Another pearl of wisdom I wish I had been handed last year: enjoy having your own space while you have it. I wish I had appreciated it that bit more.

The closeness of this house is starting to grate. No matter how good your choice of housemates, confinement in a compact space is bound to amplify tensions, especially when you end up with crazy caricatures like mine. Today was not a good day. Possibly because I was hung over from another Halloween party, or because it was another dark and grey day - about to get darker as the clocks go back. But those were really only ancillary issues.

The crux of it was an argument about petrol, as we arrived at Sainsburys for our weekend shop. I drive a Suzuki Vitara, the fuel tank of which tops off at just over £45, which gets you between 200 and 250 miles. I drive to campus at least 3 times a week, and if anyone is around when I leave or set off to come back, I take them. This happens at least twice a week, usually more. So you can imagine my surprise when I gently announced that the tank was nearly empty and in need of a fill-up, and that I would appreciate a contribution of, say, £8 each towards it, and was met with not a small amount of disquiet and denials from two of the three that they rode with me more than “once in the last month”. And this, not to put too fine a point on it, is a crock of shit.

I’m sure you can do the arithmetic here: three contributions of £8 is £24, making my share of the fuel a tidy £21. I freely admit to using more fuel than anyone else, hence the uneven split. But no, even this was not enough for the lifts to campus, into town, and to the supermarket a dozen times a week. Sadly, I was so enraged I failed to point out the irony that, as they argued about how little they made use of the car, we were standing in the car park of the supermarket that I had just driven them to (for the second time in 24 hours).

On top of that I had to yet again face the issue of how to argue with a man who refuses to listen to any voice other than his own, or take into account the feelings or opinions of anyone other than himself. This is a daily struggle, and at times I wonder why I bother speaking at all. An impossible conundrum; a man who sets rules then breaks them, and won’t be told; a man who, despite having a very tenuous grip on reality, will not be swayed in anything he does by such trifles as common sense or the concerns of others. A man who considers himself to be above any other human being, and does not entertain the belief that anyone else could possibly have anything of any worth to say. And I have to share a house with the fucker. Nothing I have done before has ever felt so much like hitting my head against a wall, for all it can achieve, and today was one of those days. And I lost my rag, properly, for only the second time with him, and immediately regretted it, for it can do nothing but further worsen his opinion of and attitude towards me. Any dissenter is a dick, no matter how right they are. But what can I do? Nothing I say will have any effect. I wonder what shocking circumstances of earlier life could lead to this ingrained, fascist self-assurance.

For those of us getting paid monthly, the end of the month is a good time. Unless of course it comes as a reminder of how much we’re getting whipped by our employers.

Today I received my payslip for last month’s work, including the commission from the month before. Having not received commission before I was expecting something in the region of £50 to £100, but was instead greeted with… £19.

Yup, for a salesperson receiving between 15 and 30 phone calls (requiring technical knowledge, good manners and an IQ higher than room temperature) and processing around £3,000-worth of orders a day (a conservative estimate) for 3 days a week for 3 weeks, I apparently have to settle for… 0.05% of my contribution to the business turnover - the grand figure of 0.05 pence in the pound. There’s nothing like making your employees feel like a Valued part of the Team.

The art community website deviantART, with whom I’ve hosted my online photography portfolio for over 18 months, has been through some ups and downs in the time I’ve been on-board. The recent trend has been for the artists to take a back seat to money-making, and I have put up with this as I didn’t think it was that much of a problem. My photos were still getting viewed, critiqued and publicised, and that was fine.

Today I am angry. A few weeks ago the techs at dA caved in to public pressure and released their much-lauded “v5″, a fairly complete overhaul of the presentation side of the site. Unfortunately they made the fatal mistake of not waiting until the fucking product was complete before they published it. Thus, a whole bunch of stuff on the site was broken or looked bad for some time until they got around to completing those bits. This, it seems, is still ongoing, with many issues remaining unfixed.

Beyond the “regular” side of deviantART there is the Prints Service, a fairly professional and highly regarded service that allows members to submit high-resolution copies of their artwork and have the whole printing process handled for them. For this dA takes a cut of the face price of a print, but it’s a reasonable deal and members can set their own prices. The styling of each member’s “Store” was different to that of their main dA page, offering a far more professional appearance to potential clients.

Until a few days ago. Now, it seems, the Store pages have been tarred with the same shitty brush as the rest of the site, removing the last vestiges of professionalism from the operation. There used to be a simple “Store” link from each member’s page to his or her Prints Store area, this is now gone. Instead a “Prints” link takes its place, which takes the user not to the storefront, but to a page listing the member’s prints without any other information at all. Nothing. Fuck-all. To get to the artist information that used to be present, the user must click a print, then click the artist’s name at the top of the display, beside the title. This then shows the “redesigned” storefront. Are most users likely to do this? Fuck they are. And even when the artist information is displayed, dA have deigned to show only the “biography” section entered by the user, not their education information, nor their awards information - even the “email the artist” link has been removed completely, leaving no way for clients to get in contact. So full marks to dA for helping communication between artist and potential client.

