Neural Integration

It doesn’t hurt to remind the world of who I am every now and again, so here I am. Hello. Here, have a mini-bio:

Writer. Journalist. Editor. Producer. Script doctor. Blogger. If it involves words, I've probably done it. Apart from poetry. Iambic pentameter gives me a damn headache. The relentless data churn of the modern age being what it is, a lot of my stuff is out-of-print or offline, but I tend to sling links to scribblings of note on here from time to time.

Sometimes, the people that I’ve worked with say some very nice things about me. We shouldn’t laugh and point at these people for their lapses in judgment. We should copy-and-paste their praise instead. Like this:

"Great guy, great writer, brilliant brain. Don't just sit there brief him ...great results." - Peter Penny, CEO, Connected Pictures

Oh, I’m also a very small, misshapen cog in the sleek, shiny beast that is They Quiz, London’s finest monthly film pub quiz. If you haven’t been to one, your life is sorely lacking the required amount of joy and laughter. You should do something about that.

I haven’t done one of these for over two years, so indulge me whilst I take you on a whirlwind tour of all the places where I soil the Internet with my virtual jibba-jabba.

Where I can be found online in 2012:

Stray Bullets - You’re looking at it. This blog is about eight years old, and I’ve been meaning to move it off Blogger for at least half of that time. Soon. Maybe. If you are a relative newcomer, please dig through the archives so that you too can become one of those intensely irritating people who say “Man, his old stuff was better”.

Shrapnel - My Tumblr blog. The short explanation is covered by my tagline over there: "Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet". For a slightly longer explanation, I’m lazy, so I’ve done a cut-and-paste on my response to a fan of my mad reposting skillz over there: “There’s no particular algorithm to the things that I hurl up here, or the frequency of posting. It’s just a collection of the pop-culture artifacts I excavate whilst mining the recesses of the web, armed with little more than a search engine and a whim. It’s also probably a reasonably accurate snapshot of my obsessions and preoccupations at any given time.”

Last.fm - Most of the stuff I squeeze into my earholes is scrobbled and logged here. You can usually tell when I’m working on something, because the stuff I rack up skews towards background music - jazz and soundtracks, primarily. Otherwise, my tastes tend to run towards funk and hip-hop. Recently, I’ve been listening almost exclusively to the Beastie Boys, for reasons that shouldn’t need further elucidation.

I’ve also started fooling around with This Is My Jam on an irregular basis, largely because it crossposts to Twitter. (Yes, This Is My Jam is the new Blip.fm)

Twitter - If you really want to hear me crapping on in 140-character bursts all day, every day, then you are in for a treat!

Flickr - This dinosaur doesn’t know that it’s dead yet, and I still throw photos up here on an incredibly infrequent basis. (I was on Instagram for a short while, but like a drunk taking a shit on the dancefloor, Facebook had to come along and spoil the fun.)

Pinboard - My bookmarking service of choice, ever since I moved away from the ailing Del.icio.us (another victim of Yahoo!’s cycle of acquisition and neglect).

I am no longer on either Facebook or LinkedIn because, really, who can be fucking bothered? Not me, that’s for sure. I am, however, on Google+. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m a big fan of the latest redesign, but that hasn’t helped to make it a more active place. Social networks don’t really work if people don’t use them, and Google+ is Tumbleweed City. I’m keeping it on a microscopically short leash for now.

How to contact me - If you know me personally, then pick up the goddamn phone. Or send me an email. Otherwise, Twitter is best. Alternatively, slap something in the comments here or use the “Ask me a question” function on Tumblr.