nemof.org blog

… hot.
… sweltering.
… sticky.

….. It’s baking in Bristol if you haven’t guessed yet! Well I at the very least am already par boiled and on the way to being a Sunday lunch. You could serve me up with roasties and gravy and I would go down very well, if you are still eating long pig like me; Of course there are alternatives if you’ve sworn off the red meat.

As I’ve surely mentioned recently I’ve moved to a new part of Bristol called Bedminster. Although I don’t remember being too young at the time, I used to live here when I was a child. I don’t know if it’s got better or worse since then but it’s definitely the hairy bum of Bristol. It’s filled with freak or uniques, lots of old dirty paedophile men like some grotesque from Monkey dust and lots of spitting, screaming youths. I make it sound terrible, and truly it isn’t all that terrible.

However I was thinking about what made Bedminster different from other parts of Bristol that are run down and it came to me quickly, this is a predominantly white lower class area, and there is very little diversity compared to the rest of Bristol. Walking past pubs going to the main drag in Beddie I happened to see the kind of people hanging outside pubs on Sunday afternoon, all pot bellied angry looking middle aged men.

I’m well known as a particularly uncharitable person so take everything I say with a pinch of salt, but the atmosphere in Bedminster suffers from it being a ghetto-ized white area. I might be romanticising St. Paul’s and Easton but they just feel much nicer than Bedminster. I lived in St. Paul’s in my first year in Bristol so I am at least able to make a reasonable comparison.

Of course there is also the fact that Bedminster is ‘over the river’ so to speak. Historically as Bristol is a port city, Bedminster must have always attracted the greatest poverty and atmosphere associated with it due to its location. It’s at the bottom of the pile, everything else literally above it as you head north towards the richest part of Bristol, Clifton. Strangely Clifton is the highest part of Bristol, what are the chances of that?

I guess this started off as a complaint about Bedminster, but has turned into a rant about geography and poverty. It frustrates me that things should be so unequal in two different parts of the same City.

Having said that, I have lived in Beddie for three days so maybe I should give it more of a chance!

in other news

I have added a "video" category to nemof.org, as I seem to find myself posting so many (ridiculous) videos. I’m thinking I might also remove them from the main page, there must be a way to stop certain categories showing up on the main blog page.

I am also currently beginning a new beta of nemof.org, it’s private at the moment but in the future will go live for testing. It will become part of my design portfolio, so I can wave shiny pretty things at prospective employers.

I just came across wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti while reading about street art, and as ever I’m extremely impressed by the amount of organization and dedication that goes into wikipedia. With simple common sense someone decided that if a given area in the wikipedia was a bit lacking in detail lets say, they should start a wikiproject for it, in this case Wikiproject Grafitti. This goes for many areas of Wikipedia, there are projects going on documenting art, culture and about everything under the sun you can think of. There’s even a wikipedia cookbook!

However, the friggin’ markup is still a nightmare and there is still no sign of a decent WYSIWYG wiki editor. I would dearly love to be able to edit an installation of mediawiki without having to deal with that nightmarish markup, I have enough trouble at the moment keeping up with CSS/JS/XML etc.

Well I did mention that I was adding a video section, so I guess I should include a video in this post. I can’t think of anything more appropriate to me at the moment than the Spiderman 3 teaser that recently came out. It actually inspired me to download (shock!) and watch Spiderman II again, a masterpiece of direction from Sam Raimi! without further ado: