Lazy Sunday Afternoon

You know what I did last weekend?  Bugger all.  That's what I did.  Well, that's not entirely true - I did some long overdue Spring cleaning and, consequently, I can now see what colour the kitchen floor is meant to be.  Anyway, getting back to the point, (a digression so early in the post, surely a bad sign), when I say that I did bugger all, I mean that I did bugger all in terms of the web.  I didn't work on any stories for The Sleaze, I didn't record or edit any audio for podcasts and I didn't do any 'back office' work on any of my sites.  It was a wonderful experience which reminded me just how much of my bloody time my various web projects take up.  It was great just to spend a couple of days crashed out on the sofa, drinking beer and watching old films.  When I did go online, it was great to just be a surfer again for a couple of the days, catching up with various reviews of obscure horror movies on equally obscure, but fascinating, blogs. 

I also took the opportunity to gloat over someone else's online problems.  I was greatly entertained by the infighting and back-biting unfolding in the forums of a rival satire site.  Now, I'm not going to name the site, as I don't want to get involved in one of those tiresome internet slanging matches, but it is run by a well known UK novelist and comic writer who recently stood as a candidate for the Labour Party in a parliamentary by-election.  Which should be sufficient information for anyone interested to work out the identity of the site in question.  To cut to the chase, it seems that some of the would-be writers had set up their own 'side project', but, by not accepting submissions for their new site, had, in the eyes of those not invited to write for the site, created an exclusive club.  There were also all sorts of allegations from the breakaway group of declining standards at the parent site, which 'justified' their actions. 

What fascinated me was the sub-text going on in the 'debate'.  Now, I might well be misjudging the individuals involved here, but the impression I got was that the breakaways were predominantly conservative in their political views and the real trigger for their move was the realisation that the site's owner was a socialist and a paid up member of the Labour Party, (which, in my book, is very much to his credit).  Horror of horrors!  They'd been writing for a real life leftie!  Undoubtedly fearing that he might also be a horrible working class person they obviously felt they had little choice but to bale and set up their own whimsical 'satire' site set in a cosy middle class English village.   Like I said, I could be being completely unfair here, but they just struck me as typical of the conservative 'satirists' I've had the misfortune to encounter elsewhere - terrified of real satire.  Ultimately, the whole business just server to vindicate my decision to close down my own site's message boards years ago and exert an iron grip on content.  But hey, this very public dispute at least provided me with some amusement on a lazy Sunday afternoon!