It used to be that the Store carried a more refined, business-centric attitude and style than the rest of the site, and this is now gone. For myself and other artists who relied on deviantART as a channel through which to sell art, the ramifications are not good. I have been constructing another website in which to showcase my photography, as I thought that the “gallery” side of dA wasn’t professional enough - but I was hoping to link interested clients to my dA Store to complete any sales. I am now very reluctant to do this. It’s great to see that sites like dA have the interests of their users at heart as they publish unfinished site builds that completely tear up the structure and ideas that the previous site used to represent.

For allowing me to be spoon-fed my opinions via a invitation system where I can be bombarded daily with appeals from parties right, left and centre wanting to induct me into their neatly compartmentalised mindset. For making it so easy for people who think I might be vaguely interested in supporting their beliefs to invite me, along with whatever other unfortunate souls happen to be connected to them, to join their I-wear-my-opinons-on-my-sleeve Facebook Group, because remember: if you said it on Facebook, It Can Really Make a Difference.

A Three-Step Plan for Facebook Groups
1. Get to know me first, so you have some vague idea as to my beliefs and opinions. Want to know what I think? Ask me.
2. Don’t bother inviting me anyway. Unless your Group is incredibly witty, chances are I’m not interested. My joining a Facebook Group is not going to influence who becomes the next US President; it is not going to stop war in the Middle East, and it sure as fuck isn’t going to resolve the current AUT strike.
3. Should I - for some unimaginable reason - decline your invitation, have a guess at what the most annoying thing you could do would be. That’s right, inviting me again. Please die.

For those unsure who this applies to, follow this simple test: Are you content to select your political stance from a drop-down list of eight options? If you answered Yes, you have a career waiting for you as a Facebook Group spammer.

</rant>

The BBC reported this evening with some gusto that the US Justice Department had released “the first video” of the impact that took place at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th 2001, thanks to a Freedom of Information request by Judicial Watch. In 2002 stills from another Pentagon security camera claimed to show the same, but were of low quality and failed to really clear up anything. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was quoted as saying, “finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines Flight 77.” Regrettably, it fails to do so.

The still below is taken from the BBC stream of the video - the source camera, like the previously released stills, is of low framerate; this is the only frame containing whatever it was that impacted with the Pentagon.

What annoyed me as much as the treatment of this release as something conclusive was the tone of the article, which reminded me of every official response to critical articles written about the incident. Theories have long circulated about what happened at the Pentagon, and regardless of what the official line is and what is branded as “conspiracy theory” are the facts - that the damage at the Pentagon was not consistent with an impact by a 757, illustrated (among other things) by the complete lack of visible debris. Okay, so perhaps this can be explained away; why then, if this is so, has the US government not released the other video and photographic material recording the incident, namely the private surveillance cameras at the hotel near the Pentagon (confiscated by the FBI after the attack) and at the petrol station across from the Pentagon. National Geographic News reported in December 2001 that “Velasquez [the owner] says the gas station’s security cameras are close enough to the Pentagon to have recorded the moment of impact. “I’ve never seen what the pictures looked like,” he said. “The FBI was here within minutes and took the film.”” The authorities have never released these images which, logic argues, should surely show the true events of that morning.

This is no wonder, however, when blinkered attitudes like those prevalent in the United States still exist. In 2002 French author Theirry Meyssan released two books attempting to give an objective explanation of what he believed were the real events at the Pentagon, namely that what impacted there could not have been a 757 but was instead a smaller plane or missile, or the damage was caused by a truck bomb at the site. Leaping aboard the American institution of anti-French sentiment, Pentagon spokesman Glen Flood described the book as “a slap in the face and real offence to the American people”. To me it seems that this mentality has become the norm when dealing with issues like this - complete rejection of the possible alternative story suggested by the “conspiracy theorists” because the ramifications of it being true are so mind-meltingly huge that civilisation as we know it would implode. The average American, despite being faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, simply refuses to even entertain the possibility that what happened could be any different from the official version of events.

The release of this video does not help to shore up the defence of the official story. It should not be treated as such. The other evidence of the events at the Pentagon that is still being suppressed needs to be released. I don’t like the official story; I don’t like the implications if one of the other theories turns out to be true. I don’t claim to know either way, but I and millions of others want to see that other footage.

Yes, what happened at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11th was an atrocity in every way. Yes, the loss of human life was horrific and terrible, and should never be forgotten. But that is not a reason to refuse to question what went on. Those who suggest alternative theories are not trying to insult the dead. They are only trying to find the truth.

US releases 9/11 Pentagon video, BBC News, 16/5/2006
Why Pentagon released 9/11 tape, BBC News, 16/5/2006
The Suppression of Video Footage of the Pentagon Attack, 911research.com
Three Months On, Tension Lingers Near the Pentagon, National Geographic News, 11/12/2001