crookesmoor grand tour

I went to my first conference last weekend. It was only in Sheffield, but that’s apparently far enough away for the University to put me up in a hotel for the weekend, so it’s still exciting. And it was exciting. I got very little from the talks themselves, but getting the chance to meet and talk with people – in some cases, people whose work I’ve been reading for the last year – was brilliant. I brought back a table mat from Wagamama with what could be the beginnings of my thesis scrawled on it, courtesy of some professor from Stanford. Ace.

I stayed in Sheffield for a bit after the conference. It was a nice sunny day, and I was feeling nostalgic (when aren’t I feeling nostalgic?), so I got the late afternoon train back and spent a few hours strolling around those old haunts. Finding myself in my old stomping grounds, it’s only right I do some stamping.

Walking through Crookes now is such a bittersweet experience. I miss the days spent living there like nothing else – they were brilliant, all three years of them. When you return to somewhere you love, you see things differently: every road and building has a memory attached to it, and everything you used to take for granted makes you smile. You get to a busy road junction and cross with muscle memory. That traffic light’s gone red, which means… and you’re across the road safely, even though it’s been two years since you’ve been there.

Those three years in Crookes were truly the best. That last year, well, that was audaciously good. But as I made a long turn back towards the station, I realized that the times I missed the most – and remembered the most fondly – were the final months there, after the January exams and before finals. That time we designed our own ridiculous cocktail and the barman actually made it for us. The Saturday nights that would begin with the most brilliant series of Doctor Who, ever! The intoxication of, for the first time, reading some graduate-level mathematics for my dissertation, coupled with strolls through the remaining lectures and coffee – lots of coffee – with my coursemates. Those glorious afternoons with Jilly, right at the end; lazy and sunny and perfect. And thus I learnt a truism: the last days are always the best.

Sheffield, all my love.

(But I like Manchester, too! So it’s all good.)

We did it! Perhaps soon I’ll stop shaking.

шосе до пекло

I (finally) passed my driving test. Yeah!

new adventures in fm

This is probably the best thing I’ve managed to do in one of these games. We beat Manchester City at Eastlands in the quarter finals, too.

I’m enjoying FM2012 a lot, mainly because of my decision to drop any pretensions of tactical acumen and instead play all my games in an unchanging 4-4-2 formation set to “attack”. At this point it ceases to be a football game, instead just spewing out arbitrary large integers, but it’s entirely entertaining.

Equally refreshing is starting as a team in the Championship and trying to work my way up to the Premier League – I haven’t yet tried this in a modern FM game, and it’s really very neat. I’m probably going up this season – I’m first at the start of February, and seven points clear of third place – but unsure of my ability to stick around in the Premier League once I get there. My board selling my best defender under my nose isn’t going to help matters. I’ve had to replace him with – and you’ll like this – Piscu. Piscu. Christ.

2011

year of revolution? year of saying sorry? year of cameraphones? year of barefoot leaders?

don’t be silly. it was the year of gin.

 

albums i liked in 2011

that were also released in 2011. this list isn’t conclusive, of course; these are just my favourites.

wu lyf

arrange

slow club

eleanor friedberger

british sea power

and all the obvious ones: pj harvey, metronomy, bon iver, st. vincent, etc.

what’s your maximum?

indeed.

sunderland 1 wigan athletic 2

These boys. They. Just. Will. Not. Die.

all said and done

There’s really nothing that I want to write here.

Hmm.

I talk a lot – not here, admittedly – about the real sense of unease Web 2.0 instills in me. Please don’t cast me as some sort of internet luddite. I think that the philosophy behind 2.0 – that the internet should allow us to connect with friends and those with similar interests, and share our experiences with them – is brilliant. It’s the execution that worries me. Sharing should be an optional thing. You should listen to an album or watch a movie and think jesus christ, that was AMAZING and then be able to share that with the people who you think are interested (this is one of the reasons I am optimistic about Google+). But instead, we get the new Facebook sidebar that shares everything you’re watching, reading, or listening to… yes, you can turn these off, but at the minute I feel like it’s an opt-out system, not an opt-in system, and as more and more websites are built around the 2.0 framework, the penalties for not opting in become greater and greater. Take World’s Biggest Pacman, for instance. You can play on the board all you want, and it’s fun, but in order to create your own map and add to it, you have to log in through your Facebook account. This is something I don’t want to do, because I don’t want my Facebook account associated with World’s Biggest Pacman. There’s surely a checkbox you can tick to stop it from spewing Pacman adverts all over your feed under your name, but it’s not worth the hassle of me finding it and unchecking it.

This is a completely stupid example, because it’s Pacman, but things like this start small. Already websites allow you to create accounts attached to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Why is this a good thing? I really don’t want, for instance, my Facebook account to be linked to my MapMyRun account. I use the former to maintain a social presence amongst friends, mostly old ones, and I use the latter to keep track of my jogging routes and times. I talk about running with some of my friends here in Manchester who also run, but I’ve got absolutely no reason to want to combine the two. I don’t want information about jogging being broadcast to the people I have on Facebook. Then disable the notifications! you say. But why do I have to opt out?

Personally, I think this integration of social networking is the wrong way to go about things. It’s probably the simplest way, though, and it certainly serves both the social networks and the websites that integrate with them well: the social networks get to extend their ubiquity, and the website gets free advertising. It’s probably great if you’re an outwardly social person, as well, but as someone who keeps a smallish group of very close friends and little outside that, it’s not something I feel comfortable with. Ones own internet experience should make one comfortable, no?

I’m not sure what I’d suggest instead, and I’m not sure social network integration is  an entirely bad thing, either. What concerns me is that there appears to be no stopping and questioning, and instead more and more integration and full speed ahead to Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an entirely social internet. And as soon as the internet becomes one person’s vision, it might well have never existed in the first place.

(nb 1. For what I regard as an example of what Web 2.0 should be like, see Yelp. It’s a well-curated community driven by user-produced content. It’s got a bit of a message board feeling to it, which is something I think 2.0 should strive towards achieving.)

(nb 2. Of course, a lot of my ideas about Web 2.0 are extremely derivative; see Jaron Lainer’s excellent You Are Not A Gadget, or Zadie Smith’s sort of Cliffs Notes version here).