I had a pretty good time at SXSW this year. It’s deeply satisfying to be around so many intelligent, creative people, and well, to get drunk with them. Jeremy Keith made the comment in the How to Rawk SXSW about how he felt he was amongst his tribe at the festival, and that’s certainly the way I felt - just hanging out with so many progressively minded, technically literate, enthusiastic and media-savvy people was a great feeling, and a reward in of itself. I also came up with a brilliantly catchy business-speak way of describing it, but Mark stole it for one of his tweets, so it’s dead to me now.

(At the same panel, Ben Huh asserted that without a doubt, at some point in the festival we would all end up in a strange car with strange people at 4am, to which I thought - bullshit; our hotel was 2 minutes from the conference centre, right in the middle of downtown where all the parties were happening - what possible reason did I have to get in a strange car. Then on the 4am Wednesday morning, I found myself in a strange car with a bunch of strangers. It’s funny how things turn out sometimes).

Anyways, here’s some of the talks I enjoyed:

• The panel Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration was great not just because of the engaging and novel subject matter, but also because I got to ask someone who actually works at NASA a question. If I ever go back in time, I’ve finally done something my eight-year old self would be impressed by.
• Twitter’s Mark Trammell gave a great, inspiring talk in What Can Carl Sagan Teach Us About The Web?, making extensive use of Cosmos to illustrate points about design, engineering and team-working.
• Bruce Lawson and Martin Kliehm demonstrated the awesomeness of HTML5 in HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches. Let’s hurry up and kill Flash, eh? Just shoot it in the head or something. Twice.
• How The Other Half Lives: Touring The Digital Divide - Jessamyn West and Jenny Engstrom gave an interesting talk on their experiences as librarians in rural and urban America, acting both as sometimes the only point of access to the internet for their communities, and as de facto trainers for a generation with no online experience whatsoever. Notes here.
• And I have to mention Memory Matters: How Do Elephants Do It by Mark Channon and Paul Duncan, not only because it was good and entertaining, but because it was a big part of the reason I got to go.

Supposedly, most of these are going to be podcast at some point, but I can’t find them at the moment. All well worth listening to if they do ever appear, however.

• Breaking Bad - discovered through work colleagues, the ongoing saga of a middle-aged chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal cancer, and with nothing to lose sets up a crystal meth lab, proves to be consistently entertaining and amusing well into its second season, although I’m slightly concerned that the friends who recommended it were pretty insistent it was the ‘wrongest’ thing on television, bigging it up in my head as Chris Morris’s Oz or somesuch, and yet sitting there watching it, all I can think is how utterly reasonable it all seems.
• Not freezing to death during one of January’s many cold snaps. Fucking hell, it’s been cold in the flat though. I hand in my notice next week, which means I should be out of this shithole by mid-April, thank fuck.
• Catching up on As It Occurs To Me, which I completely failed to listen to in the run up to Christmas. Richard Herring as brilliantly puerile as ever. Why won’t people let him be on the telly? I also caught his Hitler Moustache show at the Leicester square theatre last week. I saw a pre-Edinburgh preview last year, which was pretty funny, but this was a much more refined, focused act, with lots of new material. He’s a very funny man.
• In a similarly late to the party vein, I also picked up the first issue of Dodgem Logic. The Moore stuff is predictably essential, Graham Lineham and Josie Long’s contributions are brief but brilliant, with everything else coming across as a bit meh… And yet, whilst there’s a vein of knee-jerk hippy bollocks there, something appeals about the just-throw-everything-at-the-page editorial direction. It’s the sort of thing I feel should be being done better somewhere on the internet, and yet for some reason isn’t. Interesting to see how it develops.
• Saw Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Not great, but nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.
• My love of Grant Morrison’s ongoing Bat-saga is unconditional and unfailing, which I’m sure will come as a surprise to no one, so isn’t something I’ll go into here. His new creator-owned series Joe The Barbarian on the other hand, was an unknown quantity as I managed to completely miss all the hype and the interviews. I needn’t have worried of course - the first issue is a slowly paced scene-setter, but sets up the series concept beautifully, with incredibly lush artwork by the previously unknown to me Sean Murphy.
• Booking myself a trip to SXSW in Austin next month. Not that physically booking it was really much of a highlight, but something to look forward to. I used to joke about how I was boycotting America whilst George W. Bush was in power, but I’ve recently realised I did, in fact, boycott America whilst George W. Bush was in power.

I like the way I teased doing essay-length posts in my end of year round up, but have in fact made even less effort, resorting to bullet points rather than full posts. Something else I started doing this year was Project 365 - a photo a day for a year. Well, the loss of my camera lead, coupled with a few drunken nights where I forgot I was supposed to be taking a picture at some point meant I didn’t even make it through January (seems wholly appropriate the dream was born and died in a pub, mind. I only heard about it the day before NYE, chatting to a colleague in a pub, moments before he made off into the night with a stolen clay pot). Looks like my online fail is destined to continue. Thank you for your continued patience.

At the start of the year, I had the goal of doing a minimum of a blog post a month, which obviously I didn’t stick to, and then after my personal life imploded I assumed I’d have a lot more time on my hands and thought hey - maybe I can manage two or three a month - but that didn’t happen either. To be honest, I’ve thrown myself into my day job a bit over the last eight months, and haven’t felt I’ve had a lot to write about (although 15 posts is slightly better than what you would have got in the original plan…). I have to rethink what I want to use this place for again, I think. Most of the blogs I’ve followed over the years have abandoned news/links/micro-posts because there are better outlets for that sort of thing now. The trend seems to be for longer essays, which of course takes time and effort. And if I was going to go down that route, I’d like to do something that might actually be of interest to anyone apart from immediate friends and family - as I’ve pretty much done everything a blogger could do to drive casual traffic away from this site over the last few years, it might be nice to come up with something that might conceivably attract an audience for a change. Less prattling about meeeeeeee next year whatever happens, I reckon.

Creatively, as ever, I need to get more writing done. I’m also getting a bit hacked off with stuff I actually make the effort to finish and place ending up with publications that subsequently crash or disappear without trace. I’m hardly prolific, and the fact the one or two pieces I’m proudest of have effectively been in limbo - in some cases for years - is pretty sickening. I recently found out my major completed project of last year, for a book that was supposed to be out last January, probably now isn’t going to be in the book at all, and will likely end up as a promotional pdf. All very demoralising, and I certainly need to rethink my focus next year.

I’d thought about doing a separate best of the year post, but I think I’ll just blurt it all out here: Book: Bad Vibes, Music: St Vincent - Actor, Film: Moon, TV: Err, The Inbetweeners? Was that this year? It was for me, Comic: Batman: RIP - fuck you internet, I loved it.

See you next year, unless I get chatty between now and new year. Have a good one.

After the main party I continued drinking in town with my brother and Terry Christian, which was unexpected, where they attempted to convince me Bramhall, Cheshire was a better place to be single than London.

Meanwhile, been to the cinema recently:

Moon - reservations about how much you’d actually save, economically speaking, by establishing the kind of set-up that serves as the the film’s premise aside, I really enjoyed Bowie Jnr’s directorial debut. Was pleased the much talked about twist was actually the premise, and that it turned out to be a rather touching, thought-provoking movie about alienation, identity and compassion. A great performance from Sam Rockwell also cements his place as one of the best actors of his generation.

District 9 - This, on the other hand, was just silly and tedious. Tonally it veered all over the place, from humourous to horrific to po-faced cod-meaningful, and never in a particularly entertaining way. I also think if you’re going to make a film about the evils of racism, then making the ‘others’ part of a caste system in which the entirety of the lower-caste act throughout the film exactly as the human racists describe them as acting, probably isn’t a particularly smart decision.

Next: what I did on my holidays

Travelling west always feels peculiar. I lived for a long time in the M3/M4 corridor of course, so there’s plenty of personal memories and genera life detritus associated with that particular, most Ballardian of landscapes, however over the years a number of my oldest friends have, through chance rather than choice, drifted westwards and the act of visiting them - reconnecting with good times past - has lent the journey a slightly unreal, almost mystical feeling of going back in time, a feeling the landscape of rolling hills, fairy mounds and standing stones only serves to accentuate. Like I say, peculiar.

