn’t seem enough, efforts seem pointless and curling up in a ball is the only thing to do.

It’ll pass in a day or so, it always does, but it’s a fucker while it’s here.

Ho, and if you will, hum…

modifyme.commodfiyme - can’t say I know what it does or why, but I like it. As josh on MetaFilter says, “Crank up your speakers and make weird electronic music by making colored tiles fly around your browser window! (Sort of). It is just impossible to describe, and totally amazing.”

A nice day today. Kate’s brother John was over for the weekend and we met up with Mo (from work) for lunch at Wagamamas, then coffee and chats. On the way to dropping off John at Waterloo we popped into the National Theatre on the South Bank to be shocked by the tail end of their completely OTT South Pacific day.

Terrible photo but necessary. The white figures are cut outs of sailors dotted all around the admittedly battleship-esque National Theatre building

John suddenly decided he really needed to go to a free panel game between the casts of two current plays hosted by Emma Freud and we left him there, negotiating the hoards of face-painted children, and wandered, slightly dazed towards the Millennium Bridge.

When this was first opened I worked at the St Pauls end of Cheapside and had this rather nice idea of popping over it at lunch time for a quick visit to Tate Modern with my sandwiches, which was rather quashed when it went all wobbly.

It’s a very nice bridge indeed. Standing in the middle of the Thames with no traffic is a good experience, especially with the illuminated St Pauls at one end and Tate Modern at the other. Quite a special little place. Summer sunsets picnics are going to be in order methinks.

Then, after an amusing (for me) Mil Millington episode, we attempted to find a Pizza Express to use these vouchers we had for a free meal, which we duly did on the 2nd attempt to find one that was open. When you’re not paying for it, you do realise that their food is pretty poor. And I’m sure a pizza shouldn’t be soggy.

Then home to tea, a bath for Kate and the new Comics Journal for me.

Next week I’m on holiday. I’m planning to do a museum or gallery a day. Planned so far are Nan Golden at the Whitechapel Gallery again on Tuesday (if anyone’s up for joining me) and The Museum Of London at some point. Any other suggestions for free/cheap/expensive-but-well-worth-it things to see would be appreciated.

Some more disturbing search requests

One of the back room walls at CXR, recorded for posterity.

Oh yeah, the blog has moved to the new address. Update yer bookmarks, chaps!

It’s definitely Spring today. Awaking with the expected hangover, I managed to get to the post office before it shut to send off an Ebay sale, and decided against a coat. There’s something very liberating about going outside in just a jumper after months of having to wrap up.

Last night Kate came home about 9.00pm with lots of beer and wine and two people, which was nice. Sarah she works with and Keith is her chap and it turns out they were at Birmingham Uni in the year above me. What is it with this month and people from Birmingham popping up?

Whatever, somehow my 7″ singles were brought out for the first time in ages and Keith was pondering over how much some of them would be worth. During the years 1989 thru 1995-ish I bought a lot of 7″s because they were on the whole 99p, or the stuff I liked would’ve entered the chart for a week before ending up in the bargain bin at Woolworths. Some it’s a pretty representative batch.

Add on to this the junk shop that opened round the corner from me in Brum a few years back. Always check out new junk shops because they’ll be good stuff in there. They had boxes of 7″s that a DJ had sold to upgrade to CDs, or from an old 7″ juke box, covering most of the 80s and early 90s. Which was heaven for James the Goth and pretty good for me. Got some KLF, Nirvana, Stone Roses, that kinda thing, and an original Sugar Hill Gang Rappers Delight single from 1979, all at 5 for a £1. Thing is, some of these singles are not normal. They don’t have lables on them and the description is etched into the black plastic. Which means they’re probably super rare.

I’m not selling my week of release Smells Like Teen Spirit, nor my Loaded, but I might be tempted with the junk shop jobs. Anyone an expert on vinyl?

Online Etch A Sketch. Nuff said…

Checking out the referer logs and this one was a bit of a shock. Number one out of 21,962. WFT, indeed!

Another one of interest is where I came pretty high for situations where a manager should set ethics aside for the sake of profit and sales, which is nice.

I’d heard that the free websites hosters like Angelfire and Geocities were really strict on the bandwidth and tend to crash when linked to by people like Metafilter, but I didn’t think BugPowder could screw one up.

A few days ago I linked to There Goes Tokyo over on the main page and, to spruce things up, included an image from the site with the source being the Angelfire address (if you don’t get me, don’t worry - move on to the next post…). Ever since then the image has been replaced with the standard “image hosted by Angelfire” jpeg, only occasionally showing the lovely octopus it was supposed to.

I can only conclude that Angelfire doesn’t like the idea of that image being accessed an additional 70 times a day. Either than or it’s noticed that the image is being used by a non-Angelfire site and thinks I’m using their bandwidth without ‘paying’ for it (ie, showing people their ads) so they’ve stopped it being shown.

Whatever, it’s interesting that a site with relatively low stats can trigger them off.

Mooncat sent this on, and I almost resent him for doing so, but not quite. What’s wrong with this picture…

Green Eggs and Hamlet has been going through my head all day for some reason, though this is not the version I was told. That one went:

Would you, could you kill the King?
I could not do that kind of thing
I would not do it in a tree
Now get thee to a nunnery

Pong: The Text-Based Game - it’s a kinda zen thing, though I challenge anyone to play it for more than 30 seconds… (from the Fez)

Eek! peteashton.com has been registered! My first domain!

Oooh, do I have plans…..

Some weblogs I’ve been reading of late:

This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow
The End Of Free
Plasticbag.com
Brainsluice
Doc Searls
Evhead
Little Red Boat
Kookymojo
Matthew Haughey

All of these I’ve been reading for a while and have stood the test of time. Go read.