Surfing teh interwebs

On a Sunday morning, surfing teh interwebs is my favorite activity. Today I spent a couple of hours reading about a fascinating controversy over whether a cabal of writers known as the YA Mafia really do have the power to crush aspiring writers who negatively review their books on the internet. Thrilling stuff, brought to my attention by adult and YA writer John Scalzi's blog, where he protests too much that he and all of his YA writing friends could never find time to fuck with anyone's careers. I read all the source material...well, not all of it. There's reams of blog posts. Hundreds of them. And tens of thousands of comments.

After that I headed off to Fandom Wank to see if the YA Mafia had made the grade to be discussed there and found that it had not. Slow off the mark, FW! At FW, I learned that My Little Pony posts had so overwhelmed 4 Chan that it had been forced to start banning them to avoid being broken. If anything was going to break 4 Chan, I guess it had to be My Little Pony. And then I read some other wanks, mostly about someone called Misha and a rhino. [Fandom Wank has disappeared and links have broken, alas. 10/2017]

Yessirree, surfing the nets is the way to go.

Then I followed up on my google alerts, and one of them - for the Dead Weather - turned up a picture of me! Yes, me, on the internets! Here I am.

That's probably too large to display properly, but you could save it to your hard disk and treasure it. I'm the one on the very far left of the picture. Go me. That was at the Roxy in Los Angeles, and I mostly remember being very impressed with Little Jack Lawrence's trousers, which were of a much thicker and costlier schmutter than I thought they would be. Reminded me of Coleridge- 'as if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing'. One of poetry's greatest lines, I always thought.