The latest drop from Frieze studios:

I used time I didn't really have to make a song that nobody asked for. That's art, innit!

The idea was simple enough. I wanted to write about the multiple billionaires launching themselves into space. The phrase "Billionaires are going to space" could only be a line from Space Oddity. So, I threw myself into full Bowie mode.

In my opinion, I missed and got myself a Lightning Seeds Oasis hybrid. The point is, it's MY hybrid and I'm going to love it as one of my own.

There's quite a lot going on in this song. I tried to capture the retro vibe of the original, working within my own limitations. Originally intending to use the melodica for some of the backing, I thought I'd try using the stylophone, and boy did it work well. The fact that GarageBand comes with a mellotron plugin didn't harm things either. I've got various patches from the mellotron, getting increasingly big and soundscape filling.

I also managed to crank out something akin to a guitar solo here. The guitar lead lines are double tracked from different takes, giving it a wider sound. The mistakes are somewhat hidden by the leslie-speaker patch, that rotates the mistakes out of focus quite nicely.

For the vocal, the double tracking of octave lines gives it a nice Bowie feel, regardless of whether I'm singing in tune! The chorus is double tracked, but from the same take, giving a strange chorusing/fattening effect.

It is what it is.

 When I first met my wife, I was a daily blogger. I wrote many entries over the time we were first dating, some of which obliquely referenced things that involved her.

At some point, as a well-intentioned gift, which she received in the spirit it was intended, I collected a lot of entries from the blog into a single document, footnoted the whole thing with more information about what I wasn't mentioning in the posts, and printed it in the form of a book for her. As she was never normally seen without a book about her person, this was possibly a thoughtful gift.

Or maybe a narcissistic one.

The jury's still out. In fairness, she re-read the book in recent weeks and is still talking to me, so I remain optimistic.

The thing is that this is a place where I can chronicle my own mental decline... because it is that, isn't it? I started writing around 19 years ago as a rather snarky 27 year old. Three years later, single, trying to be a comedian, I was blogging about buying toasters.

Then there was a golden age of writing about gigs and doing young-person things like being out all week...

Now, I'm stuck at home during a pandemic with a house that smells of slow-roasted meat and an increasing number of cats.

Not being out there gigging is slowly driving me nuts. My kids think I'm funny, which is great, and I am making up silly songs and doing silly voices, but it's not the same. The problem is that I don't have a place to channel the sort of reactions I get to people being utterly insane, or self-serving, or pointless. Comedy is the outlet for cleansing oneself of the ridiculousness of the world.

If there's a place I shouldn't go when I'm feeling antsy about the people with whom I cohabit this world, it's Facebook... not just Facebook, but the local Faceboook group.

Often, I can keep my reactions under control. Today I didn't...

Faced with this:

... I posted the following reply:

The silly thing is, that she did as I asked:

I'm fucking losing it. I really am. Between the pointlessness of the above, the ridiculously vapid posts filling LinkedIn, and the fact that the world has split into people who think we should lock down more and people who think that fatties should just stay indoors so they can have a virus party in the real world, the whole limited universe I experience through my various screens has gone bonkers.

So if I want to look at the underside of someone's garbage on Facebook, then I reckon that's a healthy way forward.

Cancel culture - what a modern classic this is proving to be. The straw man against it goes something like this. 

A temporary argument against...

The hyper sensitive online activist types, censure people for minor thought crimes, piling on to try to do damage, while ACTUAL NAZIS get into power in government.

There's a lot about the above which is not true, but there's an element of truth in it.

At its worst, stirring up an outrage for what amounts to passing expressions of opinion by individuals is not particularly constructive, especially when it involves mining their timeline for that particular tweet in which they were a dick. When that outrage is then turned into a public humiliation, or an attack on their livelihood, to which the particular tweet or similar was not directly connected, then it seems like a form of bullying. People are going to have different opinions, and pile-ons are not society at its best.

For a better perspective on this, read So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson. In fact read all of his books, he's great.

But I've come to agree with it...

Earlier in this blog post... like a couple of sentences ago, I spoke up against cancel culture, and now I'll speak in favour of it. I hope I won't be taken out of context.

My own view about cancel culture is something like this.

If you're publicly being a dick, then the public may choose to filter out your dickishness.

Where this applies to someone's job is where this gets tricky. Anyone whose job involved NOT being a dick, may lose their job over actually being a dick, and that's harsh, but probably fair.

A good example of this is the firing of Rebecca Long Bailey over a tweet that seemed to some to be anti-semitic. While it's arguable whether she had anti-semitic feelings, or even biases when she tweeted, the fact that she is a politician in a party under fire for this sort of thing, meant she should have known better and was acting recklessly. 

The free speechers...

There are those who argue for free speech, in a situation where it's not freedom of the individual to campaign to make life better, or freedom to criticise the government, but more freedom to be generally harsh or nasty to people. The argument goes something like "I can't be put in prison for what I say". This is true up to the point where your verbal actions are themselves used as assault on an individual or protected group, and you can be punished for that.

The next argument goes, "Don't have a go at me for what I'm saying, if you don't like it, it's your problem - you could not listen".

In fairness, the second half of that is not really being debated. Those who speak up against someone else's freedom of speech being used by them to be a dick, are generally not so much saying that they don't have the freedom to speak so much as saying that they're being a dick. When I use my freedom of speech to criticise what you're saying, then if YOU don't like it, you can not listen to it.

