Is this thing on? Are you reading this? Good. It seems to be working.
Welcome to the Arbitrary Diary. I'm not quite sure what it is yet, so I gave it a name that I hope will cover a multitude of sins in the weeks, months and maybe even years to come. Hopefully I can offer you all some insightful musings about the world as I see it - popular culture, politics and the arts - all tastefully spliced with vitriolic polemics, witty observations and the odd dirty joke.
Failing that of course, it might just end up like most of the user-generated content on the internet: a repository for thoughts and ideas so mundane, crazy or just plain offensive, that I want them out of my own head and into the collective consciousness of society at large. Because it seems that people merely holding ill-informed opinions - about matters that shouldn't really concern them anyway - just isn't enough any more; they have to share them with me, at random, when I'm trying to find an authoritative on-line answer to such questions as: "in a life or death situation, is it OK to eat someone who's already dead?" or "how would one go about switching off the internet?" So in the absence of any real experts out there in cyberspace, I'm going to adopt the increasingly popular strategy of pretending to be one myself. On everything.
It's safe to say however, that I'm not an expert at blogging (which, I have just discovered, is a word not recognised by the spell-checker, so at least I'm ahead of the game compared to my laptop - go figure) although I'm determined to get to grips with it. I ventured into it once or twice on bebo I recall, but then all the cool kids ran away to play with facebook instead (I never liked them anyway). I watched a video last night about a project where computers get put in public places and local kids figure out how to use them like experts with no instruction. It reminded me of playing with my dad's old PC when I was about 7, I swear there was nothing I didn't know about Windows 3.1, in spite of dad's incessant fear (that remains to this day) that I was going to 'break' something. Yet the older I get, the more of a Luddite - the more like dad - I become. Sure, I've heard of RSS feeds, I just haven't found the need to incorporate them into my daily life. Twitter meanwhile is facilitating revolutions, whilst I've not signed in for months. I like Stephen Fry too, but there are limits.
Nevertheless, there's a battle of ideas going on out there - in here, on the internet - that I'd quite like to be a part of. So this is it. The Arbitrary Diary. My contribution to the digital deluge that's wising us up and dumbing us down in equal measures.
And who knows, I might even post something again sometime. In the meantime, why don't you subscribe by double clicking your fingers and following a lynx. Trust me, I'm an expert.
