Imogen Thomas (Big Brother) Sex Tape

Now that Big Brother 8 has started, I keep getting traffic again for my Imogen Sex Tape post from last year. Hehe! So folks, if you want to see the imogen sex tape, I used to have a link somewhere but I think it no longer works!

Ta,

and keep em cuming

Big Brother 8 Kicks Off Tonight

Yay! I’ve put Digital Spy’s big brother feed into my bookmarks, like last year

Roll on. Launch show 9pm Channel 4. Latest rumours:

All twelve of the contestants entering the house tonight will be female, according to The Mirror.

from Big Brother turns Big Sister?.

On Holiday from Thursday 31st

yes, I’m finally off for my holiday in two days’ time. C00l. I’ll be taking my Vaio of course, and I’ll have Internet access where I’m going.

Shame that my digital camera is in Edinburgh, so I won’t be able to take any pics

Anyhow, the plan is to:

• sort out various things with the house
• get some sun and relax
• get away from media and people
• finish Gibson’s Pattern Recognition
• read Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx

I should come back all relaxed

A Nice Web 1.0 site

My friend automatthias sent me a link today to a Speech Accent Archive, where loads of people from all over the world (native and non-native speakers of English) read out the same paragraph and you can either search for a specific accent or browse via three different categories. The ‘researchers’ (i.e. people submitting their reading of the paragraph) are indexed only as [language] [NN], e.g. english1, english2, english3, and so on.

Luckily, there is a very nice Edinburgh sample (english188), which is very well pronounced and sounds very pretty, though I have to say it’s very clean, ‘received pronuncation’ almost, and not what a lot of people around where I live speak like, ken whit ah mean ?

Anyway, I spent quite a while on the site (probably even 10 minutes!), which for me these days is highly unusual. And guess what: it’s a web 1.0 site. Very straightforward navigation, pretty, and clean. No ‘two-way-interaction’ where I can ‘talk back’ to the site, but instead, mostly educational. It reminded me in fact of a site I created many years ago, at the University of Cologne. I like it.

Though for British accents, the BBC’s Voices Archive is of course much better than the Speech Accent Archive. The Speech Accent Archive doesn’t even link to the Beeb site (they’re so web 1.0 they don’t even have links!).

The only downside to the BBC site is that you have to install sucky, bloaty, RealPlayer in order to be able to listen to it (yes, I know there are alternative players). Anyhow, there are 3 Edinburgh examples on the Beeb site, check them out! I think they are much better than the Edinburgh male on the Speech Accent Archive. Plus loads of other Scottish ones.

London is Aggressive

In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve encountered two instances of aggression in London people (towards me), which makes me think I may need to/want to take up some form of self-defence.

The first time, I think it was last week, was when I was standing in the post office queue, trying to buy a new road tax disc. This woman started verbally attacking a guy queuing behind me as he had apparently said to her young child ‘EXCUSE ME’ when the little boy kept bumping into him. She totally had a go at this guy, raising her voice at him and shouting things like ‘DO NOT BE AGGRESSIVE AND RUDE TOWARDS MY CHILD, DON’T TELL MY CHILD ‘EXCUSE ME”. And so on. I can’t even remember what it is exactly that she said. All I know was it was completely unnecessary and pointlessly aggressive, and she really didn’t stop. So the guy started defending himself but she only got louder and more aggressive, trying to involve other people in the queue.

So I stepped in, stepped towards her and next to the guy and said to her:

Stop being so aggressive.

Of course she then started attacking me and so forth, though I didn’t say anything else. She simply wouldn’t stop though. After another couple of minutes or so I told her again

Stop being so aggressive.

And I whispered in the guy’s ears to simply ignore her. So he did, and the woman stopped.

The second time is actually an ongoing form of aggression of a woman towards me. My BF has a circle of friends which I don’t particularly get on with (I blogged about it here). Now, because I don’t really have anything in common with them, I tend to avoid them.

Lately, a new person has joined the ’social circle’ and she’s a pain in the ass. She’s in her 40s, single (I think), quite desperate, needy, and attention-seeking. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad. On top of that, however, she has a nasty aggressive streak which to me indicates that she’s quite common, either from a lower-class background or simply not cultured/educated enough to conduct arguments in spoken language, rather than through bodily aggression. We had a bit of an argument about something stupid the first time I met her (last week), and yesterday we saw them again and it escalated a bit.

She gets very touchy-feely with my BF and, while I don’t mind harmless flirting, yesterday her flirting with him was quite aggressive and over the top. I think she does it because she wants to wind me up and also, because she is very needy and has to be in the centre of attention at all times. So, throughout the evening she touched up my BF, e.g. stroked his hair and arm, and getting too close for my liking (My BF is too polite to say anything). When she then started hugging him and kissing him on the cheek, I said to her:

Actually, I don’t like it when you touch him.

Bearing in mind that her sole purpose is to (a) be in the centre of attention and (b) cause me grief, she reacted by hugging him again and kissing him again. I said to her, quite loudly (and probably with a threatening tone in my voice):

Don’t do that again.

She didn’t do it again, but even afterwards she continued to verbally chat him up, saying he was beautiful in body and mind etc. blah blah blah. What I’d like to do is, next time she touches him up, grab her arms, holding both her wrists and tell her calmly not to do it again. She’s like a naughty child. The only thing I’m worried about is her aggressiveness and her simple mind, which might result in her being physically abusive towards me. I just want to resolve the argument and make her understand that her behaviour is inappropriate and unacceptable.

You may say that my BF should have told her to stop touching him, and you have a point. The problem is that my BF is very nice, and he never wants to offend people (it’s kinda a psychological condition – even if he wanted to, he can’t say what he really thinks). Plus, he probably feels a bit flattered by getting all the attention from this lonely woman.

Overall, it’s just another negative aspect of London in general. I think people here are more desperate, unhappy, and therefore, aggressive. I certainly haven’t encountered the sort of behaviour of the woman in the post office, or the simple 40-year-old bunny boiler, in quite some time. And NEVER in Edinburgh. It’s a culture that I find quite unpleasant. I like solving arguments rationally, and not by bringing emotions and aggression into it, and I absolutely cannot bear childish behaviour.

I think I’ll just have to stop seeing my BF’s ‘friends’. If he still wants to see them, fine, if he wants to see them too much, I’m going to fuck off back to Edinburgh. When these people were just boring, i.e. not stimulating, I could just about put up with them. Now that one of them is aggressive and nasty, I really see no point to it as it decreases my quality of life and wastes my time.

Busy Busy Busy

so no time to blog I’m afraid

Privacy and Web 2.0

Two quick news stories, both related to web 2.0 and privacy issues, which I thought worth mentioning.

(1) Students Criticise Staff on Net

Someone has finally picked up on what I think is probably common practice: slagging off your teacher/lecturer on the Internet. This must have always existed online to some extent; however, I believe that social networking and web 2.0, with its emphasis on 2-way-communication and socialising online (which I don’t do – I’m web 1.0 at heart), has accelerated it somewhat. It certainly has increased its visibility: sites such as myspace and facebook live and breathe socialising, which, let’s face it, is not always friendly but includes a lot of bitching, nastiness, and online bravery.

Keele University, which remanded students for such behaviour, said in a statement:

“Students may face legal action from the members of staff concerned for defamation and harassment.

“A number of students have already been written to by the university warning them of the unacceptable nature of their comments on Facebook and that any further activity of a similar nature will be dealt with severely.

I wondered, for a split second, what comments I’d get if I were still a lecturer, or if I had indeed chosen that career path after my brief stint lecturing as part of my PhD studentship.

I think my former students’ comments would be bitchy, bordering on the nasty

(2) Third of Bloggers ‘risk the sack’

Similar to the above story, this also centres on nasty and other potentially defamatory comments that bloggers may make about their employer. YouGov commissioned this research into blogging about the workplace. It looks like quite a lot of us make comments that could get us the sack:

 

Croner surveyed 2,000 people who keep a personal internet blog or diary and 39% said that they made harmful comments.

I have in the past aired some grievances about work-related stuff, but only very infrequently and certainly nothing defamatory or nasty. These days, however, I try to stay away from any stuff directly derived from or related to work. I just don’t want to take any risks. Since it’s also risky, in different ways, to blog about personal stuff, there’s nothing much left to talk about

 

 

Hackney is a Crime-Pit

Yes, I’m not too fond of Hackney. It does have its good bits, but there is a lot of crime. My BF’s new bike was nicked right outside our flat in broad daylight, within 20 minutes of leaving it outside (locked of course).

