you can't blog your blog around a memory

The clues you bastards give away! Psych profiles of a seditious buncha bright young things. (I don't know how hard you think about naming your things - but anyway you needn't think very long for your scent to be on it. And it's no more than a scent I'm after.)

• Title: Romanticise the Future. An imperative; also a statement of his new(ish) worldview. Compare with Douglas Coupland's "EROTICISE INTELLIGENCE".
  
  URL: "ithasbeesinit". Recalls Eddie Izzard, recalls Black Books - but is neither. There's a residual presence online for the whole phrase, but that's to be expected - since this URL is a spot-on evocation of the aesthetic in eC21st language; ironically awkward grammar with a nonsequitur dab of twee. Are bees more comic than your average beast? Yes.
  
  Formerly: arcolimunosotrexate - a gibberish composite of various medications of his. It ensured you got exact google hits, at least. Presumably dropped owing to a change in self-definition (up and at em).
  
  Layout: Good. Pseudo-anonymous, owing to prominent formspring account and other bright techno-utopian disclosures. Perhap colours could be tweaked (sidebar too strong).





• Title: an obligation to beauty. Another one-line worldview with an unusual normative object. Blog itself is wholly self-expressive anyway; we do not have to dig to find her.
  
  URL: "trashy elegance". After a trait recently imputed to her.
  
  Layout: Prototypical? Background is a bit strong atm.





• my camera groans beneath the weight it bears. Poignant-if-vague hipster band allusion. My fault; moving along:





• Bile Yer Ain Head. Title is a conscious reclamation of suppressed / lower-class status language. Genuinely. Also some self-mythologisation going on: "awa' an bile yer heid" (an expression of dismissive disbelief) being what he'd have people think is his family motto.
  
  Layout: messy, scatty, DIYIY OI OI OI. Ow my ears and eyes.





• Defunct?: A very sort of mundane chaos.
  
  URL: "orwellian-trash".
  
  Layout: The most striking difference is Livejournal's sheer vibrancy - he rarely gets any less than six comments, often dozens, and all sympathetic and vivacious.





• Unadvised Adventures in the North East of Scotland. Self-explanatory. Genuinely anonymous, allegedly owing to legal concerns rather than chagrin.





• Check Your Six. A friendly Americanism, and so an honest nod to the larger part of his taste. (This is changing.) But 'check your six' has a darker echo in it: look out behind you, paranoia, war. Contrast with his tag ('Gobshite') and bunched-up punk prose aesthetic (first post title: 'Turd in a Foot Bath').
  
  URL: "35hours" - the half-life of his anti-depressant then. To be fair, this was almost the only way in which he drew any attention at all to it.
  
  Layout: Black as my heart. More gloom. When my blog was white-text-on-dark, i got a number of flames from the Accessibility cru. (This was probably fair enough.)





• Mediocre Batman. 'Not a blog'. Assumed at first this was done out of steely kitsch - but turns out it is really out of love. And kitsch also. And steely liberalism. Only one of us to brandish our IRL name.
  
  Layout: Little to offer. Tumbr sux for pictures - but then we do all have ctrl++, don't we?





• out of the darkness, into the light. Suggests enlightenment / leaving behind past pain. again.
  
  Tag: "every day I wake up" - a Jay-Z reference ("now every day I wake up / Somebody got a problem with Hov") which isn't as mundane or hopeful as it sounds, on a generally muscular, uplifting album. Though presented backwards, it works as a prequel to the blog name proper: "every day I wake up out of the darkness into the light" - which makes this a blog about dawn. (The light of Pop banishing the darkness of rockism.)
  
  URL: "Kid-reflux" - a name for a bedroom dubstep boi, not the man we know. Like 'Romanticise the Future', perhaps an attempt to force a point of personality upon oneself. Name is not duplicated anywhere else.
  
  Layout: To be read at night, clearly.





• there could be snakes in here. Once again, a title with an eye to the negative. But it's actually a symbol for still the most powerful weapon we have against suffering: relativising your struggles to worse ones ("I try to put everything into perspective / Set it against the scale of human suffering / And I thought of the Mugabe government / And the children of the Calcutta railways / This works for a while / But then I encounter Primark FM"). It is also a Wittgenstein's scepticism nod. It is also a Terry Pratchett reference, though he might deny it in arsier moods. The Snakes on a Plane resonance is unintended but welcomed.
  
  URL: "afterallitcouldbeworse". Just the first part of the title, as with 'out of the darkness'. Read altogether it is quite metrical, trochaic: 'after all it could be worse, there could be snakes in here'.
  
  Layout: Egotistical "best of" category has been dropped. new headline is lacking as a result. Colours are an improvement.





• Defunct: L'esprit d'escalier: 'the wit of the staircase', or that thing where you think up a perfect witticism well after the fact. Expresses regret, but is also an unfalsifiable boast ('story of my life').
  
  URL was "gambalde", an uncommon surname of uncertain significance. Edit: 'Gambol', earlier gambolde or gambalde, from Medieval French gambade, "a leaping or skipping," from Late Latin gamba, "hock, leg," from Greek kampe, "a joint or bend."





• May as well be defunct: Hiccoughs, Anacrusis, Etc. Muso joke. The few posts are promising, if esoteric. Blogs need practice; you can see almost everyone who's written one gaining momentum from post #1 on.
  
  URL: "thebitbeforethedownbeat" - a definition of 'anacrusis'; an attempt to puncture own inflation.
  
  Layout: Classily sparse. Again, will bring down the ire of Accessibility. but Style will win out this once. (his obligation to beauty).