Bad Editor

It's an awfully strange and roundabout way to be crying for help I know, but the fact is that Swallow is back, as much as it ever will be, and as much as it ever was, although if you believe this guy, that never was very much in the first place.

"There is no there there," he says, and he is absolutely right. There is no "there" here. None. If you are looking for a "there" there, here, or indeed anywhere you choose, then you are fighting a losing battle against logic which neither I nor anyone else can help you with. There is there. It's always there. As soon as you go there, it is no longer there, because you are there, so there is no longer there, but here.

There. I've said it.

In other news, we've had mail from Justin Petersen, oh, at some point in the last twenty-two months, which scared the living shit out of us quite frankly, but has motivated and indeed accelerated our continued course of study into the realms of internet technology, about which we can quite confidently say we still know nothing, although a small trail of badly-configured imaginary firewalls has been left in our wake as we wander in our half-dazed state around London pretending to look at girls but secretly reading computer books instead.

Computer security turns out to be the ultimate in masochism, where you can spend all day struggling how to figure out how to make sure that absolutely nothing happens. You only know you've done it when nothing happens, but - aha! Perhaps they're just laying low, to fool you. Let's just say I don't use Windoze any more. With Linux I can make my system insecure all by myself without help from Bill Gates.

We honestly were going to reproduce the Justin Petersen mail, but last night we got drunk and found ourselves typing 'rm -rf *' in a directory above the directory it was stored in. As root. Why wait to be hacked when you can perform malicious damage to your own machine all by yourself without any intervention from third parties?

This ranks as one of the more stupid things we have done this week: the <pedant> has a full report, though I really wouldn't bother, because while there isn't much that is good here, that piece really is one of the ones better left unread.

Now. The good stuff. Durlabh Singh sent me these poems 'for my approval and possible publication'. I want to take this opportunity to say in public that I approve of them wholeheartedly, and urge you to read them immediately. Then read the rageboy piece and leave.

But, if you're still here, you should be aware that we are feeling particularly fortunate that we managed to save a copy of Durlabh's poems before deleting the email, unlike the work of Tracy Archbold, which we would appear to have lost, sadly forever, along with her email address.

Tracy's was the first body of text ever to be submitted to Swallow which I seriously considered rejecting. In fact after receiving it I seriously considering giving up completely. For more than a year. It was that.. uh.. powerful, albeit poisonously negative.

Finally, on rereading it for the second time a couple of days ago, I came to realise that here is a satirical writer of extreme importance, who gets the *exact* tone and phrasing of a completely soulless PR person down to a T. Sadly the text was lost in the Great Email Deletion, but if you want her to send you too a copy, all you have to do is set up a site like Swallow and wait. I understand she has a number of pseudonyms under which she operates her one-woman Renegade Email Satire collective, and I am sure that you will come across her in due course.

On which note, if you have sent me email at any time in the last two years, I no longer have it, since I am, as explained all over this site, crap. If you have sent any contributions (there's about three of you), then I have lost them, so please send them again, in the unlikely even that you can be arsed. See the Asked Questions page for details. There's a poor excuse for an apology somewhere on the site, but it's so embarrassing I can't even bring myself to draw your attention to it.

rageboy was kind though, and allowed me to reproduce his 'Important Election Day Message' even though it's a bit late, I know. Such is something, certainly. Oh I already said that. Shit.

Bad Editor