Alongside this more petty crime, there is a great deal of more serious crime, such as GBH, murder (a PC was killed a few years ago outside the flat opposite), and drug-related crime (dealing etc.). Police sirens are part of the daily soundscape, and occasionally, you get a few helicopters.

Today, for instance, just for the last 15 minutes there have been a lot of police cars right nearby, and a helicopter continues to circle right above the flat and the surrounding blocks. They are clearly looking for someone, and I also saw people running along the street. Some neighbours, like myself, have been leaning out of the window trying to get an idea of what’s going on.

I really am in two minds about this place and London in general. On the one hand, there is a lot of access to culture, much more so than in Edinburgh. On the other hand, the daily soundscape and citiscape is very post-apocalyptic. And then there’s the crime.

PS: The helicopter is gone now, just a police siren in the distance now. But it was VERY loud, and right above me, for 20 minutes or so!

‘Socialising’ on the Internet

I don’t socialise that much in RL. I’ve always liked my own peace and quiet. Even as a kid: while I did have a group of girls who I hung out with (and a couple of friendships with boys), and played outside with them a lot (I grew up in the countryside), I’ve always liked to just hang out with myself. My mum says that as a child I used to spend hours in my room, playing with my teddy bears or just with any old toys really. I just like solitude – it helps me expand.

I’m a bit weary of socialising online for a number of reasons.

(1) First of all, I’m on the computer all day for work and work-related reasons. I’m not someone who is out during the day and then comes back to ’socialise’ online in the evening. When I’m online, I’m nearly always working

That’s why I don’t have many people on msn/Psi/Skype and I really don’t like ‘chatting’ much. I view and read a lot of online communication daily as part of my work, and the least bloody thing on my mind is doing it on top of work socially! Imagine a builder coming home from work and, in his spare time, do loads of building work around his own house. Every day.

I get annoyed sometimes that people assume that ‘working online’ isn’t work as such. One of my friends in particular (she doesn’t know this blog ) keeps chatting to me on msn and trying to converse, even though I’m at work! I just happen to be ‘online’. You wouldn’t walk into someone’s office during working hours and just stand by their desk, chatting away, demanding attention.

(2) It simply isn’t fun or relaxing. I try and get away from the computer as much as I can. Unfortunately, a lot of web 2.0 sites are about ‘2-way-communication’ – and constantly socialising with others. Especially Twitter and Facebook strike me as particulary purposeless and futile, serving as they do the ‘chattering classes’.

(3) I increasingly feel the same about ‘personal emails’. e.g. old friends staying in contact, or writing emails just for the purpose of communicating, and staying in touch. I think it’s easier for me nowadays to stay in touch via my blog. OK, it isn’t exactly a 1-2-1 conversation, but at least people know what I’m up to and we sort of stay in touch that way (I also read my friends’ blogs, so I know what they’re up to and stay in touch that way).

For 1-2-1 friendship and conversation, I really prefer RL. I’d rather see someone once a year and having a really good social time, thus strengthening our RL friendship, than emailing them on a personal level regularly.

So, if you want to be my friend:

Step 1: Read my Blog!

Step 2: Meet me in RL!

Google bans essay writing adverts

This might be of interest to anaj, who’s presenting a paper on Plagiarism some time in June.

Google has banned ads for companies selling custom-made essays:

… in particular there have been difficulties with essays bought by students from companies which sell tailor-made answers, where fees can be up to £5,000 for a single piece of extended work. 

There have been reports of up to 12,000 essays being sold to students in a year, says Universities UK. 

These essays and assignments can be written by freelance academics or other students – and it is less easy for plagiarism software used by universities to detect such work.

Why is this interesting?

Because I myself signed up as ‘researcher’ for one of these dubious essay-writing companies a good while ago, when exploring avenues to make some additional money in my spare time. However, I’ve never done anything for them, but it’s very interesting the way they send their ‘briefs’ through to the ‘researchers’. It’s all very cleverly worded to circumvent the contentious issue of plagiarism. Google obviously disagrees. I have to say I agree with Google.