I sit at my keyboard tapping, many formats o'er lapping, searching for a template for a letter to Lanore.
Lanore, my Facebook friend long-standing, but my distance she's demanding, a restraining order landing, with the full force of the law.
So I'm at the keyboard thinking, with my broken heart a-sinking, trying to find the words to reconnect with lost Lenore.
Another flash story, this one written in about 30 minutes. Any resemblence to real life characters is purely coincidental (no shotgun blasts to the face for me, thank you very much).
"Red Leader, you are cleared for attack". How did I find myself here; a marine biologist attacking an American space station armed with a squid?
(This is a flash story - a story written in 15 minutes on a train to Wales)
Want to know how I ended up in Hell? It was Billy's stag night and so far a total disaster. Because of Billy's best friend Bobby, we were sitting at a raw food restaurant in London - a raw food restaurant that had run out of most vegetables. I had a plate of "spaghetti" in front of me. Spaghetti made from shaved zucchini. Cold spaghetti. Spaghetti covered in tomato sauce consisting entirely of squashed cold tomato. "Don't worry" whispered Billy, somehow picking up on my abject misery. "Wait until the girls arrive".
Try to get to sleep after watching this!
Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty from Darragh O'Connell on Vimeo.
The Economist recently had an article on social media's impact on blogs, especially how sites like Facebook have meant the death of a large number of blogs. I have been thinking recently about this myself. I haven't posted on my own blog for over 6 months, partly because Facebook's status updates has fulfilled part of my communication needs. Partly because I've been going through a phase of focusing on work and reading, and haven't been interacting much with my social network.
I do think that blogs have a part in our future - I just think that the people who used blogs as a telephone will move to Facebook, those that used blogs as a form of SMS will move to Twitter, and those that feel the need to expound on a particular topic, and want their missives to have a greater scope and longevity will continue to use blogs.
Bill Thompson has posted a thoughtful article over at the BBC about the changes that social networking is making to our standards of social interaction. He discusses his own tweeting and live-blogging at conferences, and then talks about the news updates that were tweeted by Tearah Moore during the Fort Hood incident.
The Wire was an amazing series. Here is a summary: