customdeluxe // miss weeza presents

In celebration of my freedom and the resultant lift in anxiety, here's something totally frivolous.  Thanks to the folk at Slashfood, I have come across the Omnivore's Hundred, which purports to be a list of 100 things everyone should try at least once before they die.  I wonder: should I be depressed that I've already made my way through quite a lot of these, or should I be putting together the advanced version?

Anyway, here's the list, complete with instructions (and a few comments):

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects [once was enough, thanks]
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin [Erm.  As far as I can tell, this is soil.  Why?]

64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

So.  How about you?

It's been a long time since I liked a blog post enough to actually email the link to a big list of people, but I just did: Ben Terrett's talk, "I'm a designer.  Use me better." 

Of course, sending the link felt pretty wasteful to me - if only in terms of inbox space and pixels - which made me think again about the whole online social media thing.  I clearly need a ground-up reorg of my online communications: after a long period of feeling like I had not much of anything to (publicly) say, my interest seems to have renewed.  I'm re-engaging, but in the roughly 3 years since I disengaged, so much has changed about the online world that I feel like it's not going to be right (or enough?) to just start posting again here and there, chucking up links when I feel like it, and starring the odd list item in Google Reader.  So what do I do?  I'm used to designing solutions for other people, but what's going to work for me?

If anybody's looking at this, I'm open to suggestions.

Mr. PotatoHead meets Indiana Jones.  Best.  Toy.  Ever.

I've been mildly obsessed of late with the conflict between the human tendency to simplify and linearise processes, and the human nature to be messy and complex.  This bears itself out in all kinds of interesting ways, but I just caught myself writing a stupidly long comment on someone else's blog, so I thought what the hell, let's put it here instead.

So Richard was saying that it would be great to have a unified online identity (for convenience, bien sûr), but that at the same time he wants to preserve the ability to present himself differently in different contexts.  Good point, I've said it before myself.  But there's more to this.  I was talking to a friend of mine in the States about her idea for a new social-network-ish online service and we stumbled into the problem that's plagued me ever since the earliest days of Friendster: all friends are not equal.  Nor are all colleagues.  Yet every social network based site more or less requires me to pretend they are.  I suspect that this normalisation contributes to people's need to represent themselves differently on different networks - but doing so doesn't solve the problem.  Take, for instance, my LinkedIn network.  Do I know everyone on there personally?  Yes, of course.  Do I rate everyone on there equally?  No, of course not.  Do you?  Some of those people I would work with again anyday, anytime.  Some I keep in touch with fairly regularly, and some I hear from maybe once a year.  Yet they're all equal to the outside observer.  Is that a problem?  Maybe, maybe not.  It's not an accurate reflection of my professional relationships, but with recommendations and so forth it probably comes close.

When we get into the world of personal interaction online, this same challenge gets stickier.  For instance, on Facebook there are only two ways that I can post something: either everyone who's connected to me sees it, or I send a private message to a select group of people. This means I have to think carefully about what I say and where.  Let's say I'm having a party and I only want to invite 15 people because I don't have enough chairs to go round.  I create an invitation that I only send to the people I want to invite, right?  But then woe betide me if I twitter about the preparations.  And what about those conversations you'd have with your closest friends but not necessarily your broader circle?  For all the collaboration tools and technologies out there, you're often still better off using email.

No matter how egalitarian we pretend to be, all friends - all contacts - are not created equal.  That's not because we're bad people; it's the nature of human relationships.  There are Facebook apps that acknowledge this, but they're clumsy at best and mean at worst.  Go check them out - it's a lengthy list of teenage girl torture methods. 

The thing is, humans are, by nature, complicated and erratic.  As such, it's difficult to come up with technology that truly supports our lifestyles, varied and changeable as they are.  Technology (like legislation, but we'll talk about that some other time) operates on rules, and when the rules get too complex, the machinery grinds to a halt.  So we are forced to keep things as simple as possible, but in so doing we create (or exacerbate) all manner of fuzziness.

So what do I want?  I want to do whatever it is that I want to do at the moment that I want to do it, of course.  And I want it to be easy.  Is that too much to ask?

Maybe it is. 

(but that's no reason to stop trying...)

I live in East London and work in West London.  Every month I pay £89.20 for a monthly travelcard to get me to and from work, and on the occasional jaunt into town.  This is a lot of money, but it should take me virtually anywhere I need to go in London.  Except, apparently, to work.  Eh?  How's that?  I'll explain.

I don't live near to a Tube station (there aren't many out East, at least not yet), so I get the Silverlink trains in the morning. Silverlink trains, while not fully integrated into the Transport for London network, are available to monthly travelcard holders for no additional charge. The most direct route is a westbound Silverlink train, followed by two tubes.  It's actually a pretty quick commute, at least in theory, but there are a few problems with these Silverlink trains:

1. Overcrowding.  It's not uncommon for up to three consecutive trains to be too crowded to get on during rush hour.  Since trains only run every 15 minutes, that can mean being seriously late to meetings.
2. Trains don't exactly have a great on-time record, so if you can't get on one because there's simply no room, there might not be another one for quite some time. 
   

These things used to make for a very cranky morning commute, until I found a solution: if I take the Silverlink eastbound, I can transfer directly onto the Central Line and it's only about 15 minutes out of my way.  And I can always get on the trains, and usually even get to sit down.  Heaven!  But this morning, I discovered it's not.

For those who don't know London well, the transport system works on Zones, which are concentric areas expanding outward from the centre of town.  "Downtown" is Zone 1, I live (and work) in Zone 2, and the suburbs begin at Zone 3.  Normally, you pay for your journey based on where you enter the system and where you leave the system.  My travelcard is valid in Zones 1 and 2.  So, since my commute takes me from Zone 2 on one side of town, through Zone 1, to Zone 2 on the other side of town, I should be able to take any route I like in between.  But this morning I discovered just how tenuous the Silverlink integration is. Stratford, the station where I change trains in my happy solution (remember the only reason I need to do this is that the more direct trains are too overcrowded to take), is in Zone 3.  I got off the Silverlink to change for the Central this morning, and they were doing ticket checks.  They've been doing these for the last few months to try to catch the people who don't pay for transport, and I've passed through the checkpoints any number of times with no difficulty.  But this morning, I was stopped.  I learned that even though I'm only changing trains in Stratford, and even though the only reason I go that way is because I physically can't go the more direct way, my travelcard is not valid for that journey.  I was issued a fine of £20 and told that in future I would have to buy a separate ticket to use that route.  That separate ticket would cost me £1.50 per journey, which translates to an extra £32.50 a month just for one way commutes into work.  That would bring my total monthly cost to £121.70 to go from Zone 2 to Zone 2.  Not to mention the 15 extra minutes every day.  All because the service is insufficient to take a more direct route.  Outrageous, eh?

Adding insult to injury, once I finally got in the tube (after the extra 10 minutes it took to write me a ticket), some filthy bastard sat down next to me and rubbed up against me for about 8 stops.  When I figured out that it was his hand and not his coat, I didn't punch him nearly hard enough. 

It's been a great morning so far.  Any minute now I'll get a call that my house is on fire.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the London 2012 Olympic Logo:

Newlogo_390x220

My dear and somewhat twisted Mr. Atrocity has prepared a set of questions for me to answer, so that you all might better know my mind.  I'm sure you are all very grateful.  Without further ado, here we go...

<interview>

1 - What single luxury would you take a desert island with you? It cannot be practical in any way.

Several crates of Veuve Clicquot. 

2 - What would your final meal before your execution be?

Assuming I get three courses (it's only civilised)...

Starter: sushi.  Toro, Maguro, Unagi and Sake, please.  And a tuna-and-fresh-chilli hand roll.  And perhaps a Bob San house crunch.  Beverage: a lovely dry beer.

Main: Ribeye steak.  Seasoned with just salt and pepper, cooked (preferably on a BBQ) on the rare side of medium-rare.  WIth asparagus, please. And nice crusty warm sourdough bread.  Beverage: a nice Bordeaux.  St. Julien, please.

Dessert: Cheese.  Stinky.  Epoisse du Bourgogne if at all possible.  I'll have the coffee when I finish the wine, thanks.  And have you got any Calvados?  Perfect.

3 - What is your favourite item of clothing?

Reading that question triggered a cascade of images of hats and shoes and wool and silk - it was the mental equivalent of opening the overcrowded closet.  But I have to pick something, don't I? 

[sigh]

OK.  Today, I'll say my floor length BCBG black halterneck gown.  Which oddly enough also came very close to being the thing I take to the desert island.  A girl's gotta have something pretty to wear, right?

4 - If you could repeal one law what would it be?

Any law that allows any government free access to my (or, by extension, anyone's) personal affairs - either open or clandestine - at will and without due process.

5 - How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? For extra credit show your working.

I'm glad you asked!  Grab a chair and a fresh pencil and we'll get started.

Assuming the woodchuck in question is of average size (say about 6 pounds) and temperament (irritable in a vague-ish way; restless), and the wood in the 'soft hardwood' category (e.g. hemlock) and not something like plywood or mahogany, I'd say the woodchuck could chuck roughly 2.65 iftla kubi of wood (or about 1/3 motti) before needing a bit of a kip.

It bears mentioning that the giant woodchuck (aka R.O.U.S., aka verminus gargantuus), with a mass roughly 5 times that of its smaller cousin, could actually chuck <em>over 15 times</em> as much wood if wood it could chuck.  This rather alarming disparity is due to a combination of its temperament (which ranges from moderate generalised resentment to prolonged apoplexy) and the little-known fact that giant woodchucks have a predisposition to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), the severity of which is generally proportionate to the animal's size.

It also seems to be a common assumption that woodchucks <em>can't</em> chuck wood.  In point of fact, woodchucks much prefer to chuck fine bone porcelain, which is why the chucking of wood is such a rare phenomenon.

</interview>

If you wish to subject yourselves to similar shenanigans, here are the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.” And please, feel free to comment on my fabulousness, or whatever.
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

That is all.

OK, OK!  Since I've taken down custom-deluxe, I've had a few people gripe about how I really should start posting again.  When I claimed that I don't really have all that much to say, they pointed out the lengthy rants I go on in email and over IM. 

Ahem.

Point taken.  So I suppose I'll try posting some of that stuff here, and see how it goes over.  Will it be in any way useful or interesting to anyone?  Will it get me flamed to a juicy crisp?  Or will it just lie there while big balls of tumbleweed roll across?  I suppose we'll see.

Anyway, the first thing that comes to mind is an ongoing conversation I've been having with a friend and colleague about the nature of social interaction on the web overall, and recently about the nature of identity on the web. 

The idea of employees losing their jobs because bosses find their blogs and don't like what they see there is not exactly a new one - it's been happening in the States since at least 2002 and probably longer.  I myself have moments of panic when I'm job-hunting - what if my prospective employer stumbles across some post from 7 years ago?  Then I come to my senses and realise that if anyone's going to base a determination to hire or not hire on the quality of haiku written on cocktail napkins at a bar, they're probably not the company for me anyway.  The truth is, I've never really posted a lot of personal stuff to the web.  Travel stories, sure; brief accounts of daily life, absolutely.  But never what you'd call dirty laundry, or flagrant abuse, or even angry rants about my workplace.  Not because I'm above it, mind you.  Because I think it's boring. 

But not everybody thinks that sort of thing is boring.  Which brings us to a couple of snarly (and intertwined) questions:

1.  How much of what you do online should be tied to your official, serious, professional identity and how much can be considered personal and/or anonymous?
2.  How much protection should people get or expect for their privacy/anonymity?  And how much protection should people get if they forgo anonymity? 