Anyway, my point is long train rides through the country, weekends with good company, sunshine and the seaside rock.

Also on the train, I read Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, a short eating manifesto preceeded by 200-odd pages of argument  as to why you should adopt it. It offers much food (haha) for thought. At times Pollan seems to be adopting a mildly anti-science, preachy new-agey tone of which I’m instinctively sceptical, however his argument is more broadly anti-bad science, in particular science he believes is biased or outright compromised by food manufacturers. His main target is ‘nutritionism’ - the reductionist view that the value of food is entirely derived from the sum of its nutritional components, and the only value of eating is to promote bodily health. Pollan provides many examples of just how tenuous that argument is, and exposes the health claims of many food manufacturers as at best a quasi-science ill-supported by real research. The manifesto itself is delightfully simple and revolves around advice like: eat with company; avoid anything with more than five ingredients on the label; cook; and the book’s core message, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”. Pollan makes a convincing argument and offers workable solutions. I’m already finding myself trying to follow some of his advice, checking food labels, going all-organic, and generally worrying myself about becoming too middle-class. As someone who’s general diet has gone completely to pot over the last few months though, this feels like a very positive step in the right direction. Cheers, Michael.

I’ve been following Harper’s Island on iPlayer. It’s advertised as a mystery thriller, the novelty being a character gets killed off every episode, with even the cast none the wiser as to what order they were going to be offed in until the day of shooting where their number gets called. Nice idea, except it really isn’t all that suspenseful waiting to see which muppet gets to die, and the killings themselves feel a bit tagged on to the end of every episode. It’s essentially a slasher film dragged out to thirteen-odd episodes, but I have a weakness for slashers, and whist the characters are every bit as inept and uncurious as their big screen counterparts, I’m finding it oddly compelling viewing.

After celebrating a friend’s birthday a few weeks ago, and leaving the public house in which said celebration took place slightly on the inebriated side, I had the misfortune to leave my rucksack on the tube on the way home. Whilst it didn’t have my laptop or any other high value items in it, it did contain a lot of personal items that would have been difficult to replace, such as Patrick Harpur’s OOP Daimonic Reality, which I was halfway through reading. Feeling like a bit of a tit, I filled in TfL’s lost property form with little hope of ever being reunited with Harpur’s revelatory work, but lo, they got back to me in just four days to say my treasured possessions were safely ensconced at their office in Baker Street. Fellas, as far as I’m concerned you can strike anytime you want from now on.

Last Friday I attended dConstruct, which is still a great conference in terms of pricing, venue and (generally) speakers, however it’s gotten increasingly ‘big picture’ over the years, to the point where no one is really saying anything anyone could possibly disagree with anymore. You almost want someone to step up with a keynote entitled ‘Welcome back to tables’, or somesuch. Still, it’s always good to hear the likes of Adam Greenfield speak, and Russell Davies wrapped things up in a masterly fashion. Throw in fish and chips on Brighton beach and after-con pintage and you had all the makings of a great day out.

Been keeping my weekends busy of late; firstly, had the family down to the big smoke for a couple of days, leading to many touristy things being done, such as paddling in Hyde Park, heckling people on the Plinth and pretending to be pirates on the Golden Hinde. Revelation of the weekend was that the Original and Big Bus companies’ employees really hate each other, and bad-mouth their competitors at every opportunity. Glorious visions of the two uniformed tribes engaged in pitched pub battles ensued. Also, ate at Planet Hollywood for the first time and was seated beside Bruce Willis’s vest from Die Hard with a Vengeance and one of Freddy Kreuger’s gloves, which went some way towards making up for a disappointing steak dinner.

Then last weekend I ventured out to Bristol to meet up with old chum Andy, and we went drinking on the Whiteladies Road. Our evening culminated in the Victoria pub and an increasingly dark conversation (”what this country needs is a dictator”) with an old boy who eventually announced he’d voted for the BNP in the last election (in his defence, he had nothing kind to say about Hitler). After a leisurely start the following morning, we went for a walk along the Downs, taking in Clifton and the Avon gorge, which was nice.

