about me
My 'about' page - apparently I should have one in order to avoid a highly annoying blogger habit.
This could be long...
Me
The author of this website was born on the 27th September 1985 (birthday presents always welcome!) in the south of England, where I still live. I have previously lived in France for a year (when I was 5, near Versailles) and Singapore for 18 months when I was 7/8. My house-moving seems to have been a little less frequent of late, with my last move being eight years ago, moving a distance of about two miles. My next move will likely be up to Warwick uni in October 2004, for a four-year Computer Science course. I'm currently taking a gap year to do webdesign work for a company owned by the MoD. I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that this makes me a government employee.
A lot of my rather scarce free time seems to go on the internet, reading, films, Usenet, the internet...
Films - I watch quite a variety of films and have a lot of favourites, beyond which I find it impossible to narrow down the selection. The list currently stands as:
Vertigo, Dr Strangelove, The Sting, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Blade Runner, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Dead Poets Society, The Shawshank Redemption, Léon, The Usual Suspects, Twelve Monkeys, Ransom, Pleasantville, American Beauty, Memento, Moulin Rouge, LOTR: Fellowship, LOTR: The Two Towers. If I haven't forgotten any, that is.
[There now follows quite a long digression on the subject of books. If you're not interested, you can skip this part.]
Books - I am a reader; I devour books, and always have done. Take a look at my books page if you want to see what I'm reading and what I have lined up to read. My favourite author is Terry Pratchett, who just keeps getting better with every book he writes. I've recently (in the last six months or so) realised that my SF library was rather scant, so I'm getting into Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert (Dune), William Gibson, Ursula le Guin (Earthsea), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Neil Gaiman and Anne McCaffrey (Pern). Except that I haven't yet read many of the actual books, although some are piled up in a cardboard box in my room.
Before I read American Gods, I was in the slightly strange position of having read more of Neil Gaiman's writing on his online journal than in his books - I had only read one of his short stories (Snow, Glass, Apples - do not read if you are easily disturbed) and Good Omens, which he collaborated on with Terry Pratchett. Douglas Adams is another favourite author of mine, and even if you don't like The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy I would strongly recommend that you read The Salmon Of Doubt, the posthumously-published collection of writings, articles and odd musings from Douglas' computer, as well as the beginning of the third Dirk Gently novel. It's an absolute delight to read.
Other individual books that I found to be superb (gods, this is turning into a 'recommendations' page!) include:
- The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. A really entertaining, beautifully written crime/humour/fantasy book.
- House Of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. As the Amazon review says, it's "part horror-story, part philosophical meditation, and mostly very good storytelling". The author uses every trick he can to disorient you, and manages to very successfully manipulate your reading of the book, even down to altering your reading speed in different sections. Its many layers gradually become apparent, and I can honestly say that it was the most unsettling book I had read until...
- 1984 by George Orwell. Everyone should read this. I mean it. If you haven't read it, go and buy it, or read it online.
- 253 by Geoff Ryman is another novel written in a slightly unconventional format - it documents a train journey on the London Underground (so the time span of the book lasts about 7 and a half minutes). There are 253 words each devoted to a portrait of each passenger (of which there are 252, plus 1 driver). At first these carefully drawn characters appear unconnected, but gradually the links are revealed. The book is also available to read online, if you prefer to spare the rainforests.
- Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is just superb. If you're at all a reader of fantasy you have no excuse not to read it, and if you're not then you have a little bit of flexibility but I'd still recommend it with a passion. Don't be put off by the fact that it's classed as a children's trilogy, I think that it should be at least young adult. Oh, and if you're interested, the first book should not be called The Golden Compass, it should be called Northern Lights, as it is on the UK (original) editions. 'The Golden Compass' is just as bad as the title 'HP and the Sorceror's Stone' in that it's completely inaccurate. (Although at least with Harry Potter, the phrase 'sorceror's stone' appears throughout the book in place of 'philosopher's stone'.) There is no mention of a golden compass anywhere in Northern Lights; that gold-coloured, vaguely compass-shaped thing that is being referred to is called an alethiometer, which is a truth-measurer or truth-teller. Nothing to do with a compass. And it's not golden, it is solid gold. Difference.
Okay, slight rant over (aren't you glad I barely got started on the title-swap for the Harry Potter book?), back to business.
Music - I have either a large or a fairly small music collection, depending on your perspective. Around 1000 tracks on my Winamp playlist, although it does contain quite a few songs that I seem to listen to only a few times a year. I rarely listen to individual albums any more (except when I first acquire them, and want to familiarise myself with them); I just leave my playlist on random but since I'm always quite picky about the music I listen to, I've developed this awful habit of continually clicking Next until I come something that I want to hear. This has resulted in my being able to identify each of my 1000+ tracks within the first half-second of play. Which is kind of worrying, when you think about it.
My music tastes don't range terribly far (except by the standard of most teenagers, I've found) - favourite artists include Dido, The Beatles, Coldplay, Stereophonics, Suzanne Vega, Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Gray, Oasis, Remy Zero, Lauryn Hill, The Strokes, Doves, *coughcough* Robbie Williams *coughcough*, and a group called Silverman, who y'all have probably never heard of. They're cool, though. And I don't have any strong opinions on Eminem (I only have one of his tracks; Lose Yourself), except that I think that I think his music is probably very good if you 'get' him. Except that I don't, really, leaving me in the same position as I was in regarding BuffytVS for many years - rather dispassionate towards the whole affair.
The full MP3 playlist isn't going up on this site until I've trimmed it of the embarassing ones :)
Other things...
My personality type comes out as ISTJ, which is Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging. And through Political Compass I have found that I am a moderate left-wing libertarian. Make of that lot what you will :)
I am pedantic by nature, and get over-annoyed by other people's incorrect grammar and spelling - I always have done, even in primary school. My favourite obscure word is fuliginous (meaning sooty or smoky), which I never got to use until I took this quiz. I don't really use mobile phones - the only one I have was bought three years ago, second-hand for £10 from a friend of a friend, and I've been told that it is a brick in a not-so-subtle disguise. It doesn't even have any games on it... I only turn it on once or twice a month. And people wonder why I never get their text messages! However, in general I am a gadgety person - I was the first person that I knew who got a MiniDisc player, and then an MP3 player.
Internet stuff - I have no net name, unless you count 'Cathy' (I am usually called Catherine IRL). In fact, I've always been Cathy on the internet, which has resulted in my not being able to type the word Catherine, since my fingers will always reach for the 'y' instead of the 'e'. I find it difficult to write the name Cathy as well! My user name for everything is cyoung85, used on all email addresses, sign-ups, etc., just so I don't have to think of a different user name each time that 'Cathy' has been taken. I don't use AIM, ICQ or IRC (I do want to start using IRC... when I have more time) and fell out of the habit of using MSN Messenger. Something that I never got into in the first place is RPGs, although they look quite interesting (again, if you have a lot of free time!). I spend quite a lot of time reading a few newsgroups (via Google if I'm at school) including alt.fan.pratchett, which is probably the coolest ng around.
I first learned HTML when I was doing work experience after my GCSEs, age 15. My mentor was at a loss as to what to do with me, since I'd been dumped on her about three weeks previously, and so she set me learning HTML, and JavaScript a couple of days later once I'd finished the HTML guide. My first website went up on the second day, and yea, verily, it sucked. It had frames and was hosted by Geocities, no less. No, I'm not going to link to it, it's really that cringeworthy! (Actually, if you've been reading this page attentively, you can probably guess the URL.)
bent back tulips
This site started out as just a blog, and the name 'bent back tulips' comes from a lyric in Glass Onion, by The Beatles. It was a pretty spontaneous choice, since I got the urge to start blogging before I'd thought of a name - the first name (which got axed after about two days) was 'paper ribbon'. It was just there as a placeholder until I thought of something better.
For a better explanation of what a bent back tulip is (with added photos!) you could do worse than read this entry of mine.
My first blog entry was on 8th December 2002, and since then the site has gone through two redesigns. The first design was a Blogger template, and the second design happened about two hours after that. The third design, which you can see now, has been in place since the end of January 2003, and happened once I'd learned some CSS (by hacking sites to read their stylesheets, and picking it up as I went along). There's also been the One Day Only Red Nose Day design, on March 14th 2003.
The whole site is hand coded, generally using Notepad - I did use MX Dreamweaver for a glorious 30 days, but then my free trial ran out and I discovered that the full program costs a couple of hundred GBP. (It's right there on my Amazon wishlist, if you're feeling generous!) Back to Notepad I went, and it works sufficiently well for what I'm doing. The site was hosted for free by Portland but then I exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit and moved to BlogHosts, acquiring a domain name in the process.
The blog is powered by Movable Type. It is also registered with an embarassingly large number of directories, such as Blogtree, Blogdex, GeoURL, Technorati, Blogstreet, the Pepys project, the Eatonweb portal and Weblogs.com.
For those who care, I'm running Windows Me, which can do horrible things to a computer. I'm trying to get up the nerve to install a flavour of Linux at some point. My site has been tested on IE5, IE6, Opera 6, Opera 7 and Mozilla - I don't know what it looks like in Netscape 4, so if you're running NS4 and it looks appalling, I apologise. Now get a decent browser :) and tell me about it if this site doesn't look right in your browser.
The background image on each page is cropped from a photograph taken by my dad; it is copyright to him (I'm using it with permission). It was taken of a sunrise through a steamed-up window in Houston, TX, when he was there once. Photography is a passion of my dad's, and I think he was a little bit put out when, upon seeing the photograph, I exclaimed, "That picture would be perfect for a background file somewhere..." There's a thumbnail of the original here.
Lastly; my email address cathy AT bentbacktulips DOT co DOT uk is valid, and all emails will be replied to.
Okay, that's enough! If you want to know any more about me, you can go over there, or read the blog archives. Or there's 100 Things about me if you prefer...