We at the ol’ raincoaster blog did not just fall off the squid trawler, ya know. No indeed, we were not hatched yesterday nor even the day before and are perfectly well aware of the mass moist madness that erupts when you get groups of excited, vigorous young people together in a consequence-free and water-and-stain-resistant environment stocked with bottled beverages.
Honestly, it looks like an orgy at Hogwarts to me. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all!
There’s not a raging snotload of things to do in Belgium, if you don’t rustle mussels or brew beer for a living, so these enthusiastic, yet two-years-behind-the-meme students decided to go for mass quantities, rather than attempt to duplicate the balletic elegance of the original experiment. For this monumental achievement, they gathered in historic (and, presumably, easily hosed down) Ladeuzeplein Square in Leuven, Belgium. Note please, that Coke does not work as well and regardless of what the Torygraph article linked to above tells you, it must be Diet Coke.
Not-Fleshed-Out-Yet-Really-Quite-Inescapable Conclusion: The dominant vernacular of civil engagement today defines itself directly against the current structure and forms of terrorism and is absurd in every sense, self-aware, positive in tone and gesture, meta-(not post-)intellectual, and a helluva lot of fun.
There are so many different varieties of fame these days we need to develop a whole new vocabulary to describe them. At the moment, the best we can do is to rank celebrities according to whether they’re A-list, B-list, etc. But even if we use every letter of the alphabet that still only gives us 26 different types. That’s surely not enough. Eskimos have 47 different words for snow. Shouldn’t we have 47 words for celebrity?
Well, my friends, once again the day’s work has been cleared away, the snarky comments have been left on various blogs that had it coming, the forum troll has been ratted out, and it’s finally time for me to do my own blogging.
At three in the morning.
Given that I have a meeting in about six hours for which I need to be at least presentable-esque if not actually, you know, showered and properly dressed (I mean, it’s like one or the other; what do you people want from me?) it’s not going to be an epic evening of blogging chez raincoaster, I can tell you.
What I can also tell you is that tonight Nine Inch Nails released a single for free download. It’s called Discipline, it’s very catchy, it’s not their most profound work, I found it via the RadReport, it will not play on anything other than Windows Media Player (remix it? Dude, I can’t even open it on decent software! What next, Realplayer?) and I started a new link challenge based on it.
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot is a link challenge? you ask if not in so many or those specific words.
A link challenge is this:
Look, have you ever had a boring job? I have one now. I mean, it would be sort of fun, if yes, kind of soul-killing, if my computer would stop crashing in the middle of it. But as it is, the suspense given to the whole operation does the exact opposite of what suspense does in movies: it takes all the fun out. “If I open a tab on Mollygood, is that gonna bring the whole thing down?” These are the thoughts which fill my hours. Makes me feel like hitting a tab of something else, and opening a can of something else besides.
Where was I? Oh yes, still on painkillers.
A link challenge is this: I, along with several others in the seamy underbelly of gossip blogs, get paid to make link posts, posts which consist of nothing other than links to other blogs. It’s the circle jerk manifested, and one of the reasons Google gave us all a big write-down if we got too many links from the same places. I guess Sergey and Other Guy don’t want us to inbreed or something.
But link blogging, for all that it requires much reading (or skimming) of gossip blogs, is not exactly a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporania. It’s a grind. And so the undisciplined mind, not that we’ve seen any around these parts, begins to look for ways to toy with it.
This approach is not recommended for hardware installations, even though I found that both a coffee bag clip and a Nike cross-trainer were indispensable in putting together my latest computer system. But of that we shall not speak…
So, we found some ways to toy with it. Seth started it, with his Three Word Links. I took up the challenge.
Aaaaaand the following Monday I came back with a One-Word link post. Somewhat obscure, bloodless, yes, but technically impressive in its own way, rather like a Russian ice dancing routine. Technorati doesn’t give a rat’s ass what the links say anyway.
Yes, every link is the title of a Nine Inch Nails song. Who says I can’t declare it an international holiday if I damn well feel like it? It is now nearly 3:30 in the morning and there have to be some compensations, dammit!
We shall see if Seth takes up the challenge: I have no idea how he feels about rage-emo. As for AgentBedhead, I think I know a fellow sucker for Trent when I see one. I sent the invite. Time will tell. Even if no-one takes me up on it, it’s okay.
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raincoaster 