Rattled through Sarah Pinborough’s The Taken last week, which was a solid, enjoyable mass-market horror novel concerning a remote English village under siege by a multitude of evil ghost children rather than the traditional solitary apparition. Liked it enough to pre-order Feeding Ground, at any rate.

Saw the new production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Duke of York’s Theatre last week. Great show, with great performances, sets, lighting, all of which the play thoroughly deserved. I hadn’t seen it before and have somehow managed to avoid reading it, but it’s easy to see why many consider it Stoppard’s best, and possibly most representative work.

There are two types of post-apocalyptic novel, it would seem - the ones where the survivors gamely struggle against the harsh realities of their new environment, perhaps discovering or re-discovering new skills and attitudes, and eventually succeeding in re-establishing some sort of civilization. Occasionally there’s even the suggestion that the apocalypse might have been a good thing - the survivors are able to re-connect with certain core human values now that the flab of contemporary civilization has been cut away. And then there’re the others - of which the first half of Conrad Williams’ One is as extreme an example you could hope to find. The catastrophe - a massive gamma ray burst which kills everything on the surface of the planet suddenly, painfully, and in the case of humans, graphically - and the protagonist’s awful journey, motivated by an irrational unwillingness to accept his five-year old son is dead, is simply unrelentingly horrible and refuses to give even the slightest conciliatory offering. It’s among the bleakest things I’ve ever read; a truly awful end-of-the-world scenario and portrayal of survival as something only the hopelessly insane would be even remotely interested in. Unfortunately, I thought the second half of the book lacked some of the first half’s intensity, and the introduction of more survivors, a half-hearted crack at re-establishing a modicum of civilization, and a rather unlikely-sounding extraterrestrial threat didn’t really add anything IMHO. It’s still worth persevering with, however, and Williams has firmly established himself as one of my favourite writers in the genre.

RIP Captain Britain & MI:13, which I enthused about back in the day. Like so many new titles, it faced the insurmountable challenge of building an audience in a market notoriously apathetic to the new and/or different, and was found wanting. It won’t have done Paul Cornell any harm, as pretty much everyone who read it loved it, and whilst his take on Brian Braddock was a little bit too jingoistic for my liking at times, the image of Captain Britain killing a vampire by punching its heart right out of its chest has comfortably eased itself into a respectable position on my favourite comics moments ever chart.

Jonathan Nash and Mil Millington’s Sexton Blake. Great fun, extremely funny, and available on iPlayer for the next four days.

Not really warming to Psychoville. It feels very much like LoG-lite, and the fairly lifeless direction only serves to remind how important Steve Bendelack was to the success of the League. I also - God help me - watched Torchwood on the strength of various Twitterfolks’ ravings whilst it was on. Well, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but all in all I think I much preferred it the first time round. I am, however, really enjoying the latest series of Mitchell & Webb, which has really come into its own this season.

Discovered Sarah Pinborough whilst roaming on Twitter. I actually met her at Fantasycon in… 2002? Had no idea she was a published writer though. JT and I were really quite drunk and talked to her and friends about Milton Keynes and other topics for what I remember as being quite some time before they politely excused themselves and went off to hear the no doubt more eloquent and inspiring Graham Joyce speak. Anyway, the following morning I awoke to find an answerphone message on my mobile from an unfamiliar female voice thanking me for a great time and asking when we could get together again. I was in a relationship at the time, and not really going out a lot, so naturally I not unreasonably assumed it must be the people I’d been talking to the previous evening. I remember being utterly horrified (and yet quietly intrigued and a little bit impressed) as to how I’d managed to chat someone up, give them my phone number and been so charming I’d merited an almost immediate follow-up call - and yet had no memory of it whatsover. As it turned out, it was an entirely unrelated practical joke by another mate’s girlfriend, who bizarrely chose the only evening that month I’d been talking to single women outside of a work situation to make her opening gambit. Who says the universe has no sense of humour. Anyway, that’s my (sort of) Sarah Pinborough story. Now I know she has five well-reviewed novels to her name, I have ordered one and will let you know how that works out for me in due course.

Otherwise, it’s turning out too be a quiet week in which I endeavor to not spend any cash. Have to decide whether or not to play football in the park this evening. It’s exercise - good - but it also means inevitable pubage afterwards, which is a considerably greyer area.