Music is wonderful. That's why we're all here, isn't it? Because music - selected music, at least - is wonderful. I can't listen to music at the moment. And that sucks. First, my CD player died a death and started refusing to do anything. It sulks, and that's all. Next, the CD drive in my computer started to do the same. At first it was fine with music but sulked at discs of data. Then, it was OK with well-produced tasteful indiepop but turned its nose up at anything it thought was a bit avant-garde. Now, it refuses to do anything at all. Occasionally, it goes *clunk* or *whirr* and makes the rest of my computer rather puzzled. It refuses to do anything constructive, other than print log messages like: "ATAPI unrecognised command. ide0 reset success." and so on. This is all a bit of a problem, because music - as I've probably said before - is wonderful. When I'm at home I have to make do with mp3s. These would be fine, but for my computer being rather old. It can cope with them fine, as long as I just sit swinging my head from side to side. If I try to do anything else simultaneously, it isn't happy. I click on a link in my browser window, or try to write a new email, and the music breaks up with crackles and fizzes. "If you want me, bzzzk you knnnnn [pause] ow wh [crackle] ere bzzzzzz I am, I saw your aaa aaarm bzzp crrrk sin a drrrr r r chhhrk eam" So, I was at work one day. The Boss says: "We're getting the builders in. There might be some noise." And they come, the incompetant lot, and they *do* make a lot of noise. "Aha!" thought I. "I have to have something to distract me from the drilling and hammering!" I told The Boss. "I need music!" So, now, I take a pile of CDs along to the office every day. Music is back again. Every day, whilst I busy myself with selling Scottish tat to idiots and people with no taste, I can listen to wonderful tunes and cheer myself up. When I'm along in the office, I can bop along and tap my feet between taps on the keyboard. I'm in the office on my alone a lot, because The Boss likes to go upstairs and plan his big break into the TV industry. I tap my feet, sing along and pretend I'm coding. And it's wonderful. Sinister meta-discussion is, of course, banned. Don't Do It, Kids. If you want to discuss anything that you think I'm meta-discussing, do it in private. There are often a lot of meta-discussion things I want to say, but don't, because of this ban. I often want to say "For the gods' sake, shut up about politics already," but I hold my tongue. In any case, I'm never sure of the etiquette on that sort of thing. If someone writes something you don't like, is it OK to write them a polite note and say so? Surely it's just better to try and write about The Right Sort Of Thing yourself instead. And what if they're doing it anonymously? What if they're trying to do it anonymously, but it's really easy to work out who it is - do you admit to them that you've found out? Or what if someone who is normally really lovely, who writes wonderful things, writes something occasionally that you find irritating? What's the etiquette then? If it was someone lovely trying to write anonymously but failing and being irritating too, I hate to think what all the possible permutations would be. It would be far too complicated for me to work out, certainly. That's probably why meta-discussion is frowned on, so we don't all tie our brains into knots every week. (of course, sometimes it's easy. When someone posts a badly written, badly spelled, badly punctuated rant, full of cliquey phrases like "my friends, who i'm not going to reveal the name of because it makes me sound more popular", then you know they're a twat. And if you knew they were a twat in advance anyway, it's even simpler.) Incidentally, the builders at work are *so* incompetant that one of them nearly managed to make the building fall down yesterday. Fortunately, we noticed the cracks appearing in the walls just in time. I'm not going to post the whole long story here, but it's on my website if you're really bothered. http://www.joannou.net/topofthestairs/ The etiquette thing is a bit similar to friends in bad relationships, now that I think about it. What do you do when someone lovely, who you want to have the bestest of lives, starts going out with someone who is an absolute twat? I mean, what do you *do*? Do you drop subtle hints in the hope that they will notice? Do you tell them outright in the hope that even if they don't talk to you afterwards they might at least listen and save themselves a lot of pain? Or do you just stand back and try not to cringe too visibly? My brain is melting again. The etiquette on people who plug their website in the middle of Sinister posts is obvious, of course. You give them a good spanking. No, please, I *insist* ;-) In other news, a girl I went to school with has just been sent to prison. She's been sent down for 30 months for heroin dealing. I didn't get on with her especially well - she came from a different village to me, anyway - but we shared a few classes and I knew her after a fashion. I remember when she got her naval pierced; it was going septic, but she was lifting up her blouse in German class and showing it to everybody, incredibly proud. I think of that, then I think of her now, in prison and trying to survive on her methadone prescription. After that, I want to listen to music again. Music can take my mind off of all that. Music's wonderful. xx caitlin -- http://www.joannou.net/topofthestairs/ "When life gives us lemons, we just sit there and sulk about it, in the corner of the room, in a fetal position." - Matthew Henderson, on the Sinister mailing list. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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