Free speechers hate being cancelled...

I have the right to say what I like. If you don't like it, then don't listen. What do you mean you've blocked me? How dare you react to what I'm saying by deciding not to listen to me...

It all comes down to Rule 1

Wil Wheaton is right yet again. Rule 1 is "don't be a dick".

When I look at the examples I've seen of cancelling, the majority of them come down to someone who's acting in an increasingly unlikeable way being asked to go and do it away from our nice people.

But cancelling doesn't make it better

Tiring though it is, having belligerent arsehole cluttering up our timelines and news feeds, none of them choose to change their ways when cancelled. They essentially double-down, taking their followers with them to new heights of arse-mongery.

That said, I've been heartily blocking people whose output is disgusting, rather than engaging with them.

You can't fix these problems online. As the world becomes more connected via non-human online channels, we're perhaps doomed to become more entrenched in the most stupid of our opinions and least able to rationalise our way to some middle ground.

Hoo-fuckin-ray! 

 I've spent some of the last few months gently upgrading things. The only major outlay was a new MacBook, for which half-measures seemed like a false economy. Given I hammered the new machine's CPU and graphics capability, creating a video that took nearly an hour to render, that was probably a good decision.

Point is, I've generally bought a new item on Amazon or eBay and then sold the one we had, thus upgrading, but only at part of the cost. I've also sold off things I wasn't using to fund things I wanted to buy.

I'm sure it cost me more than I raised to do this, but my general costs have gone down, so why not, eh?

In general, it means I've had a little more exposure to eBay than normal, and people seriously need to get a grip there.

Ashley's first rule of eBay (and this applies to other online purchase sites too). If someone asks questions about an item, they're probably not going to be the eventual purchaser.

I don't think I've seen it happen. The time you spend answering the questions from some over cautious tosspot who can't read the description is essentially a waste. Someone else always either beats them to the final bid, or simply bids more boldly knocking the questioner out earlier. I'm not even sure that answering questions from eBay sellers even results in them bidding.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the question facility is a bad thing. I just think it's largely used by people who haven't the gumption to use eBay. I recently asked a question of a seller and, based on their answer, offered them a price. I now have the item... No idea what I'm going to do with it, but fortune favours the bold.

Don't go early you pillock. I am not a fan of being prepared early for things. I don't turn up early for stuff if I can avoid it. I don't pre-book things. I occasionally miss out, but most often I don't, and I find I haven't wasted my energies and prolonged the whole experience in so doing.

In eBay, though, it's critical that you don't jump the gun. Put stuff on your watch list, but don't bid on the damned thing unless it's within 5 minutes of the item ending. Maybe put on a 1st bid, in the hope that it's the only bid and you'll win by default... but trying to bid halfway through an auction is simply a way to put the price up.

Fucking pay for the items you win you pricks. I bought a new Kindle before the summer holidays. It's had a lot of use, and I was interested in it as I felt my existing one was starting to run a bit more slowly. While I could probably have reset it and gone back to some sort of improved performance, I liked the idea of a more up to date model, with a longer overall life. I reckon a Kindle has about 5 good years in it. I'm now on my third. My wife is on her 4th (possibly 3rd).

I've put the old kindle up for sale. It works. I've reset it. It's in decent condition. I just fancied a nice newer one.

It's sold twice so far.

Twice.

Then the tosspot who's bid on it and won doesn't bother paying. Then eBay chases them... then cancels the sale... then back to square one.

Someone bid on it tonight. Idiots... they've raised the price by £7, but the item still has the rest of the week to go. What they've done is make it overall more expensive. Worse than that, someone else is going to win it, then not pay for it... then... the circle of bloody life.

Tonight I bought the sheet music for The Wall - I've half an idea that I may already own this... but I was too lazy to double check. I don't think I do. It turns out I've been bending guitar strings incorrectly all this time, and it's much easier when you do it properly. Lots to learn!

Watch out, this one's going to get weird.

In personal blog posts, now largely replaced by social media whingeing, as with columns in newspapers, sometimes the very point of the writing is to write in your own florid voice. You can construct complex sentences, try to broaden the use of vocabulary, talk around the subject, and even introduce your own delightful rhythms into the composition.

This is because personality writing begets readers who don't really care what you're saying, so long as it's you saying it.

Columnists like Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell, Mark Steel, and Stewart Lee, can all publish collections of their columns if they so desire, because it's their tone of voice and mood which readers are there for. How current a Charlie Booker column from 2006 is is immaterial. It's his voice.

Conversely, a lot of content on the internet is intended to convey information. I work as an editor on a technology website where the aim is to efficiently deliver the ideas for an international audience. That's not to say that such sites don't have a voice. They generally adopt an attitude to the subject and the reader. However, such sites actually require the writer NOT to write.

Writing is a spectrum. It runs from one end - putting data into structured grammar - through to the aforementioned other end, where you let your personality and voice play out on the page.

In this world of scrolling, the most generous writers will use the simplest language to convey the message with a minimum of their own wibbling on. However, ungenerous writers will either:

• Waste your time with wibble
• Provoke you with illogical invective
• Try to hook you into virtually empty pages of non-content with a provocative title