WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? [537]

I will start with the facts. As of 8.03am BST on Friday 17^th April 2026, this website, www.leighspence.net, has had one million page views since it went live at midday BST on Saturday 1^st May 2021. Thank you for being one of those viewers. I have never added a page counter to this website, as I think people stopped doing that when GeoCities closed in 2009.

This website was originally found at www.dancingwiththegatekeepers.com from 30th May 2016 – yes, I will be doing something to mark a decade since then – and I regret having not used my name from the start. Before the 2021 switch, I had amassed over 185,000 views, but despite the usual promotion on social media, including reposting new links for everything I had done to that point, it took until July 2016 for the new site to achieve one thousand views. 

Fortunately, the momentum reappeared, feelings about starting from scratch being replaced by the safety of having over three hundred articles already available: ten thousand views were reached by September 2021, and twenty-five thousand by the end of the year. Growth was steady, taking until August 2023 to reach one hundred thousand views, but it only took one more year to double that, and only until May 2025 to double that again to four hundred thousand views. 

This means that www.leighspence.net has been visited over six hundred thousand times in the last year...

This is why I am sceptical about page views for websites: it is not from seeing counters on the sites that do have them, or from media reports about other sites, or claims made to attract advertising, but from having seen the data about my own work, for it appears to be thriving to the extent of having taken on a life of its own.

I can only guess that having written about so many different subjects over nearly ten years means that work will appear in search engine results – the main driver of traffic to the website is Google, followed by itself via links from other sites, with social media in third place. Although I will continue to use social media to promote my work, it may be that I am in a good place to survive any eventual decline in the general use of social media, as people move on to other things – it may be a good opportunity to resurrect GeoCities.

I still have my suspicions about A.I. robots scraping my writing, much as anyone who has created anything and put it on the internet will do, despite all the attempts you have made to mitigate or prevent this. However, it this is simply an evolution of how people are searching for information, no matter my misgivings on checking the veracity of what they are being told, then I am glad to be considered a reliable online presence.

The conclusion I should reach from here is accept the figures, instead of being bemused by them, and don’t question why the numbers are so high. I should take it as a sign that I must be doing something right... and if you’ve read this far, I probably have.

Thanks to all of you again.

ALL I NEED IS HELP FOR A LITTLE WHILE [536]

IBM MT/ST

When the spy thriller writer Len Deigthon died in March 2026, his 1970 novel “Bomber”, about a fictional air raid during World War II, was reportedly the first novel to have been written during the word processor. However, Deighton did not use what we would picture to be one: the IBM MT/ST recorded the keystrokes of an IBM Selectric typewriter onto a magnetic tape drive built into a desk, most devices having at least two drives to allow merging sections together, often onto a third drive. The instruction manual advised users to “Think Tape”, like inputting a program. There was no screen, but it could “play back” its output to the typewriter. 

Introduced in 1964, and intended more for composing mail for businesses, IBM withdrew the MT/ST in 1970, as floppy disc drives and terminals with screens became more commonplace. But Deighton’s reason for using the machine was clear: it eliminated the constant retyping of drafts by his assistant, chapters often being revised dozens of times, gaining the ability to edit something that already existed. The tapes are now considered to be lost, but it may be the first time where the record of a novel-in-progress was held on something other than paper.

Over fifty years since the writing of “Bomber”, it appears I still need to reckon with what I should consider to be a permanent record of my work, and where that should be held.

I have two writing projects to which I attach a “permanent record” status: these articles, and a diary. The former exists, save for written notes, as computer files, each one holding the numerous re-edits made during their writing. The latter is a succession of books, written out longhand, and in many cases, especially from 2012-19, ripped out of other books and kept in folders, with some vague intention of copying them up at some point.

Both approaches carry risks, from the lack of backup made of those computer files, to the corruption of data, to paper getting mislaid or removed, or coming into contact with water – only one incident like that will lead you to writing with semi-permanent ink as a minimum for the rest of your life. But should I print out my articles, or type up my diary in future?

The short answer is to embrace the fact that both options require levels of maintenance in order to attach a notion of permanence to them: computer files need to be backed up, ideally to more than one place, and at regular intervals to avoid data loss through file corruption and the lifespan of the devices on which you hold the data; written works can be copied, either by hand, scanning them or typing them up.

Ideally, I should wean myself off pen and ink, leaning more into typing as where the creative work starts, instead of where it ends. Because I essentially come to the screen with something to finish, I am already less perturbed by the flashing cursor on a blank screen than if I started with it. I should make use of that fact.

I WANT A NEW DRUG [535]

I had the hope that, if I visit a store in a foreign country selling DVDs and Blu-rays, I will find something obscure and intriguing. In Belgium, that certainly did happen, but two facts became apparent: no film company is obliged to offer English subtitles if they are not selling to an English-language country, and if you happen across the Brussels branch of HMV, their stock is the same as their UK stores, except labelled as “UK Import”.

Fortunately for me, the French distributor Carlotta Films had released an American film from 1989 that I have only ever heard about, its name promising an interesting journey. “Dr Caligari”, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written with Jerry Stahl, is a loose remake of the German Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920), turning it into a surreal, postmodern erotic horror, a descendent of the original doctor conducting chemical experiments to balance out the psychoses of her patients. Capturing the “midnight movie” crowd that loved Sayadian and Stahl’s previous films, the pornographic “Nightdreams” (1981) and “Café Flesh” (1985), “Dr Caligari” disappeared after its theatrical run, save for limited, sporadic releases on home video - this was the first time I had come across a copy I could buy.

The art direction and the acting in “Dr Caligari” are most definitely surreal. The setting is like a more adult version of Tim Burton’s film “Beetlejuice”, but with more vivid colours, geometric shapes and angles, reminding me of Memphis furniture once again. The acting is highly theatrical and choreographed, the result of a four-week rehearsal period: stylised and emphasised poses are held, no-one allowed to just sit or stand naturally, actors are often brought into and out of shots on platforms and turntables, and movement is also simulated by moving backgrounds.

I had wondered if “Dr Caligari”, with its strange performances and themes of fantasy and erotica, with scenes of nudity and gore - a Hollywood writer’s strike during the film’s production meant its sub-$200,000 budget could stretch to special effects artists and actors that wouldn’t have otherwise been available - was deliberately made to appeal to an audience that wanted to see something wild and screwed up. I think you can consider it to be a surreal work, thought it might be up to the viewer as to whether the “s” should be capitalised – the art direction is not a gloss on a standard Hollywood script, there is symbolic use of wounds, tongues and televisions, and there is a sense of this film working within its own reality, while also commenting on how our reality “fixes” people.

Even if so, the film is so identifiably a work by Stephen Sayadian, also its production designer and art director, record as saying it needed to attract the “midnight movie” crowd to be a success. In his work as a creative director for “Hustler” magazine, in charge of advertising, the editor of the satirical magazine “Slam”, the films “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh”, the video for Wall of Voodoo’s version of the Beach Boys song “Do It Again”, and “Jackie Charge”, a “midnight movie” style play – all of which were either written or co-written with Jerry Stahl, who would also write scripts for TV shows as disparate as “ALF” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, reveal similarities in performance and production design. Sayadian has also said it made sense to hire himself as production designer on “Dr Caligari”, as hiring anyone else would have taken up a substantial fraction of the overall budget. “Dr Caligari” director of photography Ladi von Jansky also shot print advertisements with Sayadian, informing further the held poses and stylised motion.

I was happy to see a film that was unlike most I have seen, but if I wish to look up the remainder of Stephen Sadayian’s catalogue, I will need to remember that the even-more-adult “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh” were released under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”.