This second one is the one I'm thinking about a bit today - maybe I'll get to the first two another time, but of course the furor around what happened to Kathy Sierra has made this particular question a little more timely.  So, for what it's worth (see disclaimer above), my opinions:

• I feel for her.  It's a shitty thing to be threatened or stalked or otherwise the taget of pointed malice, particularly when the source is unclear.  It's unnerving and psychologically damaging in all sorts of unexpected ways, and overall just deeply deeply, DEEPLY unpleasant.
• It doesn't matter whether or not *she's* overreacting.  Personal reactions to trauma are subjective and therefore could be endlessly debated in either direction, which makes it more or less a distraction from the real question. Which is whether the blogosphere and/or the media is overreacting.
• People get stalked and threatened in the real world.  It stands to reason that they will in the online world as well - unfortunate and ugly, but any human social construct is going to have its full spectrum of leeches, predators and hangers-on. 
• The Internet, imho, offers a whole cornucopia of at-your-own-risk activities.  Some of them are far, far lower risk than others, which is why things like parental controls for web surfing exist.  Blogging is a higher-risk activity.  Blogging as a public figure of any kind, is higher-risk still.  Visibility is directly tied to risk - it makes you a natural focal point for the aforementioned scum.  Which is not to say that it's in any way right or excusable to threaten a woman with rape and violence just because you disagree with her opinions, but that's what happens when either (a) disturbed assholes or (b) adolescent idiots fixate.
• The idea that some sort of blanket legislative activity should be undertaken to combat this sort of thing is ludicrous.  O'Reilly's 'code of conduct' thing is a mess.  I mostly agree with Mr. Atrocity's assessment, so I won't elaborate further at the moment.
• As to how this relates to the much bigger question of whether the web is forming or reflecting behaviour, I'm inclined to say that it's still the same answer as before: both and neither.  Any location (geographic, virtual, etc.) humans gather, en masse, over a prolonged period of time will exhibit many of the same characteristics (positive and negative) and characters (ditto), and each location will have its own unique manifestations of same.  The Internets are no more a Utopian dreamland than Marxist Russia, and anyone who thinks they could be is forgetting about the same thing Karl forgot about when he wrote his treatise: plain old human nature.  Which means kindness and a desire toward community and generosity and humour and compassion and all the other things that make us a fabulous species, but also greed and manipulation and perversity and insecurity and the desire for power and violence and all the other things that make us so unspeakably awful. 

Wow.  I should probably climb down off this high horse before I fall off and break my neck, eh?

Of course, I haven't answered the question yet.  Do I think that it should continue to be allowed to have an anonymous identity or identities in the virtual world?  Absolutely.  Do I think that those who use that anonymity to commit criminal acts should be punished?  No question.  Do I think this requires separate legislation or censorship of the internets to protect its public figures?  I'm not convinced.  In another example of reflection (or refraction, perhaps) between the online and offline worlds, web dignitaries have their entourages of bodyguards and friends and hangers-on (and trolls), just as their brick-and-mortar counterparts do.  This already provides a certain degree of protection - any act perpetrated against a web dignitary is subject to quick and decisive response.  Kathy Sierra's case is an anomaly - a troll gone too far.  This happens in the real world too.  But how do you enforce a restraining order in the online world?

So this is Vox.  It's pretty.  And pretty functional too, it seems.  Which means the only problem (at least for now) is that I already vacillate between not really having much to say and a massive logjam of thoughts and ideas on my other blog.  So what do I do here, eh?  Interesting. 

I could talk about my house-buying process, I suppose.  Or about the article I was reading last week about how kids in school would be better off studying rhetoric than creative writing.  Or about the characters in this morning's commute.  And maybe I will, but later.  Now, I'm going to finish up my work and get ready to go sailing.