I want to clear something up from this post that I wrote a few weeks ago about how things are going.

This is my blog, it’s my way of talking to the world.  It has been since 2004.  A lot of the value of it is that I’m myself here, I talk about what I really think – many people contacted me privately to say they were going through or had been through similar experiences.  That’s why I write about such things, it helps me understand what I’m thinking better and it helps other people through identification.

Some people consider blogs to be just another media outlet or a marketing tool.  This blog is those things but not in a traditional way.  To me, the marketing function it serves is about building relationships and key elements in that are honesty, authenticity and a willingness to show vulnerability.  

When I write about having very little money and the difficulties that causes me and then I write about the ways that you can support me, it can become a bit confusing. I realise that to some people it can look like I’m begging and using emotional pulls to get you to bung me a few quid.  

That’s not my intention.  When I suggest you might like to be a micropatron, I’m still suggesting that you do so for the reasons I outlined when I started it.  I’m not asking you to pay me because you feel sorry for me or because you’re worried about me (though I know that that’s an effect for people who care), but because you value the work that I do and you want to support it above and beyond paying for stuff directly like my music or coming to see my show.   

Today is just as good a day as any to sign up or make a one-off donation 🙂

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Twitter is functionally dead to me at times like this – and “times like this” seem to be happening more and more frequently.

Another day of dstraction and misdirection takes over the space that I’d mistakenly hoped was democratic.  On Friday two members of a privileged elite got married and broke twitter for me.  This morning a member of one privileged elite claimed responsibility for the death of a member of another privileged elite.  And the crowd goes wild.

I want to be clear – I am as much a sucker for boy meets girl and good guy kills bad guy as anyone else.  I’m glad to see two young people celebrating their love.  I can’t celebrate anyone’s death, but I also know and love people whose lives were directly, painfully and irreparably damaged and disrupted by 9/11.  I understand the need for romance and the need for revenge.

The wedding is irrelevant to the day-to-day living of my life.  The death of bin Laden is not.  It is not closure, it’s the completion of one cycle of violence that will begin another.  I don’t believe that the death of the “head” of al Quaeda will mean a reduction in the risk of individual terrorism from that group, any more than I imagine that after the death of [insert your least favourite tech pundit here] gadget fanboys will stop having a fit of the vapours over the release of shiny, shiny preciouses.

I’ve seen lots of tweets crowing over the ability of twitter and other social media to spread the news, but if it just spreads the mainstream news agenda and whips up hysteria then it’s failing for me and I don’t want any part in it.  I want something else.  I want connection with others through something other than what I can find on the BBC or Fox News. 

And I just can’t help wondering what “bad news” is getting ready to be “buried” today.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous