different names for the same thing

Hi! Further to the LJ terms of service change thing, I guess I'll take 'try and get back in the habit of posting on LJ' off my to-do list, where it's been for like seven years.

But is anyone still here? Are people going over to Dreamwidth en-semi-masse? Might that wake things up over there a bit? If you're moving over or have already done, come and find me here. I've transferred my whole journal over, which I hadn't realised was possible.

I've never found a place on the internet to replace LJ, and that sucks. Facebook is like those nightmares where you realise you're naked at school and somehow your boss, your mum and your appalling US state trooper cousin are also watching. Sometimes you find some clothes and put them on, but then Mark Zuckerberg sneaks up and takes them off again when you're not paying attention. Twitter is also like that except there's an angry mob on the horizon with guns. Tumblr is like a cosy living-room which looks like it has walls, so people let themselves be messy and vulnerable, but occasionally something you say gets picked out of the conversation and broadcast to thousands over a giant tannoy. Instagram is nice and laid-back but so full of people (very, very not anyone who's likely to read this, mind) saying they're #blessed, or whatever, with rictus grins, that it makes my teeth ache. ('So #grateful to my spirited children who teach me patience every day!' Oh, honey.)

And everywhere people apologise for writing long things. I like writing and reading long things, especially about people's lives, the totality of lives with all their various interests, not the one topic they guess they ought to focus on in order to monetise their blog. Hi, I am an old curmudgeon, and right now I'm kind of revelling in it. Come and join me in my curmudgeon-den. Maybe even come to Dreamwidth.

But for a long time - like, between 2003 and 2009 - LJ was a whole world, and provided the understructure for a whole rich, busy real-world social life. Thanks to LJ my then-partner and I travelled along the US west coast for three weeks in 2005, staying and having awesome times with friendly not-quite-strangers all the way. The LJ poll feature helped me make massive art (I just asked you all what you were thinking, and just like that you all told me, and it became the Collective Consciousness installation). I have so many and different feels about The Ladies' Loos that I can't sum them up, but... that also happened. I got letters from all over the place, via kindly strangers who found them in the street, after posting about my Postwodehouse project in the found-objects community. So much of that decade is bound up with LJ, for better or worse, and most of the time I felt able to speak here more than I've felt that anywhere else. I'm straight-up grateful for that.

OK, I'm out of here. HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

You know those bits in films where the story skips forward and there's an establishing shot showing something that indicates what time we're in now? Newspaper headlines. A pop song. Colour schemes. Jeans suddenly baggy or skinny, hair suddenly fouffy or 'fro. I had a moment like that this summer on the tube at West Ham. In front of me there was a row of people reading newspapers with the Olympics all over them, and some dubstep went 'wommmmm' on my headphones just as we passed a row of wind turbines. Look, it's 2012!

I am posting to LJ from underground, on my commute, with my tiny pocket computer. This morning feels a bit like that. I am wearing glasses. My jeans are indeed skinny. I am listening to an old ultraruby mix (British Summertime). My hair is the same as it ever was. Hello world! It's been a weird couple of years. How were yours?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

I wasn't really planning to go to a protest on Wednesday. I knew there was something happening at Goldsmiths but I didn't have the details; I thought they might be occupying the library or something. If I'd known what was going to happen I'd have brought food and water and a flask of tea and worn more jumpers. All the jumpers. But whatever was happening, I wanted to be there for it. I've spent all this time thinking and planning and getting up the nerve to try and get back into academia, then being almost unbearably excited that I was going to Goldsmiths, and now it seems they're having all their funding cut. My plans for the next bit of my life are going up in smoke - but whatever, I don't want to make it about me. Every time I see anything about education on the news I get a sick falling sensation in my stomach. In any case, I got there at 11 to find people gathering in front of the main doors. Only a few hundred to start with. I had stuff to be getting on with, but when they set off for New Cross station I couldn't not join them.

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For a while, in late '08-early '09, I was actually quite enthused about politics. Sometimes, though I was wary of the feeling, I had a sense of being part of a great wave; of the system itself changing. Then, of course, the long slow fall of disillusionment. I got enthusiastic again for the election here. I took it all terribly seriously, and it all went horribly wrong. My faith in doing things through the proper channels is dwindling by the minute. But whatever was left shrank still more on Wednesday evening, as I walked back and forth like a bear in the zoo, looking at hordes of teenagers imprisoned for eight hours outside in November for having walked down a street. Seriously, in what universe is that fair?

EDIT: Photos on Flickr here.

I'm making lanterns and lampshades, and I want to test them, so what I'd like is this: a bare lightbulb on the end of a flex, so you can loop the bulb end over a rafter to hang down like a normal ceiling light and plug the other end into the wall. I seem to remember the builders having one when my home-home was being built back in the late 80s. But the searching I'm doing so far hasn't turned up anything like it. It's either your standard light fixtures or devices that let you plug lightbulbs straight into American sockets (which seem to be mainly sought after by weed-growers).

Anyone seen anything like this? Several lightbulb sockets on the same flex would be even better.

Hello! I am in London!

We arrived last Saturday after the most nightmarish move I've ever had, part of a horrible few weeks in which we flaked out on some people quite badly (sorry, vodka_fairy and Jess; sorry, Dan's mum, who ended up having to pack a load of my life detritus for me while I went off in the moving van). I honestly have no idea how Dan is still sane, never mind out job-hunting and looking sharp in his suit; and I've had a good few moments when I just wanted to hide under the furniture hugging my knees and rocking back and forth until it all went away, somehow. But it doesn't go away, and we did all the things, and we got here.

Since then we've been staying at the staggeringly generous rainsinger and Z's place. Dan's been registering with every job agency in sight. We are still house-hunting - well, room-hunting, really. We've been swinging wildly between exhilaration and terror, though luckily enough we seem to be on opposite cycles, so the other can usually talk the terrified one down. We've mostly been staying in and trying not to spend much.

But: strangely enough, I seem to have got myself half a studio space to work in, near Deptford Creek. I'm not quite sure how this happened. Most affordable studio spaces have endless waiting lists, but somehow here I am.

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And as if I wasn't already on the verge of a hysterical giggling fit all the time, I've landed right in the middle of one of their biggest events of the year. They're having Open Studios this weekend - like Artweeks, for the Oxford people - a part of the Deptford X art festival where all the studios in the complex are open to the public. You can get all the details at the link, but there's a private view from 6pm this Friday, and the studios are open from 12 to 6 on Saturday and Sunday. (The flyer above is wrong about that - it sounds like they're open from 6pm every day, which is LIES.)

London folk: please come! There will be cheap drinks! What I've seen of the other tenants' stuff is very cool! You can see a small part of my Collective Consciousness installation from last year, which I've put back together and hung from the rafters! It's five minutes' walk from Greenwich station.

Oh, London. Underneath it all I'm really happy to be back.

SEPTIMUS: So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me.
VALENTINE: The heat goes into the mix.
He gestures to indicate the air in the room, in the universe.
THOMASINA: Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance.
VALENTINE: And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly...
SEPTIMUS: Oh, we have time, I think.
VALENTINE: ...till there’s no time left. That’s what time means.
SEPTIMUS: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
THOMASINA: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?
SEPTIMUS: It will serve.

(Tom Stoppard, Arcadia)

Lantern
Originally uploaded by bluedevi

This is the sort of thing that happens when you leave me in the house on my own. I have three million very serious and important things to do, but what am I doing instead? Making lanterns and handmade books. And painting tables, but that's work, of sorts. At least, I get paid if the client sells those.

Once I get a bit better at the stitching, I'm going to make Tempin' Bear notebooks.

So yes, the white fluffy scarf.

I used to have a Russian student called Vita, who was smart, funny, outspoken and generally brilliant, though a complete fool for her exploitative twat of a boyfriend in that way that some bright young girls can be, which made me want to shake her sometimes. When she came back to Oxford at the start of term she'd bring me something Russian. Usually caviar or similar. One first day of term, though, she asked, "Are you in Greenpeace?"

What? "...No." (I was when I was a teenager but I let it lapse.)

"See, I got you this," she said, producing the white fluffy scarf and explaining that it would be perfectly acceptable in Russia but on her way back here she'd been having doubts as to whether someone in the UK would want to wear it. It is your basic knitted scarf, but trimmed with so much luxuriant rabbit fur that you can barely see the wool bits. The fur feels amazing. It is a beautiful thing, and I thanked her, but I don't want to wear it.

I know this is not consistent. I'm not a vegan; I wear leather quite happily; I eat meat, though I avoid factory-farmed stuff when I can; but the idea of wearing fur squicks me out. I have heard grim things about the Russian fur industry, but haven't had the stomach to actually look into it. But the scarf sits there and looks at me, and putting it in the bin feels wrong too because then the rabbits would have Died In Vain. (I know, I know.)

I guess I'll just charity-shop it, but I find it odd that this particular thing seems so loaded for me and I don't seem to apply the same principle to all similar things. Is it just that I've been programmed by awareness campaigns about fur and they haven't had any about (eg) shoes? I'm curious as to how others feel about it. And does anyone else want the damn thing? (ETA: this is it. OK, you can see lots of wool in that picture, but wrapped around your neck it's all Tilda-Swinton-as-The-White-Witch.)

Thank you all for your kind comments on the last post. We're dashing off to look at flats in London now. Oof. I have been furiously throwing stuff out in an attempt to convince myself that there is order to the universe. And speaking of which: these are two hasty Flickr sets of stuff I'm selling or giving away - I'll add the details, prices and so on tonight.

Clothes. Mostly Monsoon-type things, nearly all size 14, and a lovely but weird coat which is the only designer thing I own but would be better on a taller person (I'm five feet). Some free, most a fiver, a couple (the jackets) eight quid. The white fluffy scarf has a story behind it which is funny and ethically thorny at the same time.

Books and music (some of them). Books range from free to three quid for the big hardbacks. CDs mostly free or a pound a pop.

If you think you might want any of this stuff, you're welcome to come and get it (this Sunday afternoon is the 'official' time, but other times good too) or just let me know and I'll work out the postage.

Right, off to the bus. It's a beautiful pearly morning. Time for the Lemmings voice: let's go!

Dan's dad died on Saturday night.

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He was a good man, decent and fair to the bone. He worked at the Hartwell garage for most of his life. He liked breeding chickens and fixing tractors. He was shy and jovial and had twinkly eyes and a fantastic shock of silver hair, and was constantly reading out little bits of newspaper the same way Dan is constantly reading out little bits of internet. He was, as far as I can tell, Dan's mum's only friend; Dan's really worried about her being lonely.

I don't really know what to say next. Everything is either too flippant or too dramatic in an inappropriate way. But I think Dan wanted his friends to know what's happening. He won't be at comics pub, but I'll see some of you later.

ETA: oh, you guys. Thank you all. I've pointed him at this post. x